Matthew Aucoin | The New York Review of Books

Inside the Music

The decline of traditional newspaper reviews of new music offers an opportunity to expand our ideas of what music criticism could be.

November 6, 2025 issue

Perpetual Expectation

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s operas have a pervasive aura of waiting for something just out of sight, shrouded in veil upon veil.

L’Amour de loin

an opera with music by Kaija Saariaho and a libretto by Amin Maalouf; directed by Peter Sellars at the Finnish National Opera, Helsinki

Innocence

an opera with music by Kaija Saariaho and a Finnish libretto by Sofi Oksanen, with multilingual contributions by Aleksi Barrière; directed by Simon Stone at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam

May 23, 2024 issue

Alone in Paradise

George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s opera Picture a day like this illuminates not just the loss of a child but also music’s power to create imagined spaces so alluring they become an escape from reality.

Picture a day like this

an opera with music by George Benjamin and text by Martin Crimp, directed by Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, September 22–October 10, 2023

March 7, 2024 issue

Performance as Immolation

The conductor Carlos Kleiber’s aesthetic was founded on the interplay between voluptuous refinement and an impulse to violence.

Corresponding with Carlos: A Biography of Carlos Kleiber

by Charles Barber

Carlos Kleiber: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon

12 CDs and 1 Blu-ray disc (2018)

February 23, 2023 issue

Save the ENO!

The Arts Council’s decision to cut off annual funding for the English National Opera and other flagship London arts institutions will be devastating for audiences and artists.

December 27, 2022

The More Fraught the Better

Throughout The Rake’s Progress, the steady friction between Stravinsky’s music and Auden’s poetry creates a musico-poetic compound that brims with energy and life.

October 21, 2021 issue

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

The Exterminating Angel

an opera by Thomas Adès, with a libretto by Tom Cairns in collaboration with the composer; performed by Amanda Echalaz, Audrey Luna, Alice Coote, Joseph Kaiser, Rod Gilfry, Christine Rice, Iestyn Davies, and others; the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Thomas Adès

Adès Conducts Adès: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Totentanz

performed by Kirill Gerstein, Mark Stone, Christianne Stotijn, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra

May 13, 2021 issue

A Crucial Reset

October 27, 2020