BSO — 2012/11/01-06

From the BSO program detail page, where you can also find links to audio material and the program notes (especially important for the Saariaho piece, I think):

Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena, chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, leads the American premiere of influential Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's Circle Map, for orchestra and electronics, a BSO co-commission. Violinist Gil Shaham, a frequent guest with the orchestra, joins the BSO for Benjamin Britten's rarely performed Violin Concerto, and the program concludes with Dvořák's darkly majestic Symphony No. 7, which bespeaks both his love for his native Bohemia and the influence of his mentor, Johannes Brahms.

I haven't heard it yet because I had to be at Mass for All Saints Day on the evening of Nov. 1. The Globe's reviewer liked the concert, with some reservations about Gil Shaham's approach to the Britten. OTOH, the online Boston Musical Intelligencer has a review which raves about the Britten, likes the Dvořák a lot, and finds the Saariaho piece wanting. See what you think.


Classical New England is where you can hear the concert live on November 3 at 8 p.m. (with "pre-game show" at 7) Boston Time, or rebroadcast/streamed on Nov. 11 at 1 p.m., as well as on demand. Broadcast/webstream schedules and links to background material are available on their BSO page.

BSO — 2012/10/25-27

Vocal pieces are on the program for this week. It's not part of my subscription, and I'll be out on Saturday evening, but I'll add a link to the Boston Globe's review (and any others I find) when I have a chance. Meanwhile, here's what the BSO website says about it.

Charles Dutoit takes the podium for a second week to lead the BSO, an international cast of vocal soloists, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in a compelling operatic double bill pairing Stravinsky's The Nightingale and Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges(The Child and the Magic Spells). Stravinsky's 1914 opera The Nightingale-begun before, but completed after, his famous trio of ballets for Sergei Diaghilev-is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a Chinese emperor and two nightingales-one real, the other mechanical. Completed in 1925, Ravel's one-act opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges-the story of a child movingly taught the meaning of love and affection-is infused with whimsy and magic.

The performance detail page  has soloist info by clicking on their pictures. Classical New England broadcasts and streams live, beginning at 7:00 Saturday evening, with the concert scheduled for 8:00. Rebroadcast is a week and a day later, Sunday November 4 at 1:00 p.m., Eastern Time.


Edited Oct. 27 to add:

The Globe review was enthusiastic.

I also edited the line about the BSO performance detail page, because they have added written and audio material, as has Classical New England, since I wrote this and scheduled it for publication while I was away.

BSO — 2012/10/18-23

This week it's an interesting mix. I'm not really familiar with any of them. The BSO website performance details page gives the usual links to notes and audio material, as well as the following description:

Acclaimed conductor Charles Dutoit leads the BSO in a program overflowing with virtuosity. Soloist Nikolai Lugansky makes his BSO debut in Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, a massive and daunting work that tests every aspect of a pianist's skill. Not to be outdone, the orchestra's first-chair wind players step to the front of the stage to demonstrate the orchestra's own resident virtuosity in Frank Martin's mid-20th-century Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion, and String Orchestra. Opening the program is colorfully atmospheric music by Debussy: the rarely heard Symphonic Fragments from his incidental music to Gabriele d'Annunzio's mystery play The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

Bringing your cursor over the thumbnail photos identifies the performers, and clicking gets you fuller bios.

The first two pieces, those by Debussy and Martin, are infrequently performed. I think it's the first time I've heard either. Each was pleasant enough in its own way, and I wouldn't avoid either, but the thought occurred to me that they aren't really important, either. At intermission, another audience member remarked that it seemed that Dutoit was "conducting fog" in the Debussy. The music struck me as fairly static most of the time. There were not the slightly jarring harmonies and chord progressions I expect from Debussy. The Martin piece was definitely livelier. As for the Rachmaninoff, it's much better known, but I'm not familiar enough with it to rate the performance against a standard. As I listened, some passages in the piano seemed reminiscent of Chopin,  and at times the music seemed in the Tchaikovsky tradition. Certainly, the playing seemed flawless and energetic. The Globe reviewer liked the concert. So it could be your only opportunity to hear a couple of pleasant pieces and an energetic performance of a standard.

Again as usual, you can get scheduling info for Classical New England's broadcasts/webstreams, and on demand availability on their BSO page, and access the wbstream via the listen live button on their homepage.

BSO — 2012/10/11-13

This week, the BSO program has two works: Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4. Their website's performance detail page gives us the following description as well as providing links for program notes and audio previews.

Making his Boston Symphony debut, Vladimir Jurowski, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, is joined by German violinist Arabella Steinbacher for Mendelssohn's sparkling Violin Concerto. The program concludes with Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4, a dark but powerfully majestic work the composer finished in 1936. He withdrew the work prior to its premiere due to fears of official condemnation, writing instead the universally acclaimed, heroic Fifth the following year. The Fourth waited another quarter-century for its first performance.

This concert is not part of my subscription, so I wasn't there on Thursday evening (or Friday afternoon).   The Boston Globe's reviewer found lots to like in the performance of the Shostakovich and gave mild criticism, in the space he had left, to the Mendelssohn. The review refers to the circumstances of the composition of the symphony and its being withheld from performance. More fully told, the 1930's were the height of Stalin's reign of terror. Musicians and writers were actually killed if Stalin thought that their work was somehow subserve. All art had to support the ideals of the Russian Revolution, and material that was insufficiently expressive of proletarian ideals (by being too formalistic — twelve tone or atonal, for example — or too inaccessible), which amounted to being not to Stalin's taste, was not tolerated. So having had earlier work criticized in Pravda and having seen what had happened to others, Shostakovich was justifiably fearful that presenting the symphony in 1936 could have cost him his life.

As always, you can listen on Classical New England — live this evening or retransmitted on October 21.

BSO — 2012/10/06-08*

Music inspired by literature is on the first half of this week's program, with a Dvořák symphony to follow the intermission. Here's the description from the BSO's performance detail page, where you also find the links to program notes and audio previews:

Acclaimed for his previous Boston Symphony performances at both Symphony Hall and Carnegie Hall, BSO assistant conductor Marcelo Lehninger leads a program pairing the Romantic with the ruminative. American violinist Joshua Bell is soloist in Bernstein's Serenade inspired by Plato's Symposium, a dialogue on the nature and value of love. Also on the program are two audience favorites: Tchaikovsky's emotionally charged fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet, and Dvoˇrák's bucolic Symphony No. 8.

I definitely recommend looking at the program note for the Bernstein Serenade (maybe even print it out for reference during the concert) and previewing the piece on audio if you have time.

I thought that the still youngish conductor brought out the detail in the Tchaikovsky, but maybe it was partly because I was listening more closely than I usually do to that piece. Maestro Lehninger is a very demonstrative conductor — not that you'll see it, but perhaps you can imagine him turning his upper body around to "wind up" for dome of the climactic moments, and making sweeping gestures when it's loud, and little finger movements for softer rapid passages. The Bernstein Serenade was interesting. It is fairly typical Bernstein music, I think — not conventionally melodic, but with broadway-like moments and jazzy moments. It represents the participants in Plato's "Symposium" by evoking what he considers the overall mood of their successive speeches. Of course, Joshua Bell played very well. (During intermission I happened to see him posing for pictures and signing autographs outside the stage door to the main corridor, and I got his autograph in my program.) As for the Dvořák 8th Symphony, it made for pleasant, sometimes exciting, listening, with Maestro Lehninger again gesturing very expressively. The Boston Globe's review was generally favorable, but without much detail. I couldn't find review on the Boston Herald or Boston Phoenix websites. I guess you'll just have to trust me that it's worth hearing.

As always, Classical New England broadcasts and streams the 8:00 concert, with pre-concert programming beginning at 7:00. With the departure of Brian Bell, it seems that they no longer have the sort of background material they used to link on their BSO-related page. But it still gives scheduling information. Surprisingly, they now do the Sunday 1:00 p.m. repeats eight days after the original performance. So, for example, if you miss this evening's concert live, you can catch the rebroadcast/stream on October 14.


* On October 9, instead of repeating the program, they will play the Tchaikovsky and Dvořák but put Ervin Schulhoff's Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra in place of the Bernstein. If you're in the area, you might want to get a ticket. It could be interesting. Notes and audio preview are available on the performance detail page for that evening.

BSO — 2012/09/27-29

As the detail page (with links for audio preview and program notes) of the BSO website informs us, this week they're giving us "Porgy and Bess."

Reprising a highlight of the 2011 Tanglewood season, English conductor Bramwell Tovey, the BSO, a distinguished cast of soloists-headlined by Alfred Walker and Laquita Mitchell in the title roles-and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus present concert performances of George Gershwin's great American masterpiece, the blues-and-jazz inflected Porgy and Bess. Described by the composer as an "American folk opera,"Porgy and Bess premiered on Broadway in 1935 and only slowly gained traction in the traditional world of opera. Three quarters of a century later, it has assumed its rightful place among the greatest works of America's music.

The show runs nearly three hours, and garnered a mixed review from the Boston Globe. I was shocked to learn after the fact that the singing of the soloists was amplified. Hitherto, management has assured us that they never amplify the music, so this represents an unsettling precedent. It also explains why the singing was ear-piercingly loud at times. If you listen on the radio or internet, you can adjust the volume, an option I didn't have in Symphony Hall on Thursday evening. I suppose it was worthwhile as part of the experience a cultured person should have, and it's good to know how the highlights I had heard work as parts of the overall drama — and it is effective as drama. I just can't get over my disappointment that they decided to artificially amplify those operatically trained voices in a supposedly acoustically perfect hall.

As always, you can listen to the broadcast or the webstream from Classical New England. But they say that on Sunday, instead of rebroadcasting/streaming it, they will reprise the John Williams 80th Birthday concert from last summer at Tanglewood.

BSO — 2012/09/22 Opening Night

Here we are at the verge of another Symphony Hall Season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Opening Night is Saturday, September 22, with a program described as follows in the BSO website detail page:

Legendary Israeli-born violinist Itzhak Perlman joins the Boston Symphony Orchestra as both soloist and conductor to begin the 2012-2013 season with an all-Beethoven Opening Night at Symphony. The program starts with the composer's lyrical early Romances No. 1 and 2 for violin and orchestra. Completing the program is the dance infused Symphony No. 7 which the composer himself acknowledged as one of his finest works.

As usual, that page has links for program notes and audio previews.

I'll be attending most of the Thursday evening concerts in subsequent weeks, so I should be able to provide my own "review" as well as a link to the Boston Globe review. I'm even thinking of adding the Boston Herald review.

Again this season, Classical New England will be broadcasting and streaming the concerts live on Saturday evenings. Here's the page for their season overview. Usually the concerts begin at 8:00 p.m., with the "pre-game" show beginning at 7:00. But for Opening Night, it seems that the concert itself begins at 7:00, an hour earlier than usual. And another change from the usual practice is that this concert will not be rebroadcast/streamed on Sunday afternoon. We'll see if it becomes available for on-demand listening.

A big change in the broadcasts this year is that Classical New England has laid off Brian Bell, the long-time producer of the broadcasts. Here's their announcement. In addition to writing announcer Ron Della Chiesa's scripts, Brian conducted knowledgeable interviews with composers, conductors, soloists, and orchestra members and audio previews of works to be performed. It seems that Cathy Fuller will be sharing the announcer's booth with Ron Della Chiesa, which I suppose means that they won't be scripted. Ron is knowledgeable enough and a good enough raconteur that I think that format may work well. I also suppose that, given Ron's age, the station is wise to bring in a co-announcer as a potential successor to Ron. But Brian Bell's pre-concert and intermission features will be badly missed.

Three Weeks' Hiatus

As you can see from the left column of Classical New England's Boston Symphony page, the orchestra is not performing any concerts until September 22. Meanwhile Classical New England is filling the regular BSO slots on Saturday at 7:00 p.m. and Sunday at 1:00 p.m. with an "Opera Bash" on September 1&2, "Last Night at the Proms" on Sept. 8&9, and rebroadcasts of two different BSO concerts on Sept. 15&16. Then, as you scroll down the page, you get capsule descriptions of all the Saturday BSO concerts for the coming season. So you can look them over and see when you'll want to decline invitations so you can stay home and listen to the concert. I expect to resume posting info about each concert as the time comes, including my own "review" if I heard it on Thursday.

Tanglewood — 2012/08/24-26

August 24.  This evening Tanglewood invites us:

Gershwin and Friends

Join Keith Lockhart, the Pops, and favorite guest vocalists for a celebration of George Gershwin and the creators of the Great American Songbook, including Irving Berlin,  Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. The program also features Gershwin's classic Rhapsody in Blue.

The link above contains a further link to the program notes for the concert and pictures of performers that give identification when you put your cursor on them.


August 25.  Saturday evening, frequent guest conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos will lead a program of Spanish Music:

ALBÉNIZ - (arr. Frühbeck de Burgos) Suite española
FALLA - La vida breve
Full Program Notes - Saturday, August 25, 8:30pm

Program notes are available by clicking the icons to the right of the listings, and, again, information about soloists is given on the detail page when you bring the cursor to the picture — more detail if you click on it.


August 26.  On Sunday afternoon Maestro Frühbeck leads the now-traditional Beethoven Ninth to close the Tanglewood season with a guaranteed "standing O." But there's more: the world premiere of a piece titled "Koussevitsky Said," by John Harbison, for chorus and orchestra, commissioned by the BSO for Tanglewood's 75th anniversary. Here's the listing on the detail page with its links to notes (and audio for the Beethoven):

HARBISON - Koussevitzky said:, for chorus and orchestra (world premiere; BSO commission)
BEETHOVEN - Symphony No. 9
Full Program Notes - Sunday, August 26, 2:30pm

I'm really looking forward to hearing the Harbison piece — even more so after reading the program notes. I think once you read the notes, you'll want to hear it too.


Broadcasts and webstreams are scheduled as in previous weeks on Classical New England. CNE's "second page" via the BSO label, has a link to an interesting interview with John Harbison (not just a rehash of the BSO program notes). The page also tells us what Classical New England will use to fill the BSO concert slots on the three weekends between the end of the Tanglewood Season and the opening night of the Symphony Hall Season.

Enjoy!

Tanglewood — 2012/08/17-19

August 17.   On Friday evening, the BSO will perform

COPLAND - Suite from Appalachian Spring
BARBER - Violin Concerto
BEETHOVEN - Symphony No. 7

For links to program notes and audio previews, go to the BSO concert details page (or click on the icons above). The Copland is easy listening (but not bad stuff), and the Beethoven 7th is a guaranteed standing ovation producer. Augustin Hadelich solos in the Barber. Click on his photo for more info about him. It will be interesting to hear his first performance with the BSO.


August 18.  Saturday brings us "John Williams' 80th Birthday Celebration." On the details page, you can find photos depicting some of the participants (but no links to notes or audio). You get name and position by moving your cursor to the picture, and more info by clicking on it. They will give us

WILLIAMS - Olympic Fanfare and Theme KERN & HAMMERSTEIN - "The Song Is You" WILLIAMS - Three Concert Pieces WILLIAMS - Adventures on Earth from E.T. The Extra-terrestrial WILLIAMS - Fanfare for Fenway -
WILLIAMS - Hedwig's Theme from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ARR. WILLIAMS - Air and Simple Gifts WILLIAMS - Going to School from Memoirs of a Geisha WILLIAMS - Theme from Schindler's List WILLIAMS - Main Title from Star Wars WILLIAMS - Happy Birthday Variations

August 19.  The Sunday matinee brings us the Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert, conducted this year by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos

BEETHOVEN - Violin Concerto
BARTÓK - Concerto for Orchestra

This time the details page gives us the usual links to notes and audio. Gil Shaham solos in the Beethoven "Mientkiewicz" Concerto. It's one of the pieces I really like. The Bartók Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky and premiered by the BSO. I have the feeling that the BSO owns this piece. So I'm especially looking forward to this concert. Edited to add: But it's not the Boston Symphony Orchestra that will be playing on Sunday afternoon. It will be the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra: the students who are attending the BSO's"summer school" at Tanglewood.

Classical New England will broadcast/stream all three, with the usual warm-ups beforehand. See also their page about the BSO. Friday and Saturday concerts are at 7:30, Boston Time, and Sunday's is at 2:30. Tanglewood-related (loosely, at least) material begins 1 1/2 hours before the concert, with Ron Della Chiesa taking over as announcer 1/2 hour before the concert.