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Benson and the late Nat King Cole have a lot in common: Both started as acclaimed jazz instrumentalists, but became pop stars when they started singing. Cole was a huge influence on Benson, and the guitarist — who turned 70 this spring — pays tribute on his latest album.

The quartet's new album of Tchaikovsky and Schoenberg is the last to feature the cellist and longtime member of the group.

The jazz composer's latest project is an opera based on the life of Emile Griffith, a gay boxer who became a world champion in the 1960s — at a price.

For conductor Marin Alsop, Bernstein's idiosyncratic Second Symphony — inspired by W.H. Auden's poem The Age of Anxiety — is a musical quest to answer life's big questions with time out to throw a hip-swinging party.

The two artists are known opposites in the world of instrumental music. On Metheny's latest, the jazz guitarist wrings an unexpectedly visual listening experience from Zorn's knotty compositions.

A pianist raised in Jamaica, Alexander is the perfect choice to rework Bob Marley's "The Heathen."

A South African artist lays utter waste to preconceptions about period performances.

The Chicago-based Deep Blue Organ Trio combines a Hammond organ with a guitar and drums. The group's fourth album Wonderful! pays tribute to the Stevie Wonder songbook. Critic Kevin Whitehead says more jazz musicians should cover Wonder, because his tunes are "jazz waiting to happen."

Is Don Giovanni the greatest opera of them all, as some have suggested? That's hard to say, but Mozart's brilliant combination of stark human tragedy and realistic comedy features music of limitless genius, and a drama that lives up to the score.

Hear the famed contralto sing Verdi in a newly issued 1955 radio broadcast, live from the Metropolitan Opera.