Mozart

Paul Wells: Every performance could stand to be more relaxed. Explain patiently why silence is part of the modern tradition of this music. And then accept any reaction, and welcome everyone who took the trouble to show up.

Critics are split on Wajdi Mouawad’s recasting of Mozart’s The Abduction. Can modern playwrights rewrite the classics for the 21st century?

But is the Amazon series any good for classical music?

If we can have opera as funny and contemporary as ‘A Little Too Cozy’—’Cosi fan tutti,’ get it?—who needs Mozart at all?

The 17-year-old virtuoso, signed with one of the oldest classical labels, sticks with the tried and true

A few times a season, if I am a very good boy, the National Arts Centre Orchestra invites me to speak to audiences before their concerts, or to interview musicians onstage after. Last Thursday and Friday were a little nervous-making because for the first time I interviewed the orchestra’s music director, Pinchas Zukerman, who doesn’t fake it if he’s not having a good time. My luck held, because the superb young Danish-born violinist Nicolaj Znaider was on hand, and Zukerman is very fond of Znaider, so we had a blast. I learned a lot.

Classical tunes signal to thugs that they don’t belong in a given environment

Two episodes from my occasional attempts to figure music out, and share my discoveries with the curious:

A new recording of The Magic Flute takes a lot of liberties with the original score

Once a musical pariah, composer-conductor Gustav Mahler is now, 150 years after his birth, box-office gold

Both Haydn and Goya were among the many victims of an era’s rampant mania for skulls

Plus a week in the life of Y.E. Yang