The BSO has had a well-deserved couple of weeks off following their late-summer tour of Europe and, on Thursday, they took some time to regain their sea-legs.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:50PMIt’s one of the enduring ironies of classical music that so much of today’s repertoire was written by such a small number of people..
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:38AMEven if it’s a mite inconsistent, Anthracite Fields is a fully deserving Pulitzer winner.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 05:31PMJust about anything Isabelle Faust touches these days is gold – she’s one of the finest violinists out there
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:09AMIt looks to be as rich, intense, and, hopefully, rewarding a season as we’ve seen in recent memory.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:43AMMassenet’s instinct for drama and gifts as an orchestrator go a long way to carrying the piece, but it still can make for a long night at the theater.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:22PMWe’ll have to wait and see how Andris Nelsons balances things out. But there’s no reason to suspect that Boston’s getting the short end of the stick here.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:47AMThe Emerson String Quartet and Renee Fleming team up for one of the finest recordings of the year.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:00AMJavier Perianes is a musician of sweeping, Romantic sensibilities, eager to take a stand, and the result is a triumphant recording
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:40AMJohn Adams' Absolute Jest is a sheer blast of fun, wildly inventive and, at its best, a vertiginous collage.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:36AMThe trio’s musical offerings were substantial and not the easiest things for an occasional group to pull together.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:01AMTwo recent albums feature compositions by James MacMillan, one of Europe's leading composers, as well as an opportunity to hear him conducting.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:02AMThis recording is the first of a partial Shostakovich cycle Andris Nelsons and the BSO are embarking upon.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:48PMListening to Isabelle Faust's performance of Schumann's Violin Concerto that I wondered why the piece has remained on the fringes of the repertoire for so long.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:51AMPowder Her Face proved the perfect capstone to Odyssey Opera’s month-long survey of British (mostly comic) opera: biting, darkly humorous, provocative, and relevant.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 03:00PMTo say that Odyssey Opera continues to set the bar for opera performances in Boston may be a bit superfluous, but it’s true.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:37PMA series of new and recent recordings by Boston orchestras demonstrate that, in the right hands, symphonic music since 1945 remains alive and well, still powerful, fresh, and vibrant.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:35AMBy the end of Andris Nelsons's inaugural season he had the BSO playing with lots of energy and like they really care, night in and out.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:42AMTaken together, it’s a bracing, provocative, and – perhaps above all – fun survey of music for the stage from, for England, the conspicuously abundant 20th century.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:48AMRadius Ensemble's final performance of the season touched on examples of musical fantasy, worldly angst, and spiritual transcendence.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:06AMThere was new music, of which Nelsons's an uncommonly gifted interpreter; old music that mostly sounded lively; and a big, loud, late-Romantic warhorse that let him and the BSO show off.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:50AMSaturday’s was the most electrifying, exciting, spontaneous-sounding, inevitable performance of this warhorse (Beethoven’s Violin Concerto) I’ve heard.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:21AMAscending Light is, by far, the most serious orchestral score of Gandolfi’s I’ve heard and it succeeds to a considerable extent thanks to its expressive honesty.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:23PMNew England’s oldest continuously-active opera company brings to Boston a rare performance of one of Tchaikovsky’s less-familiar operatic scores.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:06AMPianist Simone Dinnerstein's new album, Broadway-Lafayette, features her on three pieces, all written since 1924, that celebrate musical ties between France and the United States.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:21AMThe opportunity to hear Leoš Janáček’s magnificent score live ultimately trumps any reservations I have about the production as a whole.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:40AMJulia Fischer’s account of Brahms’s Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) this weekend was nothing if not dynamic and impressive.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 05:52PMThe main takeaway from this first BSO album under new music director Andris Nelsons is the excellent, exciting Sibelius performance.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:16AMEvaluations of a number of intriguing new albums, including praise for a disc of string trios by Eastern European composers performed by Ensemble Epomeo.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:33AMAfter several years in the wilderness, it seems that, on the conducting front at last, the BSO is again in good hands.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:13PM
