Long Beach Opera is renowned for being at the forefront of innovation, its most recent triumph having been the world premiere of Anthony Davis’s The Central Park Five , which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for music. The Southern California … » Read

There’s something eerily fitting about Esa-Pekka Salonen’s arrival this fall as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. At a time when the coronavirus pandemic has turned the classical music world inside out and upside down, the … » Read

The life of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges reads like an opera plot—and a good one too. The first acknowledged Black classical composer in history, Saint-Georges was born on the island of Guadeloupe in 1745, son of a French … » Read

MILAN--Switzerland emerged relatively unscathed from Europe's first wave of Covid-19 last spring. Now that a second wave is ripping through the continent, however, the nation is on the ropes, its health system reportedly close to the saturation … » Read

With public performances remaining severely curtailed, not to mention the travel bans still in place, frustrated artists are finding new ways to communicate, often using newly available technology for remote, real-time collaborations. Meredith … » Read

Toward the end of his life, Richard Wagner told his wife he believed his works would be “dropped” after his death, that he would “live on in human memory only as a phantom.” This from a musician whose influence on art, … » Read

Of all the recordings in the Cleveland Orchestra’s vast catalog, its latest may be its most authentic, its most honest. Captured live at Severance Hall in March, the concert pairing Schubert’s Great Symphony in C and Krenek’s … » Read

MILAN—Last February, Italy became the first country to close theaters nationally due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Now, a second wave of the virus is sweeping through Europe; on Saturday, as Italy registered 20,000 daily cases (four times the … » Read

Pandemic aside, there is still a decent flow of recorded music coming to light, some of it featuring substantial orchestral works written by living composers. From guitar concertos and Latin-American dances to a haunting exploration of loss, each … » Read

Yuval Sharon, recently named artistic directo r of the Michigan Opera Theatre (MOT), among other plaudits, has brought his cutting-edge sensibilities to Twilight: Gods , a new production/reinterpretation of Götterdämmerung . Normally … » Read