ArtsCriticATL.com

This week, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra ends its official season with Mozart’s last two symphonies and Peter Lieberson’s “Neruda Songs,” with smoky-voiced mezzo Kelley O’Connor and conducted by Robert Spano.

Great art is supposed to speak for itself, but sometimes the life stories and biographical details are impossible to separate from the art. Mozart’s incomplete Requiem, completed on his deathbed. Van Gogh’s inflamed madness in the Provençal sun as he painted his final canvases. The vivid novels of Irène Némirovsky, penned while in hiding in the months before she was deported to Auschwitz. Sometimes art becomes embedded in legend, which…

The clock is ticking right now. “Rapido! A 14-Day Composition Contest” is again under way. The contest’s debut proved so energizing and musically successful that the award has gone national, or rather tri-regional — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago — with sculptures by Alexander Calder offered for inspiration.

Last year, the Atlanta Chamber Players and a local arts patron, Ron Antinori, cooked up a novel idea. Antinori, a banking software mogul, was intrigued by the “48 Hours” filmmaking contest, where you get a subject at 5 p.m. on a Friday and have the weekend to produce a finished film. He…

Haydn Piano Sonatas Vol. 1, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (on a Chandos CD or downloaded from iTunes)

French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet likes the comprehensive. His recordings of Debussy’s complete works for piano, on five discs, are a revelation: precise and atmospheric and emphasizing the exotic strangeness — a certain tangy, “Oriental” quality — that’s imbedded within Debussy’s music but too rarely brought to the surface.

Now Bavouzet has launched a complete survey of Franz Joseph Haydn’s piano sonatas, also on Chandos, a British label. Volume 1, sensationally enjoyable, includes four oft-recorded sonatas from the late 1760s and 1770s, when…

This week, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra will perform world premieres by two composers who have become familiar names in Symphony Hall. Not so long ago, these two were kicked around by the critical establishment — considered artistic lightweights by some and outright dismissed in Europe. But the true-believer fervor and durable commitment shown by the orchestra and conductor Robert Spano is a heartening thing, and, as we’ve reported on many occasions, the ASO actually sells more tickets when contemporary music is on the program than for standard repertoire.

The latest work from Jennifer Higdon is…

The Atlanta Opera’s tangled history and perpetually unrealized potential continues to baffle outsiders. It continues to baffle people who live in Atlanta, too. Alfred Kennedy, an old-money Atlantan who helped lead the opera until 2004, once described that history to me as “a thicket of messiness.” In the June issue of Opera News, Ian Keown, a travel writer, opera lover and regular visitor to Atlanta, tries once more to explain the history of the company.

The headline reads “Song of the South,” while the underline asks: “Atlanta has grown into an economic powerhouse. Will its operatic ambitions ever catch up?”…

The big, above-the-fold news about the 33rd Atlanta Jazz Festival, which takes place Memorial Day weekend, isn’t the return of nationally known musicians to the annual event. Sure, vocalist Esperanza Spalding and bassist Marcus Miller (Saturday), singer Diane Schuur and bassist Stanley Clarke (Sunday) will all be there, but the real story is the festival’s return to its roots.

For the past two years, the annual jazz gathering has been suffering from an identity crisis due to the drought. Outside the friendly confines of Piedmont Park, where the event had been held in some form since its maiden voyage…