Saturday, March 5, 2016

BSO — 2016/03/03-05

Charles Dutoit guest conducts for a second week. This time it's music about Spain by Ravel and Falla. Read all about it on the BSO's program detail page, where you can also go to find links to program notes, audio previews, performer bios, and their podcast:
For Charles Dutoit's second week of concerts this season, the Swiss conductor leads three Spain-centered works. Maurice Ravel's delightful one-act comic opera L'Heure espagnole, presented here in a concert performance, details the amorous intrigues of a clockmaker's wife (mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack as Concepción) and her gentleman friends. Rapsodie espagnole balances impressionistic atmosphere with Spanish dances. In between the Ravel pieces is the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla's magical Nights in the Gardens of Spain, a sparkling work for piano and orchestra here featuring Spanish soloist Javier Perianes in his BSO debut.
(Some emphasis added.)

The reviews in the Globe and the Boston Musical Intelligencer are favorable. The reviewers write more about the composers and the pieces than they do about the performers and performance. The Globe is briefer, due to their space limitations, and finds no fault. The BMInt goes into greater detail (including some irrelevant personal details about the reviewer), and finds flaws in some elements of the performance. Still, it's a wealth of background information, and it the criticisms are specific, not general. I wasn't there (instead attending a performance in Russian of Chekhov's "Three Sisters") so I can't comment.

The BSO has posted a couple of brief video clips from Thursday, so you can get an idea of what some of it is like. I can't find them on their website, but they are on the Boston Symphony Orchestra facebook page.

As always, WCRB will broadcast it live and stream it over the world wide web, beginning at 8:00 p.m., and they'll rerun it on Monday the 14th. Go to the station's BSO page for a link to interviews with conductor and pianist on "The Answered Question" as well as the schedule of upcoming broadcasts/webstreams and other links. This sort of music isn't my favorite (nor my "least favorite") but I think it's worth listening to, so I'll have my radio on.

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