Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Latest Articles

Review: Mozart's Sister

Wolfgang's understudy sister fights for the limelight
When first seen in René Féret's speculative story about the older sibling of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Maria Anna "Nannerl" is pissing in the snow.
By PETER KEOUGH | October 04, 2011

Review: A composer’s jealousy drives Amadeus at NHTP

Sacred bargain
Early in his youth, an Italian named Antonio Salieri (the outstanding Blair Hundertmark) knelt in church, looked up, and saw a certain God: "An old, candle-smoked God with a mulberry robe, staring out at the world with a dealer's eyes."
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | January 19, 2011

Summer treats

Whether classical, jazz, pop, or folk, 'tis the season to get out and enjoy the music
From Andean to zydeco, pick your flavor and there's a summer music festival ready to serve it up.
By CLEA SIMON | June 18, 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

Sparring with the Ultimate

Boston Ballet in The Four Temperaments, Apollo, and Theme and Variations
There’s never been a more brilliant exemplar of the ballet art than George Balanchine.
By MARICA B. SIEGEL | May 11, 2010

Blythe spirit

Opera Boston’s Offenbach, Thomas Quasthoff, the BSO, Boston Baroque, and BU’s Sondheim
Leaving the Cutler Majestic after the opening night of Opera Boston’s latest Offenbach, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein , you could see the smiling faces of an audience that had had a good time.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | May 17, 2010

Ye gods!

BLO’s Idomeneo, BU’s Susannah, Garfein’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Zander’s Stravinsky, and Pollini’s Chopin
Much beautiful music turns up in the 18th-century operatic form that’s probably most alien to a modern audience.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | April 28, 2010

Review: Kick-Ass

It’s Chloë Grace Moretz who kicks ass
It’s the greatest introduction of a movie character in at least 10 years, the moment when Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) makes the scene.
By PETER KEOUGH | April 14, 2010

Bach beat

Lions and lambs
Composers John Harbison and Peter Lieberson are big presences this spring.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 08, 2010

Interview: Hilary Hahn

No strings
"Just because I play classical music doesn't mean I am classical music."
By JON GARELICK | March 11, 2010

Double trouble

BLO's The Turn of the S crew, Levine's Carter and Simon Boccanegra, Teatro Lirico, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and more
Boston Lyric Opera's debut Opera Annex production was so good in so many ways, it's painful that one bad idea just about sank it.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 09, 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

Lighting history

The Gardner Museum takes a chance on the new
On January 1, 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner invited 300 guests to a private concert by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the opening of her new museum on the Fenway. After performances of Bach, Mozart, and Schumann, the mirrored doors of the first-floor concert room rolled open to reveal an extraordinary vision.
By GREG COOK | February 03, 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

Portland Symphony Orchestra

Music Seen
At January 24, Merrill Auditorium
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | January 27, 2010

Let's rock

The BSO, the Cantata Singers, Discovery Ensemble, and BCMS
WGBH radio has ended its 58-year tradition of live Friday-afternoon BSO broadcasts, and it doesn't seem that public outcry is going to change that.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 25, 2010

From Mozart to milonga

All kindsa dance hits the stage
We Bostonians may swathe ourselves in sweaters and lock our doors against the blustery weather, but once the music begins, dance performances can help us shake off the shivers — and often transport us to more temperate climes.
By DEBRA CASH | December 29, 2009

52 ways to leave 2009

Get your New Year's Eve down to an Auld Lang science.
Your usual lackadaisical approach to New Year's Eve — just see what happens and go with the flow — is not going to cut it this year. Sure, the end of this decade may not have the same kind of new-millennium pressure riding on it as the last one, but the plunge into 2010 is a milestone nonetheless.
By SHAULA CLARK | December 30, 2009

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

2009: The top 10 in pop music

Music you need to own
Hmm, lots of women, a few old dudes, and some African banjo (not to be confused with Steve Martin's Hollywood banjo).
By JIM MACNIE | December 22, 2009

Review: Nine

Rob Marshall continues his assault on good taste
It doesn't get much farther from human experience than this: an adaptation of a Broadway production adapting a film ( 8-1/2 ) about a filmmaker who imagines making a film.
By PETER KEOUGH | December 22, 2009

2009: The year in Classical

Beating the quease
This was a queasy year for classical music.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 04, 2010

Music and revenge

Elemental Theatre’s masterful Amadeus
As a play, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus has more than its share of theatrical muscle.
By BILL RODRIGUEZ | November 12, 2009

Glenn Beck's Mormon ties

Letters to the Boston editor, October 30, 2009
Thank you for carefully illustrating the intellectual dishonesty of the right wing’s number-one glory boy.
By BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS | October 28, 2009

In the swim

Guerilla Opera, von Stade’s farewell, the BSO, Handel and Haydn, the BPO, and that Tosca
My head’s swimming.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 14, 2009

Requiem detexted

Nicole Pierce at the Armory
Mozart's Requiem is one of the most controversial works in the classical repertory. Mozart had completed only parts of it and sketched other parts when he died, unexpectedly at age 35, in 1791. His death ignited immediate speculation and myth.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | September 30, 2009

Smaller, bigger, better

Boston Ballet’s fourth ‘Night of Stars’
Is Boston in the midst of a ballet boom? You could certainly believe that if you attended Boston Ballet’s fourth annual season-opening gala last Saturday.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | September 22, 2009

Review: Bright Star

Jane Campion does Keats — sort of
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art." That's the first line of a sonnet that John Keats did or did not write for Fanny Brawne, who was in either case the love of his brief life.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | September 22, 2009

Leon Kirchner, 1919–2009

In Memoriam
Craggy, tender, passionate, witty, rough-edged, lyrical, uncompromising, Leon Kirchner's music, so like the man himself, made an indelible impression. Even in his recent appearance at a 90th-birthday tribute concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the old fire and wit, the frankness and the refusal to sentimentalize, were there.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | September 23, 2009

Terpsichore's delight

A season of foot (and body) work
There's no end to variety to the fall's dance season, from a Boston Ballet classic to Hawaiian hula and "extreme action" acrobatics.
By DEBRA CASH | September 14, 2009