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Paul Sperry, Tenor Who Specialized in American Song, Dies at 90
He carved out a niche by singing songs by living composers from his own country, and was praised by critics at home and abroad.
By Adam Nossiter
He carved out a niche by singing songs by living composers from his own country, and was praised by critics at home and abroad.
By Adam Nossiter
A new recording from the conductor Klaus Mäkelä, a concerto-like work by Vijay Iyer and a fresh take on Charles Ives are among the highlights.
Chad Smith, the orchestra’s new chief executive, hopes to return the storied ensemble to its groundbreaking roots while moving it forward.
By Joshua Barone
The struggles of one of the nation’s finest orchestras show the difficulties facing classical music in the United States.
By Robin Pogrebin and Javier C. Hernández
In a rarity for contemporary music, the entire catalog of Crumb, who died two years ago, has been recorded and released in 21 volumes.
By David Weininger
Gov. Ron DeSantis gave no explanation for zeroing out the $32 million in grants that were approved by state lawmakers.
By Patricia Mazzei
This week's selection includes titles by Gabrielle Zevin, Peace Adzo Medie, Patrick Mackie and more.
By Shreya Chattopadhyay
A selection of entertainment highlights this weekend, including the film “The Bikeriders.”
By Danielle Dowling
The annual Mermaid Parade in Brooklyn is a tacky yet spectacular extravaganza.
By James Barron
The tenure of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, can be difficult to assess. That much was evident over two concerts.
By Joshua Barone
The company has bet that new operas will attract new, more diverse audiences and revitalize a stale repertory. Is the gamble paying off?
By Zachary Woolfe
The Met is approaching prepandemic levels of attendance. But its strategy of staging more modern operas to lure new audiences is having mixed success.
By Javier C. Hernández
“The Comet/Poppea” radically pares down a classic and blends it with a premiere by George E. Lewis for an original show that will travel widely.
By Seth Colter Walls
The concertmaster and first-chair violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra for decades, he took part in a diplomatic breakthrough in 1973 with concerts in Mao Zedong’s Beijing.
By Alex Williams
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Mitsuko Uchida appeared every night at her edition of the Ojai Music Festival. The rest of the time was given to other performers.
By Joshua Barone
Bogdan Roscic and Lotte de Beer are shaking the dust off Vienna’s two biggest repertory companies.
By Joshua Barone
At the Park Avenue Armory, a five-hour selection of pieces from the 29-hour “Licht” cycle is best appreciated as a marathon performance.
By Zachary Woolfe
A star-studded concert pulled out all the stops to celebrate one of the country’s most important art forms.
By Elisabetta Povoledo
The pandemic-derailed tenure of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, was too short to give us a full sense of him, as man or maestro.
By Zachary Woolfe
The star pianist sat for a candid, occasionally tense interview in which she discussed creativity, the pandemic and why she doesn’t conduct Beethoven.
By Javier C. Hernández
In Vienna, a series of concerts and summits will highlight women and nonbinary composers, as well as the dominance of the dead, white, male canon.
By Valeriya Safronova
Antonio Pappano says the London house, where he is wrapping up 22 years as music director, “will always be my home.”
By Rebecca Schmid
A revival of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” this summer at Glyndebourne, an English opera festival, features three countertenors with three different sounds.
By David Belcher
During a break at the Royal Opera House, Aigul Akhmetshina discussed her action-packed career, “Carmen” and her mission to spread her love of opera.
By Farah Nayeri
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For a year, we followed five Curtis Institute of Music students as they made friends, pushed their artistry and stared down an uncertain future.
By James Estrin and Joshua Barone
It is nearly impossible to stage Stockhausen’s seven-opera cycle “Licht.” But “Inside Light” brings a portion of it to the Park Avenue Armory.
By Joshua Barone
Jaap van Zweden returned to the New York Philharmonic to lead some of his final programs as the orchestra’s music director.
By Joshua Barone
John Adams’s opera “Girls of the Golden West,” a recital program by Barbara Hannigan and a collection of Elgar symphonies are among the highlights.
“Natural History,” performed in Cincinnati, is a collaboration between the composer Michael Gordon and the Native American ensemble Steiger Butte Drum.
By Zachary Woolfe
The choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s shows feature circus performers and abundant nudity. Now, she’s bringing her experimental approach to opera.
By Ben Miller
He arrived on a mission to reshape the ensemble as its music director. Now, as he departs, he’s still making sense of his pandemic-interrupted tenure.
By Javier C. Hernández
The Cleveland Orchestra’s staging of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” was a reminder that ensembles can help fill the gap as opera grows harder to find.
By Zachary Woolfe
The appeal — and challenges — of being a military musician.
By Sarah Diamond
Premier military bands offer rare stability for classical musicians, who consider them a strong alternative to traditional orchestras. But signing up means shipping out.
By Sarah Diamond and Christopher Lee
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DanceAfrica Festival 2024, the nation’s largest festival of African dance, is what some consider Brooklyn’s unofficial start to summer.
By James Barron
Donald Palumbo, a mild-mannered but relentless perfectionist, is stepping down after 17 years as the company’s chorus master.
By Zachary Woolfe
The tenor Freddie De Tommaso fell in love with opera and timepieces as a young boy. Now he shops for high-end examples in the cities where he performs.
By David Belcher
An opera about Danny Chen, an Army private who died by suicide after experiencing racist hazing while serving, was performed in New York, his hometown.
By Zachary Woolfe
The Dutch concert hall reversed course after facing criticism for canceling performances by the Israeli ensemble because of security concerns.
By Javier C. Hernández
Strauss had seemingly impossible standards for a soprano in “Salome.” But Davidsen, making her role debut in Paris, is exactly what he intended.
By Oussama Zahr
Hannigan, the rare artist to have a career as a soprano and a conductor, will assume a full-time conducting post for the first time.
By Javier C. Hernández
About 130 children took part in a sleepover at Rome’s opera house, part of a campaign to make up for a lack of music education by making the theater and the art form more familiar and accessible.
By Elisabetta Povoledo and Alessandro Penso
Robert Ashley’s 1994 opera “Foreign Experiences,” a portrait of a paranoid mind in free fall, is part of a wave of revivals following his death.
By Joshua Barone
This week’s program was supposed to feature the orchestra’s principal oboe, but he and another player have been suspended amid misconduct allegations.
By Zachary Woolfe
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Con tecnología avanzada, los científicos encontraron niveles extraordinarios de plomo en el cabello del compositor. Beethoven podría haberlo ingerido en sus copas diarias de vino.
By Gina Kolata
Using powerful technologies, scientists found staggering amounts of lead and other toxic substances in the composer’s hair that may have come from wine, or other sources.
By Gina Kolata
The mogul Barry Diller, who paid for the park, will finance a summer season of music, dance, theater and more, shaped in part by the Broadway producer Scott Rudin.
By Javier C. Hernández
Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato reprised their roles in Kevin Puts’s adaptation of the award-winning novel and film.
By Oussama Zahr
Alsop has had enviable success, and was the first female conductor to lead a top American orchestra. She wants to take another step up.
By Zachary Woolfe
The conductor Daniel Barenboim explores the political and spiritual power of what many consider the greatest symphony.
By Daniel Barenboim
Esa-Pekka Salonen is known for unusual, ambitious projects. But at the New York Philharmonic this week, he succeeded with standard repertory works.
By Zachary Woolfe
O’Hara is an unusual kind of triple threat: a star of Broadway and television who is appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of “The Hours.”
By Alexis Soloski
Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang said they were sidelined without cause by the New York Philharmonic after a recent magazine article detailed allegations of misconduct against them.
By Javier C. Hernández
Noltemy, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s chief executive, will take the helm of the Philharmonic as it searches for its next music director.
By Javier C. Hernández
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Kirill Gerstein’s immense recording project “Music in Time of War” surveys works by artists who witnessed World War I and the Armenian genocide.
By Hugh Morris
Asmik Grigorian, a star singer abroad, made her Metropolitan Opera debut by lending lyricism, complexity and spontaneity to a classic role.
By Joshua Barone
Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s incoming music and artistic director, stepped in after a guest conductor fell ill.
By Oussama Zahr
Celebrated for his long tenure with Lyric Opera of Chicago, he led this and other orchestras with force and a notably energetic podium presence.
By Adam Nossiter
Costanzo will be a rare figure in classical music: an artist in his prime who is also working as an administrator.
By Javier C. Hernández
Yunchan Lim’s collection of Chopin piano études, a new recording of Terry Riley’s “In C” and works by Marc-André Hamelin are among the highlights.
The opera-oratorio, an alternate Nativity story, featured a flurry of Met debuts, including the director Lileana Blain-Cruz and the conductor Marin Alsop.
By Oussama Zahr
He will begin a four-year term as the orchestra’s music director in the 2025-26 season, succeeding Louis Langrée.
By Javier C. Hernández
Peter Gordon, who studied with Terry Riley, has always made music that is surprising but accessible. Now he’s starting his own record label.
By Rob Tannenbaum
The challenge for Montana Levi Blanco, the Tony-winning costume designer for John Adams’s oratorio, was how to keep straight so many Marys.
By Louis Lucero II
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In an interview, Blain-Cruz explained why an oratorio like John Adams and Peter Sellars’s “El Niño” is more difficult to stage than the usual opera.
By Joshua Barone and Lila Barth
Olga Neuwirth’s “Keyframes for a Hippogriff,” a chaotic explosion of postmodernism, had its American premiere, conducted by Thomas Sondergard.
By Zachary Woolfe
Nuestro matrimonio a larga distancia era difícil de sostener… y difícil de terminar.
By Patti Niemi
The Danish String Quartet returned to Carnegie Hall with its Doppelgänger project, pairing Schubert’s String Quintet and a premiere by Adès.
By Joshua Barone
The New York Philharmonic commissioned an outside investigation into its culture after a magazine article explored how it handled an accusation of sexual assault in 2010.
By Javier C. Hernández
The composer Matthew Aucoin, Graham’s former student, and the director Peter Sellars have adapted her poems into the operatic “Music for New Bodies.”
By Joshua Barone
Shedding its conservative reputation, the Bavarian capital is finding unusual ways to balance tradition and innovation.
By A.J. Goldmann
Nadia Boulanger’s “La Ville Morte” was repeatedly thwarted by death and World War I, then nearly lost. Finally, it is having its American premiere.
By Joshua Barone
Anthony Davis has written operas based on recent history. But now he is adapting, and dramatically changing, Wharton’s 1912 novel “The Reef.”
By Seth Colter Walls
Fortunato Ortombina, the general director of Teatro La Fenice, Venice’s opera house, will succeed Dominique Meyer, a respected French impresario.
By Elisabetta Povoledo
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Davóne Tines, who stars in the oratorio “El Niño,” is challenging traditions in classical music and using art to confront social problems.
By Javier C. Hernández
The New York Philharmonic said the musicians would not perform for now, after a magazine article brought new attention to allegations of misconduct. They have denied wrongdoing.
By Javier C. Hernández
In a program of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, a guest conductor coaxes a sumptuous sincerity from the orchestra’s musicians.
By Oussama Zahr
Carnegie’s intermittently illuminating festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic” has suffered from interjections of too much standard repertory.
By Zachary Woolfe
Anthony Freud is leaving Lyric Opera of Chicago on good terms, though the company faces challenges in a strained environment for the performing arts.
By Zachary Woolfe
Our long-distance marriage was hard to sustain — and hard to end.
By Patti Niemi
After making history as the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire” is back — with its showstopping step dance.
By Zachary Woolfe
At Munich’s prestigious opera house, the Russian-born Vladimir Jurowski has broadened the repertoire while rooting his work in political awareness.
By Joshua Barone
Because there were few opportunities for Black singers in the U.S., she began performing in Europe, where she was praised for her work in “Tosca,” “Carmen” and other operas.
By Adam Nossiter
On Thursday, the richly talented 28-year-old maestro led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.
By Zachary Woolfe
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Karina Canellakis, a born-and-raised New Yorker, led her hometown orchestra alongside another debut, of the pianist Alice Sara Ott.
By Anastasia Tsioulcas
Selections from the Weekend section, including a review of the sci-fi romance “The Beast.”
By Danielle Dowling
Dan Schlosberg, who for 10 years has adapted opera classics for the company, has written its first world premiere.
By Joshua Barone
Tilman Michael, who leads the Frankfurt Opera’s chorus, will succeed the veteran conductor Donald Palumbo, who steps down this season after 17 years.
By Javier C. Hernández
The tenor sang the role of Ruggero in a revival of Puccini’s opera that was performed with such restraint, it verged on overly careful.
By Oussama Zahr
The pianist Alice Sara Ott, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut this week, is upending concert culture — and defying stereotypes about multiple sclerosis.
By Javier C. Hernández
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