BSO — 2022/02/26

 This evening's concert has four pieces. Here's the summary from WCRB, where you can hear it this evening and again in a little over a week:

Saturday, February 26, and Monday, March 7, 2022
8:00 PM

Tonight at 8pm, the Latvian violinist is the soloist in Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, and Andris Nelsons leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in works by Pärt and Stravinsky, as well as Saariaho’s "Saarikoski Songs," soprano Anu Komsi.

Andris Nelsons, conductor
Baiba Skride, violin
Anu Komsi, soprano

Arvo PÄRT Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
SHOSTAKOVICH Violin Concerto No. 1
Kaija SAARIAHO Saarikoski Songs (world premiere of orchestral version; BSO co-commission)
STRAVINSKY Suite from The Firebird (1919 version)

To hear Baiba Skride describe the challenges of Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1, click on the player above (transcript below).

Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at Symphony Hall with Baiba Skride

You may well want to check out the program notes on the BSO's performance page. Regrettably, it does not give the texts of the poems in the Saariaho piece. They were in the program booklet, and I found them helpful. But the program notes on all four works are worth reading if you listen. There is also this overall description of the program:

BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons is joined by his compatriot, violinist Baiba Skride, for Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which was written in the late 1940s but only premiered in 1955, after Stalin’s death helped relax the constraints on artistic expression in the USSR. The concerto contains a version of the composer’s musical “signature,” suggesting that was a work of powerful personal importance. It was composed for and dedicated to David Oistrakh. Opening the program is the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s poignant homage to Shostakovich’s great friend, the English composer Benjamin Britten. 
Finnish soprano Anu Komsi makes her BSO debut in the world premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s own orchestrations of her song cycle on poems of the great 20th century Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski. Saariaho wrote the original piano and voice versions of these songs for Anu Komsi. The Suite from Stravinsky’s 1909 ballet score The Firebird closes the program. The composer’s astonishingly imaginative orchestration perfectly captured the magical atmosphere of this Russian legend, and the Ballets Russes premiere in Paris swept the composer to worldwide fame.

You'll note that the Saariaho work is getting the world premiere of the orchestral version and the soprano her BSO debut at this week's concerts.

There are tepid reviews in the Globe and in the Intelligencer, the latter being especially critical of the playing of the violin concerto.

I was there on Thursday. The opening piece was calm and inoffensive. The violin concerto was less bombastic than most Shostakovich orchestral works, with two slow movements. I almost dozed off. After intermission, I found the first three of Saariaho's poem settings unattractive, while the final two seemed to fit the mood of the texts and were interesting to hear. Overall, though, I thought the singer handled the difficult "music" very admirably. She deserved the loud applause she got. The "Firebird" suite is Stravinsky at his most lyrical (most of it), and I enjoyed it, even if the critics weren't thrilled.

I can't give the concert a warm recommendation for general audiences. I do recommend the first piece, by Aarvo Pärt, though. If you like modern music, you might want to stick around for the rest.