Some composers—like John Adams, the author of The Dharma at Big Sur, Gnarly Buttons, and Slonimsky’s Earbox—can’t resist a catchy title. Edgar Meyer, on the other hand, seems to prefer keeping things ...

On Tuesday, Kissin imbued this section’s desolate turns of melody and harmony with soulful, almost bluesy, intensity. The ...

Composers can’t always be trusted to objectively assess their own works. However, William Walton’s appraisal of his Cello Concerto holds up: “It is to my mind the best of my three concertos,” he wrote ...

Nothing lasts forever, as Taylor Swift reminds us, be they relationships, careers, or music festivals. So it happened that the clock ran out Saturday on both the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “Decoding ...

There’s nothing like an anniversary to encourage an orchestra’s programming. Take Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Intent on marking the occasion of Dmitri Shostakovich’s death fifty ...

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 ...

It’s no secret that Arnold Schoenberg admired Johannes Brahms. Less well-known is the fact that the latter reciprocated: shortly before his death in 1897, the man Schumann once dubbed the heir to ...

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.

“What do you think this music is about?” Leonard Bernstein asked the audience during a 1958 Young People’s Concert on the subject of music and meaning. He then played a snatch of the William Tell ...

Nothing lasts forever, as Taylor Swift reminds us, be they relationships, careers, or music festivals. So it happened that the clock ran out Saturday on both the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “Decoding ...