Latest Classical music News
Cristian Măcelaru to become music director of Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 2025-26
CINCINNATI (AP) — Cristian Măcelaru was hired Wednesday as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra starting in the 2025-26 season. The 44-year-old will be music director designate in the 2024-25 season and then will have a four-year term. Măcelaru will...
Music Review: Pet Shop Boys have done it yet again with catchy and bittersweet 'Nonetheless'
Once upon a time, on Pet Shop Boys ' first single, “West End Girls,” vocalist Neil Tennant sang the lines, “We’ve got no future / We’ve got no past / Here today, built to last." Fifteen studio records later, there possibly isn't a better verse that captures the timelessness...
Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian makes belated Metropolitan Opera debut as Madame Butterfly
NEW YORK (AP) — Asmik Grigorian laughs when she recalls that she had been singing professionally for more than a decade when the International Opera Awards proclaimed her the “best young female singer” of 2016. “So for 12 years I was nothing, and then I immediately became the...
From pop to politics, what to know as Sweden prepares for the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest
LONDON (AP) — It’s springtime in Europe — time for the annual blossoming of spectacle and sound known as the Eurovision Song Contest. Taking place in May in Malmö, Sweden, the 68th annual competition will see acts from 37 countries vie for the continent’s pop crown in a...
Conductor Andrew Davis, who headed Lyric Opera of Chicago and orchestras on 3 continents, dies
Andrew Davis, an acclaimed British conductor who was music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and orchestras on three continents, has died. He was 80. Davis died Saturday at Rusk Institute in Chicago from leukemia, his manager, Jonathan Brill of Opus 3 Artists, said Sunday. ...
Theater Review: Not everyone will be 'Fallin' over Alicia Keys' Broadway musical 'Hell's Kitchen'
If you were to close Alicia Keys ’ big semi-autobiographical musical on Broadway with any of her hit songs, which would it be? Of course, it has to be “Empire State of Mind.” That’s the natural one, right? It’s also as predictable as the R train being delayed with signal problems. ...
Record Store Day celebrates indie retail music sellers as they ride vinyl's popularity wave
PHOENIX (AP) — Special LP releases, live performances and at least one giant block party are scheduled around the U.S. Saturday as hundreds of shops celebrate Record Store Day during a surge of interest in vinyl and the day after the release of Taylor Swift's latest album. There...
Director Romeo Castellucci drops out of Brussels Ring Cycle halfway through because of money, time
Romeo Castellucci dropped out of his production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Belgium’s La Monnaie theater halfway through because of what the company said Saturday was a lack of money and time. The four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)” is considered...
Jonathan Tetelman recalls his journey from a nightclub DJ to an international opera star
NEW YORK (AP) — Jonathan Tetelman transformed from a nightclub DJ to an international opera star, a music detour that was quite, well, operatic. He stopped singing in 2011 and mixed music for New York's clubbers at Webster Hall, Pacha, Greenhouse and W.i.P. These days, the...
John Adams' Nativity oratorio 'El Nino' gets colorful staging at the Met
NEW YORK (AP) — The children crumple and fall to the stage, victims of King Herod’s assassins. Then the Virgin Mary, in a voice brimming with anguish and outrage, memorializes the student protesters who were massacred by Mexican armed forces in 1968. This is “El Nino,” a...
