In celebration of his centenary, The Strad recounts György Kurtág’s musical upbringing and shares words from leading string players about their experiences with the composer and his music.
Filed under: Kurtág, music news, The Strad
February 19, 2026 • 10:13 am Comments Off on György Kurtág at 100
György Kurtág at 100
December 14, 2025 • 8:16 am Comments Off on KUOW Adds a Classical Christmas Soundtrack to Its App
KUOW Adds a Classical Christmas Soundtrack to Its App
This holiday season, KUOW – Seattle’s public radio station – is offering listeners something gentler than the daily news cycle: a steady stream of seasonal classical music.
Through a new partnership with Classical KING, the Seattle-based classical music broadcaster, the KUOW app now features Classical Christmas, the organization’s annual holiday stream. The stream appears as an additional listening option, separate from the station’s live radio broadcast.
Rather than create its own seasonal programming, KUOW has collaborated with an organization long associated with classical music in the region to create a digital-only offering that expands KUOW’s role beyond broadcast journalism.
“We are delighted to partner with KUOW,” said Michelle Maestas Simonsen, Classical KING’s Chief Engagement and Content Officer. “This seasonal collaboration is a reminder of what becomes possible when organizations with shared values work together. Whether someone wants a break from the news or simply loves holiday music, Classical Christmas is here for them.”
Classical Christmas is available throughout the holiday season in the KUOW app, where it can be streamed alongside KUOW’s regular live and on-demand programming. The stream is also accessible via Classical KING’s own app, website, and Alexa skills.
Filed under: classical radio, music news
December 13, 2025 • 11:44 am Comments Off on Holiday Baroque from Music on the Strait
Holiday Baroque from Music on the Strait
Music on the Strait is giving its first-ever concert on period instruments on Sunday 14 December in Sequim on the beautiful Olympic Peninsula. This looks to be a lovely program, featuring Baroque violinist Rachell Ellen Wong, harpsichordist David Belkovski, and their Twelfth Night Ensemble in music by Telemann, Purcell, Vivaldi, Corelli, Johann Friedrich Fasch, and Francesco Durante.
The performance is Sun 12/14 at 4pm at Trinity United Methodist Church in Sequim:
Tickets starting at $5 with our Pay What Makes You Happy pricing
free Livestream on the MOTS website at musiconthestrait.org during the concert.
PROGRAM:
Telemann | Sonata No 4 in A Minor
Henry Purcell | Suite from Amphitryon
Antonio Vivaldi | Violin Concerto in E Minor, RV 278
Archangelo Corelli | Concerto grosso in G minor “Christmas Concerto”
Johann Friedrich Fasch | Sonata No 5 in D Minor
Francesco Durante | Concerto for 2 Violins, Viola, and continuo in G Minor
Antonio Vivaldi | Sonata No. 12 in D Minor, RV 63, “La Follia”
Rachell Ellen WONG – baroque violin
James GARLICK – baroque violin
Alex GRIMES – baroque viola
Meeka QUAN-DILORENZO – baroque cello
John LENTI – theorbo/baroque guitar
David BELKOVSKI- harpsichord
Filed under: early music, music news, Music on the Strait
December 11, 2025 • 12:34 pm Comments Off on Toshio Hosokawa’s ‘Natasha’
Toshio Hosokawa’s ‘Natasha’
The New National Theatre Tokyo (NNTT) presents Toshio Hosokawa‘s new opera Natasha, conducted by Kazushi Ono and directed by Christian Räth, via global streaming. Premiered in August 2025, the production drew wide acclaim and was named a finalist in the World Premiere category of the International Opera Awards 2025.
From Friday, 12 December 2025 at 7:00 p.m. (CET) to Friday, 12 June 2026 at 12:00 p.m. (CET), audiences can experience Natasha for free on OperaVision and NNTT Stream. Running time: Approx. 2 hours 35 minutes.
Natasha is the first opera by Hosokawa to be staged at the NNTT since Matsukaze in 2018, as well as his second opera to be premiered by Ono Kazushi.
“Reconsidering the relationship between humans and nature, Hosokawa Toshio’s music is a kind of prayer or requiem. Especially after the 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, his works address humans’ repetitive history of destruction, drawing particular attention to nature’s fearsomeness and to the human arrogance of forgetting the awe nature deserves. Globally acclaimed author Tawada Yoko, who writes novels in both Japanese and German that examine the world from a German base and highlight themes of national borders and languages, is working on the libretto for the new work. The story focuses on an encounter between Natasha, a wandering immigrant driven out of her hometown, and a young man named Arato, as well as a Mephistopheles-like figure who shows and leads the pair through various scenes of human hells. Multilingual with Japanese, German and Ukrainian languages, the opera compares and contrasts the origins of modern civilization and humanity. The groans of the endangered earth resonate deeply throughout this opera that depicts destruction and hope with multiculturalism as the key to finding a path forward.
Hosokawa’s music resonates with meditative power—at once ritualistic and deeply human—evoking the cries of a wounded planet while offering a glimpse of hope.”
Creative Team
Libretto by Yoko Tawada
Composed by Toshio Hosokawa
Conductor: Kazushi Ono
Production: Christian Räth
Set Design: Christian Räth, Daniel Unger
Costume Design: Mattie Ullrich
Lighting Design: Rick Fisher
Video Design: Clemens Walter
Electronic Sound Design: Sumihisa Arima
Choreographer: Catherine Galasso
Cast
Natasha — Ilse Eerens
Arato — Hiroka Yamashita
Mephistos Enkel — Christian Miedl
Frau A — Mari Moriya
Frau B — Akiko Tomihira
Businessman A — Tang Jun Bo
Businessman B — Timothy Harris
Saxophonist — Masanori Oishi
Electric Guitarist — Gaku Yamada
Chorus Master — Kyohei Tomihira
Chorus — New National Theatre Chorus
Orchestra — Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra
Filed under: music news, new opera, Toshio Hosokawa
December 2, 2025 • 1:03 pm Comments Off on A New Sound Takes Shape: Leonard Fu on Joining the Juilliard Quartet
A New Sound Takes Shape: Leonard Fu on Joining the Juilliard Quartet
UPDATE: The concert on December 4 will be livestreamed here at 7.30pm EST.
The Juilliard String Quartet gives its first New York performance with new violinist Leonard Fu on Thursday. I interviewed him for The Strad about joining the storied ensemble and about the program they will perform:
As the Juilliard Quartet makes its New York debut in its new formation, newly appointed second violinist Leonard Fu reflects on tradition, renewal and shaping the ensemble’s evolving voice…
continue
Filed under: Juilliard, music news, string quartet, The Strad
October 26, 2025 • 12:43 pm Comments Off on Awards Announced at 2025 Honens
Awards Announced at 2025 Honens
The final results of the 2025 Honens International Piano Competition are in – and the Gold goes to Élisabeth Pion! 
After a dazzling performance of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, the 29-year-old French Canadian was named 2025 Honens Gold Laureate in Calgary last night. She takes home CAD $100,000 and a three-year career-accelerator program valued at more than $500,000. She also swept up the Audience Choice Award (worth $5,000 CAD).
The final round featured all three finalists, each in a different concerto, with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra led by Elias Grandy.
Hearty applause as well for Silver Laureate Carter Johnson (29) and to Bronze Laureate Anastasia Vorotnaya (30) – and for all seven semifinalists who made this year’s Honens an inspiring, memorable festival. They included Ádám Balogh (28), Elia Cecino (24), Giorgio Lazzari (25), Sandro Nebieridze (24), Chaeyoung Park (28), Derek Wang (27), and Yuanfan Yang (28).
With performances this bold and individual, the Honens ideal of the “Complete Artist” feels alive and well.
Filed under: Honens International Piano Competition, music news, pianists
October 23, 2025 • 12:09 am Comments Off on BERBERIO BASH – Luciano Berio & Cathy Berberian at 100
BERBERIO BASH – Luciano Berio & Cathy Berberian at 100
Born just months apart in 1925, Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian formed one of the most daring creative partnerships of the 20th century. Together, the Italian composer and American mezzo-soprano blurred the lines between composer and performer, intellect and emotion, experimentation and play. They expanded our understanding of what a voice could do and reinvented the relationship between music and theater itself.
The Seattle Chamber Orchestra opens its fourth season on Friday 24 October with a centenary tribute to these two kindred spirits. The program, designed by SCO Founder and Music Director Lorenzo Marasso, features Berio’s beloved Folk Songs, Sequenza for voice, and Sequenza for harp, alongside works by John Cage, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Claudio Monteverdi that were signatures of Berberian’s repertoire.
The concert takes place at 8pm at the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Ave N, Seattle). Tickets here.
The Seattle concert is part of a global series of events celebrating Berberian and Berio throughout 2025.
PROGRAM
Luciano BERIO O King
Claudio MONTEVERDI Lamento della Ninfa
Luciano BERIO Autrefois
Luciano BERIO Wasserklavier
Giorgio Federico GHEDINI Arbero pecerillo from Quattro canti antichi napoletani
Luigi DALLAPICCOLA Divertimento in Quattro Esercizi
Luciano BERIO Sequenza II – for solo harp
John CAGE The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
Luciano BERIO Sequenza III – for solo voice
Luciano BERIO Folksongs
w members of the Seattle Chamber Orchestra
Lorenzo Marasso – conductor & piano
Stephanie Aston – solo voice
Wendy Wilhelmi – flute
Kevin Morton – clarinet
Shelly Myers – oboe
Jordan Voelker – violin & viola
Rose Bellini – cello
Alison Bjorkedal – harp
Arx Duo – percussions
Filed under: Lorenzo Marasso, music news, Seattle Chamber Orchestra
October 7, 2025 • 1:19 am Comments Off on Happy Birthday! Yo-Yo Ma at 70
Happy Birthday! Yo-Yo Ma at 70
The legendary cellist was born on 7 October 1955. The Strad takes a look at some moments of the cellist’s unparalleled career over the decades…
Filed under: music news, The Strad, Yo-Yo Ma
September 11, 2025 • 1:04 am Comments Off on Teddy Abrams Named Artistic and Executive Director of Ojai Festival
Teddy Abrams Named Artistic and Executive Director of Ojai Festival
Big and exciting news from the Ojai Festival:
Ojai, CA – September 10, 2025) – Ojai Music Festival Board Chairman Jerry Eberhardt announced today the appointment of conductor/composer/pianist Teddy Abrams as Ojai’s next Artistic and Executive Director effective September 1, 2026, with his first Festival being the 81st Festival in June 2027. He will join the ranks of such distinguished predecessors as Ara Guzelimian, who concludes his tenure with the 2026 Festival, Thomas W. Morris, Ernest Fleischmann, and Lawrence Morton. Mr. Abrams’ collaboration with the Ojai Music Festival will be concurrent with his post as Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra….
Filed under: music news, Ojai Festival, Teddy Abrams
September 5, 2025 • 1:22 am 1
Salonen with the Parisians in Lucerne
Big news this week: just after Esa-Pekka Salonen wrapped up his Lucerne Festival visit with the Orchestre de Paris, it was announced that he has been named the ensemble’s Chief Conductor starting in 2027. Parallel to that, he’ll become the take up the new Creativity and Innovation Chair of the Philharmonie de Paris. Salonen’s collaboration with the orchestra in Lucerne offered a vivid taste of that future partnership in two very different programs last weekend.
In the first, Augustin Hadelich was the soloist in an account of the Brahms concerto notable for its shadowed lyricism and spacious pacing, illuminating the score’s darker hues. Hadelich played his own cadenza and his arrangement of a Carlos Gardel tango as a steam-vent of an encore following such intensity. If Salonen brought structural clarity to the Brahms, the suite from Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that followed surged with dramatic sweep. The episodes seemed to unfold as part of an inexorable tragic arc rather than a set of contrasting miniatures.
His second evening with the Paris musicians revealed a touch more humor alongside the testosterone of ‘Don Juan’. But all that Straussian horn-iness set the stage for the much-anticipated world premiere of Salonen’s own Horn Concerto written for Berliner Philharmoniker principal Stefan Dohr. It’s a big piece, heroic in its way and abounding in the composer’s deep knowledge of the literature across music history, especially Mozart, Beethoven, and Bruckner (Salonen also trained as a horn player). He colorfully remarked that these moments from the musical past ‘appear and disappear like fish coming to the surface to catch an insect before diving to the depths of the sea again’.
The concerto teems with exposed solo passages that seem to test the limits of breath and control — not to mention imagination, indispensable to giving expressive shape to Salonen’s fertile ideas. Around the horn, the orchestra cast a kaleidoscope of refined colors. The concerto will travel widely in the coming months, so I hope to get a chance for more encounters.
Horn sounds resounded still again, sublimely, in the Sibelius Fifth. Salonen’s control of the art of transition, with subtly judged but dramatically thrilling accelerando, was a marvel. For all the monumentality of the closing chords, I fancied amid their awe an echo of mortality, like the trees being felled at the end of ‘The Cherry Orchard’. But the solace of Sibelius’s glorious Swan Theme circled in the mind’s ear as the swans on Lake Lucerne outside the KKL glided serenely by in serene silence.
Filed under: Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lucerne Festival, music news, Sibelius, classical, classical-music, music, orchestra, piano
MEMETERIA 