BSO/Classical New England — 2020/05/02

This week's encore broadcast (and webstream) of the BSO takes us back to yesteryear (i.e., 2019) to the concert of February 9 of that year. Can I do better than copy and paste what I wrote back then? I'm not going to try. Here it is.

"It's all 20th Century music this week, but it could be worse. Some of it is very good and some of the rest isn't tough to take (at least for me). I'll let the BSO's [performance] detail page give the introduction:

The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili joins Andris Nelsons and the BSO as soloist in the important Polish composer Karol Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No. 1, a brilliant piece colored by both French Impressionism and German late Romanticism. American orchestral works open and close the concert. The St. Louis-born Olly Wilson, who died in March 2018 (and whose Sinfonia was commissioned by the BSO for its centennial), was a longtime faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. His well-traveled orchestral work Lumina is a scintillating, single-movement orchestral landscape. Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3, premiered by the BSO under Serge Koussevitzky in 1946, is a substantial, expressively rich work incorporating the composer's familiar Fanfare for the Common Man as the theme of its final movement.

(Some emphasis added.)
Don't forget the links to performer bios and other info on the performance detail page.

I attended the performance on Thursday. The opening piece struck me as unmelodious and disjointed. I thought of Elliot Carter and Milton Babbitt, but this wasn't quite as cacophonous as their stuff. Anyway, I wouldn't blame anybody for skipping it. (The problem is knowing when to come back for the next piece. You should be safe if you're tuned in by [8:14].) Or, you might want to listen and see if it's better than I think it is. In the past Szymanowski's music has also struck me as unpleasant, but this is better than the things of his I had previously heard, so it was a pleasant surprise — lush is a word that comes to mind for the overall impression. After intermission Copland did not disappoint.

The reviews are in, and while both the Globe and the more extensive Intelligencer found minor details to criticize, both were generally satisfied. An interesting sidelight: when the reviewer in the Intelligencer, Mark DeVoto, was a college student, Aaron Copland autographed DeVoto's copy of the score of this evening's symphony.

As always, you can go to the WCRB website for information about their programs as well as the link to their live stream, where you can listen this evening at 8:00, [EDST] if you're outside their broadcast range."

WCRB's detail page for the concert also has links to interviews with the violinist and the conductor.