“[Bleeping] family,” Jeff Goldblum’s Zeus mutters in an early episode of Netflix’s Kaos. He could easily have been referring to the dysfunctional brood at the heart of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s ...

One Response to “Nelsons closes BSO’s Beethoven symphony cycle with glimpse of Promised Land” Posted Feb 07, 2025 at 2:43 pm by John L. Hodge This is a letter that I sent to the Boston Globe, which ...

“Thunder is good,” Mark Twain wrote. “Thunder is impressive. But it is lightning that does the work.” A couple lightning bolts struck at Symphony Hall Friday night in the form of the Handel & Haydn ...

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 ...

Handel’s Messiah (1741) is a staple of the American Christmas tradition. Even though the bulk of the piece focuses on Christ’s death and resurrection, many of Boston’s fine ensembles perform the ...

Some ballets, like The Rite of Spring, turn up on concert programs so frequently that it can be hard to imagine experiencing them in a theater. Gabriela Ortiz seems to have taken that reality to heart ...

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 ...

Andris Nelsons’ annual opera-in-concert weekends with the Boston Symphony Orchestra usually showcase the conductor at his best. This year’s surely did, with the culminating installment of the ...

“In my beginning,” T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker, “is my end.” That was literally the case for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s nine-year-long survey of Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonic music: the ...

Sometimes good things come in threes. Other times, they happen in fours. Take the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concert at Symphony Hall on Thursday night. There were, on the one hand, a trio of debuts: ...

After a difficult year and a half, the Handel and Haydn Society has even more to be thankful for this holiday season than the return to live music-making. Prior to Friday night’s performance of Handel ...

Just like that, Boston’s heavyweight classical musical ensembles are both back in action: one day after the Boston Symphony Orchestra kicked off its 143 rd season, the Handel & Haydn Society followed ...