BSO/Classical New England — 2023/05/27

 While we await the opening of the BSO 2023 season at Tanglewood, WCRB continues with encore broadcasts from Tanglewood 2022. https://www.classicalwcrb.org/show/the-boston-symphony-orchestra/2022-06-13/twin-vivacity-with-the-naughtons-at-tanglewood

Saturday, May 27, 2023
8:00 PM

Christina and Michelle Naughton are the soloists in Poulenc’s firecracker Concerto for Two Pianos, and Earl Lee leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony and “Pulse,” by Brian Raphael Nabors.

Earl Lee, conductor
Christina and Michelle Naughton, pianos

Brian Raphael NABORS Pulse
Francis POULENC Concerto in D minor for two pianos and orchestra
Felix MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 3, Scottish

This concert was originally broadcast on August 5, 2022 and is no longer available on demand.

Hear an interview with Christina and Michelle Naughton, recorded at Symphony Hall in October 2021.

I was coming home from my visit to PEI so I didn't post about the concert last August 5, although I did post about the Saturday and Sunday concerts that weekend. Here's a link to the BSO performance detail page, which has the usual links to program notes etc. and synopsizes the show as follows:

BSO Assistant Conductor Earl Lee makes his BSO debut, joined by the virtuosic piano duo of twins Christina and Michelle Naughton in their Tanglewood debuts performing Francis Poulenc’s impish neoclassical Concerto for Two Pianos. American composer Brian Raphael Nabors’ exciting and rhapsodic Pulse reflects on the varieties of experience that we might encounter every day. Felix Mendelssohn found inspiration for his intensely Romantic Symphony No. 3 on a trip to Scotland in 1829. Composed a decade later, it was his last completed symphony.

The review in the Intelligencer mistakenly attributes the concert to Saturday evening. It describes the Nabors and Poulenc pieces more than speaking about the quality of the performance, The reviewer was unenthusiastic about how the Mendelssohn was played. The Globe review of the weekend was happier.

All in all, it seems worth listening to.