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 ...

Nothing lasts forever, as Taylor Swift reminds us, be they relationships, careers, or music festivals. So it happened that the clock ran out Saturday on both the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “Decoding ...

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 ...

At least two things become readily apparent during an Evgeny Kissin recital. First, the man’s musicianship is immense. His playing is not limited by issues of period, style, or genre. Second, he ...

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 ...

It’s no secret that Arnold Schoenberg admired Johannes Brahms. Less well-known is the fact that the latter reciprocated: shortly before his death in 1897, the man Schumann once dubbed the heir to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks? The Boston Symphony Orchestra—now in its 144 th season—trotted out a fresh one with conductor Dima Slobodeniouk on Thursday night: eschewing the usual ...

Back in 1986, Midori made the front page of The New York Times after a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade at Tanglewood resulted in two broken E strings and the then-14-year-old playing on ...

Some ballets, like The Rite of Spring, turn up on concert programs so frequently that it can be hard to imagine experiencing them in a theater. Gabriela Ortiz seems to have taken that reality to heart ...

On paper, the lineup for pianists Víkingur Ólafsson and Yuja Wang’s duo recital on Friday at Symphony Hall didn’t make much sense. John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow, for instance, don’t normally share ...