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Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the US première of Tansy Davies' Forest, a work intended to evoke a Romantic sensation of mystery and nature.

The New York Philharmonic brought two works to the stage at David Geffen Hall last week; their extremely polished rendition of Lera Auerbach's violin concerto contrasted starkly with their under-rehearsed Mahler.

During the 2015/16 season, the top 89 symphony orchestras in the US dedicated only 2% of their programmes to music composed by women. Here are ten women composing in a variety of different genres.

Taking time out from working on his new opera, Girls of the Golden West, which premières in San Francisco later this year, we spoke to John Adams about politics, Scheherazade.2 and where he sees the future for classical music.

Conductor Susanna Mälkki, in her Met Opera debut, led the Met Opera Orchestra in a limber performance of Ms Saariaho's gorgeous music, the first woman-authored score to be heard at the Met in 113 years.

In Jaap van Zweden's first time conducting the New York Philharmonic since it was announced, earlier this year, that he would be succeeding Alan Gilbert as music director, the orchestra sounded more enlivened than they have in months.

During Jessie Montgomery's Records from a Vanishing City, musical styles from avant-garde jazz to Angolan lullabies quarreled and overlapped, keeping our ears pricked for the duration of the piece.

Clarinetist Kari Kriikku sauntered through the aisles of both the orchestra and audience, spinning around in two complete 360s and surely dousing the flabbergasted listeners in the floor seating with saliva.

New York City is so packed with delectable curiosities that its inhabitants are prone to cases of FOMO (fear of missing out). Reviewer Rebecca Lentjes is an insider. Read her tips and squeeze the most out of your visit.

Despite the fact that few (if any) in the audience could understand ancient Greek, the emotions of the characters, and particularly the desperation of Mr Falk's Kassandra, came through with astonishing intensity.

The third night of New Opera Days Ostrava took place in the Antonín Dvořák Theatre and consisted of a double bill of two hour-long operas.

The first night having taken place on the outskirts of town in the 'Coal Mine Bathrooms', I was curious as to where I'd land on the second night of New Opera Days Ostrava. This time I found myself at Cooltour, a more conventional theater above a coffeeshop/bookstore complete with outdoor patio from which the smell of barbecue occasionally wafted.

NODO opens with Ligeti's Aventures and Nouvelle Aventures in the old bathrooms of Coal Mine Hlubina, followed by the world première of Mr Kotík's William William in the hall upstairs. 

Musically inoffensive, the soaring Romanticism further makes sense given the story, in which a cast of García-Márquezian characters float down the Amazon River on a steamboat rife with passion and yearning.

Per Nørgård's music sounds like sonified math, an algebraic equation unfurling across time and mingling with Reichian phase shifting and drum patterns. 

Michael Tilson Thomas, leading the San Francisco Symphony in an invigorating performance of works by both Schubert and Mahler, emphasized the idea of repetition as an evolution rather than a lie.

In addition to incorporating twelve-tone rows for each character and within larger musical units like canons and chorales, the entirety of the opera itself is palindromic in structure, with performers whose characters died gruesome deaths during the first act returning as new characters in the third.

William Kentridge’s chamber opera Refuse the Hour emerged amid a hurricane of clashing out-of-sync metronomes, frenetic choreography, African drumming, brass glissandi, and sound-making contraptions. 

The concert, which was part of Mostly Mozart’s “A Little Night Music” series of late-night events, was comprised of six preludes, six canons, and George Benjamin’s 2001 composition Shadowlines, six canonic preludes for the piano that were written for Aimard.

Alexei Lubimov’s recent late-night recital at the Mostly Mozart Festival alternated rippling, dappled notes of Debussy with the playful simplicity of Satie’s music, contrasting vivid Debussyste images with the static yet aimless wandering of Satie’s rarely-performed piano works.

On a program of musical works with imagery ranging from Mount Fuji to zygotes, the common thread was Japan and the sounds it has inspired over the past few decades.

Such careful conveyance from both performers and composer fostered the sort of “deep listening” Pauline Oliveros has encouraged throughout her decades-long career.

It was during this second half of the concert that concert-goers were rewarded with Mr Kissin’s inimitable technique, a full range in sounds filling the hall, and of course that element of uexpectedness that draws such large crowds year after year.

A bearded lady and her taxidermied shark are just two eccentric characters livening up Stravinsky’s 1951 moral fable The Rake’s Progress, though the shark is unique to Jonathan Miller’s revived production. 

A concert of five composers, and three of them women – bravo to the JACK Quartet not just for inimitable execution, but for programming as well.

Carnegie’s Zankel Hall hosts a four and a half hour celebration of the work of Meredith Monk.

The influence of words and storytelling is apparent from Mr Adams’ dense score to Scheherazade.2, which broods throughout with cinematic yet unpredictable intensity.

An exploration of the choral music of the 1960s and 70s by such giants as Stockhausen and Cage, plus a few rarer examples.

Two seasons after his Met Opera debut, Thomas Adès is back at Lincoln Center making his conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic, including his own tremendous orchestral work, Totentanz.

James Levine led the MET Chamber Ensemble through a remarkable performance of Carter's The American Sublime, whose scattered yet distinct clouds of sound evoked the warmth, irony, and philosophical musings of the texts.

Cage hoped that the change from “pinch-penny mental attitudes to courageous wastefulness” would become as prevalent in the arts as it is in nature. Along those lines, his late choral music is spare, seemingly simple: quiet, almost fragile sounds scattered over silences.

Part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series, Matthew Polenzani's programme impressed. Beginning with Beethoven, he made his way from German to French by way of Liszt, then carried on with Satie and Ravel, and finally wound down the concert with a set of Samuel Barber songs and some lovely encores.

  Iván Fischer has distinguished himself as a conductor with inimitable listening skills; he truly has an ear for which sounds should be coming from where and how the sounds of each member of the Budapest Festival Orchestra should be arranged in space. 

The opera, directed by Mary Birnbaum, rotates through a cast of characters including Tonic, Dominant, and Subdominant as well as a be-wigged Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

David Robertson carried the Met Orchestra through one of the most brilliantly-conducted performances I’ve witnessed, though the music itself was not always impressive. 

Esa-Pekka Salonen infused his rendition of L'Oiseau de feu with air rather than fire. I’ve come to expect passion and urgency from performances of the complete ballet, but his splintering silences and startling dynamic shifts lent a unique tone to the work.

“Singers wound their way through the frozen food aisle, followed by musicians trying not to let their instruments topple over any produce.” The performance raised many questions pertaining to place and how composers and performers incorporate the idea of space or venue into their work.

Alan Gilbert consistently pulled warm and intense playing from all sections, and the energy exchanged between him and Lisa Batiashvili was palpable.

The musical objects ranged from Phyllis Chen’s custom music-box to a Chinese food take-out box that sounded as if birds were chirping inside. Occasionally, the amalgam of twinkling noises was joined by a titter of laughter from the fascinated audience.

Throughout ten surprising and impassioned minutes, the musicians, conducted by harpsichordist Jacob Greenberg, oscillated between the unhurried harpsichord chorale and the furious upside-down bowing of the bass and alternated long soupy phrases with delicate, supernatural trills. 

This outdoor piece wasn’t just about nature; it took place in nature. The rumbles of bass drums and timpani mingled with the delicate sounds of the wind rustling through the trees and stones being scraped together by musicians.

Two worlds occupied by the same two women and presented, jarringly, as a single multi-story set. One is the pristine white deck of a 1960s ship bound for Brazil, and beneath it, where the hull might be, is the grey grim world of Auschwitz.

After four and a half hours of glacial, repetitive, soporifically quiet music... the crowd goes wild! This was the scene at Issue Project Room on Sunday evening as three members from the Either/Or Ensemble concluded Morton Feldman’s monumental trio For Philip Guston.

Two works composed in the past two years, one by a 28-year-old, one by a 103-year-old. Each offered such a wide span of sounds that within a half hour, the audience had been whisked through every imaginable mood.

Marino Formenti only briefly introduced his eclectic whirlwind recital, “Liszt Inspections”, before calling out “Good luck!” and diving into one of the most attention-grabbing sequences of music that I’ve ever witnessed.

In addition to the “Mickey Pick-Slate” chants, the score of Anthracite Fields incorporates the banging of a can, the spinning of bicycle wheels, whistling, and shouting.

The four pieces – all U.S. premières – created a portrait of Boulez minus Boulez, reminding me of a middle school art exercise in which we were asked to draw an egg without any white crayons.

  Conducted by Neal Goren, the musicians breathed across and blew notelessly into their instruments, creating layers of sounds that grew ever more intriguing as the repetition of the word “nevermore” grew ever more sinister.

Each note from the Bavarian RSO was infused with a sort of insistent newness as the musicians poured forth adventurous interpretations of two familiar works.

James Levine and the Met Orchestra travel a few blocks south to Carnegie Hall, to perform a program of works by Antonin Dvořák.