Preliminaries looked unpromising, even worrying. On the big screen were photos of the main characters, definitely not the singers, including Wozzeck, not a soldier but a near-invisible worker on the ...

Lisette Oropesa, the soprano from Louisiana, has become a big, big singer. She is rail thin (a runner and a vegan). But she is a prima donna in New York, Salzburg, and elsewhere. I remember a time ...

‘World Premiere on Video’, proclaims the cover, which is I suppose strictly true, but one shouldn’t get too excited. What we have here is Un ballo in maschera as we largely know it, but with text for ...

The Korean National Symphony Orchestra on Thursday unveiled its 2026 program, marking the first full season led by new music director Roberto Abbado. The 71-year-old Italian maestro will make his ...

BUSAN, South Korea — South Korea's K-pop artists are on such a roll across the globe that it can be easy to forget their classical music forebearers were rocking the world's concert halls well before ...

The Korean National Symphony Orchestra (KNSO) said Tuesday it has appointed Italian conductor Roberto Abbado as its new artistic director. His three-year contract will begin in January 2026. A nephew ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. The festival’s choice this year was among the more arcane: Macbeth in a critical edition of the now-standard 1865 ...

«It sometimes happens, at the end of great masterpieces, that I feel a climate of real involvement between me, the orchestra, the audience: as if everyone were holding their breath together. And when ...

“Simon Boccanegra,” a story of fathers, politics, love and duty, is returning to La Scala, where personal connections to the opera run deep. By David Belcher Fathers and history loom large, both ...

Will love triumph over the weight of the past, or will the need to avenge the crimes of the father blight all joy? Il Trovatore, one of Giuseppe Verdi’s most beloved operas, begins with a Spanish ...

In my hot youth, to borrow from Byron, the palm (or should it be baton?) for the title of most legendary living conductor undoubtedly belonged to Sergiu Celibidache. The Romanian had given up the job ...

The American soprano/mezzo-soprano Maria Ewing has died aged 71. Born in Detroit to a Dutch mother and an African-American father, Ewing went to school in the city before training in New York and ...