On Thursday, the orchestra and music director Andris Nelsons celebrated their colleague as part of this month’s “E Pluribus ...

The occasion was the final installment of the BSO’s month-long “E Pluribus Unum” festival. Though its offerings have been haphazard and hardly comprehensive, the jubilee has launched the orchestra and ...

“I hate quotation,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. “Tell me what you know.” Well, there’s no question that Carlos Simon knows the charismatic black church. The son of a preacher, the Boston Symphony ...

Who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks? The Boston Symphony Orchestra—now in its 144 th season—trotted out a fresh one with conductor Dima Slobodeniouk on Thursday night: eschewing the usual ...

The Handel and Haydn Society might be the country’s oldest performing arts institution, but it certainly is projecting—and performing with–the vigor of youth this week. On Monday, the ensemble ...

Beware of ideas, Joseph Stalin once warned: they are more powerful than guns. “We would not let our enemies have guns,” he went on. “Why should we let them have ideas?” That statement might make a ...

Over the years, Dante Alighieri’s Commedia has been the impetus for any number of musical works. Yet, aside from Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini, few are firmly established in the canon. On the ...

A sold-out Symphony Hall witnessed a moving performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor (“Resurrection”) by the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Benjamin Zander Friday night.

The end of a matter, the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, is better than its beginning. Though that reality isn’t borne out in every situation, the sentiment largely applies to Beethoven’s nine ...

There are few great works upon which fame has shone more unwillingly than Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor—at least so far as the Boston Symphony Orchestra is concerned. True, this ...

Complete cycles of the Beethoven symphonies aren’t for the faint of heart. Just ask Lorin Maazel, whose 1988 traversal of the set included a respirator in the dressing room—just in case. Then again, ...

The Boston Symphony Orchestra presented a program of Liadov, Bartók, and Rachmaninoff Thursday evening at Symphony Hall. Led by conductor Eun Sun Kim in her BSO debut and featuring pianist Inon ...