VAN Magazine

BSO declines to renew Andris Nelsons’ contract - The Boston Globe Music director will depart after 2027 Tanglewood season.

The Boston Globe reports that the Boston Symphony Orchestra has declined to renew music director Andris Nelsons's contract past the summer of 2027. The orchestra has so far not elaborated on its reasoning.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/06/a...

"Paavo Järvi has been appointed Chief Conductor & Artistic Advisor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, succeeding current Principal Conductor Edward Gardner at the start of the 2028/29 season," the LPO announced today in a press release.

Exclusive: BBC Radio 3 has ended its relationship with Norman Lebrecht following an email to Yuja Wang the pianist described on Instagram as "derogatory misogynistic bullying."

here's a piece i wrote back in 2017, about Radigue's Biogenesis
bsky.app/profile/vanm...

van-magazine.com

RIP Éliane Radigue (1932-2026)
van-magazine.com/mag/eliane-r...

(Almost) Every Piece by Darius Milhaud, Ranked “The complete Milhaud? Won’t you be holed up in a bunker for six months?” said a friend when I mentioned this project. If people know one thing about Darius Milhaud, it is that he was one of the most ...

It's the listicle you've all been waiting for: @carolinefrmus.bsky.social ranks (almost) every piece by Darius Milhaud: van-magazine.com/mag/every-pi...

Inside the UK’s Amateur University Opera Societies The supporting pillars, ornate in red and gold, glimmer dully in the dark. Icons of the Church Fathers line the walls. An elaborate altar, framed by stained-glass windows, is upstaged metaphorically a...

University student opera in the UK is cheap, messy and a blast. Maddie Lay explores a form that professional opera could learn a lot from:
van-magazine.com/mag/student-...

Is it just us?

Inside the UK’s Amateur University Opera Societies The supporting pillars, ornate in red and gold, glimmer dully in the dark. Icons of the Church Fathers line the walls. An elaborate altar, framed by stained-glass windows, is upstaged metaphorically a...

University student opera in the UK is cheap, messy and a blast. Maddie Lay explores a form that professional opera could learn a lot from:
van-magazine.com/mag/student-...

Hilary Hahn and Seth Parker Woods have withdrawn from the world premiere performance of Carlos Simon's Double Concerto Suite at the Kennedy Center in March. They will be replaced by National Symphony Orchestra Associate Concertmaster Ying Fu and NSO Assistant Principal Cello Raymond Tsai.

(Almost) Every Piece by Darius Milhaud, Ranked “The complete Milhaud? Won’t you be holed up in a bunker for six months?” said a friend when I mentioned this project. If people know one thing about Darius Milhaud, it is that he was one of the most ...

It's the listicle you've all been waiting for: @carolinefrmus.bsky.social ranks (almost) every piece by Darius Milhaud: van-magazine.com/mag/every-pi...

In 2013, conductor Frédéric Chaslin tried to organize a meeting between Jeffrey Epstein and a young philosophy student in Paris. Chaslin says he didn't know the disgraced financier's criminal record. Their Facebook messages tell a different story: van-magazine.com/mag/frederic...

In @vanmusicmag.bsky.social on 12 Feb: my ranking/round-up of 345 Darius #Milhaud pieces! Over four months, I listened to or read as many of his 443 opus numbers as I could find. Today and tomorrow I’ll post highlights: as this is Milhaud, it’s going to be a LONG thread 1/

Among those laid off by the Washington Post today was Michael Andor Brodeur, the paper's classical music critic: another blow to an invaluable yet increasingly precarious discipline.

also of note, though I was frankly surprised Gergiev showed up as little as he did in the search. bsky.app/profile/outo...

Did This Conductor Organize Meetings with Young Women for Jeffrey Epstein? Emails released on Friday appear to show Frédéric Chaslin currying favor with the financier and sex offender.

New: Did this conductor organize meetings with young women for Jeffrey Epstein?

Emails released on Friday appear to show Frédéric Chaslin currying favor with the financier and sex offender.

Full story: van-magazine.com/mag/frederic...

BarTálk: Lise Davidsen’s Isolde (VAN Magazine) A video review, with Huw Lemmey, of Lise Davidsen’s titanic debut as Isolde in Barcelona. View this post on Instagram A post shared by VAN Magazine (@vanmusicmagazine)

Huw and I––the @badgayspod.bsky.social gays––went to Tristan und Isolde at the Liceu, starring Lise Davidsen. Here's our video review for @vanmusicmag.bsky.social benwritesthings.com/bartalk-lise...

The Sensations of Disconnection It was a rainy afternoon in an autumnal London as conductor-composer Jack Sheen tuned the quietude of Gerard Grisey’s “Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil.” The performers, the London Sinfonietta and...

In Jack Sheen's music, "the audience should feel like they’ve gone deaf or something" van-magazine.com/mag/jack-she...

The Direction of History Gambist and conductor Jordi Savall has recorded over 200 albums, most featuring music written before 1750—the year most mainstream conductors’ repertoire begins. Then, in 2018, Savall began a plan to ...

Jordi Savall is the winner of the 2026 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Revisit our 2022 interview with him here:

van-magazine.com/mag/jordi-sa...

The Rough Joy Western classical music is often thought of as placeless: a grammar of sound that belongs everywhere and nowhere, drifting free of soil, climate, history, on some variation of Henry Russell Cleveland’...

The Orchestre Symphonique des Enfants de Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo is not a polished youth orchestra of the El Sistema variety. What it has to offer, J.R. Patterson writes, is something much more valuable. van-magazine.com/mag/orchestr...

Over on Instagram, Tim has a new video essay on Feldman, bodies, and monuments. Check it out :)

www.instagram.com/reel/DTajYCl...

Some highlights ⬇️

“Something that has to do with … leaving … ” Between the winter of 1950–51, when he began mapping out a series of “Projections” in squares on graph paper, and the attenuating final breath of “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” in 1987, there were fewe...

Morty's 100th birthday is Monday. Tim Rutherford-Johnson has a beautiful essay in this week's VAN with reflections on the composer's aesthetic of absence. van-magazine.com/mag/morton-f...

(This is in no way adult content. Cheers Bluesky!)

Happy New Year! Are we still saying that? Who knows! Happy something anyway.

Over on Instagram, we asked contributors and friends of the magazine for their ins and outs for 2026. Thoughts?

www.instagram.com/p/DTIOkcziAF...

Machine in the Gods When Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus opened in Bayreuth in 1876, it boasted the latest in theater technology. From its covered orchestra pit to its state-of-the-art lighting and stage machinery, the th...

For @vanmusicmag.bsky.social I wrote about Bayreuth’s AI Ring Cycle, and what the use of AI means for labour rights, intellectual property, racial bias, and the creative process:

I also covered Giorgia Meloni’s use of “meritocracy” to push a right-wing view of Italian culture, and discussed what authoritarianism means for art:

Music From the Inside of the Sun Last winter, Georg Friedrich Haas mentioned to me that the composer Arash Yazdani, a former student of his and a friend of mine, had given him a word he’d been looking for his entire career. That term...

And finally, Georg Friedrich Haas and Arash Yazdani discuss the concept of plasmatic music—a music of super heated, super pressurized sound: van-magazine.com/mag/plasmati...