Music
The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal programs a lot of new music but that is not the point.
Christopher Rouse is a tough composer to pin down and that stylistic unpredictability has, in part, provided his music notable expressive breadth.
Felix Mendelssohn remains one of the West’s most underrated composers.
Those assembled at Boston’s Jordan Hall were thoroughly prepared to be enraptured.
Jason Isbell has got sober, and his songs ring with the urgency of the newly recovered (and newly remarried, to his violinist Amanda Shires).
Mavis Staples’ voice and stage presence still exude power, still plumb emotional and spiritual depths.
Hardly any of the under-60s generation can tell you who Serge Koussevitzky was or what his legacy consists of.
Elgar’s brilliant scoring in his Symphony no. 1 was front and center, in this performance not an end in itself but serving clearly expressive goals.
Nobody, these days, plays the music of the Strauss family better than the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
Rethinking the Repertoire #8 – Sibelius’s “Night Ride and Sunrise”
Surely the time has come for a major revival of Night Ride and Sunrise.
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