BSO — 2018/11/03

This evening a couple of "golden oldies" surround a piece which the BSO is giving its American premiere this week. On the orchestra's program detail page we read:

In this London-oriented program, Andris Nelsons leads the BSO in the American premiere of the first of several BSO co-commissions this season, English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage's Remembering: In Memoriam Evan Scofield. Evan, son of the great jazz guitarist and Turnage collaborator John Scofield, died of cancer at age twenty-five. The piece was co-commissioned by the BSO with the Berlin Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra. Opening the program is Haydn's Symphony No. 93, one of the first of the group of bold, innovative symphonies he wrote for performance in London during his visits there in the early 1790s. The English composer Edward Elgar's tour-de-force of orchestral and expressive imagination, the Enigma Variations, is a series of widely varied portraits of his friends via transformations of a common musical theme.

(Some emphasis added.)
The page also has the usual links to background material.

I was there for the first performance of the program on Thursday. I didn't notice anything spectacular in the playing of the Haydn or the Elgar, but they are enjoyable to listen to. At the end of the Turnage piece, the composer joined the conductor on stage after the initial bows, and I was part of the warm ovation for him. I like to applaud composers who produce listenable works. As the program notes point out, the work is in four parts. The first part struck me as jazzy. The second seemed noisy and cacophonous. If that had been the whole thing, I wouldn't have been so inclined to applaud the composer. The third part had both jazzy and noisy elements. In the last part, which was the first composed, we finally got calm and elegiac music such as one would expect in a piece expressing sorrow.

The review in the Globe is favorable (but not a rave) and gives an insight into the meaning of the first three parts of "Remembering." The Boston Musical Intelligencer's review, less encumbered than the Globe's by space limitations, is also favorable, with more detail.

So I definitely recommend listening over WCRB at 8:00 p.m. EDST this evening, November 3, and/or at 8:00 EST on Monday, Nov. 12. A second page on the station's website gives links to a conversation with composer Turnage and another, about the program, with Andris Nelsons.

Enjoy.