Category: NPR Music: Classical

With a piano draped in spring flowers, Lara Downes plays a smart set of music, new and old, that offers the power of renewal.

Let the new music sextet yMusic serenade you with a light-as-air track from a forthcoming album.

National Symphony Orchestra Music Director Gianandrea Noseda is reshaping the ensemble’s sound with the help of 17th and 18th century instruments he purchased secretly.

The five-time Grammy winner has mounted two operas at the Metropolitan Opera, which until 2021 had never staged a work by a Black composer. Hear him discuss the future of opera with Lara Downes.

Terence Blanchard made history last season when his opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones was the first work by a Black composer staged by the Metropolitan Opera. And the Met has asked for more.

Thomas Bangalter, formerly of French electronic music duo Daft Punk, has released a classical music album: the score to a ballet titled Mythologies that draws on American minimalism and Baroque works.

The influential Japanese composer died March 28 from cancer. A wide-ranging musician, the Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder was a synth-pop idol and the writer of sweeping movie scores.

A new collection of recordings finally freed from the vaults offers a chance to hear one of opera’s greatest artists sing Wagner, Strauss, Berlioz and more.

Scientists have sequenced the genome of Ludwig van Beethoven from two-century-old locks of hair, and found clues about the ailments that plagued him in life.

Two musical worlds collide as jazz pianist Dan Tepfer finds inspiration, and room for improvisation, in J.S. Bach’s Two-Part Inventions.