AIX-EN-PROVENCE—Like Easter itself, the Festival de Pâques is a moveable feast. Every year its two-and-a-half week program of events is timed to straddle Holy Week, with one of Bach’s Passions given during Easter weekend as the … » Read

Italian pianist Beatrice Rana turned 30 in January and is honoring the occasion with a string of concerts in Europe and the U.S. that have included Beethoven’s Sonata in B flat, Op. 106, Hammerklavier, a coming-of-age piece if there ever … » Read

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