Hello, this is Times music critic Mark Swed. After spending some quiet moments over the Memorial Day weekend perusing Apple Music Classical, I’m filling in for the Essential Arts’ essential Carolina A ...

Happy New Year, Essential Arts readers! 2025 is already shaping up to be a feast of a year in terms of arts and culture in Southern California, and we here at The Times are ready to eat up. Here are ...

Little by little, year after year, from one season to the next, there have been some subtle yet certain shifts in programming among local classical music organizations — in both good and not-so-good ...

There’s more Mozart on tap around town this spring than even the most devoted Mozartian could catch. The same, more or less, goes for fans of Mendelssohn and Verdi. Puccini, too. Yet none of those ...

When performers didn't acknowledge the applause, I kept thinking the clappers might get the hint. But they never did in the Beethoven, and interstitial applause finally petered out only halfway ...

From the Top has championed young classical musicians for 25 years. And soon the nonprofit public radio program will move to North Texas. The show is heard on nearly 200 stations across the country.

For many listeners, classical music conjures up images of old men in powdered wigs, ballerinas in swan-like tutus, perhaps even a season or two of Bridgerton. The origins of classical music are rooted ...

But, counterintuitive though it might seem, I don’t think sound is always a helpful way to understand genre. I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, ...

You’ve heard it all before. Classical music is dead. It’s one of our culture’s most enduring variations on a theme: that classical music is dying, or aging, or rusty or, at the very least, dusty. It’s ...