In its season finale, Boston Cecilia delivered a compelling and sensitively shaped performance that showcased the ensemble’s expressive range and rhythmic vitality, while providing a showcase for the ...

Beware of ideas, Joseph Stalin once warned: they are more powerful than guns. “We would not let our enemies have guns,” he went on. “Why should we let them have ideas?” That statement might make a ...

There’s nothing like an anniversary to encourage an orchestra’s programming. Take Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Intent on marking the occasion of Dmitri Shostakovich’s death fifty ...

The singers of Seraphim delivered an uplifting concert at Holy Name Parish in West Roxbury Saturday night. The program, titled “Inspired to Joy,” included works from the Renaissance to the 21 st ...

“[Bleeping] family,” Jeff Goldblum’s Zeus mutters in an early episode of Netflix’s Kaos. He could easily have been referring to the dysfunctional brood at the heart of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s ...

Composers can’t always be trusted to objectively assess their own works. However, William Walton’s appraisal of his Cello Concerto holds up: “It is to my mind the best of my three concertos,” he wrote ...

As a rule, Germans don’t do American-style hyperbole. So perhaps the billboards recently up in Berlin declaring conductor Joana Mallwitz “the next big thing” were meant more as statements of settled ...

There are few great works upon which fame has shone more unwillingly than Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor—at least so far as the Boston Symphony Orchestra is concerned. True, this ...

The end of a matter, the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, is better than its beginning. Though that reality isn’t borne out in every situation, the sentiment largely applies to Beethoven’s nine ...

Try though they might, not every season opener qualifies as a bona fide “event.” But Music Worcester’s did on Friday night. With the Philip Glass Ensemble on hand to curate a selection of the iconic ...

Brevity, Shakespeare tells us, is the soul of wit. Yet concision needn’t come at the expense of depth, as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s shortish program on Thursday night demonstrated. Led by Sir ...

1. Music by Korngold, Mozart and Andrew Norman. Kirill Petrenko/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra The Berlin Philharmonic’s visits to Boston haven’t once, in this century at least, disappointed.