The album, appropriately entitled Hoffnung, opens with a nuanced account of the expansive Im Freien. The combination of Hasselhorn's communicative diction and Bushakevitz's poetic phrasing brings a rapt intimacy to this six-minute celebration of nocturnal beauty.
Samara Joy sings with old-school phrasing and a modern calm that makes the Great American Songbook feel freshly alive. Her tone is warm and centered, her control is ridiculous, and the swing is the real flex, every line shaped with patience and purpose.
David Bellion spent over a decade in top-flight football, playing for clubs like Manchester United and Sunderland, before becoming Red Star FC's creative director, focusing on brand development and cultural connections.
The collaboration marries Yener's distinctive vocals with the punchy sound of Madrigal, resulting in a contemporary track that resonates with emotional complexity.
All but one of the song titles on Body Sound, the debut album from experimental string trio Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart, line up nicely-a few words, usually two, usually nouns, separated by a vertical line. The straight line in the middle means different things in different disciplines. In computing, it's called a 'pipe' and serves as a conduit. In poetry, it denotes a pause or break. In music, it marks the beginning and end of measures.
The piece is steeped in Schopenhauer's meditations on the futility of worldly striving and the necessity of accepting oblivion. It is also infused with Wagner's paganistic worship of desire and his matchless ability to translate longing into perpetually unresolved musical phrases.
Fast forward a few decades and John Wilson is still hand-picking musicians and still serving up performances so polished they leave critics scrabbling for superlatives. These days Wilson's main outfit is the Sinfonia of London, and he is as likely to be conducting the symphonic mainstream as showtunes.
When wonderful scores of music have been rediscovered after being forgotten for 350 years, it's akin to finding doubloons that were lost at the bottom of the ocean in a shipwreck. Yet the result of musical rediscovery is much better than finding long-lost gold, because musical treasures can be shared with a world of listeners.
Her slowly shifting synthesizer compositions and quiet, meditative pieces for acoustic instruments continue to inspire a deep immersion in their audiences, and her recordings and writings have influenced multiple generations of musicians worldwide.
People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you've just got to see. I think that is its own reward. In an era where New York's storied Met Opera has faced layoffs, pay cuts, postponed productions, and a controversial financial agreement with Saudi Arabia, forward-thinking artistic direction becomes essential for survival.
We began in the world that was-in the humid atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, from which Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Schoenberg emerged. In a program note, Blier wrote that the "Fugitives" concept was inspired by Zemlinsky's "Meeraugen," or "Sea Eyes," which tells of a "person staring into the roiling abyss of the ocean." You had the feeling, as the evening went on, that the crushing realities of twentieth-century history-war, revolution, inflation, the Depression, Fascism-made such refined aestheticism untenable and forced composers onto other paths.
The Austrian pianist's expressive, emotional playing may grab the headlines, but it's the unerring sense of underlying architecture that's the thread through her long career. We heard that here, not just within each of the works, but in the shared foundations, and sometimes secret connecting passages, she revealed between them.
I was immediately struck by his magnetic intensity, his fierce passion for music and his unique way of speaking English—punctuated by frequent utterances of er-er-er. Many years later, Kurtag was to tell me: 'Stuttering is my natural mode of expression.' He and Marta simply embodied—he still embodies—music. I had never met anyone to whom each note mattered so much.
Radulovic plunges in, his audacious attack and intonational high-wire act almost upsetting the applecart in the oompah-pah finale. The same fearless commitment pays dividends elsewhere: in the jaunty Heifetz arrangement of the Gavotte from the Classical Symphony, for example, or in the spiky march from The Love for Three Oranges.
Any composer's relationship to music is intense, but Sarah Kirkland Snider, whose debut opera, Hildegard, receives its world premiere at the LA Opera this week, ratchets that intensity up to a higher, more metaphysical level. When Snider hears music, she says, she sometimes wants to eat it that's how deep the desire goes. She's not traditionally religious, but she has come to see music as a mysterious, divine force within her.
The youngest person to win the prestigious Marilyn Horne Foundation Vocal Competition, Sierra made her operatic debut at age 16 as the Sandman in Hansel and Gretel. Today Sierra is best known for her roles in Verdi's Rigoletto (as Gilda) and as the lead in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.
Better Broken Tour 2026 Dates Wed Jul 1 Franklin, TN FirstBank Amphitheater Fri Jul 3 Atlanta, GA Synovus Bank Amphitheater at Chastain Park Sun Jul 5 Vienna, VA Wolf Trap Filene Center* Tue Jul 7 Philadelphia, PA TD Pavilion at Highmark Mann Wed Jul 8 Bridgeport, CT Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater Fri Jul 10 Boston, MA Leader Bank Pavilion Sat Jul 11 Forest Hills, NY Forest Hills Stadium
Andre de Ridder is either brave or stupid. He has accepted the role as the music director of English National Opera its chief conductor and keeper of its musical flame. He will take up the role formally in 2027. The post has been empty for several anguished years, sparked by Arts Council England's 2022 announcement that the company would lose all its funding unless it moved out of London.
I'm a harmonica and accordion player and one half of folk-classical duo Stevens & Pound. As a multi-instrumentalist I am rooted in a folk tradition that is oral, aural and communal. Music and song are passed down by ear, either through recordings or more fun traditional music sessions. Here, players and singers get together to share, swap and play tunes, drawing from a repertoire that is always evolving.
She can belt it out in English and Italian; what can't she do? For the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Milan, Italy, Mariah Carey did what those in Milan do: Sing in Italian. As she walked toward the center of the stage in San Siro, she was followed by at least five people who helped carry the train of her dress.
