The classical-music world has a fraught relationship with fame. On the one hand, people are always pining for the days when Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, and Leontyne Price dominated the airwaves and appeared on the covers of magazines.  

Just over an hour into a rehearsal here last week, the maestro’s baton came down like the crack of a whip, and the music screeched to a halt. Long Yu, the imperious 45-year-old conductor of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, wanted

On Wednesday night, 30-year-old Latvian Andris Nelsons, music director of England’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, makes his debut at the Metropolitan Opera leading Puccini’s “Turandot.”  

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to conduct a word-class professional orchestra?

For the first time an orchestra in mainland China is taking on a foreign music director: the French conductor Michel Plasson is becoming music director of the China National Symphony Orchestra.  

Neville Marriner puts down his cup and saucer and waves an invisible baton around the living room of his Kensington, London, home.  

You can sense the soul of certain great orchestras, just by seeing where they live. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra – which is about to open the Shell Classic International Series at London’s South Bank Centre – is one of them.