Mark Morris

Latest Articles

The BSO opens its summer home without Levine, but with Mark Morris & Yo-Yo Ma

Tanglewood report
It was especially sad that Levine, who cancelled his entire Tanglewood season and then resigned as BSO music director as of September (he just underwent another major surgery on his spine), couldn't lead this particular program.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | August 10, 2011

Review: James Levine with the Met and the BSO

Plus Mark Morris and Boston Baroque
Sighs of relief at Symphony Hall, from patrons and management alike: James Levine, music director of both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, had completed a doubleheader.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 20, 2010

Fall Dance Preview: Kick up your heels!

Dance around town
Fall dance starts at the very beginning, which is a very good place to start, with Doug Elkins and Friends’ hilarious send-up of The Sound of Music , and continues straight through to the brink of the holiday season with an authentic Gypsy “Ole!” from a pair of flamenco cousins.
By DEBRA CASH | September 16, 2010

Second sight

Boston Ballet reprises Jiří Kylián’s Black & White
May in Boston has always been Storybook Ballet Month, as Boston Ballet finished off its season with Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty or Don Quixote , something classical and highbrow and reassuring. That, after all, is what Boston audiences want, right?
By JEFFREY GANTZ | May 28, 2010

What's new

BMOP, and the Christian Wolff festival
The timely highlight of Gil Rose’s latest BMOP (Boston Modern Orchestra Project) concert, “Strings Attached,” was a new/old piece (2004, revised 2009) for two string orchestras by Scott Wheeler now called Crazy Weather — the new title taken from a John Ashbery poem that begins, “It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having.”
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 23, 2010

Stopping time

The BSO, Peter Maxwell Davies, BCMS, BMOP, Mark Morris, and Christian Tetzlaff
BSO music director James Levine has returned to Symphony Hall for the first time since October, when back surgery put him out of commission.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 02, 2010

Squiggles and lines

Alonzo King at the ICA, Mark Morris at the Opera House
The eponymous directors of Alonzo King Lines Ballet and the Mark Morris Dance Group both came from backgrounds in modern dance with sprinklings of other styles, and they both subsequently invented movement vocabularies to serve their choreographic ideas.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | February 02, 2010

John Harbison plus 10

Picking from a packed concert schedule
Classical music in Boston is so rich, having to pick 10 special events for this winter preview is more like one-tenth of the performances I'm actually looking forward to.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 05, 2010

Midsummer madness

Mark Morris, Yo-Yo Ma, and the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, Mozart in Boston, Meyerbeer at Bard
After a relatively quiet summer, I saw Boston Midsummer Opera's Cosí fan tutte at BU's Tsai Center. Then I raced out to Tanglewood for a Mark Morris program accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, a BSO matinee with Ma, and all six concerts in the annual Festival of Contemporary Music.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | September 29, 2009

Close encounters

Keep your eye on this Bird
Laura Jacobs, who was the dance critic here at the Phoenix in the mid 1980s, is the author of Landscape with Moving Figures, a collection of writing from the New Criterion that's as polemic as it is poetic. But she's also a novelist. Like Women About Town (2002), The Bird Catcher focuses on a young woman finding her way in 21st-century Manhattan.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 05, 2009

Mad love

John Harbison's Winter's Tale, Dvorák's Rusalka, Hans Graf with the BSO, Mark Morris's music
The destructive power of jealousy makes a good subject for opera.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 24, 2009

Note shapes

Mark Morris at the Majestic
When the Celebrity Series announced that the Mark Morris Dance Group would do three older pieces for its annual Boston appearance, we got a chance to revisit works we haven't seen in a while.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | March 24, 2009

Pilgrimage

Alan Gilbert with the BSO, plus Collage New Music, Boston Baroque, and Teatro Lirico d'Europa
Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony is a stunner. And Boston Symphony Orchestra guest conductor Alan Gilbert, the New York Philharmonic's music director designate led a stunning performance.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 17, 2009

Review: Jiří Kylián's Black and White at Boston Ballet

Dance noir
The Czech choreographer/Nederlands Dans Theater director made an evening out of five pieces — No More Play, Petite Mort, Sarabande, Falling Angels, and Sechs Tänze — he'd created between 1986 and 1991.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | February 19, 2009

Anniversaries and other occasions

Masur's Mendelssohn, Orfeos from Norrington and Levine, the Discovery Ensemble, and the Inauguration 'performance'
Anniversaries, however fabricated, can still be useful. This year commemorates the 200th birthday of Felix Mendelssohn, the 150th birthday of Victor Herbert (both recently celebrated with intensive "orgies" on WHRB), the 200th anniversary of Haydn's death, and the 250th anniversary of Handel's death.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 27, 2009

Lift every voice!

Classical goodies for 2009
Opera is the big word for 2009.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | December 30, 2008

Year in Classical: Celebrate!

Comings and goings
In Handel's Hercules, the demented Dejanira's loss is still so painful, I was afraid to listen; now I don't want to hear anything else.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | December 22, 2008

Not so great

San Francisco's Nutcracker on PBS
Way back in 1977, PBS gave us a Nutcracker with a difference: Mikhail Baryshnikov as an electrifying Nutcracker/Cavalier and willowy Gelsey Kirkland as an older-than-usual Clara, as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | December 02, 2008