The Metropolitan Opera’s stage door, a plain entrance hidden in the tunnels of Lincoln Center, routinely welcomes star singers, orchestra musicians, stagehands, costumers and ushers. But a different bunch of visitors arrived there on a recent afternoon, carrying stuffed toy rabbits and “Frozen” backpacks. They were children, ages 7 to …
The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what has hooked them recently. Leave your own favorites in the comments. ‘The Barber of Seville’ For an opera lover seeking a bit of escapist fun, Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” …
Bach: Mass in B Minor Julie Roset, soprano; Beth Taylor, mezzo-soprano; Lucile Richardot, alto; Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, tenor; Christian Immler, bass; Pygmalion; Raphaël Pichon, conductor (Harmonia Mundi) Raphaël Pichon and the musicians of his Pygmalion chorus and orchestra have made some extremely fine recordings over the last several years, from …
The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what has hooked them recently. Leave your own favorites in the comments. Nicole Scherzinger I would not have expected the former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, Nicole Scherzinger, to convincingly …
Marsalis: ‘Blues Symphony’ Detroit Symphony Orchestra; Jader Bignamini, conductor (Pentatone) I love when a new recording changes my mind. Previously, I had considered Wynton Marsalis’s Second Symphony (2009), known as the “Blues Symphony,” to be the least persuasive of his orchestral works. In 2019, he suggested that he felt similarly …
More than 50,000 spectators filled Kennedy Stadium in Washington on Nov. 27, 1977, for a football game between two bitter rivals, the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys. There was drama in the game, with both teams in the hunt for a playoff berth, but more unusual was the entertainment before …
Sofia Gubaidulina, a Tatar-Russian composer who defied Soviet dogma with her openly religious music and after decades of suppression moved to the West, where she was feted by major orchestras, died on Thursday at her home in Appen, Germany. She was 93. Carol Ann Cheung, of Boosey & Hawkes, Ms. …
The conductor Gustavo Dudamel has premiered dozens of pieces in his career. But the score that he was giddily studying on a recent afternoon at Lincoln Center was different: a nearly 125-year-old piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel that had only recently surfaced in a Paris library. “Imagine more …
The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what has hooked them recently. Leave your own favorites in the comments. ‘Her Story’ at the Kennedy Center There was a time in recent memory when a performance of Julia Wolfe’s …
Field: Complete Nocturnes Alice Sara Ott, piano (Deutsche Grammophon) The Irish composer John Field (1782-1837) is commonly said to have invented the nocturne as a piece for piano, passing the form along for his younger contemporary Frédéric Chopin to perfect. If sometimes forgotten, Field’s contributions have hardly escaped notice. Liszt …