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Seattle audiences welcomed Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison to Benaroya Hall this past weekend with the west coast premiere of his work, What Do We Make of Bach? for orchestra and obbligato organ.

John Harbison's Second Symphony takes the listener from Dawn to Darkness, while Vaughan Williams' Fifth offers “the similitude of a dream” in Boston. 

John Harbison's 80th birthday in December was marked at the start of Ken-David Masur's colorful program with the Boston Symphony. 

Between Baz Luhrmann’s recent film The Great Gatsby, Northern Ballet’s The Great Gatsby currently at Sadler’s Wells, and Elevator Repair Service’s circulation-testing, eight-hour Gatz at the Noël Coward Theatre last year, Londoners such as myself could be forgiven for feeling all Gatsbied out (in truth, Gatz could probably have achieved that by itself).

The San Francisco Symphony recently returned from an exhausting six-city, ten-concert tour of Asia and now enter the month of December with a selection of seasonal, festive performances.

There is an electric guitar on stage at Boston's Symphony Hall, and it is not a Pops concert.John Harbison's Symphony no. 5 for baritone, mezzo-soprano and orchestra up-ends what we think of as a symphony, presenting the voice as an instrument and recalibrating the form.