Early in the opera Dead Man Walking , based on Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir of counseling death-row inmates, the protagonist’s car gets stopped for speeding. Sister Helen is racing to cover the 150 miles between her New Orleans … » Read

LOS ANGELES—Mozart’s Don Giovanni owes a lot of its durability to its ambiguity. Everyone has a different take on it. Just the description of it as a dramma giocoso invites a vast interpretive range. Take, for instance, the startling … » Read

LONDON—Whether it was an appearance by rising-star Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, or just the relative ease of getting to and from London’s Royal Festival Hall for a three o’clock Sunday afternoon event, this September 24 … » Read

PHILADELPHIA—In the 1880s, reporter Nellie Bly feigned madness in order to infiltrate the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in New York City. She chronicled its brutal conditions in a series of first-person articles in the New York World , and … » Read

For those who have long bewailed the Metropolitan Opera’s neglect of new work, the current season, which opened last night with Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking , is a dream come true. It includes six works that premiered between 1986 … » Read

Doppelganger can be seen as director Claus Guth’s attempt to create an opera that Franz Schubert never wrote. In the program booklet for his creation, Guth laments that the composer’s actual operas, with their inadequate librettos, … » Read

The Boston-based White Snake Projects and its founder Cerise Lim Jacobs have a well-established reputation for cutting-edge ventures , so their recent performances of Monkey: A Kung Fu Puppet Parable raised expectations on the part of a critic … » Read

Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly , one of opera’s undeniable treasures, has in recent years become a flashpoint for critics due to its stereotyped images of Japan and the male fantasies too readily assigned to Asian women. … » Read

LONDON—It may be all change at the London Symphony Orchestra, but the programming is as original as ever. Simon Rattle, the outgoing music director, was a sterling champion of new, or modern music, and it appears that in associate artist … » Read

Among the first stirrings of the new season, the New York Armory’s estimable recital series presented on September 11 acclaimed soprano Julia Bullock in the intimate Board of Officers Room. John Arida was at the piano for a varied program … » Read