MANCHESTER—California-born Finnish-American conductor Aku Sorensen has won the 2026 Siemens Hallé International Conductors Competition. The 29-year-old, who has lived in Finland for the last ten years, clinched the win with a … » Read

LONDON—Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is a masterpiece, so seamlessly does the composer integrate music and text to create a gripping piece of music drama. It is not, however, indestructible. A successful production needs to … » Read

LONDON—The later compositions of Jean Sibelius are succinct, stripped back as they are to the essentials of musical expression until his final symphony, the Seventh, delivered its profound dialectic in 20 uninterrupted minutes. Yet only 32 … » Read

LOS ANGELES—Irish composer Gerald Barry’s wonderfully outlandish operas used to arrive at Walt Disney Concert Hall with regularity every five years, starting in 2006 with The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit , followed by The Importance … » Read

LONDON—The idea of reimagining the Easter story through the eyes of a woman is a good one (see John Adams’s The Gospel According to the Other Mary ). Commissioned by Scotland’s Dunedin Consort, along with the Barbican Centre and … » Read

Three new releases highlight the diversity of orchestral and chamber music coming out of the U.S. right now. First up, Sarah Kirkland Snider ’s Forward Into Light , a distinctive and immersive album by one of America’s most individual … » Read

CHICAGO— Hello, Dolly was right: Sometimes, it only takes a moment. Director Matthew Ozawa’s widely traveled production of Madama Butterfly is far from perfect in its arrival at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where Ozawa is the chief … » Read

SAN FRANCISCO—In its inspired concept and eerily enchanting realization, Opera Parallèle’s La Belle et la Bête is a triumph of the first order and certainly one of the signal achievements of this resourceful small … » Read

In 2019, the New York Philharmonic presented the premiere of David Lang’s opera prisoner of the state , a Fidelio adaptation that used Beethoven’s scenario to comment on the persistence of political oppression into our own time. The … » Read

LONDON—Like his stagings of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre , Barrie Kosky's new Royal Ballet and Opera Siegfried is rooted in the natural world. But this third instalment—seen at its March 17 premiere—was different. A … » Read