ArtsCriticATL.com

Although Sonic Generator is Georgia Tech’s contemporary music ensemble-in-residence, the group is starting to seem like a house band at the Woodruff Arts Center. This partnership might be a good strategy for SG’s long-term survival, especially as the state’s budget for education is trimmed. And it’s been good for Atlanta’s classical music scene, which benefits [...]

Robert Spano, who’s celebrating a decade as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, has just been appointed to the same role with the Aspen Music Festival and School, a summertime training program for elite young musicians from around the world. The 49-year-old conductor starts as music director designate and co-director of the conducting program [...]

Bach’s B-minor Mass, assembled from parts and never performed complete during the composer’s lifetime, has become our standard for what we might call the grandiloquent sublime in music. It has become a central pillar of the canon, and thus can seem impossible to consider apart from its monumentality and our modern ideas of completeness. Whether [...]

The Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs will bring Regina Carter’s Reverse Thread, the Gerald Clayton Trio and the Warren Wolf Quintet to Piedmont Park for the 34th Atlanta Jazz Festival this Memorial Day weekend. Ninety Miles featuring Stefon Harris, David Sanchez and Christian Scott, trumpeter Sean Jones and local singer Audrey Shakir also are scheduled [...]

When the Atlanta Opera first performed Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” in 2005 at the Civic Center, it was among the first of the revitalized company’s artistic triumphs. The chorus was especially wonderful, prepared by Walter Huff to the highest standards most anyone had ever heard. A review of that “Porgy” caught the eye of Paris’ [...]

The musical cultures of Latin America have enriched the Atlanta Symphony’s programming immeasurably in recent years.  Not least, this comes from the orchestra’s close association with Osvaldo Golijov, an Argentine with a complicated multiculturalism — the sounds of the Latin street and the Jewish shtetl, with a dose of George Crumb’s unbounded creativity — running [...]