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Byline: Anne Midgette Leon Fleisher, the brilliant American pianist who was in his 30s when fingers in his right hand suddenly stopped working - a fateful twist that cut short [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette MIAMI - Michael Tilson Thomas is 74 years old. In conductor years, that's young. He wears his elder-statesman mantle lightly, even with a kind of incredulity. He's [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette The signature image of the artist Agnes Denes shows her standing in a field of golden grain, with skyscrapers in the background. It's not just a snapshot; [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette NEW YORK - The signature image of the artist Agnes Denes shows her standing in a field of golden grain, with skyscrapers in the background. It's not [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette WASHINGTON - Russell Thomas is a single dad to a 5-year-old son. He's an opera singer who was bitten by the opera bug when he was 8 [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Classical music isn't always welcoming to newcomers. People who dare to ask questions about the genre tend to preface them with a lot of apologies for their [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Michael Tilson Thomas is 74 years old. In conductor years, that's young. He wears his elder-statesman mantle lightly, even with a kind of incredulity. He's 'MTT,' music [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette 'The magic word tonight is 'Intermezzo,'' said Gianandrea Noseda, with the air of a 'Sesame Street' host announcing that this episode was brought to you by the [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Anna Thorvaldsdottir's music is about spaces. The Icelandic composer creates small worlds for the ear to inhabit, rather than musical narratives for an audience to follow. It's [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette 'Esultate,' exult: It's the first word out of the mouth of Verdi's Otello, a passionate tenor with lungs of steel, and a benchmark for one of the [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Early-music vocal groups are all the rage, and 'the rage,' in classical music, can last a very long time. Think the King's Singers, founded in 1968; Chanticleer, [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette In the mid-20th century, Gustav Mahler, after a period of semi-neglect, started to become one of the canonical composers of our time. It makes perfect sense. Mahler [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Russell Thomas is a single dad to a 5-year-old son. He's an opera singer who was bitten by the opera bug when he was 8 and wanted [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Marek Janowski is a short, slightly disheveled looking man with straggling gray hair who often looks as if he has just woke up. He is, in short, [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette 'Classical music is like a museum,' people say. It's a frequent complaint, even if it's wildly inaccurate, especially now. People who say it mean to indicate that [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette As bodies shed and replace their cells, long-standing musical ensembles evolve through different members over the years. The Takacs Quartet was founded in 1975 by four students [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Gianandrea Noseda brings fun into music. This isn't a side of him I saw or understood until he came to the National Symphony Orchestra. As a guest [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Why don't we hear more music by women? Who better to answer the question than a quintet founded by a woman. For more than two decades, Imani [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette NEW YORK - The energy that crackled from the stage on Monday night was enough to douse any lingering sense of cynicism. The Metropolitan Opera, waking up [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota is as big as Delaware and Rhode Island combined, and it has some of the highest poverty rates in [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Two weeks ago, the Maryland-based National Philharmonic announced that it was planning to close because it had run out of money. Now, the group has an embarrassment [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette This week, the National Philharmonic, an ambitious orchestra in Maryland, announced that it had run out of money and would close. As I have been covering the [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette At times of transition, art looks to its roots. This spring, a new theater opened and an established theater director left by paying homage to the dawn [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette The National Philharmonic, a year-round regional orchestra based at Strathmore in Montgomery County, Maryland, is planning to close after 36 years - because it's run out of [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette At times of transition, art looks to its roots. This spring, a new theater opened and an established theater director left by paying homage to the dawn [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Art, it's said, holds a mirror up to society - particularly on the stage. In Europe, especially, even traditional operas are frequently updated or reinterpreted with contemporary [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette You've seen the TV show, now see the opera. On June 15, 'The Central Park Five,' a new opera by composer Anthony Davis, had its world premiere [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Fiddling while Rome burns: It's used as an image of leaders ignoring serious problems for their own amusement. In the case of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra musicians, though, [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette It's official: It's a lockout. On Sunday night, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra confirmed what it effectively announced on May 30: The musicians of the orchestra are locked [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette NEW YORK - Rather than staging old operas over and over, why don't we write new versions? The question is often asked, but I've seldom seen it [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette It takes lot of different things to be a star musician, and one of the least discussed is the ability to come through when the stakes are [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Last week, the sports world was thrown into a tizzy about one of the oldest recordings of one of the country's most beloved songs. Irving Berlin wrote [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette The arts are for everybody; the arts are elite. The arts are hard to define, because as soon as you call them 'the arts' they become associated [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Every so often, when I'm pontificating about opera, in print or in person, a reader or an editor will ask me, 'But what exactly is bel canto?' [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette NEW YORK - Richard Wagner's 'Ring' cycle is the most expensive, ambitious undertaking for any normal opera house: four operas about gods, heroes, supernatural beings and the [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Michael Tilson Thomas, once a bad boy of American music, has, at 74, become one of its gray eminences, but he's remained one of its great communicators [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette On Feb. 1, 2018, I put on a pair of sneakers and went for a run for the first time in more than 30 years. To say [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette I fully realize that for many people, Garnett Bruce's production of 'Faust' at the Washington National Opera, which opened at the Kennedy Center on Saturday night, will [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Yotam Haber is an established composer and pianist, an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, a former artistic director of New York's MATA festival and [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette When Robert Carsen's production of 'Eugene Onegin' opened at the Metropolitan Opera in 1997, many people were vocal about how much they hated it. It was too [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Programming a concert shouldn't be about filling a quota. It should be about enlightening an audience with great music in wonderful combinations. Two concerts last week served [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette WASHINGTON - It was a gesture of political protest: On Saturday night, the Kronos Quartet played the music of composers from countries named in President Donald Trump's [...]

Byline: Anne Midgette Bottom line: Any classical music concert that mainly features the music of black women is a very good thing. This is a field with huge gender and [...]

Byline: Anne MidgetteThe Grammy Awards for classical music are irrelevant: I, and many others, have been saying that for years. But as we prepare for Sunday's annual ceremony, with its [...]

Byline: Anne MidgetteBenjamin Appl, a 37-year-old German baritone, began his first-ever American tour this month with a three-concert New York debut, singing Schubert's 'Schone Mullerin,' 'Winterreise' and 'Schwanengesang,' three of [...]