A Very Smart Bluffer’s Guide to Classical Music, a post that I published here back in 2014, has turned out to be the most popular post ever on this blog. That tells me that people have need to bluff about classical music. And if that’s true, let’s get opera into the...

Maestro John NelsonFor the last five years the Chicago Bach Project and maestro John Nelson have presented landmark performances of Bach’s choral masterworks, including Bach’s St. John Passionand St. Matthew Passion. Critics have called those performances “powerful”...

If you missed the most recent debate of the Republican presidential hopefuls last week, don't worry. We are happy to recreate it for you today, using performances from operas that come eerily close to the real thing.Wolf Blitzer arrives to moderate the debate . . ....

If you’ve been searching for the perfect Christmas present, we’ve found it for you. It’s the new Steinway & Sons CD of the complete Tchaikovsky Nutcracker ballet arranged for piano by a terrific young pianist named Stewart Goodyear.To apply the term “arrangement”...

I flipped on the radio last week just in time to hear a performance of the “Catalog Aria” from Don Giovanni. You know it – it’s a very popular aria, beloved of young baritones, in which Leporello counts up all the women who his boss, the Don, has seduced during his...

For the last few months I’ve been reading Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, an absolutely terrific book that Ian Bostridge has written about Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle.  Bostridge, as you know, is a British tenor who has delivered...