Around the U.S.

By Susan Brodie

Two new operas about women, opening the seasons in New York and San Francisco, prompted some thoughts about how females have been portrayed in operas over the last four centuries. What a Pandora's box!

By Paul Horsley

Featuring Nicole Cabell and local hero Joyce DiDonato as the star-crossed lovers, the Lyric Opera of Kansas City has mounted an auspicious production of The Capulets and the Montagues. A modern setting throws us into the midst of guns and strife.

By Richard S. Ginell

There was never an opening of a new concert hall quite like that of Walt Disney Concert Hall on Oct. 23, 2003. The hype was overwhelming, even suffocating. Amazingly, a good portion of these euphoric predictions have come true.

By Susan Elliott

Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera is a glittery affair, with gala goers of both sexes dressed camera-ready at every turn. A few celebs came down the red carpet Monday night … but most of the extra-musical attention was centered on the LGBT protesters out on the plaza.

By Robert P. Commanday

Along comes Dolores Claiborne in its premiere at the San Francisco Opera, reassuring us that new opera is really possible. A composer today can write music for the orchestra that gives another level of meaning to what's being sung and is at once engaging. That composer is Tobias Picker.

By Heidi Waleson

What kind of music relates to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Temple of Dendur or to paintings in the newly reinstalled European galleries? Beginning this week at a series of occasional "Grand Tour" concerts, listeners will move through four galleries and hear expertly curated mini-concerts.

By John von Rhein

Theodore Morrison's new opera Oscar starred countertenor David Daniels as the poet and playwright, while Joyce DiDonato and Susan Graham, two of America's finest mezzo-sopranos, were treated to showcase productions of their own.

By Daniel Hathaway

Russian pianist Stanislav Khristenko, 29, took first prize at the invigorated 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition, which used bold recruitment techniques to lure the world's top talent and planted keyboards on the city's streets to create neighborhood buzz.

By Ken Hoover

I expected to see a good production of Wagner's Ring cycle at the Seattle Opera, and I was not disappointed. Created under the natural influence of the northwest environment – lots of trees, cliffs, etc. -- it may be closer to Wagner's original concept than any Ring currently being performed.

By Gary Lemco

A Music@Menlo program of Bach's French connections, given in a season devoted to the influence of various aspects of Bach's art on the composers who came after. Tournier, Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Franck are featured.

By Grace Lichtenstein

“These buildings aren’t nouns, they are verbs,” says Aspen music director Robert Spano about the festival's new facilities as “spiritually transformative” places where the orchestras are better because the rooms themselves “encourage what sounds right. It’s truly exhilarating.”

By Gary Lemco

The profound impact of Bach's contrapuntal genius on multifarious generations of composers was the subject of a recent Music@Menlo concert, which marked the West Coast debut of the Danish String Quartet and featured Swiss-born pianist Gilles Vonsattel.

By Stephen Dankner

For a significant number of devoted performers, conductors and intrepid listeners, Carter's career was uniquely inspiring. Carter created his own path, undeflected by the vagaries of trends that left no mark on his style or aesthetic.

By Mike Greenberg

The wartime composition, a capstone of the Cactus Pear Music Festival, resonates with a universal human sense of something beyond experience and reason, a feeling that touches the religious and the materialist in equal measure.

By Gary Lemco

Music@Menlo, now underway through Aug. 10, is focusing its season on Bach's influence throughout musical history. Founded by Wu Han and David Finckel, the California Bay Area festival opened with an impressive concert of Bach-influenced works from Schubert to Bartók.

By John W. Lambert

Ignat Solzhenitsyn contributes some edge-of-your-seat Shostakovich to the Eastern Music Festival, and adventuresome programming under the direction of Gerard Schwarz goes beyond the usual subscription fare.

By Elaine Strauss

CoOPERAtive — a summer program that coaches aspiring singers in the many facets of a professional vocal career — now opens master classes to all, via the web. Rider U.'s Westminster Choir College runs the program, with artists such as collaborative pianist Martin Katz on hand for guidance.

Compiled by CVNA Editors

In attendance at the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival were dozens of music critics who are members of the Music Critics Association of North America, and who held their national meeting in the midst of the festival's rich program of performances and exhibitions.

By Earl Arthur Love

The most anticipated offering of this year’s bi-annual Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) was the North American debut of Handel’s rarely performed first opera, Almira. Composed when Handel was only 19, it premiered in Hamburg in 1705. Displaying an abundance of riches, the dazzling production flew by.

By John W. Barker

Among the 93 fringe events offered at the Boston Early Music Festival were six of Biber's so-called Rosenkranz-Sonaten, each on a different violin with unique "scordatura" tuning to allow for novel fingerings and coloristic effects.