by Paul E. Robinson

Last week, at the Long Center for the Performing Arts, Peter Bay and the Austin Symphony presented an all-Russian program: Rachmaninov’s “Vocalise,” followed by the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 3, and closing with the Shostakovich Symphony No. 5, this Russian composer’s most popular symphony.

As always, Maestro Bay had prepared well and interpreted [...]

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by Paul E. Robinson

There are plenty of recordings of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 Op. 60 (”Leningrad”), but one rarely gets a chance to hear it in concert. The same could be said, only more so, for Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto Op. 15. To have them both offered on the same program is a [...]

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by Paul E. Robinson

A centenary celebration is in order for one of the greatest of American composers, Samuel Barber (b. March 9, 1910), and yet the scheduled tributes in the country of his birth are few and far between: the Philadelphia Orchestra, for example, which premiered many of Barber’s compositions, has programmed just a [...]

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