Classical Music
Music by Amy Beach, Leonard Bernstein, Florence Price, John Harbison, and John Williams: this Boston Landmarks Orchestra concert had a little something for everyone.
The world-renowned tenor Ivo Židek leads a spirited cast, and reminds us how involving opera can be when sung by native speakers.
What business has a period orchestra got playing the music of Anton Bruckner? And why can’t conductors and orchestras just leave Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” alone?
Mother Nature provided singular and poetic assistance during Sunday’s afternoon outing at Tanglewood.
Could it be that Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp is the big kahuna of our symphonic music?
Composer Michael Daugherty’s lovely survey of 20th-century touchstones continues; violinist Philippe Quint plays a lineup made up (mostly) of commissions.
Pianist Daniil Trifonov’s no stranger to playing Rachmaninoff with Nelsons and the BSO—they delivered a memorable outing of this very piano concerto in 2019—and, while Saturday’s traversal was periodically rusty, it built in spirit and tightness as the evening proceeded.
On “hommages,” United Strings of Europe is technically secure, rhythmically precise, richly colored, and ever attuned to matters of nuance and spirit. Tchaikovsky’s output could be uneven, and this installment of Alpesh Chauhan’s continuing traversal of the Russian icon’s orchestral music with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is proof.
The new “Portrait” package contains five hours of music by Bizet that is mostly unknown to music lovers and music lovers. Plus one of his best operas, a one-act written just before “Carmen”: 1872’s “Djamileh,” which is set in a harem.
Neeme Järvi, true to his usual form, favors brisk tempos, which tend to keep things from getting bogged down in Wilhelm Furtwängler’s bog of a Symphony No.2; Nicholas Collon leads a stupendous recording of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5.
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