Find articles | Kurt Gottschalk

Sixtrum’s program – framed by two very different composers but just as much by the big wooden instruments that filled the staging ground – is pristine both In sight and sound.

Aucoin, librettist Jorie Graham and director Peter Sellars make New Bodies more a haunting mood piece than a cautionary tale for the American Modern Opera Company.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with Stewart as soloist, is transformed into a call for climate action at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center, the strongest moments coming in the musical quotations. 

Some 350 years after their composition, Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas might not retain their all of their mysteries, but their beauty is eternal. 

Conrad Tao bookends his Zankel Hall recital, performed on a concert grand and a large electronic keyboard, with Debussy’s 12 Études. 

At the center of this production is the centuries-old verse of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the wondrous voice of Magos Herrera and a richly realized telling of the quest for knowledge. 

Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony is a massive and aptly complicated work to which William Kentridge’s film adds contextual layers of stop-motion animation and vintage footage in a surreal nightmare of tyranny.

The name given to TAK's program was “Holding”. Were we being cared for or were we simply stuck waiting? Was this a respite or a reserve? 

Deborah Colker directs an ambitious show, which works incredibly well with storytelling as emotive as it is narrative, confronting death and loss in sharp, weary pains. 

The North American premiere of Indra's Net finds Meredith Monk back in her familiar, inexplicable realm. 

Inside Light, which takes music from Karlheinz Stockhausen's massive, 29-hour opera cycle Licht, adds to the enigma while creating its own spectacle. 

Weilerstein’s playing is animated and on point, joyous and precise in an engaging solo recital. 

From the simple observations of Jessie Montgomery’s duets to the slow beauty of Kaija Saariaho’s Light and Matter, the program holds out promise that, whatever else happens, the sun will still rise tomorrow. 

The show benefits from a strong cast and Mary Kouyoumdjian’s score worked wonderfully well, but it remains a weird story, unbalanced and ultimately unsatisfying. 

Anthony Davis’ groundbreaking opera, with a jazz band in the middle of the orchestra and a book that focuses more on crises than victories, proves hard to see as an heroic tale.

Jacob's Ladder receives its world premiere, sandwiches by two staples of the 19th-century Romantic repertoire. 

At National Sawdust, Ligeti's 18 études and 18 responses are presented as a whole and are best heard that way, too, indulging in Han Chen’s fluency and the richness of his Fazioli concert grand.

In their “Visionary Sounds” concert, the ensemble lets Eastman's Stay On It fall into abandon at times... but never without a plan. 

Last year, the upstart Heartbeat Opera impressively reimagined Fidelio for the Black Lives Matter era. Their new Tosca places the tragic opera about an opera singer in a land where women have been banned from singing. 

An engaging and inventive piece of theatre (sometimes tiringly so) that is, at least half the time anyway, about its titular subject. 

A program of works for soloists and small ensembles proves aurally and visually taxing, emotionally and intellectually exhausting, all in fairly enticing ways.