Anastasia Tsioulcas

Last month, The New Yorker announced that it was teasing a new "freemium" version of its website (which launches this fall) with an alluring proposition. All of its most recent pieces, plus the full archives back to 2007 and some even older selections, are free for the rest ...

The video for Ibeyi's song "River" is, frankly, more than a little unsettling. Twin sisters take turns staring flatly into the camera, singing expressionlessly, in between being repeatedly submerged underwater. Are we witnessing a baptism or a drowning? It's unclear. But the song is so darkly beautiful and beguiling that ...

You might not think that sunny summer is the best time to go burrowing deep into dusty sonic arcana. But I feel an immense compulsion to do so right now, thanks a string of superb new compilations of vintage material — paired with the release this month of Amanda Petrusich's ...

Composer John Luther Adams has been enjoying enormous success. He won this year's Pulitzer Prize for his expansive, unsettling and darkly beautiful orchestral piece Become Ocean, which will be released in the fall in a recording by the Seattle Symphony. His monumental 2009 percussion ...

Last year, the Carnegie Hall-organized National Youth Orchestra of the USA launched amid a rush of media attention from across the country and around the world, with performances in Moscow, St. Petersburg and London. This week, a fresh crop of very talented young musicians, all between the ages ...

Twenty years ago, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti gave a sold-out concert at LA's Dodger Stadium. It still echoes today in both the music business and public TV.

One of the most prominent American conductors, Lorin Maazel, died today at his home at Castleton Farms, Va. He was 84. His death was announced by the Castleton Festival, the annual summer series he founded. The festival officially attributed his death to complications stemming from pneumonia; however, the ...

This Saturday evening, the New York Philharmonic is bidding a fond goodbye to principal trumpeter Philip Smith, who is retiring after 36 years with the orchestra. The NY Phil brass and percussion ensemble is putting on a special concert in his honor.

Smith joined the New ...

We at NPR Music leave a lot of variables out in the wild when we make Field Recordings. That's especially true when we commission new music for the annual Make Music New York festival, as we have for three years.

Since we're not using a traditional stage and people are ...

Since June is the traditional month for weddings, how about we turn our ears this month to two odd-but-charming marriages and a party that devolves into a drunken episode?

The first two are oddball transcultural affairs. The first pairs the Korean hit-maker Psy with the affable Snoop Dogg, while the ...

The sale of the most expensive musical instrument in history could be announced Wednesday. And it's a viola. (Will the viola jokes stop now?)

We put out a call and they came — by the hundreds. When we invited wind, brass and percussion players to join us yesterday in Brooklyn to perform a world premiere by Red Baraat's Sunny Jain for the annual Make Music New York festival, ...

Swaying triple time has besotted dancers and musicians alike around the globe. But the quintessential high-society dance has surprisingly indecent roots.

When we plan Field Recordings, we usually look far and wide to find off-the-beaten-path locations for filming musicians. But a unique opportunity presented itself when a duo called Wanderlust Projects — designers of "transgressive placemaking experiences" for urban explorers, usually in abandoned or otherwise off-limits places ...

The widely admired Spanish conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos died this morning in Pamplona, Spain at age 80. It was just a week ago that Frühbeck acknowledged he was ill with cancer and announced, via the Boston Symphony Orchestra, that he would have to cease working.

"After meeting with ...

Many of us at NPR Music fell hard for Arizona's Sergio Mendoza and his band La Orkesta this year. Together, they mix myriad Latin styles — what Mendoza calls "indie mambo," salted with generous handfuls of cumbia, merengue and ranchera — and then feed all that through a ...

An astonishing conversation has emerged in the weeks since Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught began her run as Octavian at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. Erraught was excoriated by a handful of male London critics for her weight — prompting a widespread backlash on her behalf in the aftermath ...

This month's pick of music from around the globe is, for the most part, lifted from current events. From a propaganda song that conquered Egypt in the run-up to the new round of presidential elections to a throwback to a very little-known chapter of the late Maya Angelou's ...

Star mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato gave the 2014 commencement address at Juilliard Friday — and it's a memorable one, both for her words and by DiDonato's own example as someone whose own career began under low heat.

DiDonato has posted the text of her speech on her ...

Composer and singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane says that the inspiration for his new album, The Ambassador, is 10 buildings in Los Angeles — appropriate, given what a gifted musical architect he is.

The Ambassador is structured as a set of 10 vignettes, each a meditation on life in ...