Esteban Salas y Castro, a humble priest, is today widely considered to be Cuba’s first native composer. Born in Havana on Christmas Day 1725, he would spend much of his life in Santiago de Cuba, on the island’s eastern end, working in … » Read

The recent announcement of the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative by Secretary of State Antony Blinken represents a reboot of a decades-old strategy by the U.S. to use music as a means of transcending political and geographical borders. It first … » Read

Alice Parker, whose choral compositions and arrangements have long been a staple of the repertoire for ensembles ranging from high school glee clubs to church choirs to professional choruses, died on December 24. She was 98. A native New … » Read

The barbaric attack by Hamas in early October has mobilized Israelis of all stripes. For the musicians of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, whose scheduled performances in October and November were cancelled, the call to action initially meant … » Read

Apart from fund-raising, the New York Philharmonic’s annual Spring Gala appears to have missions to accomplish and messages to deliver: The centennial of its trademark Young People’s Concerts; the propensity for music education of its … » Read

The pandemic wreaked havoc with audience behavior in the performing arts across the U.S. The forced abandonment of live performances for a year or more, combined with the explosion of streaming services, served to gut post-pandemic subscriptions … » Read

The classical music world lost a wealth of talent in 2023. Here are a number of artists, pedagogues, and administrators who have made significant contributions to the field during the course of their lives. Italian soprano Renata Scotto , whose … » Read

In accordance with recent tradition, the Metropolitan Opera instituted a new production on New Year’s Eve (December 31). Its unremarkable choice of Bizet’s Carmen this time may have been motivated more by the present trend to … » Read

Among high-profile music (as opposed to film) critics, opinions of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro are mostly positive, or “pretty good” as Mark Swed writes in the Los Angeles Times . Cooper’s commitment to getting the story … » Read

LONDON—Of all the instruments in an orchestra, the French horn is the most exposed. One crack and the whole audience winces. Listening to a fiendish bit of Peter Maxwell Davies a few months back at London’s Wigmore Hall, it was a … » Read