NEW YORK – Spooky! Mary Zimmerman’s new production of Dvořák’s Rusalka starring Kristine Opolais at the Met is a twisted hybrid bordering on a parody of convention. If capricious and confusing, it's also beautiful and intriguing.
DIGITAL REVIEW - Mahan Esfahani is a terrific musician with a beautiful touch and technique to burn. He is also an audaciously contemporary programmer, turning the usual marketing of harpsichord players on its Baroque head.
OTTAWA, Ontario – High-decibel intensity marked the onset of Chamberfest, an annual two-week event that's getting bigger and better. The Canadian National Brass Project launched it with classic fanfares and a world premiere.
CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, Calif. – The theme of the 78th Carmel Bach Festival is “Bach, Bohemia and Beyond,” with Dvořák, Bartók, Zelenka, and even Ligeti in the mix with old Herr Bach, plus a concert version of The Magic Flute.
DIGITAL REVIEW - Perhaps the most interesting of all the Pierre Boulez repackagings is a collection that revisits his tumultuous early days as an intellectual bomb thrower and musical style setter at the head of the Domaine Musical.
The Stonehill Jewish Song Collection — over a thousand songs on 39 hours of recordings — provides a reminder of a once-stable life in the old country. Dr. Miriam Isaacs has spent three years working on the project.
SAN FRANCISCO - Marco Tutino’s new opera is a flashy hybrid of verismo opera and neorealist cinema that tells of war crimes in an Italian village after Mussolini's fall. Vivid staging and a strong cast helped lift a listenable score.
OJAI - This year's music director, percussionist Steven Schick, has programmed works by 34 living composers, including Pulitzer winner John Luther Adams, who'll be represented by two pieces in their West Coast premieres.
LEIPZIG - Oper Leipzig, in the composer's home town, presented the first three installments of its new Ring cycle, along with performances of Parsifal,Tannhäuser, and from Wagner at age 23, the rarely done Das Liebesverbot.
DRESDEN - "Fire Ice" is the theme of the 2015 Dresden Music Festival, an extravaganza of eclectic offerings devised by German cellist Jan Vogler, who has transformed the event since taking over in 2009.
LOS ANGELES - The Los Angeles Philharmonic's Next on Grand Festival, running through May 31, features seven world premieres and programs led by music director Gustavo Dudamel and creative chair John Adams.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - His music toys with antecedents and expectations; it is full of ideas and contrasts; there is often a dramatic arc. But when all is said and done, Wolfgang Rihm's new piano concerto is much ado about very little.
OTTAWA - The Salzburg Marionette Theatre has toured North America with a playful show built around Schumann’s Papillons and Debussy’s Boîte à joujoux. Remarkably life-like puppets teamed with pianist Orion Weiss. Paris is next.
ATLANTA — The orchestra that Robert Shaw made famous finally got down to musical business with belated opening weeks led by music director Robert Spano. Short notice after a nine-week lockout saw 31 substitutes filling in.
CINCINNATI — André Previn basked in a Queen City of the West welcome for the sunny violin-cello showpiece he wrote for Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson. They'll take it to five North American stops in 2015, then on to Europe.
CHICAGO - A radiant traversal of Bach's six “concerts avec plusieurs instruments” by the Chicago Symphony under Nicholas Kraemer showed how far we’ve come in assimilating, or perhaps accommodating, Baroque performance practice.
BROOKLINE, Mass. - For Swiss composer Frank Martin's rarely performed 1940 chamber opera treatment of the Tristan and Isolt myth, Boston Lyric Opera converted Temple Ohabei Shalom into a theater-in-the-round.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - You'll feel your vocal vibrations when you sit in MIT MediaLab's Cocoon and experience the intensity of the oRb, an ostrich-egg-like interactive creation of composer Tod Machover and his team.
EDMONTON, Alberta - An eight-stop tour by the Quebec chamber orchestra has an early romantic flavor, with an arrangement of Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor (Death and the Maiden), plus Mendelssohn and Schumann.
BRITISH COLUMBIA - Two cities honored Remembrance Day weekend with Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. In Vancouver, a great tradition is upheld. In Victoria, under conductor Tania Miller, a first endeavor has shining worth.