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Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the German baritone whose beautiful voice and mastery of technique made him the 20th century’s pre-eminent interpreter of art songs, died on Friday at his home in Bavaria. He was 86.

Joshua Bell recently made a surprise appearance on TMZ, the website infamous for its scandalous and prurient celebrity news and gossip. It's not normally where you expect to find a classical violinist, celebrated though he is. While touring in Spain, Bell had been robbed. "Thief Jacked My $38K Watch In Masterful Heist," the TMZ headline roared... Bell is doing several interviews this day; we have 15 minutes. With a new record out and a U.S. tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields just on the horizon (they'll be at Segerstrom Concert Hall on April 26), there is...

A Gilbert and Sullivan twin bill, including complete performances – with spoken dialogue – of H.M.S. Pinafore and The Gondoliers.

Giacomo Meyerbeer Arrived After Centuries of Anti-Semitism The sudden proliferation of Jewish composers in the mid-19th century was unprecedented in the history of classical music. Until then, Jews had been limited to the role of virtuoso performers, but that all changed when Germany’s two most famous composers were of Jewish origin. These two were Felix Mendelssohn, whose most prominent public manifestation was the oratorio “Elijah” (1846), and Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jacob Liebmann Beer), the prolific composer of the operas “Robert le diable” (1831), “Les Huguenots” (1836) and “Le prophète” (1849). David Conway’s “Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from...

LA Opera continues its celebration of composer Benjamin Britten's centenary with the delightful comic opera Albert Herring. It's spring in a bucolic English country village; time for the formidable Lady Billows and her committee to choose a May Queen from the lovely local maidens. But the only virgin to be found is Albert Herring, a meek mama's boy who reluctantly becomes Loxford's first May King. Albert Herring returns to LA Opera's repertoire for the first time in two decades.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Riccardo Muti knew something strange was happening in the audience, but he didn’t immediately think “fist fight.” It was a fight in Orchestra Hall, however, with a man in his 30s slugging a 67-year-old man during a quarrel over seats Thursday night. It played out during the second movement of the Brahms Symphony No. 2.

With 47 Oscar nominations to his credit, more than any other living person, John Williams, at age 80, shows no sign of slowing down. He’s currently working on his 26th film score for director Steven Spielberg in a career that has no equal. Join host Jon Burlingame for American Journey, A Tribute to John Williams, Sunday, February 26 at 1 p.m. on Classical KUSC.

Lorin Levee, Principal Clarinet of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, passed away peacefully on February 22 surrounded by friends and family. Mr. Levee, born July 8, 1950, is survived by his mother Mildred, brother Phil, son David, daughter Marissa Martinez and granddaughters Maya and Gwen Levee.

Tuesday, February 7: A Gilbert and Sullivan evening, featuring performances of The Pirates of Penzance and Patience (complete with spoken dialogue) by the D’Oyle Carte Opera Company.

DETROIT (AP) - The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has launched a webcast player that will allow music lovers to enjoy an upcoming performance of Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 4 and other concerts online for free in the comfort of their homes.

* Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, "La primavera" (Spring) 1. Allegro 2. Largo 3. Allegro Pastorale * Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 8, RV 315, "L'estate" (Summer) 1. Allegro non molto 2. Adagio e piano – Presto e forte 3. Presto * Concerto No. 3 in F major, Op. 8, RV 293, "L'autunno" also known as the "Danza Pastorale" (Autumn) 1. Allegro 2. Adagio molto 3. Allegro * Concerto No. 4 in F minor, Op. 8, RV 297, "L'inverno" (Winter) 1. Allegro non molto 2. Largo 3. Allegro

ROWDY groups of teens are turning their ‘Bachs’ on a popular Birmingham city centre meeting spot – after police starting playing classical music for Christmas shoppers. The teenagers have moved on from the ramp leading from New Street to the Pallasades shopping centre since the music started being piped through the PA system. Officers said it was an unexpected result as the original aim was simply to pipe soothing classical music to ease harried Christmas shoppers. The ramp has for years been a popular meeting spot for gangs of teenagers and a source of a large number of complaints from...

On Oct. 22, 1811, Franz Liszt was born in the Hungarian (now Austrian) village of Raiding. His bicentenary follows hard on the heels of Chopin’s, last year, and anticipates Wagner’s and Verdi’s, in 2013. But whereas no one really doubts the greatness of Wagner or Verdi, and Chopin seems universally beloved, things are not so straightforward with Liszt. He was, to be sure, an unrivaled performer (“A god for pianists” in Berlioz’s words), a man of unusually catholic artistic interests and the 19th century’s nearest approach to a Hollywood superstar. But although he is surely significant enough to celebrate, the...

The quiet legend that was Kurt Sanderling is no more. Sanderling, a German refugee in Stalin’s Russia, grew very close to Dmitri Shostakovich during and after the Second World War. He was joint principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra with Yevgeny Mravinsky, effectively his deputy. He would get to conduct the second run of performances of each new symphony after his boss had given the premiere. Mravinsky, a man of deep reserve, had a cold and formal relationship with Shostakovich. Sanderling became a close friend. When I asked him once to talk about it, he refused. ‘I don’t like...

There is a new conductor-composer coming to the fore, and her name is Adina Spire. She has recordings of Vivaldi, Mozart, and others. I have linked a youtube of her conducting a part of the 4th movement of Dvorak’s 8th, and as you can see she conducts with energy and enthusiasm. I became acquainted with her through Soundclick, where she posted some of her own works, and where I have an account. She is on Facebook, and has more of her conducting efforts there as well.

Josef Suk, one of the best Czech violin virtuosi, grandson of composer Josef Suk (1874-1935) and great grandson of world-famous Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904), died last night at the age of 81 ...

Bernard Greenhouse, an internationally acclaimed cellist and a founding member of the Beaux Arts Trio, died on Friday at his home in Wellfleet, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 95.

Classical music still effective at dispersing loitering teens April 4, 2011 | 9:00am With all sorts of the funding cuts hitting orchestras during the recent recession, there is still one aspect of classical music that local governments find valuable -- the music's unfailing ability to disperse loitering teenagers from public areas. Whether its Handel piped into New York's Port Authority or Tchaikovsky at a public library in London, the sound of classical music is apparently so repellent to teenagers that it sends them scurrying away like frightened mice. Private institutions also find it useful: chains such as McDonald's and 7-Eleven,...

Lee Hoiby, a composer of operas and songs that balance unabashed lyricism and careful craftsmanship, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 85 and lived in Long Eddy, N.Y.

5:00PM Eastern / 4:00PM Central / 3:00PM Mountain / 2:00PM Pacific THE TURN OF THE SCREW BY BENJAMIN BRITTENSunday, March 20 at 2:00 PM     Join Classical KUSC Sunday afternoon at 2:00 for LA Opera On Air as we bring you a performance of Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw, live from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  KUSC's Duff Murphy and Kimberlea Daggy are your hosts.

Milton Babbitt, godfather of American ascetic music, has died aged 94. He was far more than his music let on. A mathematician and wit, he once taught Stephen Sondheim, who spoke of him ever after with warm appreciation. In a 2004 interview, Sondheim said: 'Babbitt taught me what long-line composition is about, how to organise music over a span of time. It has to be the musical equivalent of a plot in a play.'

Dame Margaret Price, who was considered one of the world's leading sopranos, has died at the age of 69.

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John Alldis, who died on December 20 aged 81, was a distinguished choral conductor.

The nominees to receive the most prestigious awards in the music industry, the Grammy Awards, were just announced. Among the five nominees for Record of the Year is a song titled "F--- You," with the F-word, of course, spelled out and pronounced. Here are the song's opening lyrics: "I see you driving 'round town With the girl I love and I'm like, F--- you! Oo, oo, ooo I guess the change in my pocket Wasn't enough, I'm like, F--- you! And f--- her, too!" The next lyrics add the S-word: "I said, if I was richer, I'd still be with...

Anna Russell - The (First) Farewell Concert (1984) To end a long, hilarious career, classical music comedienne Anna Russell revived some of her best and funniest routines and took them on the road. This special PBS production, taped in Baltimore at the beginning of that 1984 tour, is a treasure for music lovers who understand that the thing they love can be charmingly goofy. The highlight of the disc, and the routine that most fans remember most fondly, is her discussion of the Ring cycle. She tells the convoluted story of Wagner's four-installment epic, with careful attention to its absurdities,...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Soprano soloist Helen Boatwright, who championed the performance of American song and recorded the first full-length album of songs by composer Charles Ives, has died.

Shirley Verrett, the vocally lustrous and dramatically compelling American opera singer who began as a mezzo-soprano and went on to sing soprano roles to international acclaim, died Friday morning at her home in Ann Arbor, Mich. She was 79.

Rudolf Barshai, who has died aged 86, was the leading Russian viola player of his generation and an important conductor, particularly in the music of Dmitri Shostakovich; he emigrated to Israel in 1977, claiming that he could no longer stand the way in which he was being treated by the Soviet authorities.

Los Angeles Philharmonic Presents Celebración: Opening Night Concert and Gala Live on Classical KUSC Thursday, October 7th at 7 PM The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Music Director Gustavo Dudamel usher in the 2010/11 season with the Celebración: Opening Night Concert and Gala, Thursday, October 7th, at Walt Disney Concert Hall and broadcast live on Classical KUSC. The orchestra is joined by renowned Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, a close friend of Dudamel, in his Walt Disney Concert Hall debut...

Audio: a production, done in 1977 by Robert Conrad, the founder of WCLV classical radio in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. The script was written by conductor Kenneth Jean and Mathias Bamert is said to have had a role in the production. Video: ascvideo (Arnold Schönberg Center, Wien)

Today is the first day of Rosh Hashana, the holiday that marks the beginning of the Jewish new year. For the next 10 days, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Jews around the world will gather to chant the prayers of the High Holy Days to melodies that have been used for generations. Some of the melodies will be simple and some complex, and some will be particularly beautiful. What almost none of them will be is “classical”: Western classical composition, the dominant feature of Christian sacred music for more than a millennium, remains mostly absent from Jewish liturgical...

Direct medical evidence? None. Autopsy? Not performed. Medical records? Nowhere to be found. Corpse? Disappeared. Yet according to a recent article in an academic journal, researchers have posited at least 118 causes of death for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A modest industry of medical speculation has grown up around the subject, evidence of our fascination with what cut down great creative artists in history. In Mozart’s case published speculation began within a month of his death in 1791, and musicologists, physicians and medical scholars have regularly joined the fray ever since. Dr. William J. Dawson, a retired orthopedic surgeon...bibliographer for the...

Thanks to period-music evangelists, breathtaking virtuosity, and millions of listeners, the art form remains vibrant. Anyone inclined to lament the state of classical music today should read Hector Berlioz’s Memoires. As the maverick French composer tours mid-nineteenth-century Europe conducting his revolutionary works, he encounters orchestras unable to play in tune and conductors who can’t read scores. A Paris premiere of a Berlioz cantata fizzles when a missed cue sets off a chain reaction of paralyzed silence throughout the entire sorry band. Most infuriating to this champion of artistic integrity, publishers and conductors routinely bastardize the scores of Mozart, Beethoven, and...

This guy wasn't paying attention when they said to "silence your cell phones..."

If any recent president's life is the stuff of operas, it's Bill Clinton's. There's been comedy, drama, back-stabbing, shouting, crying, death, and many miraculous comebacks. But that's real life. Now art will be imitating life in a project coming together in Little Rock and meant to show how his struggles as a kid raised by a fun-loving mother influenced the making of the 42nd president. Billy Blythe features "a snapshot of a day of his life in Hot Springs in the 1950s," says the opera's producer, Bonnie Montgomery to our Suzi Parker. "Clinton's life is very operatic, over the top,...

...Beethoven's life was as complex and outsize as his art—a roller-coaster ride of willful strife, earthy humor, crushing loneliness, explosive rage and spiritual triumph. Similarly, his music "takes at times the majestic flight of an eagle, and then creeps in rocky pathways," as an 1810 review in the Parisian Tablettes de Polymnie reported. "He first fills the soul with sweet melancholy, and then shatters it by a mass of barbarous chords. He seems to harbor together doves and crocodiles."

Benjamin Lees died of heart failure on Monday, May 31 at North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital in Glen Cove, New York at the age of 86.

I have no idea the standing of the late Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983, if memory serves me correctly) in the world of music, other than that he was a famous symphony conductor, quite possibly one of the best of the past century. But by the time I met him, in February 1978 in London, he was nearing 90 years old, and had long ago passed the baton on to others. His appearance was a shock to me, because I had not realized how ancient he was at the time; I was seeing a white-haired crooked little man who in no...

On Jan. 14, the violinist Hilary Hahn scored a rare gig for a classical music performer: She appeared on "The Tonight Show." And not just any "Tonight Show," but the "Tonight Show" during the final days of Conan O'Brien's brief tenure as host. Everybody was watching. So it came as no surprise that Hahn's new album, "Bach: Violin and Voice," debuted that week at No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts. No. 1 on the charts: It doesn't get any better than that. Or does it? The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are...

Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 5 Adagietto Part 1 Herbert von Karajan Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra One of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed...enjoy!

...he passed comfortably in his home in Palm Springs California after a long illness. Cause of death was congestive heart disease...

Odd, the pianist Kirill Gerstein thought. A music critic from Houston was coming to interview him in Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. Gerstein’s manager had arranged the meeting, at the Omni Hotel’s J bar, to coincide with a run of concerts last November. Might as well meet the writer, the pianist thought. Kirill Gerstein, a naturalized American citizen of Russian origin, is the latest recipient of the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award. But instead of a critic waiting at the bar, it was the man from the Gilmore festival. And in his hand was an envelope proclaiming Mr. Gerstein the latest winner of...

Sunday, January 3rd at 2 PM Pacific / 3 PM Mountain / 4 PM Central / 5 PM Eastern, Classical KUSC presents a rebroadcast of “On Dangerous Ground: A Tribute to Bernard Herrmann.” This two-hour sound portrait of one of cinema’s greatest composers will be hosted by Jon Burlingame, author, USC professor, and a writer on film music for Variety. The program includes rarely heard interviews with Herrmann himself, and excerpts from his concert music as well as dozens of his great film scores, from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver. Herrmann’s legendary partnership with Alfred Hitchcock will be showcased with...

Soundtrack albums are the hidden pleasures of pop. Composed and performed to accompany moving images, they're emotional enhancers. This dramatic quality, coupled with the depth of sound-field in full cinema reproduction, ensures that many soundtracks stand apart from their parent films as a listening experience.

Benedictus XVIJoseph Ratzinger  Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music - The Musical Offering in MP3 The Musical Offering A selection of sacred and classical music in Mp3 played by teachers and students of Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music

Gustavo Dudamel is back in town, and Thursday night he conducted a magnificently theatrical performance of Verdi’s Requiem that felt like his first real concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. All Los Angeles, of course, knows that last month Dudamel began his tenure with a free event at the Hollywood Bowl, and that was followed by nervous-making high-profile programs in Walt Disney Concert Hall the next week.

Carl Orff Orff was born in Munich on July 10, 1895. His family was Bavarian and active in the German military. Orff started studying the piano at age five and also took organ and cello lessons. By the time he was a teenager, Orff was writing songs, although he had not studied harmony or composition. His mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. Orff wrote his own texts and he learned the art of composing, without a teacher, by studying classical masterworks on his own. In 1911-12, Orff wrote a large work for baritone voice,...

Alicia de Larrocha, the diminutive Spanish pianist esteemed for her elegant Mozart performances and regarded as an incomparable interpreter of Albéniz, Granados, Mompou and other Spanish composers, died on Friday evening in a hospital in Barcelona. She was 86.

The eminent American composer Leon Kirchner, who was also a pianist, a conductor, and an influential professor at Harvard University, died at his Central Park West apartment in Manhattan on Thursday morning. He had been receiving home hospice care for several weeks, and died of congestive heart failure, said Lisa Kirchner, her daughter. Mr. Kirchner was 90.