“Progress depends above all on the temper of the nation,” Anthony Eden told the House of Commons in 1938. “And that temper must find expression in a firm spirit.” The former foreign secretary and ...

Genius, Edison told us, is mostly the result of hard work. Too much of it, though, can lead to deleterious ends: as Jan Swafford’s recent biography convincingly argues, overwork played an outsized ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

Tis the season for musical marathons, at least in New England. A little more than a week after the Boston Symphony Orchestra wrapped its survey of the complete Beethoven symphonies, the Celebrity ...

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, ...

What’s a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida without elephants? Cheaper and less complicated to put on than the alternative, for one. It was also the look Boston Lyric Opera went with for their ...

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 ...

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 ...