Music
Richard Vacca’s The Boston Jazz Chronicles will be a foundational document that other researchers will turn to again and again as they delve into more specific niches of Boston jazz history and unearth as yet unknown artifacts of this era and its neglected body of music.
Read MoreWhy, Rita Costanzi asks incredulously, do harpists, albeit occasionally, marry other harpists: “Does the word masochist mean anything to you?”
Read MoreWith “In Seven Days,” Thomas Adés seems to have developed a musical language that’s complex yet not forbidding: there’s no sense that his music is weighed down by expectations of the past, even as he freely refers to archaic compositional forms.
Read MoreIn any piece, the remarkable pianist Jason Moran might go to the very edges of the harmonic movement, until he on the verge of free jazz.
Read MoreTeams of string coaches were deployed to make this quartet of actors look like they knew what they are doing with their instruments, but no critic has noticed how completely unrelated the motions of their left hands — finger placement and vibrato — are to the music that is played, with the exception of Christopher Walken, who looks like he is playing his cello correctly and producing real music.
Read MoreHandel & Haydn Society captured all of this and then some with a vigorous, focused performance that was a marvel of controlled fury.
Read MoreWill You Can Be A Wesley be your pick for Rock Artist of the Year? Who will it be, Boston? Make your Nate Silver-style predictions and let me know what you think!
Read MoreSaariaho’s music is often lush and vibrant, to be sure, but it also can lose track of its musical purpose and meander excessively from time to time. Not so in “Circle Map.”
Read MoreConsidered by some to be a guardian of ancient music, Jordi Savall has inspired adulation for a variety of reasons, but in the end it’s because he plays the viol or viola da gamba better than just about anyone else alive.
Read MoreThe 35th anniversary concert proved that Coltrane’s music and memory continue to strongly hold sway in the hearts and souls of musicians and audiences alike.
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