[1] VAN first received international attention in February, 2016, when its interview with Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas was written about in The New York Times.

Several pieces written for VAN are listed as sources in the textbook Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance.

It has published interviews with Teju Cole, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Hannigan, Mahan Esfahani, András Schiff, Angela Gheorghiu, Davóne Tines, Claire Chase, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Peter Eötvös, and Elina Garanca.

VAN has published essays and features written by Haas, cellist Matt Haimovitz, author and former Leonard Bernstein assistant Craig Urquhart, ABC News's Alexandra Svokos, The Paris Review's Helena de Groot, Kenji Fujishima, critic and librettist Olivia Giovetti, musicologist and Jeopardy!

In 2019, VAN broke news of conductor and music director Daniel Barenboim's alleged professional misconduct, characterized across interviews with past and current employees as "authoritarian, mercurial, and frightening" behavior.

This prompted a rebuttal from fellow harpsichordist Andreas Staier (also published in VAN) that led to a public row covered particularly in the UK press.

[21] In the winter of 2017–2018, composer, curator, and VAN contributor Arno Lücker published a video (on his own blog) featuring violinist Daniel Hope set to a different track of a badly-played violin, an example of "shred" videos (a popular meme at the time that featured well-known musicians re-dubbed with deliberately bad performances).