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Byline: Joshua Barone A few years ago, during the Ojai Music Festival in California, the pianist Vikingur Olafsson was having a couple of beers with the composer John Adams when [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone A revival called 'Show/Boat: A River' joins a history of reimagining the musical that goes back nearly a century, to its first performances. Few musicals have as [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone and Vincent Tullo Listen to how Tchaikovsky uses the celesta in 'The Nutcracker,' unleashing the potential of the instrument to signal playfulness and fantasy. There comes a [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone A new opera by Mikael Karlsson and Royce Vavrek, directed by Ivo van Hove, aims to capture the lavishness of Ingmar Bergman's film, in half the time. [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone The stage of the Felsenreitschule, a theater carved from the side of a mountain in Salzburg, Austria, is about 130 feet wide. During concerts, artists come out [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone and Balarama Heller As the story goes, Indra, the king of the gods, takes a net and stretches it across the universe. At each joint is a [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone As subscriptions face an uncertain future, classical music could look to the membership models of streaming services and gyms for inspiration. Perhaps you spend your mornings at [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone The first time Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated a Russian novel together, it felt as though another man had joined their marriage: Dostoyevsky. 'It was a [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone The Salzburg Festival is synonymous with excellence and fame. But it's also a place where artists on the cusp of stardom can shine. The Salzburg Festival has, [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Salonen, who will soon be a free agent for the first time in decades, could do pretty much anything at this stage. What will it be? On [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Teodor Currentzis, whose MusicAeterna receives funding from a Russian state bank, has eluded censure at the prestigious Salzburg Festival. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the classical [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Hector Berlioz did not have the twilight of a great composer. In his memoirs, he described himself in his 60s as 'past hopes, past illusions, past high [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson's production of 'Tristan und Isolde' at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany is an excellently conducted puzzle of grim symbols. Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde' is [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Beethoven's aspirational vision of unity and peace can be applied to virtually any situation or place. The music makes sure of that. Even if you don't know [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Chad Smith, the orchestra's new chief executive, hopes to return the storied ensemble to its groundbreaking roots while moving it forward. 'I'm going to sound like such [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone The tenure of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera's music director, can be difficult to assess. That much was evident over two concerts. So far, Yannick Nézet-Séguin's tenure [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Bogdan Roscic and Lotte de Beer are shaking the dust off Vienna's two biggest repertory companies. In a rehearsal studio built on the grounds of old military [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone At Munich's prestigious opera house, the Russian-born Vladimir Jurowski has broadened the repertoire while rooting his work in political awareness. One by one, the singers came out [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Dan Schlosberg, who for 10 years has adapted opera classics for the company, has written its first world premiere. For the last decade, Heartbeat Opera has treated [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone With a team of researchers and dedicated musicians, the conductor Kent Nagano is taking a historically informed performance approach to Wagner's epic. What began as a flippantly [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins's new opera, about events still in progress, finds fault and complicity in every player of a global blame game. The climate activist [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone As Adès premieres an orchestral work, 'The Exterminating Angel' is receiving something rare in contemporary opera: a new production. Pity living composers, toiling away in a field [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Loriod, the vessel for Olivier Messiaen's piano works, had a rich musical life beyond him, which is captured in a new set of recordings. The composer Olivier [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone 'I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world,' Franz Schubert, suffering from syphilis and reeling from professional failures, wrote in March 1824 to [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Mathilde Laurent, Cartier's perfumer, has created a scent poem that enhances the experience of Scriabin's synesthetic score for 'Prometheus.' It was time to smell Scriabin's 'Prometheus: The [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Romeo Castellucci's production of Wagner's 'Ring' at La Monnaie embodies ideas that the Metropolitan Opera should take note of for its own staging. Before Act II of [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Inon Barnatan has created a solo transcription of 'Symphonic Dances' in which he tries 'not to imitate an orchestra, but to embody it.' Sergei Rachmaninoff composed two [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone One night last fall, Franz Welser-MÜst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, walked onto the stage of Severance Hall, crossed over to the podium and faced [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Richard Nelson seemed to have found the perfect home for his play 'Our Life in Art.' He had written a show about the Moscow Art Theater's 1923 [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone 'You know, I had the idealistic notion, when I was 20, that I was going into the theater,' Stephen Sondheim once said. 'I wasn't; I was going [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone 'X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,' from 1986, receives its grandest treatment yet, in a production expected to play on opera stages from coast to [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone 'He doesn't like talking about himself,' Marja Kantola-Panula said, gesturing to her husband, Jorma Panula, across their dining table while he sat silently. He had been asked [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Maxime Pascal, a latecomer to classical music, forged an unusual path to the podium that has paid off for him and for audiences. Growing up, the conductor [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Among the company's annual summer offerings, Monteverdi's 'L'Orfeo,' from 1607 but newly reorchestrated and imaginatively staged, stands out. It's a change so small, you might not even [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Claus Guth's entertaining and often sexy new staging of Handel's opera-oratorio hybrid in Munich is a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera. Staging oratorios in the opera house [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Not everything was an artistic or audience success at the 75th Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. But everything was worth discussing. Christian Gerhaher never left the stage. He [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Two works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, by two inventive opera partnerships, use fables to explore grief and queer utopian dreams. Happiness doesn't come quickly. Aristotle claimed that [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone She is marking her 24-year effort to expand the instrument's repertoire with performances, including a Carnegie Hall series, as well as a box set and a new [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Giddens said that the success of their opera 'Omar' proves that 'nobody has the lock on being a composer.' 'I mean, look: I'm bowled over right now,' [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone A spherical concert hall inspired by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's ideas will be suspended in the Shed's McCourt space. At the height of musical modernism, the composer [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Among our critic's recommendations are multiple 'Ring' cycles, a premiere by Ellen Reid and the soprano Lise Davidsen in Strauss's 'Salome.' Keeping up with opera in Europe [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone The group returned to Zankel Hall for the latest installment of its 'Doppelgènger' project, featuring a premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Schubert's song 'Gretchen am Spinnrade' famously imitates [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Jean-Yves Thibaudet is playing Messiaen's 'Turangalîla-Symphonie' this week. But before, he debuted a night of jazz standards with Michael Feinstein. PALM DESERT, Calif. - 'Jean-Yves, when did [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone and Mark Sommerfeld 'Right now you're dancing on top of or ahead of the music,' Justin Peck told members of New York City Ballet during a recent [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a contender for the orchestra's podium, shined in 'The Rite of Spring' - the piece Jaap van Zweden began his tenure there with. When Jaap [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Gail Samuel took the helm of one of America's most storied orchestras in 2021, and was the first woman to lead the institution. Gail Samuel, who took [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone NEW RIVER GORGE NATIONAL PARK, W.Va. - A hiker's mouth dropped when she learned why a small group was forming at a rocky overlook here. 'Yo-Yo Ma,' [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Having assumed the podium of three major orchestras and appeared on the world's prestigious stages, he debuts next at the New York Philharmonic. AMSTERDAM - It's impossible [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone This composer, diarist and reluctant pioneer of gay liberation has died. A critic remembers visiting him in his twilight. Several years ago, during one in a series [...]

Byline: Joshua Barone Benjamin Bernheim's arrival at the house was put off by the pandemic. Now singing in Verdi's 'Rigoletto,' he's a natural fit there. It took a few tries [...]