Clad in a poncho, baritone Marcelo Guzzo, brought commanding presence and a resonant timbre to his role as vocalist and guide ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Boston Symphony Orchestra presented a program of Liadov, Bartók, and Rachmaninoff Thursday evening at Symphony Hall. Led by conductor Eun Sun Kim in her BSO debut and featuring pianist Inon ...

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 ...

Whoever planned the first month of concerts at Symphony Hall this year deserves a pat on the back: rarely, if ever, do four consecutive weeks of programs, and from different artists, hold together so ...

Tis the season for musical marathons, at least in New England. A little more than a week after the Boston Symphony Orchestra wrapped its survey of the complete Beethoven symphonies, the Celebrity ...

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 ...

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, ...

Andris Nelsons’ annual opera-in-concert weekends with the Boston Symphony Orchestra usually showcase the conductor at his best. This year’s surely did, with the culminating installment of the ...