BSO — 2011/10/02

As usual, we begin with what the BSO website says about the concert which will be broadcast and streamed live on Saturday evening on WCRB and other stationsand rebroadcast and streamed on Sunday afternoon at 1:00* on WCRB.

All-Mozart Program Buy Tickets $32.00  - $120.00  Related performances in this program October 1, 2011 8:00 PM Boston Symphony Orchestra  October 1, 2011 8:00 PM Symphony Hall Boston, Massachusetts Share this event:     There is a $6.25 per-ticket service fee for this event.

Featured Artists    Anne-Sophie Mutter  violin and conductor Program  Notes   Audio  MOZARTViolin Concerto No. 2 in D, K.211 MOZARTViolin Concerto No. 1 in B-flat, K.207 MOZARTViolin Concerto No. 4 in D, K.218 Download the full Program Notes Podcasts for this series Include: Audio Concert Preview by Marc Mandel, narrated by Eleanor McGourty. About the Music After playing and conducting the Third and Fifth of Mozart’s five violin concertos on Opening Night, Anne-Sophie Mutter completes the with Mozart’s violin concertos 1, 2, and 4. Written in Salzburg between 1773 and 1775, the five concertos together show the composer’s increasing confidence in his own compositional personality. The elegant Violin Concerto No. 1, written when Mozart was seventeen, is already a gem; but one marvels at the increasing wealth of personality the composer brought, two years later, to the Second through Fifth concertos.

Times are Boston local time, and there will be the usual pre-concert features at 7:00 on Saturday.


If you click on the link I gave above, there will be links for notes about the music. Mozart may seem pretty basic, and I'm sure it will all be easy to follow, but sometimes the notes can point out something "below the surface" that we don't notice as we float cheerfully on the surface of beautiful music.

As the website mentions, the Saturday concert is the second of two in which Anne-Sophie Mutter is both soloist and conductor. The first is this evening, Friday, which is opening night for the BSO's season. I decided to get a ticket and go to it. It will be my first Opening Night, at the Boston Symphony. There was an interesting article about Anne-Sophie Mutter's role in the concerts in today's Boston Globe.
I think its very informative — well worth reading.

*Please note that when I mentioned these rebroadcasts in my previous post, I gave the wrong time. They are at 1:00 p.m., Boston time, not 3:00 as I had mistakenly thought. I have also corrected my earlier post to show the correct time.

Concert Season Begins; Good News for Europe

Concert Season Begins.  On Saturday the sailing season ended for me as I helped run the last Saturday races for 2011. On Sunday the concert season began for me as I attended my first Handel and Haydn Society concert of their 2011-2012 season. They had actually given the concert on Friday as well, and here's a link to the review in Saturday's Boston Globe. Unfortunately, I tend to doze more at matinee concerts than at evening ones. Still, I heard enough to say that I liked the performances, that I didn't think the sound of the fortepiano was lost — at least where I was sitting in the second balcony center — and I found the Mozart symphony really striking, especially the second movement, which struck me as a little bit faster than I expected. In a Q&A session with audience member after the concert, Christophers and Bezuidenhout explained that the somewhat faster tempo seems to correspond more nearly to the 18th Century style than the slower tempo which is common today. One source is the metronome markings which Czerny and Hummel placed in the piano four hands arrangements which each made of the symphony.

I had thought that this was the quickest turnaround ever for me between sailing and concert seasons, but I see from my archive that last year I went to a concert even before the sailing season was over. But it was a special event, not part of a subscription.

I may go to the BSO opening night concert this Friday. They are offering a $50 discount, which brings it close to the price I pay for my Thursday evening subscription concerts.

Good News for Europe.  WCRB has announced that they will rebroadcast the Saturday evening Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts at 1:00 p.m. on Sundays (which would be 6:00 p.m. in Great Britain and 7:00 in Germany — a more convenient time for most Europeans that 2 or 3 in the morning, I suppose).

Note: Edited to correct time of rebroadcasts of BSO concerts. Correct times are now in bold face above.