As I have noted before, Ward Stare (who completed his tenure as Resident Conductor of the symphony in 2012 and is now in demand as both and operatic and symphonic conductor) is someone to watch.

As anyone who has ever taken a “music depreciation” course will recall, “program music” is the label applied (sometimes dismissively) to any composition either inspired by or intended to depict something non-musical. That usually means the dramatic, literary, or visual arts, although history and nature figure prominently as well.

Winter Opera’s ambitious production of Strauss’s seriocomic “Ariadne auf Naxos” is impressive, given the size of the cast and intellectual complexity of the piece.