Classical Music
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Newly recorded in the original German, Anton Reicha’s Lenore offers a vivid response to Bürger’s famous “Gothic” ballad from 1774.
Joseph Horowitz’s short, punchy, well-sourced, and compulsively readable book argues for bringing back the forgotten works of important Black composers.
Thanks to a blend of compositional technique and solid musical grounding in each of the works, “Flames to Ashes” exceeded easy categorization.
Here’s my list of twenty superlative operatic offerings of different kinds.
Johannes Brahms’s wistful 1894 Clarinet Sonatas receive fantastic performances.
Taken together, the selections on Attacca Quartet’s latest release is something of a meditation on the human condition.
If you’re looking for instrumental music that grapples with tumultuous events, times, and circumstances, this may well be the disc for you.
Music Commentary: Top Classical Performances and Recordings of 2021
Here are a handful of concerts that stand out from the past several months, as well as my favorite albums of 2021 – apparently even a global pandemic can’t stop the surprisingly resilient classical music recording industry.
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