Music

Over the past few months, The New York Times has asked all kinds of experts to answer the question, What would you play a friend to make them fall in love with...

On the surface, Ed Sheeran and Led Zeppelin might not seem to have a lot in common. Sheeran is a baby-faced singer-songwriter whose hummable ballads like “Perfect” and “Photograph” have become streaming-era...

Glum, ponderous songs about madness, mortality and greed, punctuated with tense instrumentals. Was that a blueprint for a blockbuster? It hardly sounds like the makings of one of the best-selling albums of...

The threats facing democracy will be a central focus of Carnegie Hall’s coming season, the presenter announced on Tuesday, with a festival devoted to the flourishing cultural scene in Germany between the...

Cleveland was a boyhood bluegrass zealot, not a prodigy. When he was six weeks old, his parents began toting him to bimonthly Saturday concerts his grandparents hosted at an American Legion in...

Four months later, when the time finally came to play the album for Atlantic, 100 gecs went all out, renting the venue Irving Plaza in Manhattan for the afternoon and rolling out...

Directors love Wagner’s operas, which infuse the suggestive sketchiness of parables into clearly conceived plots and characters. They offer both strong bones and flexibility.“Lohengrin,” about an anxious and divided society into which...

Can anything halt SZA’s reign over the Billboard album chart?For a 10th time, “SOS,” the second studio LP by SZA — the genre-blurring R&B singer and songwriter born Solána Imani Rowe —...

Uchida’s recording of these pieces is insistently lyrical, borderline Schubertian. The sonatas were, in her reading at the time, intimate, private musings that were made public but didn’t seem as if they...

Mr. Whitlock wrote the words for that song and the chart-topping “Take My Breath Away,” central elements in the success of the hit 1986 movie.