It is no small feat to present a concert comprised largely of unfamiliar repertoire. Under the direction of music director Michael Barrett, Boston Cecilia’s season finale on Saturday night at All ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

More of the latter quality would have benefited Alban Gerhardt’s take on Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, which followed intermission. Back on a BSO subscription program for the first time ...

There was something fitting about the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra offering Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 on Sunday at Symphony Hall. It wasn’t just because the sleigh bells at the start of its ...

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 ...