Stories

Take In the Gleaming Tones of Multi-Instrumentalist & Composer Ólafur Arnalds

This prismatic NPR Tiny Desk Concert will challenge your view of what making music means in the digital age.

Stephen Raskauskas | September 30, 2016

15 Classical Works to Help You Fall into Fall [Playlist]

Fu Xiru as Zi Dan in “The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan”

Stephen Raskauskas | September 27, 2016

How Western Opera Changed Singing in Chinese Opera

Stephen Raskauskas | September 13, 2016

VIDEO: How A 440 Became Standard Concert Pitch

brahms tchaikovsky -- classical music feuds

6 of the Most Famous Classical Music Feuds Between Composers

Hannah Edgar | November 7, 2018

The history of music is full of friendships and feuds. These composers certainly had complicated relationships. What are your favorite composer clashes?

11 Standout Classical Saxophone Pieces You Need to Hear [Playlist]

Michael San Gabino | November 6, 2018

Invented in 1846 by Adolphe Sax, the saxophone is still seen as the new kid on the block in classical music. Though it seems like we can only count on our hands the number of times we see the saxophone in the concert hall — think of An American in Paris by Gershwin or Boléro by Ravel — the instrument does have a robust and diverse classical repertoire.

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15 Sopranos Singing One of the Craziest Coloratura Arias

WFMT | July 19, 2016

One of the most difficult coloratura arias in the entire operatic repertoire, “Les oiseaux dans la charmille,” comes from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman (Les contes d’Hoffmann). The piece is also known as “The Doll Song,” since the character who performs it, Olympia, is a mechanical doll. In the opera, Hoffman recounts how he was charmed by the automaton, co-created by Spalanzani ...

Philip Glass: “What’s Most Misunderstood About My Music”

Stephen Raskauskas | June 21, 2016

Philip Glass is simultaneously one of the best known and most misunderstood composers of our time. Though he has many fans, he also has many critics. When Donal Henahan was the New York Times’s senior critic, he described Glass’s opera Akhnaten as “one more example of going-nowhere music” that provides mere “backgrounds of continually repeated, barely varied sound patterns. They ...

38 Classical Hidden Gems You Should Listen to Right Now

WFMT | June 1, 2016

Time for a musical deep dive!

The New York Philharmonic This Week