BSO — 2012/09/22 Opening Night

Here we are at the verge of another Symphony Hall Season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Opening Night is Saturday, September 22, with a program described as follows in the BSO website detail page:

Legendary Israeli-born violinist Itzhak Perlman joins the Boston Symphony Orchestra as both soloist and conductor to begin the 2012-2013 season with an all-Beethoven Opening Night at Symphony. The program starts with the composer's lyrical early Romances No. 1 and 2 for violin and orchestra. Completing the program is the dance infused Symphony No. 7 which the composer himself acknowledged as one of his finest works.

As usual, that page has links for program notes and audio previews.

I'll be attending most of the Thursday evening concerts in subsequent weeks, so I should be able to provide my own "review" as well as a link to the Boston Globe review. I'm even thinking of adding the Boston Herald review.

Again this season, Classical New England will be broadcasting and streaming the concerts live on Saturday evenings. Here's the page for their season overview. Usually the concerts begin at 8:00 p.m., with the "pre-game" show beginning at 7:00. But for Opening Night, it seems that the concert itself begins at 7:00, an hour earlier than usual. And another change from the usual practice is that this concert will not be rebroadcast/streamed on Sunday afternoon. We'll see if it becomes available for on-demand listening.

A big change in the broadcasts this year is that Classical New England has laid off Brian Bell, the long-time producer of the broadcasts. Here's their announcement. In addition to writing announcer Ron Della Chiesa's scripts, Brian conducted knowledgeable interviews with composers, conductors, soloists, and orchestra members and audio previews of works to be performed. It seems that Cathy Fuller will be sharing the announcer's booth with Ron Della Chiesa, which I suppose means that they won't be scripted. Ron is knowledgeable enough and a good enough raconteur that I think that format may work well. I also suppose that, given Ron's age, the station is wise to bring in a co-announcer as a potential successor to Ron. But Brian Bell's pre-concert and intermission features will be badly missed.