Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Jane Sheldon

The problematic nature of Britten's Rape of Lucretia is well-known: Sydney Chamber Opera's production attempts to navigate it via gender inversion. 

Mary Finsterer has managed a musical melange that crosses effortlessly and delightfully from the Renaissance to today. If only Tom Wright's book and libretto had been a match, this would have been a work worth taking to the world.

Its achievement lies in the brilliant notion of taking the two parts of Dostoevsky's work – the Aboveground Man's self-loathed life and the Underground Man's reflections upon it 20 years later – and running them concurrently, using two different singers.

John Zorn’s compositions presented at The Cloisters contained a bonanza of musical ideas, rolling in unnervingly peculiar waves and presented in clumps and clusters like audio versions of found art. 

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.

Showing unusual restraint for Sydney Chamber Opera, Giya Kancheli's monodrama Exil became a performance with an undeniable power and poignancy in the hands of this young company.

On Thursday evening, not a seat was vacant in Alice Tully Hall for The Holy Visions, the inaugural concert of Lincoln Center Festival’s three-day performance series honoring John Zorn’s impending birthday. The series is just a small installment in Zorn@60, an international celebration of one of New York’s most revered avant-garde composers and musicians, who will turn 60 on 2 September.

John Zorn doesn’t look 60. He looks 35, or whatever age it is where you’re still just about young enough to get away with wearing baggy camouflage pants. “And that’s how it’s done!” he yells through his mic at the end of the first half, over huge applause and cheering from this passionate Barbican audience.