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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“Thunder is good,” Mark Twain wrote. “Thunder is impressive. But it is lightning that does the work.” A couple lightning bolts struck at Symphony Hall Friday night in the form of the Handel & Haydn ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The singers of Seraphim delivered an uplifting concert at Holy Name Parish in West Roxbury Saturday night. The program, titled “Inspired to Joy,” included works from the Renaissance to the 21 st ...

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 ...

To live, Nietzsche tells us, is to suffer, and few 19 th-century composers captured the essence of that sentiment more memorably than Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Yet the Russian master was much more ...

If the two immediate standing ovations on Thursday evening were any indication, sometimes the only response to a performance is “Again!” Such was the case at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s ...

There’s nothing like making up for lost time. That, on the one hand, is what the Bamberg Symphony did in their first Celebrity Series concert since 1983, delivering one of the meatiest—and most ...