Yuja Wang was the piano soloist in Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie with Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thursday night. Photo: Winslow Townson Kids and, sometimes, conductors say the darndest things. In a 1980 talk to the American Symphony Orchestra League, Leonard Bernstein posited that Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements (completed in 1945) was the last “really great symphony” and went on to make the assertion that “for the last thirty years we have no real symphonic history.” In so doing, Bernstein managed to negate not just two of his own contributions ..read more

Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott performed Tuesday night at Symphony Hall. Photo: Robert Torres/Celebrity Series Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Kathryn Stott offered a fitting tribute to the myriad beauties of musical friendship to a full house at Symphony Hall. Tuesday evening’s performance was one of the last of the nearly 40-year collaborative relationship between Ma and Stott, as Ma told the audience. Earlier this year, Stott announced her retirement from public performance at the end of 2024 to devote her time to teaching and supporting young musicians. More than anything—more than the compelling progr ..read more

Michael Winter performed Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 1 with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra Sunday in Newton. Tucked away at the Second Church in Newton, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra delivered a charming meditation on music and nature on Sunday afternoon. Led by composer and guest conductor Jeff Beal, Pro Arte offered a performance that displayed the strength of the ensemble and made a powerful argument for the pleasures of a chamber orchestra in a culture that favors grandiose musical gestures. The program opened with Beal’s Overture to Pollock—a film on the life of painter Jackson Po ..read more

Violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Kirill Gerstein performed Sunday at Jordan Hall for the Celebrity Series. Arnold Schoenberg thought so highly of Johannes Brahms that he grafted the scion of conservative 19th-century German musical values into his artistic family tree. In a 1947 essay, Schoenberg, the arch-Modernist who founded the Second Viennese School and birthed the twelve-tone method, even went so far as to canonize his predecessor as “Brahms the Progressive.” Though there wasn’t any Schoenberg in Christian Tetzlaff and Kirill Gerstein’s Celebrity Series recital at Jordan Hall o ..read more

Peter Tantsits starred in Odyssey Opera’s presentation of Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe Friday night at the Huntington Theatre. Photo: Kathy Wittman/Ball Square Films Considering the variety and invention of his writing, it’s surprising that Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories haven’t figured more prominently in the opera house. Then again, there’s no guarantee an adaptation of “The Masque of the Red Death” or “The Fall of the House of Usher” would have legs: the canon is a strange, capricious mistress, as composer Dominick Argento well knew. The Pennsylvania-born, Minnesota-b ..read more

Andris Nelsons will open the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2024-25 season with a gala concert on September 19. Photo: Robert Torres The Boston Symphony Orchestra celebrates Andris Nelsons’ first decade as music director while also highlighting new and recent initiatives in its 2024-25 season, which was announced Thursday. Though at times retrospective, the upcoming year does include a series of premieres as well as Nelsons conducting a pair of landmark scores by Gustav Mahler and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Nelsons kicks off the festivities with a gala concert on September 19. The event includes ..read more

Domingo Hindoyan conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thursday night. Photo: Michael J. Lutch If the two immediate standing ovations on Thursday evening were any indication, sometimes the only response to a performance is “Again!”  Such was the case at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performance on Thursday night at Symphony Hall, where conductor Domingo Hindoyan and cellist Pablo Ferrández provided a program characterized by deep emotion expressed with stunning clarity. Thursday’s program featured Roberto Sierra’s Sinfonía No. 6, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and Dvořák’s Sevent ..read more

The Isidore String Quartet made its Celebrity Series debut Wednesday night at Pickman Hall. Photo: Jiyang Chen Not every concert does, or should, offer a moral. And perhaps gifting the audience one wasn’t the ultimate goal of the Isidore String Quartet’s Celebrity Series debut program Wednesday night at the Longy School’s Pickman Hall. Still, given the excellence and concentration of the night’s performances, it was hard to escape the feeling that there wasn’t a larger purpose to the New York City-based tetrad’s lineup of works by Franz Josef Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Billy Childs tha ..read more

Bruce Liu perfumed a recital Saturday night at Jordan Hall for the Celebrity Series in his Boston debut. Photo: Christopher Koestlin It is, or now should be, a truth universally acknowledged that a late-March Nor’easter is no match for Bruce Liu’s local fan base. Despite the unremittingly nasty elements, a full house turned out to witness the Paris-born, Montreal-based pianist’s Boston (and Celebrity Series) recital debut Saturday night at Jordan Hall. And well they might: Liu, who was the first-prize winner of the 2021 Chopin Piano Competition, is no garden-variety virtuoso. True, he’s got ..read more

Celebrity Series JIJI, guitarist Music by Paganini, León, Reich, JIJI, and others 7 p.m. Crystal Ballroom, Somerville celebrityseries.org Boston Symphony Orchestra Clark Rundell, conductor esperanza spalding, vocalist and bassist Leo Genovese, pianist Terri Lyne Carrington, drummer Dayna Stephens, saxophonist Shorter: Forbidden, Plan-It! Shorter: Orbits Shorter: Midnight in Carlotta’s Hair Shorter: Excerpts from …(Iphigenia) Shorter: Causeways Shorter: Gaia 7:30 p.m. Symphony Hall bso.org March 22 Celebrity Series Chromic Duo Music by Chopin, Ravel, Arnalds, Eno, Wieland, and Kariũki 7 p.m. Cr ..read more