Lloyd Schwartz

A new two-CD set features music inspired by Shakespeare as well as actors reading his work. Critic Lloyd Schwartz says any excuse to honor the master playwright is a good one.

Classical Music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new compact disc of the string quartets of Charles Ives, performed by the Lydian String Quartet. Schwartz says it's one of the best quartet performances on record.

Enter Me

Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen explores questions of time, memory, nature and human isolation. His recent collaboration with soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan has garnered worldwide attention.

The inaugural show at the Metropolitan Museum's Met Breuer branch raises the question of what makes a finished work of art. Critic Lloyd Schwartz calls it "an astonishing gathering of masterpieces."

Music critic Lloyd Schwartz first met poet Elizabeth Bishop when she moved to Cambridge in the early 1970s after living in Brazil for nearly 20 years. Now Schwartz has co-edited a new collection of work by the former U.S. Poet Laureate.

When his mother was turning 90, music critic Lloyd Schwartz wrote poems that put her memories into verse. Composer Mohammed Fairouz set three of the poems to music on the new recording, No Orpheus.

The opera, by the late composer Maurice Ravel, spins a modern fairy tale about a naughty child at bedtime. Critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new recording of it by conductor Seiji Ozawa.

In the 1940s, recording engineers perfected new sound techniques that were used in World War II — and which launched a hi-fi revolution. Lloyd Schwartz reviews the new 53-CD Decca box set.

Some 30 years ago, the Kronos Quartet created a sensation by releasing an album of chamber music that included an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." Now Brooklyn Rider, another gifted string quartet, is again blurring the boundaries between classical and more popular kinds of chamber music. Fresh Air classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz says he admires that blur.