Some opera directors try to lend old works new relevance by staging them in a contemporary setting. David McVicar’s bleakly faithful new production of Verdi’s Don Carlos , which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, took no such … » Read

MILAN--On the evening of February 24, Valery Gergiev conducted the highly successful opening night of a new Pique Dame at La Scala. At dawn the next day, Vladimir Putin launched a ruthless invasion of Ukraine. Gergiev has subsequently refused to … » Read

LONDON--Alarm bells rather than telephones rang when Barbara Hannigan declared in a video—on the London Symphony Orchestra website--that La Voix humaine (“The human voice”) “seems to be” the last conversation of a … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—In a charmingly entertaining evening devoted to Beethoven’s The Creatures of Prometheus , the San Francisco Symphony under its Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen offered a buoyant performance of the 1801 ballet score, … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO--To produce his hauntingly layered score for the chamber opera Sophia’s Forest , Lembit Beecher mingled a string quartet, percussion, and his own sound sculptures made of rotating wine glasses, a bicycle wheel, and other found … » Read

LONDON--There were plenty of draws for this February 23 concert at Festival Hall, not least of which was Jimmy López Bellido’s new Piano Concerto, a London Philharmonic Orchestra commission here receiving its world premiere with … » Read

Premiered in 1924, Leos Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen is the sweetest fruit of the Czech composer’s late harvest of operatic masterpieces. “A merry thing with a sad end,” was how the 70-year-old composer … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO--In these cramped times of diminished expectations, high ambition is a cause for gratitude and anticipation. Everything about the opera …(Iphigenia) , from its curiously punctuated title to the mixed musical forces and … » Read

LONDON--Ever since he burst onto the classical music scene in 2009 with Aheym , a commission for the Kronos Quartet, Cincinnati-born composer and guitarist Bryce Dessner has been earning respectful plaudits for his intricate yet approachable … » Read

LOS ANGELES – Late one night two decades ago, Esa-Pekka Salonen, architect Frank O. Gehry, and LA Philharmonic concertmaster Martin Chalifour donned hard hats and ventured downtown to an unfinished shell of a building that was soon to … » Read