DATE BOOK – The hotter months invite you to plug into a new opera about Steve Jobs, enjoy outdoor concerts at ski-country heights, and cruise the Colorado River with concerts at bankside. Here’s a look at mountain area highlights.
DIGITAL REVIEW – In fall 2015, Los Angeles was the setting for Hopscotch: A Mobile Opera For 24 Cars, with riders listening to fragments en route to various destinations. Now comes the recording on a USB drive shaped like car key.
CINCINNATI - Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s 1991 opera offers an unflinching view of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's torments and passions. The piece alternates in the summer festival with works by Puccini, Mozart, and Missy Mazzoli.
SEATTLE – Closing the Symphony's season, music director Ludovic Morlot paired Ligeti’s Requiem and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, turning T.S. Eliot’s quote that the world ends "not with a bang but a whimper” on its head.
ST. LOUIS – Despite an appealingly quirky score, the opera by Philip Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton felt like a bloodless intellectual exercise; pervasive cartoonish mugging at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis didn't help.
LOS ANGELES - LA Opera Off Grand performed Kamala Sankaram’s Thumbprint, about a young gang-rape victim who summons the strength to report the crime, in the presence of the work's subject, Pakistani activist Mukhtar Mai.
DIGITAL REVIEW – In a pairing of recent concertos by Osvaldo Golijov and Christian Lindberg, Swedish clarinetist Emil Jonason showcases not only his technical virtuosity, but also an exceptional flair for generating excitement.
Breaking the Waves, with music by Missy Mazzoli (right) and libretto by Royce Vavrek, is the first winner of the Music Critics Association of North America's Best New Opera Award. The presentation will be made July 19 in Santa Fe.
BERLIN – Andrew Norman's educational opera A Trip to the Moon, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle and a large cast of pros and amateurs, is skillfully constructed while leaving an aftertaste of cliché.
BOSTON – Adding to its chain of splendid opera productions, the Boston Early Music Festival offered a stylish account of André Campra’s Le Carnaval de Venise, a tale of love and murderous revenge from the age of Louis XIV.
VICTORIA, Tex. – Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, the new artistic director of the Victoria Bach Festival, signaled Baroque mastery plus an intent to up the festival’s game in modern repertoire and music of Hispanic heritage.
OJAI, Calif. – In a festival known for stretching, musicians led by composer-pianist Vijay Iyer went about as far as you can go with improvisations that raised the question, what is the line between music and noise?
FORT WORTH, Tex. – The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition winnowed 30 contestants to three winners, including gold medalist Yekwon Sunwoo, who played Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto in the final round.
NEW YORK – The filleting of literary works for operatic treatment is nothing new, but the New York premiere of Péter Eötvös’ Angels in America finds Tony Kushner’s epic drama to be robbed of its rich socio-political specificity.
NEW YORK – Led by Esa-Pekka Salonen at Carnegie Hall, the Met's pit band confirmed its status as one of the world's top orchestras in three programs pairing music by Mahler with works by Schumann and Sibelius.
VIENNA - At the Theater an der Wien, installation artist Jonathan Meese and Austrian composer-librettist Bernhard Lang created Mondparsifal, a new version of Wagner's Parsifal that moves the action to the future, and to the moon.
BOOK REVIEW – In When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph and Its Aftermath, Stuart Isacoff brings a pianist's insights and historian's rigor to an event that shook the world nearly six decades ago.
BERLIN –Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face Suite is part of a series of commissions that will accompany Simon Rattle on his final stretch as Berlin Philharmonic music director. He leaves in 2018 to focus on the London Symphony.
LOS ANGELES – Yuja Wang is in the midst of a rare
cycle of Béla Bartók’s three piano concerti with the LA Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel. There should have been nothing for her to fear in the ferocious first concerto.
TORONTO – The Bang on a Can All-Stars performed works by a dozen contemporary composers from Canada and the United States in an eclectic program that included John Oswald’s “plunderphonic” treatment of a Motown hit.
