PARIS—Valentina Carrasco’s production of Nixon in China for the Opéra National de Paris, the most star-studded of six unrelated stagings in Europe* this season commemorating the 50 th anniversary of the Nixon-Mao talks, faced a … » Read

Say what you will about the archetypal program of curtain-raiser, concerto, and big symphonic work, the format can still yield rewarding results. So it was on Tuesday evening (April 18) when the National Symphony Orchestra led by Music Director … » Read

CHICAGO—Pops concerts: Most devoted symphony-goers can’t abide them, while symphonies can’t live without them. Anything that flirts with popular music tends to be viewed as a necessary penance to keep institutions afloat, or, … » Read

LONDON—Watch out world, there’s a new choir in town. Vox Urbane, whose inaugural concert took place amid the dilapidated grandeur of the Asylum Chapel in Peckham, a south London suburb with a proud working-class Victorian legacy, is … » Read

For seven years Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman in North Carolina, hid from her abusive enslaver in an attic space that measured 9-feet long by 7- feet wide and 3- feet high. With only a small peephole to let in light, she sweltered in the … » Read

AIX-EN-PROVENCE—While summer here has long been synonymous with great opera, for the past ten years a second festival has joined its elder brother and become an indelible fixture on the springtime calendar. The Aix Easter Festival has fast … » Read

Success was all but assured at the Metropolitan Opera debut of the opera Champion before the curtain went up. The story of middle-weight boxer Emile Griffith (1938 – 2013) has triumph, tragedy, and extra texture that comes with repressed … » Read

Pianist, composer, painter, and author Stephen Hough has added a third title to a list of publications that already includes Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More   and the novel The Final Retreat . His late st, Enough: Scenes From … » Read

LOS ANGELES—After long, ultimately transformative tenures with Finland’s Lahti Symphony and then the Minnesota Orchestra, and shorter ones in Seoul, Scotland, and Iceland, Osmo Vänskä has hit the road as a guest conductor, … » Read

One of the most felicitous results of the classical music world’s push to expand the repertoire has been the rediscovery of long-forgotten composers such as Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint George. Born the son of a French planter and an … » Read