BSO — 2023/04/29

WCRB gives us the basics, along with access to an interview with the soloist:

Saturday, April 29, 2023
8:00 PM

Encore broadcast on Monday, May 8

Renowned South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho is the soloist in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, and Andris Nelsons leads the Boston Symphony in Caroline Shaw’s meditative Punctum and Stravinsky’s Petrushka.

Andris Nelsons, conductor
Seong-Jin Cho, piano

Caroline SHAW Punctum
RAVEL Piano Concerto in G
STRAVINSKY Petrushka (1947 version)

To hear a preview of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G with Seong-Jin Cho, use the player above, and read the transcript below:

Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at Symphony Hall with Seong-Jin Cho, the pianist who's back in Boston after a few years, it turns out that you were here in 2020, just before everything got locked down for the pandemic. Seong-Jin Cho, thank you so much for a little bit of your time today.

Seong-Jin Cho My pleasure. It's really great to be back

For more information, we can visit the BSO's performance detail page, and from there we can follow links to the program notes for each piece.

Acclaimed South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho returns to Symphony Hall for Maurice Ravel’s Concerto in G, one of the composer’s final works, which ranges from jazzy energy to poignant lyricism. Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Caroline Shaw’s Punctum, is a meditation on a moment from J.S. Bach. Igor Stravinsky’s 1911 ballet Petrushka, the second of his great trilogy for the Ballets Russes company, depicts the hapless living puppet title character in gloriously scored scenes from a carnival fair.

Saturday evening’s performance by Seong-Jin Cho is supported by the Roberta M. Strang Memorial Fund.

---

Andris Nelsons, conductor
Seong-Jin Cho, piano

Caroline SHAW Punctum
RAVEL Piano Concerto in G
Intermission
STRAVINSKY Petrushka (1947 version)

This wasn't part of my subscription, so I'll be hearing it for the first time along with you. Of course, I've heard the Ravel and Stravinsky on other occasions, and I can recommend them. As for "Punctum," I see it was premiered last summer on July 30 at Tanglewood, but I have no memory of it. The program note doesn't tell us a lot either. There is no review of this concert in either the Globe or the Intelligencer, but a Globe review from last summer has this to say:

Shaw describes her “Punctum,” originally a string quartet but presented on Saturday in a new incarnation for orchestra, as “an exercise in nostalgia” inspired by a moving passage from Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” in which the author finds a photo of his deceased mother as a child and discovers in its smallest details the essence of her entire adult being. “Punctum” was also inspired by Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” and Shaw plays ingeniously with the idea of tonal harmony as a kind of found object, a photograph of a loved one who has been lost, an artifact that may be savored on its own terms but cannot be separated from the ravages of time. Robust chords drift in and out of focus. Seemingly unified gestures are fractured over the orchestra as a whole. In order to actually see history, Barthes writes, we must stand apart from it. Shaw’s work seems by turns to flout and accentuate that distance from an idealized classical past.

It should be a good concert. Enjoy.