On April 23rd, the Metropolitan Opera staged a new production of Lucia di Lammermoor , the Donizetti masterpiece (one of them). Marilyn Horne, the great mezzo-soprano, once complained that reviewers spent most of their reviews on productions, not … » Read

Replacements, in these fragile times, are a fact of festival life. Artistic directors need a Plan B in case illness strikes—and so it was this month in Aix-en-Provence, France. The Easter Festival 2022, April 8-24, welcomed back a live … » Read

It was just one of a multitude of automobile ads on Canadian television, but it got Ken MacLeod’s goat. The commercial for Nissan Infiniti features close-ups of an SUV in the middle of a concert hall, where a youth orchestra is performing a … » Read

Harmony: A New Musical captures the story of the Comedian Harmonists, a highly successful male sextet in Weimar Germany composed of three Jewish and three Gentile members. From 1928 until 1935, when the Nazi regime forbade fraternization between … » Read

The Manhattan School of Music’s (MSM) Orchestral Performance (OP) graduate program is to have a new head in David Chan, longtime concertmaster of the Met Opera Orchestra and a conductor in his own right. He takes over as of July 1, … » Read

WARSAW (AFP) – Ahead of their first concert since the start of Russia's invasion, members of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra voice hope that their music will heal troubled souls and help boost Ukrainian culture. Some of the orchestra's … » Read

In an action he later likened to an “absurdist play,” Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov had his concert at a central Moscow venue interrupted by police officers who ordered the hall cleared due to a supposed bomb threat. In his first … » Read

In his new book, The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century , conductor John Mauceri suggests that classical music has been one of World War II’s overlooked casualties. Focusing his attention on four men—Paul Hindemith, Arnold … » Read

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2022-23 season takes aim at relevance and reckoning, its programming rich in new and/or monumental works (Shostakovich’s Babi Yar , the overture and third act of Tannhäuser ), and focused … » Read

LONDON—With its mixture of medieval history and fairytale magic, Lohengrin inhabits that awkward territory between the fabled pageantry of Wagner’s early works and the philosophic mysticism of Tristan und Isolde . Musically there is … » Read