Wednesday, September 16, 2026

News and Ideas Worth Sharing

Larry Wallach

Larry Wallach is the Livingston Hall Chair in Music at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he has taught for five decades. He is a performer, composer, musicologist, and educator whose interests span the history of Western music up to the present day, with particular focus on baroque and modern repertories. He has published articles about Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms, and as pianist performed all the Ives violin sonatas. He is a founding board member of the Berkshire Bach Society. Dr. Wallach is active as a keyboard player on harpsichord, organ, and piano, collaborating with Ronald Gorevic, Paul Green, the Avanti Wind Quintet, John Cheek, Daniel Stepner, Stephen Hammer, Lucy Bardo, Paul Green, Susanna Ogata, Allan Dean, Ronald Barron, the Berkshire Bach Society chorus, Crescendo, and Anne and Eva Legêne. He has organized and performed in a concert for the Bard Retrospective Festival for Charles Ives in 1996, for the Housatonic River Festival Concert in 2004, for the Boston Early Music Festival in 2009, and for a program of music for four harpsichords that was performed in Norfolk CT, Great Barrington, MA, Albany NY and Hunter NY in 2009 and 2010. His compositions, primarily of chamber music, have been performed in New York, New England, Texas, California, and elsewhere. In 2020, his orchestral composition “Species of Motion” was recorded by the Janacek Philharmonic in the Czech Republic. He started writing music reviews for the Columbia College newspaper and resumed in 2009 for the Berkshire Review of the Arts.

written articles

CONCERT REVIEW: A righteous experience transcending time

Three composers representing three epochs contributed compositions to a program that offered a grateful audience respite from the anxieties, conflicts, turmoil, and dissonances of today’s secular existence.

CONCERT REVIEW: ‘Music is a mystery that cannot be decoded’ — Bohuslav Martinu at the Bard Music Festival, first weekend, Aug. 8 through 10

Martinu wrote no commentary or explanation regarding any of his music—he simply let it speak for itself.

TANGLEWOOD REVIEW: A busy weekend at Tanglewood, with traffic jams and singing teapots

This review will attempt to cover three very different concerts that took place from Saturday to Monday at Tanglewood last weekend.

CONCERT REVIEW: ‘The World As You’ve Known It’ — Contemporary women composers address the big picture

All the works presented were masterfully orchestrated with original and striking colors and a vast range of gestures, from subtle whispers to roars and shrieks, with everything in between.

CONCERT REVIEW: Musical wizardry — Celebrating Ravel at 150

I had expected that the marathon length of the concert would cause many audience drop-outs after this second intermission, but that was not the case. The wizardry of both composer and pianist pulled most of us back into our seats.

REVIEW: Epiphanies of Nature from Finland, California, and the Berkshires

Sadly, the anticipated maestro (now a youthful 67) had to withdraw; stepping heroically into the breach was a familiar presence at Tanglewood who knows his Sibelius: English composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès.

REVIEW: Opening nights for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra — two orchestras, three conductors

Along comes the piano phenom of our age, Daniil Trifonov, in a performance that could also be described as overly dramatic except that it was rendered so powerfully and with so much rhetorical conviction and perfect execution, to such a rousing reception, that it is hard to argue with it.

REVIEW: Romanticism’s winding path retraced — Zoltan Fejérvári’s piano recital at Tannery Pond

The first half of this program consisted of two sets of shorter pieces known as "character-pieces," by Dvorak and Janacek, while the second half began with an earlier example from Robert Schumann.

CONCERT REVIEW: The Kronos Quartet sparks the Next Festival of Emerging Artists at PS21

The Next Festival of Emerging Artists also has its eyes on the future. An annual event founded by composer-conductor Peter Askim in 2013, it brings together young like-minded string players and cutting-edge composers for a week of intensive preparation followed by a pair of performances.

CONCERT REVIEW: An airy spirit comes to Earth, with flutes, at Tanglewood

While audiences come to concerts expecting to hear a selected menu of scores played as written by (frequently) absent composers, here we were confronted with a totally integrated experience of instrumental and vocal sound, many spontaneously created, as well as lights, body movement, and theater.

CONCERT REVIEW: Pan-Slavic fun with strings attached

A Hungarian, a Russian, and a Polish Gypsy go into the bar.

CONCERT REVIEW: Bach’s organ music warms the audience that came in from the cold

Renée Anne Louprette playing the Johnson Organ at the Housatonic Unitarian Universalist Church, Saturday, February, 8, 2025.

Not the usual suspects: The Terra String Quartet expands the repertory

This is a group that could have showcased its formidable skills with staples by Beethoven or late Schubert, but instead chose to expand our horizons with less frequently played works by Mozart and especially Mendelssohn.

Musical ‘elitism’ validated: Miranda Cuckson and Conor Hanick at PS21’s House Blend series

In Miranda Cuckson and her pianist-partner Conor Hanick, PS21 has found and featured two elite artists that happen to be "classical" musicians who share a rare sense of style, adventure, and program-building.

A double-double from Mozart and Ax: four concertos in two nights

There are rare artists who succeed in convincing us that we are hearing the essence of Mozart, and among them Emmanuel Ax rates very high.

Saving Haydn for last, with jokes from the composer and the podium

It was unusual and refreshing that Alan Gilbert not only chose a relatively unfamiliar Haydn symphony (one I had never heard live before) but gave it a place of honor at the end of a substantial program of works otherwise from the 20th century.
spot_img

The Edge Is Free To Read.

But Not To Produce.