Summer has a kind of Jekyll/Hyde duality. As appealing as outdoor events might sound – concerts and plays in the park, hot dog eating contests on the boardwalk – I find myself seeking cool indoor places more often than not. Two major art shows currently on view – Henry Moore outside at the New York [...]

In April, Esquire magazine did a photo spread called “Symphony in Black,” profiling some on-the-rise musicians on today’s classical scene. All were young, talented, hip. One musician I was surprised to see didn’t make it into that piece is José Franch-Ballester, a 27-year-old clarinet whiz who is a native of Moncofa, Spain. New Yorkers take [...]

It’s hard to find a more fitting act to open Lincoln Center’s annual Midnight Summer Swing series than Nellie McKay. Now, Lincoln Center isn’t new territory for McKay, who appeared in that institution’s Great American Songbook in March 2005, but the interesting development this time around is that she’ll be fronting a band called the [...]

Well, death is easy in the arts. And it sure gives you a built-in advantage when it comes to critical consideration. Comedy, on the other hand, is not only hard to do, it’s hard to get cred for. Let’s pretend, for instance, that the Oscars have any kind of relevance in terms of actual quality [...]

It is fascinating to think that Die Soldaten, a vast, experimental opera by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the same time during which the AMC’s popular hourlong television drama Mad Men is set. Mad Men is about the advertising world in New York just before [...]

The talk in art circles may be about China these days, but the northern European scene isn’t doing too bad for itself either. Just this summer in New York, there’s “From Another Shore: Recent Icelandic Art” at Scandinavia House, “Arctic Hysteria: New Art from Finland” at P.S.1, and of course Denmark’s Olafur Eliasson is staging [...]

In music performance today, one of the hottest presenters around is Wordless Music . If you’re a New Yorker, they seem to be suddenly everywhere, and their concerts have been getting raves from critics from The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Gramophone magazine, as well as attracting audiences that represent [...]

In his new autobiography, Put on a Happy Face, composer Charles Strouse at one point writes, “If you speak of musical failures, to most people, it’s as boring as hearing about ‘the four hours I spent waiting for a plane at the Buffalo airport.’” Most people—except for musical-theater fans, that is! America is said to [...]

Pity the Rodolfo and Mimì pouring out their hearts this July in La Scala’s La Bohème. It’s possible that more people will be craning their necks to see 27-year-old Venezuelan conducting sensation Gustavo Dudamel in the pit, than either the Mimì (Italian soprano Carmela Remigio) or Rodolfo (American tenor James Valenti, who sang a televised [...]

Sam Buntrock’s staging of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George is nominated for several Tonys and has received a lot of praise, especially for its ingenious use of animated projections. The actors interact with these moving images (a small dog is particularly popular) and the device is not only creative, [...]