Around the U.S.

By Richard S. Ginell

LOS ANGELES – New works included Esa-Pekka Salonen's glistening Iri da iri, which chorale members themselves commissioned, and high-schoolers joined Francisco Núñez, who reprised his own swinging samba Es Tu Tiempo.

By Perry Tannenbaum

CHARLESTON, S.C. – A new sense of adventure pervades Spoleto Festival USA, where the scales have tipped toward newer works. Among this year's offerings is the U.S. premiere of Michael Nyman's opera Facing Goya.

By Richard S. Ginell

LOS ANGELES - Renée Fleming and Plácido Domingo are helping Los Angeles Opera end their season, but not together. She's singing Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire; he's Athanaël in Thaïs. Both triumph.

By Daniel Hathaway

CLEVELAND - Digital animation is the motor that drives the Cleveland Orchestra's inventive version of The Cunning Little Vixen at Severance Hall led by Franz Welser-Möst and featuring a splendid cast.

By Nancy Malitz

CHICAGO - A Chicago Symphony festival will celebrate Shostakovich, Britten and Prokofiev under guest Jaap van Zweden, who admires the composers' ability to "create beautiful flowers in the darkest of times."

By Paul Hyde

CHARLESTON, S.C. - British composer Michael Nyman awaits the U.S. premiere of his opera Facing Goya, a surreal meditation on the painter's long-lost skull, among artistically diverse offerings from classical to circus arts.

By Heidi Waleson

NEW YORK – The first two concerts in the fourth and final "Spring for Music" featured the New York Philharmonic and Seattle Symphony, the latter in the Pulitzer-winning Become Ocean by John Luther Adams (right).

By Daniel Hathaway

CLEVELAND – Gabriela Lena Frank rose to the occasion after the Cleveland Orchestra commissioned a concerto for its principal piccolo, Mary Kay Fink. The premiere shared a program with music by Rouse and Mozart.

By Leslie Kandell

NEW YORK – The New York Choral Society's pairing of music by Jennifer Higdon (right) and Gustav Holst pointed out similarities and differences in the composers' approach to the time-honored genre of the oratorio.

By Mike Greenberg

FORT WORTH – Composer Daniel Crozier and librettist Peter M. Krask's With Blood, With Ink languished without a professional staging for years until the Fort Worth Opera gave it a handsomely staged and well-sung production.

By Lawrence B. Johnson

Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz, winner of the 25-year-old Gilmore International Keyboard Artist Award, heads to Kalamazoo as the seventh star in a constellation of winners. He will perform twice during the anniversary fête.

By Marvin J. Ward

BOSTON – Martin Pearlman's performance edition of Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria was star of the night at the New England Conservatory, along with the U.S. debut of Portuguese tenor Fernando Guimarães.

By Philippa Kiraly

SEATTLE – It's been 16 seasons since Mina Miller began to present Music of Remembrance chamber music concerts memorializing Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. These concerts are like no others.

By Adeline Sire

BOSTON – Lutenist Paul O'Dette tried to introduce Johann Sebastiani's Passion According to Saint Matthew in 1997, but he had to wait until last weekend to realize his dream at the New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall.

By Philippa Kiraly

SEATTLE - Maximilian Steinberg's Passion Week, written in the early 1920s and arguably the last major piece of sacred music composed in Russia after the imposition of Communist rule, has been unveiled by Cappella Romana.

By Mike Greenberg

HOUSTON – Is it opera? Is it film? Is it circus? Yes. And the miraculous, acrobatic European production of Richard Wagner's 'Das Rheingold,' in its U.S. debut by Houston Grand Opera, is also politically fearless.

By Richard Ginell

LOS ANGELES – As offbeat as things often are around Walt Disney Concert Hall, they got a lot more so as March careened into April. The Minimalist Jukebox – or Minimalist Jukebox 2.0, if you will – was at our throats again.

By Jeff Dunn

BERKELEY, Calif. – The Kronos Quartet's world premiere of 'Beyond Zero: 1914-1918,' with music of Aleksandra Vrebalov and film by Bill Morrison, featured vintage deteriorated film cels. Do you see the cannon at left?

By Marvin J. Ward

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – In despair and defiance, voting rights champion Fannie Lou Hamer told 1964 Democratic National Convention leaders: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Mary Watkins' opera honors Hamer.

By Perry Tannenbaum

SAVANNAH – A welcoming and eclectic music festival arrives, like the elite Masters golf upriver, on the cusp of Georgia's winter and spring. Daniel Hope leads the classical side of things in this unabashedly historic city.