The Metropolitan Opera’s record of performing pre-Mozart operas is pretty slight and is likely to remain so until it finds an appropriate smaller venue. Even so, the lack of an ideal venue is not an excuse for ignoring this segment of the … » Read

LOS ANGELES – While Esa-Pekka Salonen is going to the San Francisco Symphony next fall, he remains the conductor laureate of his longtime orchestra to the south, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Indeed, whenever Salonen revisits the band … » Read

WNYC has responded to pressure from its local community, and especially its new music community, and cancelled all plans to drop New Sounds . The program, hosted by John Schaefer since its inception 37 years ago, will remain on the air at its 11 … » Read

Conductor Zubin Mehta took the stage in Tel Aviv on Sunday for an emotional final performance as music director of the Israel Philharmonic, retiring after 50 years with the orchestra. The 83-year-old, who underwent treatment for a cancerous tumor … » Read

For those who think of countertenor Iestyn Davies as the flamboyant castrato of Broadway’s recent Farinelli and the King , or as the high-pitched hypochondriac party guest in last year’s Met staging of Thomas Adès’s The … » Read

PARIS--Top architect Jean Nouvel is suing one of his former clients, the Philharmonie concert hall in Paris, in a dispute over the cost of building the venue, which opened in 2015. In a complaint filed in the Paris court on October 14, his … » Read

Russell Thomas has a problem—of sorts. A tenor who has performed in many of the world’s leading opera houses, he can sing one of the art form’s most demanding roles—Verdi’s Otello. Many tenors cannot, and as a black … » Read

Desire , a one-hour chamber opera by Hannah Lash, had its premiere last week at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, which, under the supportive leadership of Melissa Smey, produces short, spare, experimental, often weird pieces like this … » Read

Adrian Jones becomes the new orchestral director of the Staatskapelle Dresden as of January 2020, a capacity in which he’ll be working with Dresden Staatsoper Chief Conductor Christian Thielemann. Jones succeeds Jan Nast, who left Dresden … » Read

Johann Sebastian Bach is often portrayed as a model of rectitude—a “conformist establishment figure” closely associated with “respectability and propriety.” But, argues music historian Ted Gioia, that … » Read