News

On 21 September the Berlin Music Festival presents the concert premiere – close to a century after its composition - of a Bauhaus-influenced geometric dance opera by Marc Blitzstein. The composer of Parabola and Circula was a leading figure of 1920s American new music, a friend of Aaron Copland and mentor of Leonard Bernstein.

Gabriela Ortiz curates six concerts of chamber and orchestral music as the 2025 director of Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music this July.

What Belongs to You is the winner of Music Critics Association of North America's 2025 Award for Best New Opera, given annually to a new work in recognition of both musical and theatrical excellence.

Guitarist Sean Shibe is soloist in Mark Simpson’s ZEBRA, premiered at the BBC Proms on 22 July. Scored for electric guitar and orchestra, the new work is inspired by a series of hallucinations documented by sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick.

The newest work by HK Gruber is a clarinet concerto premiered at the Carinthian Summer Festival by Sharon Kam on 5 July, exploring the defiant genre of Finnish tango.

Read what critics are saying about The Metropolitan Opera's production of Antony and Cleopatra by John Adams.

The Phoenician Scheme prominently features the music of Igor Stravinsky, including recordings of The Firebird, Petrushka, and Apollon Musagète.

Following its premiere this month in Pittsburgh, Lera Auerbach’s new orchestral work Frozen Dreams receives its first European performances with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck on 21 and 22 June.

The new Turning Points brochure examines 20th century composers whose lives and musical careers were ended by murder or damaged by exile, banishment or suppression.

The Australian premiere of David T. Little’s ensemble work Ghostlight sees the composer attending performances in Sydney and Canberra in July. Little’s What Belongs to You has just won the MCANA Best New Opera award.

The Hamburg State Opera presented in May the premiere of Unsuk Chin’s second opera, Dark Side of the Moon, in which the worlds of physics and psychoanalysis collide.

From Dust, the virtual reality opera by Michel van der Aa, has won the Immersive Competition at the 78th Festival de Cannes. Premiered in Rotterdam in December, the opera is presented at the Holland Festival between 13 and 29 June.

Sean Shepherd’s Latticework premieres this summer with violinist Leila Josefowicz and cellist Paul Watkins.

A compiled list of 2025 summer festival highlights around the United States.

May brought the final publications in the newly revised and corrected edition of all 15 Shostakovich symphonies, bearing fruit from the merging of publishers Boosey & Hawkes and Sikorski. The four scores, released to complete the set, range from experimental early Soviet symphonies to Shostakovich’s late, great song-symphony exploring themes of mortality.

La Biennale di Venezia has awarded Meredith Monk the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of Biennale Musica 2025.

In its 25th anniversary year, The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace has reached the highest ever position for a work by a living composer in the Classic FM Hall of Fame; its arrival in at number two marks it as Britian’s favourite piece of contemporary classical music for the third year in a row.

Sokolovic’s You Can Die Properly Now receives its world premiere with soprano Emma Pennel and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal in May.

Anne Akiko Meyers premieres Eric Whitacre’s The Pacific Has No Memory this spring, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on May 17.

Lera Auerbach’s new orchestral work Frozen Dreams receives its world premiere with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck in June.