Artistic inspiration can come from the most unexpected places.

The occasion was the final installment of the BSO’s month-long “E Pluribus Unum” festival. Though its offerings have been haphazard and hardly comprehensive, the jubilee has launched the orchestra and ...

“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 ...

On Thursday, the orchestra and music director Andris Nelsons celebrated their colleague as part of this month’s “E Pluribus Unum” festival. While the evening’s program offered its share of familiar ...

Who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks? The Boston Symphony Orchestra—now in its 144 th season—trotted out a fresh one with conductor Dima Slobodeniouk on Thursday night: eschewing the usual ...

“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 ...

The Handel and Haydn Society might be the country’s oldest performing arts institution, but it certainly is projecting—and performing with–the vigor of youth this week. On Monday, the ensemble ...

“[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 ...

Saint-Saëns’ Henry VIII was presented in the original five-act version Saturday night by Odyssey Opera. Painting: Hans Holbein, 1540. Henry VIII was the very model of a ruthless tyrant. Yet in Camille ...

To live, Nietzsche tells us, is to suffer, and few 19 th-century composers captured the essence of that sentiment more memorably than Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Yet the Russian master was much more ...

Whoever planned the first month of concerts at Symphony Hall this year deserves a pat on the back: rarely, if ever, do four consecutive weeks of programs, and from different artists, hold together so ...

Happiness, George Burns once quipped, is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. Samuel Barber’s Vanessa showcases an alternative: the opera, with its libretto by Gian Carlo ...