In a dressing room behind the stage in the Metropolitan Opera House, Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter and educator, intently watched a live feed of the big band representing the Osceola County School for the Arts, from Kissimmee, Fla. They were playing Dizzy Gillespie’s “Things to Come,” a piece that can …
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 …
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 …
Branford Marsalis has traveled the world over, but one trip back to his hometown, New Orleans, still stands out. He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he was the bandleader on “The Tonight Show” in the early 1990s, and was invited on a local talk show that was being broadcast …