Anastasia Tsioulcas

#NPRreads is a new feature we're testing out on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers throughout our newsroom will share pieces that have kept them reading. They'll share tidbits on Twitter using the #NPRreads hashtag, and on occasion we'll share a longer ...

When you're all grown up, you — at least theoretically — put away childish things. But there are exceptions, as violinist Hilary Hahn proves in her latest recording project.

The album is a pairing of two concertos she's been playing since she was just 10 years old: 19th-century ...

The international megastar Stromae has a seemingly boundless love of music across genres. And if his tune "Carmen" seems vaguely familiar, it's because the track is a reworking of an operatic classic, the "Habanera" from Bizet's opera Carmen. "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut ...

Taraf de Haïdouks burst onto the international scene a quarter of a century ago as an incredible Rom (Gypsy) group from Romania, with blistering violins and lightning-fast cymbaloms set off by bouncing accordion and double bass. Since their formation as an international touring band back in 1990, their older generation ...

Dogs barking, wind howling, ice crunching, then the sudden "ch-ch-ch-ch" of a sawing beat: That's composer Derek Charke's opening salvo in his transporting piece Cercle du Nord III.

Charke wrote this piece in 2005 for the Kronos Quartet, who premiered it the following year. It includes an ...

Just as we hit springtime (finally!), I think I've found the happiest song to greet the season. It comes courtesy of Tal National, a band from the West African country of Niger. This rollicking track is called "Zoy Zoy," which is also the name of their new album.

Tal National ...

The eyes of the pop music world are on Austin, Texas this week. Thousands of bands and fans have descended upon the city for the South by Southwest music festival. Austin is also home to its own music scene year-round — and one of its more unusual groups ...

It was nearly 20 years ago, back in 1997, that the Buena Vista Social Club became an improbable worldwide sensation: a group of mainly elderly (and some younger) Cuban musicians, performing traditional son music for an album produced by Ry Cooder. The combustible success of that first project ...

Ethan Hawke might strike you as an unlikely guide to classical music. But in directing his first documentary, Seymour: An Introduction, he created an intriguing and ultimately profoundly moving tribute to a largely unknown artist, 86-year-old pianist Seymour Bernstein.

A student of Clifford Curzon, Nadia Boulanger and Georges ...

It was supposed to be a celebratory occasion, a high-profile performance of a piece given life by the orchestra that commissioned it — a young composer's music played by other young musicians.

Instead, the performance scheduled for Sunday of Jonas Tarm's music at Carnegie Hall by the highly regarded ...

One of the best recently released music documentaries — The Last Song Before The War — wasn't originally supposed to be about music.

American filmmaker Kiley Kraskouskas was living in Germany in the fall of 2010. "I'd previously been doing graduate work in sociology at New York University, ...

I fell hard for the 20-year-old twin sisters of Ibeyi last summer, when they released the entrancing, unsettling video for their single "River." The way that Lisa-Kainde and Naomi Diaz mixed deep soul with Afro-Cuban tradition and electronic textures resulted in one of the best new cuts I'd ...

The New York Philharmonic sprang an enormous surprise this morning: Its music director, Alan Gilbert, announced that he will be leaving the orchestra in the summer of 2017. Gilbert will have spent eight years as the artistic head of the ensemble by the time of his departure, ...

Pianist Aldo Ciccolini was born in Naples, Italy, but he had a French soul. A passionate champion of French composers, he recorded more than 50 albums, mostly of French repertoire, and along the way championed many underrepresented French composers, especially Erik Satie. Ciccolini died overnight Saturday at age ...

This month, I'm very sad to mark the passings of two great artists who used their talents to larger ends.

Born in Paris to Swiss and French Alsatian parents, Julien Jalâl Eddine Weiss was unlikely to become one of the great bulwarks of Arab classical music. He died on January ...

Demis Roussos went from an early start as a prog-rock pioneer to wearing a kitsch crown. He died Sunday at age 68 in Athens after suffering from cancer of the stomach, pancreas and liver.

His death was first announced on Twitter this morning by a close friend, French-Greek entertainer

Pill popping, pot smoking, back-stabbing, bed hopping and tantrum throwing — now we're talking classical music! At least that's what the new Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle would have us believe is all in a day's work for orchestra musicians. The 10-part series is based on a tell-all book ...

Four a cappella voices making divine music: This has been the heart of Anonymous 4's mission for nearly three decades. And as the group bids farewell this season, they're saying goodbye in a poignant way — with the release of an album that couldn't feel more timely. It ...