BSO — 2014/03/06 (Broadcast of 3/8)

This evening, at the usual time, and again on March 17, WCRB/Classical New England will broadcast/stream a recording of the March 6 Symphony Hall concert performance of Richard Strauss's Salome under the baton of Music Director designate Andris Nelsons. The BSO's performance detail page has this to say about it:

BSO Music Director Designate Andris Nelsons leads a stellar cast in this special, one-night-only concert performance of Salome, Richard Strauss's 1905 leap into modernism. The libretto is a nearly exact German translation of Oscar Wilde's lurid amplification of the well-known Biblical story of Herodias' young daughter Salome, who dances for King Herod and in return demands the head of John the Baptist. The opera's highly innovative music matches the psychological ambiguity and intensity of the plot.

You can also go there for the usual links to performer bios, program notes, and audio material.

I wasn't there on Thursday (having exchanged my ticket for one to the all-Beethoven concert on Tuesday, March 18), so I can't give you my impression. The Globe's reviewer was very pleased with it. Without the space restrictions of a print newspaper, the Boston Musical Intelligencer's reviewer gives more detail about the performance, and an interesting vignette about the cast and some grad students at the end of the review. He was also very pleased with the performance.

When "Tosca" was new, a critic (G.B. Shaw?) called it "a tawdry little shocker." I tend to feel the same way about "Salome," so I'm not sure I'll listen in. But if you're at all interested in hearing the favorably reviewed performance, tune in to Classical New England or pull them up online at 8:00 p.m., Boston Time. Their BSO page has links for material about this and other BSO concerts.

As I mentioned last week, their Monday, March 10, repeat will be of an all-Beethoven concert given at Tanglewood last summer. They haven't yet announced when they will air tonight's Symphony Hall all-Mozart program, but they are recording it so we should get to hear it sometime.

Tanglewood August 21 – 23, 2009: End of Symphony Season — Not to Be Missed!

from the Boston Symphony website

"Kurt Masur Conducts Beethoven and Mendelssohn

Kurt Masur opens the BSO's final Tanglewood weekend August 21 leading two classical masterworks, Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 and Haydn's Symphony No. 88. The program's centerpiece is a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 in C, featuring the BSO debut of one of Mr. Masur's favorite collaborators, the young French pianist David Fray. Mr. Fray has received numerous prizes and awards, and was BBC Music Magazine's "Newcomer of the Year" in 2008.

August 22, 2009 8:30 PM Kurt Masur dedicates a concert to showcasing the music of one of his most admired composers, Felix Mendelssohn. This BSO program features Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 4, Italian, one of the composer's most beloved works, evoking the warm climes of the Mediterranean, as well as The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave) Overture, begun during a visit to the Hebrides archipelago off the coast of Scotland. The evening's centerpiece is Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, featuring one of the BSO's most popular guest artists, the American violinist Gil Shaham.

Michael Tilson Thomas Conducts Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

On August 23, Michael Tilson Thomas leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra's final program of the 2009 festival season, the annual grand finale performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. The masterwork features the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, soprano Erin Wall and mezzo-soprano Kendall Gladen in their BSO debuts, tenor Stuart Skelton in his Tanglewood debut, and bass-baritone Raymond Aceto. The program begins with Ives' Decoration Day, the composer's stirring ode to Memorial Day."

The Friday and Saturday concerts are at 8:30 p.m. and are streamed on WAMC. The Sunday concert is at 2:30. It is also streamed on WAMC; and WGBH streams it with a "pre-game show" beginning at 2:00. All times are Eastern.

More info is available at the website on the Tanglewood pages.

BSO — 2009/04/09-14 Edited: Review Added

This week's Boston Symphony Orchestra program, to be streamed over WGBH at 1:30 p.m. EDT on Friday, and WCRB at 8:00 p.m. EDT on Saturday will be:

Sibelius — "The Bard"

Grieg — Piano Concerto

Copland — Suite from "Appalachian Spring"

Bartók — Suite from "The Miraculous Mandarin"

conducted by BSO Assistant Conductor Shi-Yeon Sung, with Nelson Friere as soloist in the Grieg.

There was an article about the conductor in yesterday's Boston Herald. Last summer she conducted a BSO concert at Tanglewood. Here's a Boston Globe article about that and another concert the same weekend.

More information about the concert is available at the BSO website, including podcasts about the pieces, linked to the first page.

And here's the Globe's review.

BSO — 2009/03/26-28

Again I'm late with the announcement of this week's BSO concert.

They're giving
Ravel's Mother Goose Suite
Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, with Lisa Batiashvili as the soloist
and after intermission
Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka (1911 version).

The conductor is Charles Dutoit.

I was there Thursday evening (only because it was part of my subscription series — none of it excites me) and I thought it was well played. But what do I know?

The Boston Globe's reviewer liked it.

The WGBH stream will begin in less than an hour and a half from the time I post this, and on Saturday at 8:00 Eastern Daylight Time, WCRB will stream it.

Comment on BSO — 2009/03/05

You gotta listen to this! The first part was really good. But after the intermission, the Ives symphony was spectacular. He has two different rhythms going in different parts of the orchestra at times, so that they need a second conductor. He takes familiar (to him at least) tunes and weaves them into this symphonic structure. The second movement is wild. The third and fourth are sublime. When it was over, the conductor held up his hand for a long time to prolong the silence into which the music had brought us. When he lowered his hand and one or two people had begun to clap, I shouted "bravo!" over the general quiet. Enthusiastic applause ensued, and eventually a standing ovation.

I urge everybody to get the program notes from www.bso.org and listen to either or both of the streamed broadcasts. And then if you're within striking distance of Symphony Hall, try to get a ticket for the final performance on next Tuesday, March 10.

I'll edit this to add the Boston Globe's review in the morning.

The Sibelius was pleasant, and the Rachmaninoff familiar and well done. But if you can only take time for the Ives, it will begin shortly after 2:45 on Friday, and 9:15 on Saturday.

Edited to add Boston Globe review:

Gilbert leads BSO in Ives's epic Fourth Symphony
By Jeremy Eichler
Globe Staff / March 6, 2009
Next fall the young conductor Alan Gilbert will be taking up the reins of the New York Philharmonic as its 25th music director and there are high hopes that he will bring that magnificent yet artistically staid orchestra a sense of freshness and new life. Focused yet unflashy on the podium, he is unquestionably a thoughtful musician with engaging ideas about the music of today and how it connects to the great masterpieces of the past. It should be fascinating to see if and how he can turn around the huge orchestral ship.

In the meantime, a bit of Gilbert's flair for programming with rich contrasts was on display last night in Symphony Hall, where he led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in three early-20th century works that were all written within 30 years of each other yet seemed to hail from completely different universes. The evening opened with an alluring performance of Sibelius's tone poem "Night Ride and Sunrise," yet the strongest contrast came with the final two works: Rachmaninoff's ubiquitous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Ives's epic and rarely heard Fourth Symphony.

Rachmaninoff was ultimately a late-Romantic composer marooned in the 20th century. "I understand nothing of the music of today," he commented in 1933, the year before he wrote his Paganini Rhapsody. In some of its structural details you can feel Rachmaninoff working hard to sound innovative but his piece inevitably became best known for its moments of soaring lyricism and old-fashioned keyboard brilliance. The British pianist Stephen Hough last night gave it a supremely poised and thoughtful reading that did not shy away from the work's external glitter but also seemed determined to spotlight its textural subtleties and moments of quiet poetry. He did so extremely well.

Rachmaninoff once wrote that "a composer's music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, the pictures he loves. It should be the product of the sum total of a composer's experiences." Ironically, few pieces answer this call more fully than Ives's visionary Fourth Symphony, in which the composer seems to have united all of the disparate musical and biographical threads that run through his other works. It was written mostly between 1909 and 1911 and yet it is still a piece that sounds bracingly modern today.

It calls for chorus and massive orchestral forces which Gilbert managed artfully last night, with the aid of an assistant conductor (Andrew Grams) who helped the musicians navigate the multiple tempos. The work is a giant palimpsest with musical layers piled high on top of each other, at times building to a kind of glorious sonic anarchy. Gilbert chose a spacious pacing and found clarity and structure within the chaos. He drew a beautifully rich tone from the strings in the third movement fugue, and traced the broadest of arcs in the spiritually searching finale. At the very end, the music created just the desired effect: it seemed to evaporate into a clear night sky.

The Early Years

Music has been part of my life since childhood.

I have a memory of being in the kitchen as my mother was doing the ironing one day. She was listening to the radio and people were talking about Tannhäuser. It must have been a Met broadcast. I was maybe five or six at the time. But I don't recall the Met broadcasts as a normal feature of Saturday afternoons at our house at that time. But when I was maybe twelve, I was a a friend's house, and we turned on the radio and it was the end of Il Trovatore. My friend wasn't interested, but I insisted on listening, at least sporadically, to the end. From then on I was hooked on opera.

There were a few symphonic broadcasts. But also around the time I was twelve, my folks bought a record player with an automatic changer. I began to listen to the records in the 78rpm collection they had. And we began to buy new records.

So during my high school years, I listened faithfully to the Met broadcasts and to other classical music on the radio. At the same time, I enjoyed much of the popular music of the day. In college, my familiarity with the classical broadened, my love of opera continued, I continued to enjoy popular music, and Joan Baez's records awakened real enjoyment of folk music.