LONDON—The inaugural Southbank Centre Multitudes festival turned out to be one of London’s 2025 cultural highlights. The idea of pairing each of the venue’s resident orchestras with practitioners from other disciplines threw up … » Read

Soprano Asmik Grigorian has fashioned a portrayal of Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana that is hers and hers alone. The Lithuanian singer, starring in the Met’s current Eugene Onegin , never falls into routine; her performance brings surprises … » Read

LOS ANGELES—Approaching the final months of his 20-year tenure as Los Angeles Opera’s music director, James Conlon dearly wanted to conduct Verdi’s Falstaff one more time. His first professional conducting gig was Falstaff , and … » Read

The novelty at this year’s Aix-en-Provence Easter Festival has been the first engagement of an orchestra in residence. Such a title may seem a touch grandiose for a three-night gig, particularly since one of these was a chamber recital that … » Read

LONDON—It has been 12 years since British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber put his cello back in its case for the last time, a herniated disc in his neck having brought a premature end to a career that had begun in 1972 with the first London … » Read

LONDON—Bastard Assignments, a collective in the thriving British experimental music scene, has received positive notices in the past (“one of the most exciting forces in contemporary music,” as quoted from the Financial Times in … » Read

AIX-EN-PROVENCE—As fine wines improve with age, so the Aix Easter Festival has matured into one of Europe’s unmissable classical music gatherings. While not a behemoth on the scale of London’s BBC Proms, it is a beacon among … » Read

CHICAGO—During a recent Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, Katinka Kleijn sidled onto the Orchestra Hall stage, as she has for more than 30 years, to join her colleagues in the cello section for a program of rich, late-romantic … » Read

CHICAGO—Jakub Hruša has death on his mind. At least, his recent Chicago Symphony Orchestra program did. On April 9, he anchored his guest appearance with Rachmaninoff’s The Isle of the Dead and the Prelude and Liebestod … » Read

Innocence by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has made an impact that few other recent operas can match. Following its premiere at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2021, Saariaho’s dramatization (with a multilingual libretto … » Read