Though the Boston Symphony Orchestra didn’t advertise it as such, Thursday night’s concert with Alan Gilbert at Symphony Hall was essentially an evening of premieres. There was, for one, the unveiling ...

“Age is an issue of mind over matter,” Mark Twain reportedly said. “If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” Whether or not Herbert Blomstedt shares Twain’s philosophy, the 97-year-old maestro’s stage ...

New England might be in the grip of a winter with seemingly limitless reserves of snow and ice, but the Boston Symphony Orchestra took a decidedly autumnal view of things for Herbert Blomstedt’s ...

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: ...

Symphony Hall was ablaze with music, dance, and poetry Friday night as the Back Bay Chorale, in collaboration with the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and the Boston Children’s Choir, performed Carl ...

“I hate quotation,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. “Tell me what you know.” Well, there’s no question that Carlos Simon knows the charismatic black church. The son of a preacher, the Boston Symphony ...

Nothing beats a good opening. As it happened, Thursday’s concert from the Boston Symphony Orchestra boasted two of the canon’s best hooks. The first bars of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9—quiet, spare, ...

Fitchburg, Massachusetts doesn’t loom large in the annals of music history. But the town in the Commonwealth’s north-central region has at least one claim to fame: it witnessed the first Boston ...

Pierre-Laurent Aimard released a well-received recording of Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier in 2014 on DG. The celebrated French pianist has finally followed that up with Book II (this time for ...

The Boston Symphony Orchestra presented a program of Liadov, Bartók, and Rachmaninoff Thursday evening at Symphony Hall. Led by conductor Eun Sun Kim in her BSO debut and featuring pianist Inon ...

The end of a matter, the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, is better than its beginning. Though that reality isn’t borne out in every situation, the sentiment largely applies to Beethoven’s nine ...

“The aspect of things that are most important for us,” Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.” The great philosopher wasn’t speaking of orchestral ...