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 ...

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.

“[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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

As far as Gustav Mahler was concerned, a symphony should be just like the world, embracing everything. On Friday, Sir András Schiff applied that principle to the piano recital, marking his return to ...