Sounds of the city: New York composers featured in CONTACT! season opener

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.

Nico Muhly describes A Scream and an Outrage, the weekend of events he curated at the Barbican this weekend, as like a dinner party, “a gathering of friends and family new and old; loosely organised”.

In recent seasons, the New York City Opera has largely limited itself to chamber operas. Its newest production marks a renewed ambition: Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, a proto grand opera that ends with nothing less than the parting of the Red Sea.

Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw is a sensible choice for the New York City Opera: its chamber orchestration and emotional intimacy make it unsuitable for production by the Met Opera (against which every other company in town must define itself), and its claustrophobia would seem to offer a great opportunity for one of the company’s more innovative directors to create something

When it comes to contemporary music, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) has made great strides in their ten-year history, premièing over 500 compositions and performing not only in New York and Chicago but in venues all over the world.

San Francisco Opera's production of Sweeney Todd brings nothing new to the musical, but the cast includes wonderful surprises – most notably Stephanie Blythe's Mrs Lovett.