Classical Source Reviews

Yuja Wang began with eight selections from Shostakovich’s cycles Opuses 34 & 87 blended into a continuous whole, creating dreamy auras, sweet melodies, dance-like passages, and a march, all decorated with shimmering figures, trills and […]

Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra launched their 2024 Tanglewood Season with two works from a crucial period that not only marked a transition in Beethoven’s development but a watershed moment for music. Gil […]

Edgar, the second of Puccini’s operas, is probably the least encountered of the thirteen that he wrote, though New Sussex Opera brought it to the Cadogan Hall in its earlier four-Act version in 2012. Since […]

Augustin Hadelich joined the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and Bernard Labadie for this OSL Bach Festival 2024 program showcasing 18th-century concertos in alternate versions. The evening began with an elegant reading of Charles Avison’s D-minor […]

For its final concert of the season, the Met Orchestra arrived at Carnegie Hall in full force for music from three masterpieces of the mid-19th and early-20th-centuries operatic repertoire opening with an exhilarating account of […]

For his final concert program as New York Philharmonic Music Director, Jaap van Zweden led a sturdy, accurate and well-balanced reading of Mahler’s Symphony No.2, customarily referred to (though not by the composer) as the […]

Focused and confident from the start, Evgeny Kissin took a quick, perfunctory bow, and launched into an intriguing interpretation of Beethoven’s E-minor Sonata. After sounding the opening chords of the capricious and elusive first movement […]

For her new production of Carmen for Glyndebourne, Diane Paulus indicates that she aims to concentrate on Don José’s psychology and backstory. But as is increasingly the case with productions of the opera, it does so by […]

The New York Philharmonic concluded this season’s ‘The Art of the Score’ series with a screening of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Watching the heartwarming story of the gentle lost alien and Elliott, the troubled […]

Four months after his Carnegie Hall appearance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seong-Jin Cho returned, opening with one of Haydn’s few Sonatas in a minor key. After the impatiently insistent opening came a suitably sprightly […]