NPR Staff

"Good music is good music," violinist Angèle Dubeau says. The Canadian musician interprets theme music from Halo, Angry Birds and other video games on her latest album.

The jazz master died on Wednesday at age 91. In a 1999 interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross he talked about his decades in the music industry and his first love: rodeo roping.

The celebrated young American cellist walks us through her recording of this "devastating" concerto written just after the end of World War I. She collaborated with conductor Daniel Barenboim, whose late wife, Jacqueline du Pre, was the standard-bearer for this work.

You might envision Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy as cute and cuddly. But they're tough characters united to fight the boogeyman in Rise of the Guardians. NPR's Michel Martin talks with director Peter Ramsey about the movie — and becoming the first African-American director of a big-budget CG-animation film.

The composer has done a brave thing for any artist in any medium: He's messed with a classic, specifically, Vivaldi's most famous four violin concertos. Richter says he had "to figure out how much Max and how much Vivaldi there was going on at every moment."

The young composer from Brooklyn battles stereotypes in classical music with her DIY aesthetic, her penchant for blending genres, and her new opera, Song from the Uproar, based on the early 20th-century adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt.

Conductor John Eliot Gardiner and author Matthew Guerrieri explain the incredible resonances, past and present, behind one of the most famous phrases in music: the start to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Now considered one of Verdi's masterpieces, the opera flopped on its first run and carries the stigma of cursing those who perform it to terrible fates.

Stephen Spielberg's new movie Lincoln features the authentic sounds of 1865, from Lincoln's own pocket watch to the latch on the carriage door that carried him to Ford's Theatre. Sound designer Ben Burtt talks about making the objects of Lincoln's life heard.

The studio of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Marin Alsop was hit by Hurricane Sandy. When she conducts some water-damaged scores in the future, she'll have wrinkled reminders of the fragility of life and the redemptive power of music.