American conductor Lorin Maazel celebrates his 80th birthday this weekend conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the Austrian capital. Topping the programme of Saturday's performance at the Musikverein concert hall will be the world premiere of a suite taken from Maazel's opera "1984", based on the novel of the same name by George Orwell. Maazel will also conduct Claude ...

Star baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky is fearless when reaching for musical heights. But the Russian singer says he's always been scared of physical heights — even on stage sets. So he decided to tackle his fear by reaching sky-high — literally. The 47-year-old, silver-haired opera singer parachuted from a ...

Tsarist Russia berated it as subversive, Nazi Germany banned it outright and to this day, for Poles, the cascading notes of Frederic Chopin still symbolise their country's long struggle for independence. After hearing Chopin's quintessentially Polish "Mazurkas" and his "Revolutionary Etude", Robert Schuman, a German and like Chopin a renowned 19th-century composer, understood, describing the music of his ...

A brand new opera by German composer Aribert Reimann was given a rapturous reception at its world premiere at the Vienna State Opera here Sunday. "Medea" is, in the words of the 74-year-old composer, his "eighth-and-a-half" opera, and was commissioned by the Austrian capital's world famous opera house. It also a farewell gift of sorts from the house's ...