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1 month ago | 
nytimes.com | Joshua Barone |Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim |Zachary Woolfe |Oussama Zahr
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. A clip from the Boston Symphony Orchestra's performance in April 2023. There was a time in recent memory when a performance of Julia Wolfe's "Her Story," for women's chamber choir and orchestra, would have passed without incident.
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2 months ago | 
nytimes.com | Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
A violinist plays for her father. A singer takes requests. In hospitals and hospices, bedside performers offer a new kind of care.
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Dec 23, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
Even after giving birth? I credit the Queen with bringing me back postpartum with both of my kids. The first time I was nursing my 6-week-old daughter backstage between arias - I had had a C-section and to have all the muscles of my support system slashed in half was terrifying. It was a questionable decision for my mental health, but certainly for my financial health I didn't really feel I had a choice. And the Queen brought me back.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
At the USSR Museum, a two hour's drive from Moscow, visitors can peruse copies of Pravda and Izvestia in a 1960s-style apartment replete with tarpaulin boots and aluminum spoons, part of "a hidden world," its website says, "of emotional memories and warm nostalgia." On Thursday, the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Keri-Lynn Wilson turned David Geffen Hall into a different kind of museum of Soviet history.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Joshua Barone |Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim |Zachary Woolfe |Oussama Zahr
The New York Times's classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what hooked them during the past month. Leave your own favorites in the comments. Image An installation view of "Living Room, Orlean, Virginia," part of "Making Home - Smithsonian Design Triennial" at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Credit...
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
The completion of the transcontinental railroad was a herculean achievement. In 1850, the United States had 10,000 miles of track; by 1900, trains carried people, goods and ideas from coast to coast over 215,000 miles of track. Recently, historians have begun to tally the human cost of this construction project, especially among the people who performed the dangerous and backbreaking labor and the Native tribes whose lands and livelihoods were slashed through by the tracks.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
When the soprano Lucy Shelton opened a recital at Merkin Hall in 2019 with "Adieu à la vie," a song by Rossini, she was about to turn 75. And though she was not bidding farewell to life as the song's title suggests, she felt she was done with performing. For decades, she had been one of the most sought-after interpreters of contemporary vocal music. But she had reached a point where "I couldn't sing the things that I used to sing," she said in an interview.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Joshua Barone |Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim |Zachary Woolfe
The New York Times's classical music and opera critics attend far more performances than they review. Here are some that hooked them during the past month. The Boston Symphony Orchestra performing 'Veni, Creator Spiritus' at Symphony Hall. JOSHUA BARONE Despite years of hearing live music, we both had Mahler firsts this month; for me, the Eighth Symphony and for you the Third. Maybe it says something, that a composer so often performed still has his rarities.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
The opera opened with amplified breathing: gasps, hisses, labored inhalations. A string quartet introduced spidery harmonics that consolidated into brighter chords and were joined, over time, by radiant voices. Exuberantly lyrical, their lines unfolded in stark contrast with those of the protagonist, who, strapped into a wheelchair center stage, had thus far contributed only some short comments in the machine tones of a text-to-speech synthesizer.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
When Arnold Schoenberg conducted the premiere of "Pelleas und Melisande," his symphonic poem based on the somber fairy-tale that inspired Debussy's opera, in 1905, it was in front of a hostile Viennese audience. Reviews were "unusually violent," the composer would later recall, with one critic suggesting he be committed to an asylum and banned from all access to music paper.
