436 stories by "Jonathan Blumhofer"
It looks to be as rich, intense, and, hopefully, rewarding a season as we've seen in recent memory.
Massenet'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.
We'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.
The Emerson String Quartet and Renee Fleming team up for one of the finest recordings of the year.
Javier Perianes is a musician of sweeping, Romantic sensibilities, eager to take a stand, and the result is a triumphant recording
John Adams' Absolute Jest is a sheer blast of fun, wildly inventive and, at its best, a vertiginous collage.
The trio's musical offerings were substantial and not the easiest things for an occasional group to pull together.
Two recent albums feature compositions by James MacMillan, one of Europe's leading composers, as well as an opportunity to hear him conducting.
This recording is the first of a partial Shostakovich cycle Andris Nelsons and the BSO are embarking upon.
Listening 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.
Powder Her Face proved the perfect capstone to Odyssey Opera's month-long survey of British (mostly comic) opera: biting, darkly humorous, provocative, and relevant.
To say that Odyssey Opera continues to set the bar for opera performances in Boston may be a bit superfluous, but it's true.
A 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.
By 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.
Taken 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.
Radius Ensemble's final performance of the season touched on examples of musical fantasy, worldly angst, and spiritual transcendence.
There 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.
Saturday's was the most electrifying, exciting, spontaneous-sounding, inevitable performance of this warhorse (Beethoven's Violin Concerto) I've heard.
Ascending 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.
New England's oldest continuously-active opera company brings to Boston a rare performance of one of Tchaikovsky's less-familiar operatic scores.
Pianist 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.
The opportunity to hear LeoÅ¡ JanáÄek's magnificent score live ultimately trumps any reservations I have about the production as a whole.
Julia Fischer's account of Brahms's Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) this weekend was nothing if not dynamic and impressive.
The main takeaway from this first BSO album under new music director Andris Nelsons is the excellent, exciting Sibelius performance.
Evaluations of a number of intriguing new albums, including praise for a disc of string trios by Eastern European composers performed by Ensemble Epomeo.
