The New York-based Escher String Quartet made an impressive debut in the Concord Chamber Music Society series yesterday afternoon in the Concord Academy’s dry-but-articulate, steeply raked arena theater, producing a variety of sound signatures appropriately particular to each composer on the program of Beethoven, Janáček, and Brahms, earning quite an enthusiastic response.    [continued]

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini with pianist Inon Barnatan and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition led by BSO Assistant Conductor Anna Rakitina naturally paired in Friday’s matinee. Both Moscow-born, contemporaries Rakitina and composer Elena Langer stepped out in the former’s Suite from Figaro Gets a Divorce.    [continued]

Handel and Haydn Society’s Messiah under the spell of guest conductor, Václav Luks, an energetic musical polymath, with well-matched soloists—soprano Amanda Forsythe, contralto Avery Amereau, tenor Ben Bliss and bass-baritone Kevin Deas, proved riveting. Reprises Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.    [continued]

The Lord of Cries received its East Coast premiere at Jordan Hall on Saturday night in Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s concert-version co-production with Odyssey Opera. The large orchestra under Gil Rose, gave a vigorous and often incandescent account which matched the work of the excellent vocalists, headlined by counter-tenor superstar Anthony Roth Costanzo.    [continued]

Angela Hewitt led the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in a profoundly moving reading of a selection of Bach’s keyboard concertos on Saturday afternoon, in the beautiful, sold-out Shalin Liu Performance Center at Rockport.    [continued]

The Handel & Haydn Society brought an exquisitely played and sung, and very well-blocked and costumed Marriage of Figaro to Symphony Hall on Friday. Conductor Raphaël Pichon, singers, and fortepianist melded as if long-time collaborators with the responsive and sonorous H+H orchestra and chorus.      [continued]

Castle of Our Skins’ presentation at the Boston Athenæum last Thursday celebrated the library’s extensive renovations and the artistic contributions of American Black composers and poets.    [continued]

The Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts’s “Desert River” mixed Yazhi Guo’s suona and guanzi with Chi Wei Lo’s classical-piano improvisation; and Leo Blanco’s jazz piano for an interested turnout Saturday evening at Jordan Hall on Saturday night. Held in esteem in his country, Guo should find such recognition and honor far beyond.    [continued]

All eyes and ears turned to the audacious submitting of one man at the Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Calderwood Hall this past Sunday, as Christopher Taylor triumphed in this fourth and final installment (Beethoven’s comedic Eighth and gargantuan Ninth) of his self-proclaimed “crazed odyssey” through all nine of Beethoven’s Symphonies transcribed for solo piano by Liszt.    [continued]

The Berlin Philharmonic’s rendition of the Korngold Symphony along with a Mozart violin concerto and an interesting new work conveyed energy and meaning every second.  The Symphony Hall concert on behalf of the Celebrity Series of Boston led us to new horizons and deepening insights.    [continued]

Coro Allegro, which has carved out its own special niche, collaborated with the Arneis Sring Quartet and pianist Yulia Yun in “Letters to Our Children: Voices across Generations for LGBTQ+ Youth” at Old South Church on November 6^th.    [continued]

“Love in the Time of…”, Boston Opera Collaborative’s interestingly staged mashup of Schumann’s Dichterliebe and 16 commissioned songs “about love” based on responses to Schumann’s music and Heine’s poetry debuted last night at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center. Continuing Friday and Saturday nights,    [continued]

Chorus pro Musica and the Sonic Liberation Players gave of a transcendental rendition of Rothko Chapel under conductor Jamie Kirsch within Boston’s Church of the Covenant last Saturday night. The well-done pieces that preceded it did not quite fit the overall picture.    [continued]

Lionel Meunier, Artistic Director of Vox Luminis, led a five instrumental- and nine vocal- contingent through Claudio Monteverdi’s valedictory compilation, “Selva morale e spirituale” (The Moral and Spiritual Forest) with some appealing detours into the composer’s other collections at Jordan Hall last night for Boston Early Music Festival. And early times it was as the    [continued]

Last weekend’s Chameleon Arts Ensemble concerts at First Church in Boston encompassed the fantastic, the morbid, the anti-social, even the horrific, skillfully mixing well-known repertoire with less familiar and new.    [continued]

The BSO marked James Sommerville’s final performances at Symphony Hall as principal horn last night. The Strauss-BSO-Nelsons Alpine Symphony  elicited euphoria Thursday night, while a cubistic BSO commission from Caroline Shaw and Mozart’s 40^th left milder impressions.    [continued]

Boston University’s 26^th annual Fringe Festival under the auspices of the BU Opera Institute and the School of Theatre, opened its second week this past Friday with Ned Rorem’s idiosyncratic opera Our Town in a run at the CFA Concert Hall.    [continued]

The Whitman sampler that Winsor Music proffered Friday at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center packaged new flavors with old favorites mostly from composers with solid connections to Boston.    [continued]

Skylark’s confident, raucous, loud, and at times radiant traversal of Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles last night at Church of the Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, led this writer on a journey from a skeptical distancing through hypnotic confusion to free-will acceptance.    [continued]

Maurice Clerc offered varied fare and skillfully employed the many resources of the beautiful 1875 E. & G. G. Hook organ at Holy Cross Cathedral last Sunday.    [continued]

This week’s BSO concerts with conductor Andris Nelsons offer Beethoven’s 5^th piano concerto, the Emperor, with the revered pianist Mitsuko Uchida and Shostakovich’s haunting and energetic 5^th Symphony, known for its outward apologia, inner sarcasm, and unique references.    [continued]

What blissful, Vienna-centered divertissements Boston Symphony Chamber Players dispensed at Jordan Hall yesterday afternoon, during which time we compared the 16-year-old Mahler with the 19-year-old Schubert, saluted a fleet-of-foot 94-year-old whose work sounded the youngest of all, and imagined a monkey and organ grinder.    [continued]

Sunday’s Celebrity Series of Boston visit from Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic coupled Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz’s violin concerto Altar de cuerda with Mahler’s First.    [continued]

The world premier of Harbor by the Liz Gerring Dance Company with the JACK Quartet at the Institute of Contemporary Art this past Friday proved that dance can fundamentally enhance John Luther Adams’s music.    [continued]

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has had a special relationship with Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. On Thursday, Andris Nelsons forged his own in a reading that was savage, sumptuous, and altogether magnificent.    [continued]