For sheer drama in classical music this year, it will be hard to top the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's knife's-edge performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 on Saturday night at…
Everybody knows about Walter Cronkite and his impact on television news. Fewer people remember or know about Cronkite's great rival on NBC during the 1960s, The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Pair…
Debut recordings by emerging classical performers face enormous challenges. There's the issue of finding unique material or a unique voice after so much music has been recorded so many times…
The sheer number of mid-rank orchestras in the Washington area guarantees a wide variety of musical approaches to holiday concerts. But the prize for the most boundary-expanding holiday prog…
A packed house at the Phillips Collection could have been forgiven if they thought that pianist Einav Yarden had magically switched out Steinway grand pianos between numbers. The Israeli pia…
How much do you re-interpret music that was written 100 or 200 years ago? This eternal question has an unequivocal answer in the hands of a young ensemble like The Ariel Quartet: Just do it.…
Which pieces to put with which on an orchestra program is a subject of endless debate. Does it really matter if concerts have an overall theme? It does if they have as meaningful a connectio…
Rising local soprano Danielle Talamantes talks about the Met, concert music, and the opera singer's life Politicians and lobbyists running to catch the Acela at Union Station in D.C. or Penn…
Challenging or dissonant music can be a slog for both the classical music performer and the listener. If you're at all fearful to see live concerts because of the reputation of 20th-century …
Sometimes there's reason to doubt why a symphony orchestra needs all those violins. Many of the labor disputes that are running around the country's major professional ensembles, including a…
Standing alone on the stage of the Eastern Shore home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, pianist Thomas Pandolfi joked that no orchestra was magically going to materialize before the audie…
No type of ensemble works harder these days than string quartets to make classical music "cool" and relevant. From hip, funky websites to innovative performances in unusual spaces, string qu…
You have a right to be skeptical when a symphony orchestra claims to have a unique sound. Down through the centuries most composers of symphonic music have given specific directions about wh…
Why do people willingly get dressed up and head out in the dark to hear funeral music when no one has died? Three words: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. There have been dozens or hundreds of other …
If Thomas Pandolfi hasn't done all that a pianist can do to present an exceptionally broad range of music to an engaged public, he certainly seems determined to. The D.C. native, one of the …