Music
It’s March in Boston and that means lots of tourists and college kids wearing green things and claiming to be Irish. Take them by the hand and lead them to one of the following musical offerings around the city this month.
Handel and Haydn artistic director Harry Christophers placed a composer who is familiar, but not always the focus of attention, front and center, and, in the process, reminded us just how good a musician Haydn was.
In the slow third movement, Mr. Zander, the BPO, and the Symphony seemed to really be in sync: the music breathed, sighed, sang, and unfolded at a natural pace that brought out the best in everybody.
Postmodern jazz trio The Bad Plus plays some of the prettiest Stravinsky ever performed.
No one would say that Terri Lyne Carrington’s versions of Ellington’s pieces are definitive, but they extend the legendary composer’s legacy in a personal and significant way.
Peter Hook’s memoir contains no earthshattering revelations, but it does offer a new way (or at least another way) of thinking about the four young men who made up Joy Division.
Heartbeat is an international non-profit organization that is aimed at uniting Israeli and Palestinian musicians, educators and students in order to transform conflict through the power of music.
Composer James MacMillan’s musical strategy in this opera is a stylistic patchwork that seems to mean to convey that each character inhabits a different, mutually misunderstood world.
While The Vaccines Come of Age is a very good album, I can’t listen to it without thinking that maybe the band grew up a little too fast.
In an effort to give the proceedings an intimate, salon feel, the Symphony Hall stage was dotted with a couple of potted plants, three armchairs, and a pair of music stands; the cavernous environ of the space was still very much present, but one appreciated the effort to minimize it, even if only partially successful.
Classical Music Commentary: Boston’s Lost Opportunity — How the BSO Board Chose Charles Munch over Leonard Bernstein