“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 ...

“[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 ...

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 ...

The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra under founding conductor Benjamin Zander opened their season Sunday at Symphony Hall with an intense program devoted to the relationship between old and new.

There are few great works upon which fame has shone more unwillingly than Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor—at least so far as the Boston Symphony Orchestra is concerned. True, this ...

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 ...

“A classical music concert isn’t a political event,” Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander said before Sunday’s performance at Symphony Hall. Even so, he conceded, the ...

Not every night does the music of Beethoven conjure the words and sentiments of Mahatma Gandhi, E. M. Forster, and Louis Spohr. Then again, not every evening at Symphony Hall proves so stimulating as ...

Since its founding in the late 90s, the Calder String Quartet has developed a sterling reputation for its wide-ranging programming and championing of contemporary music. Friday night at Jordan Hall, ...

Zander, Boston Phil bring fresh insights to Bartok, Brahms and Beethoven ...

1. Music by Korngold, Mozart and Andrew Norman. Kirill Petrenko/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra The Berlin Philharmonic’s visits to Boston haven’t once, in this century at least, disappointed.

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 ...