LONDON—In 1876, all the world and his wife flocked to Bayreuth to marvel at the premiere staging of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen . One hundred and fifty years on and the global appetite appears undimmed for this four-opera … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—The murder weapon is already on display before it actually gets used in Keith Warner’s Elektra . Initially seen at San Francisco Opera in 2017 and revived by Anja Kühnhold, Warner’s riveting production sets … » Read

John Adams’s presence as a composer at Ojai 2026 was as pervasive as music director Esa-Pekka Salonen’s throughout much of the weekend. Indeed, one each of Adams’s screwball “trickster” pieces closed three … » Read

LONDON—As with London buses, so with the operas of Monteverdi. You wait ages to catch one and then two come along at once. A pair of them hit England’s summer festival stages over the same June weekend in a clash of diaries (as well … » Read

OJAI, CA – Like Brigadoon, the small California town of Ojai comes to life once a year on a single weekend in June with an improbably durable, world-class music festival. This time, it was observing its 80th year, part of a continuous … » Read

The June 12 Lincoln Center premiere of Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 13 ( Hallucination City ) for 100 Guitars was haunted by the ghost of a New York City that no longer exists. Branca emerged in the experimental scene of early 1980s … » Read

MILAN—An icon of bohemian Paris in the heart of the city’s red-light district, the Moulin Rouge opened in 1889 and has been synonymous with nightlife and spectacle ever since. The club, which gave birth to the can-can at the turn of … » Read

CHICAGO—Sometimes having a formula is a very wise move. Not as an excuse to phone it in or justify stale routine. Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra, which opened its 91 st season last week in downtown Chicago’s Jay Pritzker … » Read

BARCELONA—By all rights, a commemoration of celebrated Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí should have been performed at the Basilica of the Sagrada Família, the modernist master’s final (still unfinished) project and one of … » Read

The Atlanta Opera’s four-year Ring des Nibelungen project, which reached its culmination last week with Götterdämmerung , seeks to relay the cycle’s narrative simply and directly. That interpretive strategy—the work of … » Read