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3 weeks ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Jeffrey Gantz
Boston Ballet will open its 2025–2026 season at the Citizens Opera House with George Balanchine’s “Jewels” and close with Marius Petipa’s “The Sleeping Beauty.” In between we’ll get a world premiere by former company artist My’Kal Stromile and Boston Ballet’s first-ever performances of Frederick Ashton’s “The Dream,” William Forsythe’s “Herman Schmerman,” and Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering.” We’ll also see the return of Crystal Pite’s “The Seasons’ Canon,” resident choreographer...
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1 month ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Jeffrey Gantz
This year’s “Winter Experience” from Boston Ballet has two masterpieces from George Balanchine, “Mozartiana” and “Symphony in Three Movements,” bookending Claudia Schreier’s “Slipstream” and Leonid Yakobson’s “Vestris.” The Ballet last danced “Mozartiana” in 2004; it hasn’t done “Symphony” here since 2012. “Slipstream,” from the 2022 “ChoreograpHER” program, and “Vestris,” which the Ballet first offered in 2019, are also welcome returnees.
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1 month ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Jeffrey Gantz
How do we feel about red? That’s what Boston Dance Theater is investigating this weekend in its Global Arts Live–sponsored appearance at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “Red is a feeling” offers premieres from Iranian-Hispanic choreographer Roya Carreras Fereshtehnejad and BDT founder and co–artistic director Jessie Jeanne Stinnett along with repertoire pieces from German choreographer Marco Goecke and Israeli choreographer and BDT co–artistic director Itzik Galili.
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1 month ago | 
classical-scene.com | Jeffrey Gantz
Few conductors can have led Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony as often as Benjamin Zander has over the past 45 years.
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1 month ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Jeffrey Gantz
How do you choreograph “To be or not to be”? That is the question, or at least one of them, for anybody looking to make a movement piece out of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” This past weekend at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, Canadian artists Robert Lepage and Guillaume Côté provided the answer.
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1 month ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Jeffrey Gantz
“Swan Lake” premiered in 1877 with a libretto of uncertain authorship, a score by neophyte ballet composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and choreography, now lost, by the now forgotten Julius Reisinger. In 1895, two years after Tchaikovsky’s death, the ballet got a complete overhaul, with new choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. Neither production was a success.
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2 months ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Jeffrey Gantz
Not many cities get two high-class versions of “Swan Lake” in the space of a week. Boston Ballet will open its current production next Thursday. But this week, Grand Kyiv Ballet is at the Emerson Colonial Theatre for two performances. Created in 2014 by Oleksandr Stoianov, this Ukrainian company brought a sold-out “Giselle” to the Colonial last February and “The Nutcracker” and “The Snow Queen” last November.
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2 months ago | 
classical-scene.com | Jeffrey Gantz
Back in 2015, during one of the worst Boston winters in decades, Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic warmed us all up with a mid-February program of Johann Strauss’s Frühlingsstimmen (“Voices of Spring”), Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (“Four Last Songs”), and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. Sunday at Symphony Hall, Zander and the BPO, with English soprano Claire Booth, reprised that program, minus the Strauss waltz.
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2 months ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Jeffrey Gantz
Back in January 2020, just before Covid-19 struck, the Celebrity Series brought tap prodigy Caleb Teicher and composer/pianist Conrad Tao to New England Conservatory’s Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre for “More Forever,” a sophisticated meditation on time, with elements that included a toy piano and a sandbox. This weekend, Teicher and Tao are back with “Counterpoint” at the Boston Arts Academy Theater.
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2 months ago | 
classical-scene.com | Jeffrey Gantz
The BSO’s January Beethoven symphony cycle comes to a close this weekend with the Eighth and Ninth. It’s not a pairing I recall seeing very often, though Lorin Maazel did them together the last time the BSO offered a Beethoven symphony cycle, back in 2009.
