Anastasia Tsioulcas

June 21st has come to be one of our very favorite days on the calendar. It's not just the first day of summer (though there is that). It's also time for Make Music New York, which presents about 1,000 — yes, 1,000 — free outdoor concerts across the ...

The violin and viola that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played himself are in the United States for the first time ever. The instruments come out of storage only about once a year at the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria. The rest of the time, they're kept under serious lockup. I ...

Not everyone gets to celebrate his or her 19th birthday the way Conrad Tao will: On June 11, he'll release a major-label debut album and curate the first day of his own three-day new music festival in Brooklyn. But if any musician is primed for such ...

A few weeks ago, we asked you to take the last minute of Stravinsky's famous music for The Rite of Spring, transform it into something new and post your creations to YouTube. And boy, did you guys deliver, just in time to mark the ballet's 100th ...

Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer and filmmaker Prashant Bhargava transport Igor Stravinsky's imagined springtime religious ritual to India, where such a celebration is real: the joyous...

Composer, pianist and software engineer Stephen Malinowski has created one brilliant solution to an age-old problem: how to communicate and understand what's going on in a piece of music, particularly if you don't know standard musical notation. Over the course of some forty years, he's honed what he calls his ...

We're celebrating the centennial of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in a big way around here. Throughout this coming week and until the actual 100th anniversary Wednesday, May 29th, you'll be hearing, watching and reading some incredible work inspired by this riveting — and game-changing — piece of art.

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Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring turned Paris upside down upon its world premiere in Paris May 29, 1913 — and we're asking you to help us celebrate this groundbreaking work's centennial.

This one piece paved a new artistic path not just for musicians but for all ...

Opera audiences are well acquainted with all manners of intrigue — whether political, romantic or psychological. The exciting American composer Nico Muhly is updating that paradigm to the 21st century with his opera Two Boys.

This work, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, is loosely based on a true ...

Every Tiny Desk Concert provides its own particular thrill, but it's not every day that we get to welcome one of NPR's 50 Great Voices to our offices. With the visit of the incredible, honey-voiced Mohammad Reza Shajarian from Iran, we lucked out by having him sing on ...

Thursday morning, the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced that conductor Andris Nelsons is being appointed as its music director. The selection puts an end to the uncertainty that has cast a long shadow over the celebrated orchestra in recent years.

The BSO's former music director, James Levine, officially resigned ...

Program:

• SHCHEDRIN: Slava, Slava
• SCHNITTKE: Viola Concerto
• SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 5

• National Symphony Orchestra
• Christoph Eschenbach, music director
• David Aaron Carpenter, viola

When the National Symphony Orchestra closes out the third edition of the Spring for Music festival on Saturday night, it marks the return of ...

It frankly doesn't sound like much of a rallying cry, but in a recent essay for London's Guardian newspaper, British pianist James Rhodes is encouraging folks to "commit suicide by creativity." And what method of self-murder does he advocate? Playing classical music.

Even he admits that he went ...

You might never tell by her youth or her warm and approachable demeanor, but 26-year-old Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti has already had an extraordinary career. Mentored by Yehudi Menuhin starting at age 10, Benedetti won the BBC Young Musician of the Year Award a decade ago — and, really, that ...

Today is Russian conductor Valery Gergiev's 60th birthday. Guess what he's received as presents? A national prize from his close friend Vladimir Putin — and a brand-new, government-funded theater in St. Petersburg to go with it.

The famously overbooked conductor is general director of the Mariinsky Theater in ...

During the chaos and oppression of China's Cultural Revolution, one curious new theatrical genre was born — and it was the child of the Communist Party. Jiang Qing (a.ka. Madame Mao), a former stage and screen actress and the notorious wife of Mao Zedong, led the creation of

The mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is widely loved not just for her glorious voice, but her very refreshing down-to-earth spirit. As "The Yankee Diva," DiDonato uses social media — YouTube, Twitter and Facebook in particular — to talk to her fans. There's no artifice and, despite her tongue-in-cheek handle, ...

For more than 50 years, Adolph "Bud" Herseth was the principal trumpet player for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble widely adored by brass aficionados for its seemingly limitless power and impeccable style. Herseth, who was one of the pillars of that famous Chicago sound, died this past ...

English conductor Sir Colin Davis, an artist who reached the summit of his career in his 70s and was celebrated for his interpretations of music by Berlioz, Sibelius and Mozart, died Sunday at age 85 of an unspecified illness. His death was ...