This Friday and Saturday, New York City Opera is running it’s annual VOX sequence, wherein ten American composers get their works read by the orchestra and singers of that amazing institution.  (I was fortunate enough to be part of it in 2004.) One of the pieces on Saturday is by Paola Prestini, who I think [...]

Speaking with 28-year-old tenor Sean Panikkar, you get the feeling he could do pretty much anything he set his mind to. He shows virtually none of the stereotypical traits that tend to come to mind when we hear the word “tenor”—the extreme nerves, flightiness, vanity, and so forth. The onetime engineering student, who was a [...]

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 [...]

The opera stage is filled with tragic characters who have lost touch with reality—one of the best-known examples being Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, seen in Mary Zimmermann’s new Met production earlier this season with the high-flying soprano Natalie Dessay. But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez tells it in his new book The Soloist, [...]