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'Winterreise,' Schubert's 24-song masterpiece of shivery gloom and disappointment, comes to us in a variety of colors. A few days ago Christine Schafer sang it at the Rose Theater as […]

Listeners could forget about thematic unity at Radu Lupu's Carnegie Hall recital on Monday night. A sold-out house heard Schubert's Piano Sonata in D (D. 850) before intermission and Debussy's […]

All so-called original art is based on what someone else has done already. An apt subtitle for a lot of 20th-century painting is 'Picasso Looking at Ingres,' and how much […]

Ensemble ACJW's latest appearance on Friday offered music by Alan Hovhaness and Messiaen at the Paul Recital Hall of the Juilliard School. Carnegie Hall, Juilliard, the Weill Music Institute and […]

Every opera company needs its 'Barber of Seville,' and the Metropolitan Opera has one that does quite nicely. The heavy, often murderous gloom that sits over so much of the […]

SAINT-SAeNS: PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 2 & 5; FRANCK: 'SYMPHONIC VARIATIONS' Jean-Yves Thibaudet, pianist; Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, conducted by Charles Dutoit. Decca 475 8764 4; CD. IT is hard […]

It wasn't supposed to be a competition, but everyone knew it was. At the Morgan Library & Museum on Thursday, two inanimate objects battled for first place. In one corner […]

Concertgoers like you and me have become part police officer, part public offender. We prosecute the shuffled foot or rattled program, the errant whisper or misplaced cough. We tense at […]

No one, except the musicians, had to work hard at Avery Fisher Hall on New Year's Eve. Profundity, nobility and cosmic suffering had the evening off. Joshua Bell played his […]

The second half of December seems to be the time when classical music's old pros go away and the young and aspiring take over. In recent weeks at Carnegie Hall […]

Schubert died at 31. How much music did his early death deprive us of? Not a lot. Rossini died at 76, but give or take a few interesting items at […]

Stereotypes get a bad name, but our poor brains couldn't function without them. Americans look toward Europe and see weariness and cynicism bent under the weight of history. Europeans see […]

I HAVE found precious little music to rediscover this year, but several concerts have helped me rediscover other things. If none were significant musical events or, for that matter, very […]

Deciphering what Ensemble ACJW means goes a long way to explaining what it does. To Academy, Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute might have been added […]

Political relevance, mother's milk for opera in the 21st century, was poison for Italian composers like Verdi. 'Un Ballo in Maschera' broadly re-enacts the assassination of the Swedish king Gustav […]

Three duos performed Brahms at Weill Recital Hall on Saturday night. All were beneficiaries of weeklong workshops and master classes led by Emanuel Ax, David Zinman and Richard Stoltzman. Brahms's […]

Shostakovich wrote his D minor Cello Sonata in 1934 as the terrible Soviet purges of the next five years were about to begin. Its Bolshevik-friendly tone represents a U-turn from […]

Religious art operates under the principle that God wants the best. St. Thomas Church does its best to oblige. Its 'Messiah' performances are near the top of New York's many […]

Composers from the north put their exports in the hands of Americans on Monday night. Speculum Musicae, the New York new-music group, played pieces by the Finnish composers Kaija Saariaho […]

Danny Newman, longtime director of press and public relations at Lyric Opera of Chicago and an influential thinker on the art of selling classical music to the public, died on […]

Poor Schumann. Every time he touched an orchestra, people meddled. Conductors reorchestrated his symphonies posthumously. His wife, Clara, nagged him into turning a fantasy for piano and orchestra into the […]

Every literate Russian can quote Pushkin and hum a tune from Glinka. No Russian orchestra on the road is likely to leave either man at home. Valery Gergiev and the […]

Lumped by history with Schumann's other large-scale vocal works, 'Das Paradies und die Peri' has suffered guilt by association. 'Genoveva,' his only finished opera, demonstrates a great man's stubborn ineptitude […]

'EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH' changed my life. Everything I thought musical theater was, abruptly wasn't. St. Paul had his road to Damascus; mine was the Brooklyn-bound No. 4 train to […]

Beethoven visited the violin and piano format 10 times: often in the early years, sparingly later on. People will know best the 'Kreutzer' Sonata, sitting somewhere in the middle of […]

When Glenn Gould died unexpectedly in 1982, a victim of a stroke at the unseemly age of 50, his red-hot reputation had calmed to a simmer. Gould, a sufferer from […]

Small, shiny new and with seats that descend toward the stage at a dangerously Alpine-like slant, the Morgan Library & Museum's concert hall has a vivid sound with dangers of […]

When you remember the House of Windsor's origins, it is easier to accept that the British choral tradition also has a couple of Germans as its bedrock. Handel turned to […]

Science tells stories that help us negotiate the world around us; the stories change with our needs. Euclid works for carpenters but not astrophysicists. The fact that one story -- […]

Thomas Bernhard once wrote that all of Austria was suicidal, but that not all of its citizens followed through on the inclination. The Berlin Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall on […]

Correction Appended International youth orchestras have become useful symbols for the world peace lobby. The UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra, which played at Avery Fisher Hall on Thursday night, advertises musicians […]

European culture has been chipping away at Russia for three or four centuries, with varying success. Dmitri Hvorostovsky's elaborate evening at Avery Fisher Hall on Wednesday went back and forth […]

It must be odd for those outside Western European culture to find their music presented on brightly lighted stages in front of listeners sitting quietly in the dark. Friday night […]

Petite, baby-faced and outwardly diffident, the young French pianist Lise de la Salle presents a shy eye to her audience, but one that turns fierce when the music starts. Her […]

'PRECIPICE: Modern Marimba' Nathaniel Bartlett, marimba player. Albany TROY 855; CD. HAD enough of the Beethoven Ninth? Reeling from the Anna Netrebko/Lang Lang/Yo-Yo Ma/Renee Fleming syndrome? Running to escape the […]

Listening to Patricia Racette sing popular songs at the Neue Galerie on Thursday and recollecting her 'Madama Butterfly' this season at the Metropolitan Opera posed the interesting question of where […]

The year 1902 had no CDs or DVDs, but it did have arrangers. Into them music publishers poured symphonies, operas, string quartets and oratorios, all to be ground to a […]

'La Traviata' returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon. When a Franco Zeffirelli production is on the boards, competition is in the air. Who will win? Verdi's beloved music, […]

CRITICS are sometimes asked how they prepare for premieres. In my business a new piece is a threat; it strips the writer naked. Unlike Brahms's Fourth Symphony, it springs from […]

The New York Philharmonic was the ideal orchestra for two very different pieces on Thursday night. Semyon Bychkov was the visiting conductor at Avery Fisher Hall, and his choice of […]

The old and the new go head to head in the music of Charles Ives, but conflict may not be the right word to describe it. There were more than […]

Angela Hewitt is traveling the world this season bearing great armfuls of Bach, gifts to be bestowed on places as distant as Macao, Colombia and South Africa. Both books of […]

It is unsettling evidence of one's own age and station in life to find that electronic music -- once virgin territory for the young explorer -- now includes within its […]

The Beethoven piano sonatas tell a story, but which story is a matter of debate. Andras Schiff played the first 4 of the 32 sonatas at Carnegie Hall on Sunday […]

New York is a Mahler town, which is probably why the Cleveland Orchestra made Mahler's 'Resurrection' Symphony the punch line for its three-concert series at Carnegie Hall that ended on […]

Recent casting policy at the Metropolitan Opera falls somewhere between the Three Tenors and three-card monte. Latest to turn up in the Met's shuffling and reshuffling of its stars is […]

Extravagance in orchestra playing often, but not always, describes happenings on a big scale. Carnegie Hall was filled with such memorable uproars when the Filarmonica della Scala played Wagner and […]

Evicted from its premises while Alice Tully Hall is being renovated, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has set up shop for most of its coming season at the […]

Margaret Carson, widely regarded as the leading lady of classical music publicists in New York, who guided a generation of singers through the Metropolitan Opera and shepherded the career of […]

Kiri Te Kanawa's principal asset as a musical artist is lovability, and those who came to hear this New Zealand soprano sing at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night made no […]