Music Reviews

My friend Stephen Albert once said that he couldn't imagine writing a string quartet after those of Bartok.

The $10,000 Music Pulitzer Prize went this year to Alaskan composer John Luther Adams, launching a heated debate in the music world over who was – or wasn’t – most deserving of this perpetually controversial award.

Contrary to many keyboard artists, pianist William Grant Naboré seems perfectly at home with Beethoven’s daunting Diabelli Variations.

His timeline stretches

Every few years, music lovers should try to attend a live performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphonie. Not just to clean one’s pipes but to be reminded what a composer’s volcanic imagination can do with an orchestra.

Pierre Boulez’s brainchild from 1976, the renowned Ensemble Intercontemporain, is on the road again with a combination program of standards and some striking new sounds from the world of new music. Audiences are responding with rapture.

You would have to be quite a sure-footed composer to believe you could improve on something as perfect as the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.

Nothing clears the mind of overplayed Christmas season tunes – popularly known as earworms -- like an hour in the company of Keeril Makan’s music. His new CD, Afterglow, is as refreshing as a glass of cold Chablis.

Dame Evelyn Glennie works wonders with her mallets, hammers and her bare hands in a new CD of John Corigliano’s percussion concerto – a piece that he initially hesitated to undertake for fear that it couldn’t be done. At least not to his exacting standards.

Alexander Tcherepnin’s piano music, just completed on last of four CDs, reflects his lifelong span of variegated composition, including his earliest creations at 15 years of age while on the run with his family from Russian revolutionaries. 

French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, a member of the Liszt-Chopin circle and one of the most respected piano virtuosos of his day, is back with us after decades of neglect.  The occasion for his return is the 200^th anniversary of his birth, and two striking CDs o

The intensity of the relationship between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann has intrigued music historians for 150 years and now conductor/pianist John Axelrod has tackled the liaison with a new double CD set (Brahms Beloved, Telarc) linking them in words and music.

Nothing excites music lovers more than the discovery of a previously unknown composition by a dead master.  Such stories are even better if the score has been unearthed from detritus in some isolated farmhouse almost ready for the torch.

“Light and Shadow” at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall Saturday night was sponsored by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts, a worthy non-profit organization devoted mainly to boosting young Chinese musicians and artists.

The Korean-born, American-trained pianist Soyeon Kate Lee is developing rapidly as a seasoned performer with personal charm and musical intelligence, both of which were on display Sunday in a challenging program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Traditional classical music finally wore out its welcome with me a few years ago by endless repetition of the Top Twenty pieces on FM radio.

Renowned Japanese percussionist Kuniko Kato makes stunning music from the simplest of instruments, stretching their sonorities to heights never previously heard on record.

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition ended with the results many observers had predicted, the gold medal going to a self-assured Vadym Kholodenko, 26, of Ukraine.

I recently became a “chance music” composer by accident – the best way. John Cage would have approved.