Berlin music

Berlin music

The Irish Baroque Orchestra and their conductor Peter Whelan bring Messiah back to Dublin, the city of its 1742 premiere, attempting to recreate the version heard at its first performance.

Wagner's reputation can be both a headache and an irresistible challenge to opera directors. Though opera usually demands strict fidelity to the music as it was written, there is traditionally more leeway in staging decisions.

Lachlan Turczan's practice sits in the space between physics, optics, and environmental art, as he works with lasers, water, mist, and custom-built lenses to produce sculptures made entirely from light.

Butterfly unfolds across four unique versions of the same song, each exploring different genres and emotional depths while maintaining a cohesive melody and lyrics.

'Laserheart reflects my journey of transformation and courage. As a trans woman, this song represents reclaiming my power, my voice and my identity. It's about standing fearless in your truth and turning vulnerability into strength.'

Opera is worth $3.4 billion and is expected to grow to $5.33 billion over the next few years. First-time attendance has more than tripled since 2021, as more young people head to the opera house.

Rigoletto's librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, replaced the king with the Duke of Mantua, who is just as morally bankrupt as the original. The opera premiered in 1851 in Venice and has been a popular production to roll out with both name recognition and one of those golden tunes that almost everybody has heard: La donna e mobile, which becomes haunting in the context of the actual plot.

By installing my sculpture Vertical Highways V03 in front of Rockefeller Center, I want to initiate a dialogue of art and architecture that resonates with the urban history of New York City.

Bomsori Kim is a 36-year-old, South Korean, classical violinist who plays from the soul. In Bomsori's hands, she takes people on a journey to the music of another century.

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.

In the opening sequence, Laura encounters a paddleboarder clad entirely in black who turns a covered face silently in her direction as he passes by - death as an urban hobbyist.

The thing is an almost-four-hour-long continuous explosion - actors dancing, grappling, and hurling furniture; the director present onstage ripping pieces out of the set; paint and blood and flowers and feathers everywhere.

Claude Chabrol, the celebrated co-founder of the French New Wave, stated, 'Because men are living, and women are surviving. Cinema is about surviving.' This profound insight influenced Petzold's approach to storytelling.

It's probably the heaviest thing I've written in terms of lyrics, and probably the lightest of what we have cooking in terms of sound.

Bailey was only 19 when she was cast in The Little Mermaid, thanks to what director Rob Marshall described as her otherworldly sensibility.

All this to say that Alexander Whitley can harness the technology that so fascinates him, and equally importantly, that he fully understands, to enhance his primary vocation as a dance maker and produce bewitching work. Unfortunately, Mirror, and its companion piece The Rite of Spring, in the brand new double bill currently at Sadler's Wells East, proved major disappointments.

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.

In Siegfried, the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner shifts the focus away from the troubled world of the gods towards the energy of youth on earth. This is storytelling through opera, where the theatre is crucial and the music sublime.

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.

Maira Kalman painted a vase exploding with flowers, capturing the anticipatory air the season brings. She cited Gustav Mahler's 'Das Lied von der Erde' ('The Song of the Earth') as her inspiration: 'Dark is life. Spring is here. The birds are singing.' What more do we need to know?

My dad bought his first blues album in Sweden, 1964. It was a John Lee Hooker album, and even though it was on the other side of the world in a place my dad had never been, and a place he could not relate to, the music was so powerful that it changed my dad's life and he devoted his whole life to music. When I was about seven years old, a little boy, he put a guitar in my arms and I loved the guitar.

I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more. Chalamet said in a recorded conversation for Variety, expressing his reluctance to participate in art forms he perceives as lacking contemporary audience engagement and cultural relevance.

Pornceptual challenges mainstream perceptions of pornography, reframing it as inclusive, artistic, intimate, and respectful rather than exploitative or taboo. Its events, from Berlin to international stages, bring a sex-positive, body-inclusive ethos to nightlife. Strict consent practices, no-photo policies, and spaces designed for authentic self-expression create a rare kind of freedom - one that allows visitors to explore identity, desire, and intimacy without judgment.

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.

Volti and Left Coast meet in a bold and dramatic new work by Chris Castro for storyteller and musicians, which delves into the ancient and universal human explanations for our beginnings. The human relationship to our environment forms a through-line from romantic to experimental musical sensibilities.

Charles-Valentin Alkan was undoubtedly one of the great composers of his day. Chopin, his friend and one-time nextdoor neighbour, was an enthusiastic admirer, while Liszt cited Alkan as the only person in whose presence he felt nervous performing. Many of his keyboard works are notoriously difficult to play, yet all are immaculately crafted.

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.

From unassuming hunks of Carrara marble and limestone, Matthew Simmonds carves realistic, miniature gothic cathedral arches, stairwells, and colonnades. Often based on architectural details of real places, such as cities around Tuscany and Germany's Bamberg Cathedral, the sculptures portray intimate details of corners, vaulted ceilings, arcades, and stairwells that can sometimes be peeked through additional apertures.