A screen grab from a YouTube excerpt of Carson Kievman’s Fourth Symphony. When Carson Kievman and his brother took a trip out to a coral reef in the Florida Keys recently, they discovered something ominous. “It was completely dead,” said Kievman, a composer and founder of the SoBe Institute of the Arts in Miami Beach. […]

Catherine Russell. It’s one of the curious features of South Florida musical life that so many concert series, even ones as long-running as the Community Arts Program, take place in churches. Next week, the CAP opens its 28th series of summer programs at the beautiful Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ with an impressive […]

Brett Karlin, incoming director of the Master Chorale of South Florida. Brett Karlin would like you to forget that the Master Chorale of South Florida was once the chorus for the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra. After all, that orchestra vanished 10 years ago this month, and Karlin thinks it’s time that the chorale, which survived the […]

Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy. Miami is currently in the throes of its annual celebration of piano music, the Giselle Brodsky’s Miami International Piano Festival, which began its 16th incarnation last night with a concert by the young Russian pianist Nikolai Khozyainov, who played music by Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and Prokofiev. Tonight, it’s a debut for the German […]

Poster for the Mainly Mozart Festival. This Sunday, the 20th incarnation of South Florida’s Mainly Mozart Festival launches at the Coral Gables Museum, and will last over the next six weekends. As the festival’s title suggests, the music of Mozart is a central focus, and will be featured in each of the concerts. But there […]

The Miami Symphony Orchestra, as painted by Erik Speyer. Here it is May, and that means we’re getting closer to the really hot months here in South Florida, and that usually also has meant that the musical season evaporates like the puddles after a June rain hereabouts, i.e., quickly. But over the past few years, […]

Soprano Nadine Sierra. In a few days, Nadine Sierra is bound for Italy, where she’ll be singing in the oldest continuously operating opera house in Europe. There in the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, which opened in 1737 and whose house composers have included Giaochino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti, she’ll sing four performances beginning […]

Juan Ponce de Leon (1474-1521). The concert season is still going strong even as the weather warms up, and we’re starting to head into the heat and humidity that will be with us for most of the rest of the year. Here’s a look at some concerts coming our way in the next few days: […]

The musicians of the 164th Infantry Co., New York. When the Civil War came to the United States, it came to a people who, musically speaking, were a churchy lot. But they were also a people of sentimental secular song that hymned home and hearth, of minstrelsy and spiritual, and to hear the music of […]

Martha Mooke. The viola is not an instrument that gets a whole lot of love when it comes to musicians looking for a solo career. The violin and cello usually get more interest, in part because there’s a much bigger repertoire for those instruments, not just in chamber works such as sonatas, but concertos, too. […]