LENOX, Mass. - This summer's six-concert Festival of Contemporary Music, planned by the late composer Steven Stucky, found composers, students, scholars, and publishers gathering from around the country.
FISHTAIL, Mont. – Arts philanthropists Cathy and Peter Halstead traveled the world in search of a remote landscape in which nature and the arts could interact. It's called Tippet Rise, and classical music plays its part.
Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif. – Festival artistic director Paul Goodwin and associate conductor Andrew Megill have been throwing in things you wouldn't associate with an event called a Bach festival and making everything fit.
HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. – After an absence of 23 years, former festival music director James Levine made a triumphant appearance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus leading Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony.
TORONTO – A "London Calling" theme has yielded chamber music programs for 2016 Toronto Summer Music, which reconstructs 18th- and 19th-century traditions for coronations and fashionable concert societies.
DIGITAL REVIEW – Valery Gergiev's cycle of Scriabin symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra does not eclipse excellent earlier efforts by other orchestras. Nor does it surpass previous work by Gergiev himself.
ATHERTON, Calif. – Music by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and Stravinsky enchanted and dazzled. A full house erupted into unbridled applause after the 1913 piano four hands version of Le sacre du printemps.
LOS ANGELES – If any score is made-to-order for the musical strengths and temperament of conductor Gustavo Dudamel, Bernstein's West Side Story is it. Dudamel delivered the goods, and then some, at the Hollywood Bowl.
BERLIN – Salvatore Sciarrino’s Luci mie traditrici, inspired by Gesualdo’s crime, creates a realm where human emotion is stripped down to elemental vibrations. The Staatsoper staging is memorable for its committed performances.
DIGITAL REVIEW – Five composers, operating in specialized sound worlds of their own, wrote a tour-de-force for the vocal group Roomful of Teeth in evocation of a river diverted to serve the parched American West.
EUGENE, Ore. – Though still grounded in the music of J.S. Bach, the Oregon Bach Festival also embraces the present. Matthew Halls led the world premiere of James MacMillan’s timely — as it turned out — A European Requiem.
HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. – Jazz trumpet star Wynton Marsalis, whose freshly minted Violin Concerto in D will be played July 12 at the Ravinia Festival, says his friendship with soloist Nicola Benedetti led him back to the classical realm.
ST. JOHN'S, Newfoundland – The ambitious little company Opera on the Avalon presented the world premiere of Ours by composer John Estacio and librettist Robert Chafe, about the force of 800 men that was decimated at the Somme.
ROUND TOP, Tex. – Over a span of 45 years, pianist James Dick has transformed a dot on the map into a perennially vital summer institute that spotlights young musicians who regularly perform with their distinguished elders.
CHICAGO - Conductor Carlos Kalmar, whose imaginative programming has been a strength of the annual Grant Park Music Festival, led orchestra, chorus and soloists in an authoritative account of Martinů’s 1955 oratorio.
DIGITAL REVIEW – Leiser and Caurier's satirical 2012 production, now on DVD, has Cecilia Bartoli's Cleopatra singing a Handel aria with a bag over her head, plus mind-bending sex, fantasy and horror that's over the top.
