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 ...

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 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 ...

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.

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 ...

“[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 ...

Sometimes good things come in threes. Other times, they happen in fours. Take the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concert at Symphony Hall on Thursday night. There were, on the one hand, a trio of debuts: ...

Complete cycles of the Beethoven symphonies aren’t for the faint of heart. Just ask Lorin Maazel, whose 1988 traversal of the set included a respirator in the dressing room—just in case. Then again, ...

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 ...

The Handel and Haydn Society might be the country’s oldest performing arts institution, but it certainly is projecting—and performing with–the vigor of youth this week. On Monday, the ensemble ...

Some composers—like John Adams, the author of The Dharma at Big Sur, Gnarly Buttons, and Slonimsky’s Earbox—can’t resist a catchy title. Edgar Meyer, on the other hand, seems to prefer keeping things ...