Alex Ross

Endless debate over whether the ending of the composer’s Fifth Symphony represents a capitulation to Soviet demands or a secret dissent obscures a more tantalizing possibility.

Celebrating the composer’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, at a festival in Bloomington, Indiana.

In Missy Mazzoli’s “The Listeners,” a group of suburbanites hear a low, pervasive hum that others cannot.

Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is nearly a hundred and has forgotten nothing. In “The Commandant’s Shadow,” she meets the descendants of Rudolf Höss.

Carolina Uccelli’s opera “Anna di Resburgo” was remarkably inventive—but it vanished after its première. Teatro Nuovo has brought it back to life.

Damien Geter’s “American Apollo,” at Des Moines Metro Opera, along with revivals of Debussy and Strauss.

Yet the Mass is ultimately not Machaut’s most striking achievement. Superbly constructed as the score is, it does not mark a leap beyond other, anonymous masses of the period. Chanticleer augmented the movements of the Mass with a generous selection of Machaut’s works in secular forms, for which he wrote both texts and music: ballades, rondeaux, lais, virelays, and motets. In these, we are confronted with something more modern—and more elusive—than a monumental meditation on liturgical ritual. M…

The Fashionista Modernism of Yuja Wang

In April, I went to Prague for the final installment of a four-year series called Musica Non Grata, which focussed on German-speaking Jewish composers who thrived in the First Czechoslovak Republic, between 1918 and 1938. The principal venue was the Prague State Opera, as the New German Theatre is now known. The German government provided support, memorializing the Germanophone culture that once flourished in Czech lands. Two of Zemlinsky’s operas, “A Florentine Tragedy” and “Kleider Machen Leut…