Music
The magazine’s Roots and World Music critic looks back at a year of live performances: here are the winners and a few losers.
Beethoven’s Mass in C is the highlight. Would that the San Francisco Symphony’s performance of the Third Concerto had more electricity.
These live recordings capture Weather Report’s sound during its most celebrated years.
This is truly exciting, world-beating Beethoven, played with gusto and a kind of musical intelligence that you simply can’t take for granted.
Leave it to Todd Rundgren to poke fun at greatest-hits tours in the middle of a greatest-tour.
When she composes a song, she said, it’s her guitar, rather than her voice, that “chooses the key. The guitar is the boss.”
Of course, it’s a tricky business to summarize a classical music scene as busy and wide as Boston’s.
What came through strongest was Darlene Love’s pride in having a new album out and a comeback underway.
Classical Music Commentary: “Boulez est mort”
And yet, for all the violence of his youthful polemics and his unflinchingly-held beliefs, Pierre Boulez was neither demagogue nor ideologue.
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