The violinist Elmar Oliveira won the gold medal in the Tchaikovsky competition in 1978 (sharing it with Latvia’s Ilya Grubert), and is still the only American ever to win that prize. Since then he’s been steadily concertizing, recording and teaching. I’ve heard him a couple of times up at Lynn University in Boca Raton, once […]

I wonder whether anyone does an annual Handel Count at this time of year, tallying up the performances of Messiah that suddenly appear across the land like the red and green foil that magically appears in bags of Hershey’s Kisses. George Frideric Handel wrote his oratorio in August and September 1741 for a hospital benefit […]

Colin Matthews. (Photo by Maurice Foxall) This has been a good season so far for new classical music, with big premieres from Carlos Rafael Rivera and Daniel Bernard Roumain in the past couple of months, and some more fresh music debuting this weekend at the New World Symphony. The much-celebrated British composer and conductor Oliver […]

Daniel Bernard Roumain. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes) Back in late September, violinist and composer Daniel Bernard Roumain premiered his Dancers, Dreamers and Presidents, a three-part tone poem inspired by an impromptu dance that talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres and then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama did during the 2008 presidential campaign. The work debuted Sept. 25 at the […]

Joshua Habermann This weekend’s performances by the Master Chorale of South Florida of Haydn’s epic oratorio The Creation mark the welcome return to area concert halls of a great Classical-era masterwork. But they also are significant for another reason. The concerts are part of a unique resource-sharing move that involves three different arts organizations in […]

“She looked like Dante and was very masculine and imposing,” Igor Stravinsky once said of his friend and patron, the Princesse de Polignac. “Her ambition was to have her bust next to Richelieu’s at the Louvre.” Ambition indeed, but the princess, who was born Winnaretta Singer in Yonkers, N.Y., and an heir to the Singer […]

Saturday night’s New World Symphony concert at the Knight Concert Hall introduced South Florida to an 18-year-old British musician who has already made a serious name for himself. And not just recently, either, hard as that may be to believe. Alexander Prior, son of a Russian mother and British father, has studied for the past […]

Tonight and tomorrow (Oct. 27 and 28) mark the first two concerts in Miami to be sponsored by the new Florida International University chapter of the American Liszt Society, which is dedicated to advancing knowledge about Franz Liszt, the great Hungarian pianist and composer. The bicentenary of Liszt’s birth in 1811 falls next year, and […]

After cellist Lynn Harrell played Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations with the New World Symphony on Saturday night at the Lincoln Theatre, he came out for a solo encore. And he introduced it this way: “I can’t tell you how exciting it is to be playing with these young musicians, who are just starting out on the […]

Sandra Lopez, with Marcus Haddock, as Mimi in La Boheme. Festival Miami gets going Friday, and this year’s selection of classical, jazz, pop and dance events opens with one of the most cherished compositions of Richard Strauss, the Four Last Songs. Strauss wrote them in mid-1948, the year he turned 84, and although the title […]