Category: NPR Music: Classical

Two short operas that got their premieres at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. feature Black female protagonists.

The rising star of the British Kanneh-Mason family offers vigorous Chopin, serene Liszt and a stirring spiritual at the trusty Tiny Desk upright piano.

NPR Music’s classical expert is an omnivorous listener, who treated the music of 2024 as sustenance for a year of zigzagging emotional highs and lows.

Discover a wide range of this year’s most compelling classical music, from symphonic thrill rides and soaring voices to delicate baroque suites, ambient adventures and one groove-laden masterwork.

Olivier Latry is Notre Dame Cathedral’s longest-serving organist. Just days before the church’s gala reopening, after the destructive fire in 2019, he talks about the refurbished instrument — it holds 8,000 pipes — and its role in the church.

The Grammy winner and former Late Show bandleader unravels the crisscrossing threads of musical lineage from Beethoven’s own personal blues to the musical art form that undergirds Batiste’s Louisiana roots.

You can’t always know that it’s a great year for new music while it’s happening, but there was a sense from the very start of 2024 that we were in for a ride.

Composer Laura Kaminsky’s intimate new opera, Lucidity, centers on an aging opera singer, portrayed by the 80-year-old soprano Lucy Shelton, dealing with the effects of memory loss.

The youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition makes our trusty upright piano sound like a 9-foot grand in music by Liszt and Tchaikovsky.

NPR’s A Martínez speaks with Dutch brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen about their new EP, Rêve, featuring piano duets by lesser-known composers influenced by — or rejecting — French Impressionism.