He’ll be returning to local stages next week to lead the Master Chorale of South Florida and the Boca Raton Symphonia in complete performances of Handel’s Messiah, but what he’s focused most on these days is reaching 2,000 children in the Miami-Dade school system. In an interview I had with him earlier this month at […]

From left: Laszlo Pap, Mei-Mei Luo, Richard Fleischman and Claudio Jaffé. It’s too early to call it in an invasion, but one Palm Beach County-based string quartet is expanding this season to venues in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. The Delray String Quartet, founded six years ago out of the collapse of the Florida Philharmonic, has […]

Carson Kievman in his office. (Photo by Greg Stepanich) Carson Kievman never thought he’d be running an arts school. But one request to find a violin teacher for a friend ultimately led to music teachers and students using his Miami Beach apartment for lessons, and before too long, he was renting out a studio apartment […]

Earlier in the year, I spent some time listening to two newer recordings with good South Florida connections, and I don’t know that they got a lot of attention at the time, so here’s my effort at redressing that. The first was a Naxos disc called Reflections of wind band music by the American composers […]

Time was, if you lived in or near a big American city, that the orchestra in your neighborhood would drag out spooky light classics to celebrate Halloween: the Saint-Saens Danse Macabre, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, perhaps the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of Paul Dukas. Those days are pretty much gone, and the celebration itself isn’t what […]

Allison Eldredge solos with the Miami Symphony on Sunday. How does one go about rebranding a symphony orchestra? If you’re the Miami Symphony Orchestra, you get this message across: We want to be a world-class orchestra, and we’re taking big steps to get there. The group has hired its first director of development, has a […]

Kelly Kaduce as Suor Angelica, a role she will sing at Florida Grand Opera. Opera has its roots in the late 16th century as an entertainment for the cognoscenti, and it’s arguable that no other art form is so artificial. And yet it’s also true that few other art forms have enjoyed the new lease […]

If you were one of around 30 people who took Seraphic Fire up on its most recent offer last weekend, a concert of Renaissance polyphony should be showing up in your inbox sometime today. The Miami-based choir, which gave four concerts — titled The Musical Da Vinci Code — of 15th- and 16th-century music from […]

The Orchestra at the Opera House (1870), by Edgar Degas. The return of James Judd to area concert stages, which will occur in early December when the former Florida Philharmonic conductor leads three performances (one of them at Miami’s Trinity Cathedral) of Handel’s Messiah with the Master Chorale of South Florida and the Boca Symphonia, […]

Libby Larsen. (Photo by Ann Marsden) It’s shaping up to be a season of premieres here: Music from Richard Danielpour and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich later this season, works from University of Miami student composers (Oct. 7) and six 10-minute chamber operas from UM faculty (Oct. 13) during the upcoming Festival Miami, and on Oct. 10 […]

Frederic Chopin, photographed in 1849, the year of his death. The next few years in the world of classical music are replete with bicentennial anniversaries of the births of several composers whose music fills much of the core repertory: Robert Schumann and Frederic Chopin (1810); Franz Liszt (1811); Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi (1813). Look […]