When the Imperial Symphony Orchestra begins its new season Tuesday, the program for its first concert will rely on a bit of a marketing gimmick. Called “Pleading the 5th on the 5th,” the orchestra will play excerpts from works with the number five, including the first movement of the most famous “fifth” of all, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, with its instantly recognizable four-note opening.

WHAT started as a pleasure for Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan became a powerful campaign that changed the role of women in music.

A few hours before the gala start to a new season, Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb was anything but boastful. This, despite successfully opening up his company to the world.

LISTENING to music can greatly boost a person’s ability to exercise – so much that Olympians and joggers can actually go faster, higher and stronger with the right tune.

SEATTLE—During a recent performance of “The Green Sheep,” a spectator burst into tears. Some in the theater feared the worst: a mass audience meltdown.

MATSUMOTO, Japan — The big news from Asia about Western classical music has been coming for a decade from China, where the surge in education and performance has been explosive. The brash and hugely gifted pianist Lang Lang has been an apt symbol of that explosion, though new star Chinese performers and composers seem to emerge by the month.

Maestro Daniel Barenboim believes people still have an interest in what he has to say after all these years. Ahead of his participation in Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, he discusses political situation’s effect on music, need for contemporary work, and conclusions from his 60-year career.

Can we separate Wagner’s artistic achievements from his personal views?

THE virtuoso Canadian pianist Glenn Gould is one of those performers, like James Dean or Maria Callas, whose life and legend nearly overshadow their artistic achievements. But since Gould also insisted on keeping his private life shielded, he would seem to be a particularly elusive and unlikely choice for a documentary film that presumes to call itself “Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould.”

NAISSAAR, Estonia – In the Baltic Sea, about 45 minutes from Tallinn, the boat full of music devotees arrives at this near-desert island, then rides in army-style trucks past rusty Soviet war machinery and defused mines to a concert hall called Omari Barn – for music they can’t hear anywhere else.