BSO — 2012/05/3-5 "Last Night at Symphony" Info and Reviews

This week's concerts are the last of the 2011-2912 BSO subscription season. They will be on hiatus until the Tanglewood season begins for them on July 6. Then they will play three different concerts almost weekend — Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoon — through August 26. I expect Classical New England to carry them all live. Information about the schedule is posted at www.bso.org if you click on Tanglewood at the top of the page.

But back to the present. This week it's two works with chorus: Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. As the BSO website says:

The 2011-12 BSO season closes triumphantly with the last of three Bernard Haitink-led concerts, a program of two very different works for voices and orchestra. Stravinsky's beautifully austere Symphony of Psalms was commissioned to commemorate the Boston Symphony's 50th anniversary and was given its American premiere by the BSO under Serge Koussevitzky in December 1930. Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, one of the most beloved, familiar, and compelling works in the repertoire, still startles with its radical departures from the symphonic tradition that Beethoven inherited and developed. American soprano Jessica Rivera and American mezzo Meredith Arwady are making return engagements with the BSO. Italian-German tenor Roberto Saccà and German bass Günther Groissböck make their BSO debuts.

I enjoyed the Thursday evening performance. I thought Maestro Haitink enabled all the instrumental lines to be heard except in the loudest passages when it's inevitable that some get drowned out: this performance was so well balanced that most of the time every voice, instrumental and vocal, could be heard. The bass soloist in the Beethovenwas particularly good, I thought.  The Globe's reviewer was not so happy with it. He thought the pairing of works made no sense, and he found fault with various elements of the performance. Despite what he thinks, I recommend listening this evening, tomorrow or on demand. I hope the clarity of Thursday evening's performance comes through on the radio or via the webstream.

BTW, now the concerts will be available for streaming for a year, rather than just two weeks, and they'll be on the BSO website as well as Classical New England, but I'm not sure how to access them from the BSO site.

Spring Orgy® Period 2012

WHRB has begun their Orgy Period today with the Psychedelic Unknowns and are now into the Blue Note 1500 Series Orgy, which will continue through Friday interspersed with the Psychedelic Unknowns tonight and the Smiths and Morrissey overnight Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Classical music orgies will begin on Saturday evening at 5:00 with the Max Bruch Orgy. Then on Sunday from 3:00 p.m. until midnight they will present the Warhorse Orgy. Further Orgies will include

• Siegmund Romberg — begins Monday, May 7, at 7:00 p.m.
• Sergei Prokofiev — begins Tuesday, May 8, at 5:00 a.m. and runs, with overnight intermissions, through Friday, May 11
• Musikpolitik — Sunday, May 13, 1:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
• Igor Markevitch Centenary — begins Monday, May 14, at 1:00 p.m.
• Albert Roussel and Florent Schmitt — begins Tuesday, May 15, at 10:00 a.m., resumes May 16 at 1:00 p.m.
• Wilhelm Stenhammar — begins Thursday,  May 17, at noon
• Ton Koopman — begins Friday, May 18, at noon

In general, orgies end at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., and in the case of the ProkofievOrgy, it resumes at 5:00 on the successive days. Further information about performers and works to be performed and approximate timings is available in the Program Guide at the WHRB website. The same site also gives you a Listen Online button so you can listen to the orgies via webstream.

For any readers who have not read about earlier Orgy® Periods, WHRB is a largely student-run station at Harvard University, and the orgy periods began as a way for disc jockeys who were also students to avoid spending a lot of time deciding on programming during university exam periods. They would just play everything they had by a particular composer or performer, and then move on to another.

BSO — 2012/04/26-28 Info and Reviews

Here's what the BSO website says about this week's concert.

In the second of his three BSO programs this season, Conductor Emeritus Bernard Haitink leads Beethoven's warm and ever-popular Pastoral Symphony, which depicts a pleasant day in the country (notwithstanding a brief thunderstorm). Equally pastoral, but from a different world, is Debussy's lush, languid, modern Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun, which reveals the still-young composer's mastery of a new musical language. Austrian pianist Till Fellner makes his BSO debut in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat, composed while he was working on his great opera The Marriage of Figaro.

I was there on Thursday evening as part of my regular subscription series, and again on Friday afternoon with a priest friend who had wanted to go with me to a concert and selected this week's program. He didn't want to have to be driving after dark, so he didn't join me on Thursday evening. I could have exchanged my Thursday evening ticket for one on Friday afternoon, but I decided that the Mozart and Beethoven would be worth hearing twice; and I'm glad I did. I thought Mr. Fellner, making his debut with the BSO, did very well, and the orchestra also was flawless. The reviewer for the Boston Globe also found it very good.

So I think you won't be disappointed if you listen to the stream from Classical New England at the usual times. And you may also want to check out the background features there as well as at the BSO site.

BSO — 2012/04/12-14 & 18-24 Info and Reviews

Sorry I've been late posting about these, but it's not too late to listen to the on demand webstream from Classical New England.

I missed the earlier performance,

Former Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen makes a long-awaited return to the BSO podium with a sparkling program, including a recent work of his own, the highly admired Violin Concerto. The critically acclaimed and popular Canadian-born virtuoso Leila Josefowicz, for whom Salonen wrote the piece, is soloist in these performances. Ravel's familiar Le Tombeau de Couperin is the composer's own orchestration of four movements from his 1917 piano suite of the same name. Stravinsky's complete The Firebird ballet score, composed in 1910 for the Ballets Russes, launched the composer's international reputation with its kaleidoscopic orchestration and exotic sound. It remains one of his most popular works. http://www.bso.org/Performance/Detail/23006/

because I had a meeting to attend that Thursday.

 I was at Symphony Hall for the Beethoven and Mendelssohn on the 19th

 BSO Conductor Emeritus Bernard Haitink leads three weeks of programs to conclude the 2011-12 season. He is joined by popular actress Claire Bloom as narrator and the bright young singers Layla Claire and Kate Lindsey for Mendelssohn's delightful complete incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, also featuring the women of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Opening these three weeks of concerts, each of which features a Beethoven symphony, is the composer's Symphony No. 1, a piece many years in the making that helped establish Beethoven's status as the major inheritor of the Viennese Classical style from Mozart and Haydn. http://www.bso.org/Performance/Detail/23009/

 and thought they were good.

The earlier concert sounded good on the radio, and the Globe reviewer was enthusiastic. http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/04/13/esa-pekka-salonen-makes-triumphant-bso-return-with-his-violin-concerto/Rm5yvrfiwFJiLtwG2EMahP/story.html The review for this week's program wasn't quite such a rave, but overall favorable. http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2012/04/20/sturdy-beethoven-sparkling-mendelssohn/fp3VAfbmy8DAngxdv6h3aK/story.html

So I think you'll find them both listening to. http://www.wgbh.org/995/

BSO — 2012/04/5-7 Info and Reviews

This week's offering is  "A German Requiem" by Brahms. The BSO website offers the usual sort of background info about the program as well as this brief summary: 

A German Requiem, Brahms's largest work, originated with music he wrote following Robert Schumann's attempted suicide in 1854 and evidently was also connected with the death of Brahms's own mother. The result is an utterly personal, scarcely ceremonial Requiem for soprano and baritone soloists, chorus, and orchestra, episodically setting texts from the Bible. Christoph von Dohnányi and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus are joined in these concerts by English-Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska in her BSO debut and the young German bass-baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann.

Since it's Holy Week, I was in church Thursday evening and will be again this evening. But the Boston Globe reviewer was very favorable. There is also a bass in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus who provides interesting insights into the preparation and performance over a series of five posts (so far). Preparing was apparently quite a bit of work, with a demanding conductor, but he seemed quite pleased with the final result. The posts are well worth reading for insight into what you're hearing.

I'm invited to brunch after Mass on Sunday, so I may not even be able to catch the rebroadcast on Classical New England, but I definitely want to hear the "on demand" sometime in the next couple of weeks. Enjoy the full treatment on Saturday evening or the actual performance portions on Sunday. And, as usual, CNE also has their own background material on their website.

 

BSO — 2012/03/27-31 Info and Reviews — Also St. Matthew Passion

BSO.  This week's Boston Symphony is unusual: before the intermission a keyboard concerto of Bach's, reworked into the supposedly "original" violin concerto which Bach wrote and then transcribed; then fast forward 200 years for something by the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski; and after intermission Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. Bach is usually the province of "early music" specialists; Lutosłaswski isn't exactly a household name; and the Fourth is not one of the more frequently performed of the Beethoven symphonies (and rightly so, IMO). Surprisingly, to me anyway, it turned out to be a good program.

First, though here's the BSO website, where you can get their information about the music. They summarize it as follows:

Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos, who has appeared with the BSO as soloist, conducts the orchestra for the first time in two works and is soloist and conductor for Bach's Violin Concerto in D minor. The Polish composer Witold Lutosławski's sonorous, moving Musique funèbre was composed for the tenth anniversary of Bartók's death and was a watershed work for its composer. Beethoven's high-spirited, gregarious Symphony No. 4 closes the program.

As for reviews, the Globe was generally approving, but with reservations. IMO the Bach piece worked quite well as a violin concerto. The program note indicates the there are enough examples of how Bach transformed violin concertos into harpsichord concertos that people can make good guesses at how a hypothetical violin concerto would have looked when all they have top go on is the keyboard version. In this instance, you wouldn't know it wasn't Bach's original. The Lutosławski piece was intended to be  12-tone music. but I could hardly recognize it as such. Much of the time, the pitches he chooses out of the possible 12 actually harmonize. So it was pretty easy listening. Even the jarring dissonance in the middle was tolerable. I think for the audience in the hall, it benefited from the way the players were seated in a semicircle. You could see the music traveling from the cellos on the far right to the first violins on the left, as each section entered; you could see clearly which sections were playing; and at the end, you could see them dropping out from left (top violins) to right (second cellos) until finally there was just a solo cellist. But I think it should be worth hearing even without the visual element. I've never really liked the final two movements of the Beethoven Fourth Symphony. They seemed gruff and boisterous, without much musical value. But on Thursday in symphony hall, they finally sounded like music, not organized noise. I suppose I have to give credit to the conductor for that.

You can hear it all on Classical New England on Saturday at 8:00, with "pre-game" show at 7:00 p.m., and background interviews preceding the concert and during intermission. The repeat should be at 1:00 on Sunday, and "on demand" streaming for two weeks thereafter. As with the BSO website, there are links to background info on the concert.

St. Matthew Passion.  On Sunday afternoon at 3:00 you can hear a live performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion by he Handel and Haydn Society broadcast and streamed by Classical New England, the same folks who bring you the BSO Saturday concerts. For details and links to additional information, see this page of their website. The Globe's reviewer was quite pleased with the first performance, on Friday evening.


My brother and I have tickets to this performance, so you'll be listening along with us if you tune in or log on.

BSO — 2012/03/21-24 — Updated March 24

This week, the BSO is performing music by Kodály, Dvořák, and Mendelssohn. Here's what their website says. You can also find links to further information on the program there.

The phenomenal German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann returns for the too rarely heard Dvořák's Violin Concerto, a powerful and beautiful Czech-flavored piece here conducted by the young Slovakian conductor Juraj Valcuha in his BSO debut. Opening the concert is the Hungarian Zoltán Kodály's Dances of Galánta, a 1933 orchestral masterpiece steeped in Central European folk music. Mendelssohn's always fresh Symphony No. 3,Scottish, was one of the fruits of the young genius's long trip to the British Isles in his early twenties.

It's part of my subscription, but I had another event to go to this evening (an interfaith seder), so I exchanged my ticket for Friday afternoon. Time permitting, I'll post my own thoughts and link the Boston Globe review sometime between now and the broadcast/webstream on Saturday evening over Classical New England.

Update: I found the Friday performance quite enjoyable, and I'm looking forward to rehearing it on Classical New England. The reviewer for the Boston Globe also found much to enjoy and nothing to criticize in the performance.

BSO — 2012/03/6-17

The Boston Symphony is on a hiatus from its subscription series of concerts. Last week they were performing in Carnegie Hall in New York City. This week they are giving youth concerts and family concerts in Symphony Hall.

I don't know what Classical New England will be doing to fill the time slots in which they usually present the BSO concerts. You can listen and find out, I suppose. That's what I plan to do. Maybe the website will tell. I haven't checked it out.

Next week we should be back to live concerts on Saturdays and rebroadcasts on Sundays.

John Harbison on Bach's St. Matthew Passion

On February 29, I attended a lecture by the composer John Harbison on the "St. Matthew Passion." He acknowledged that there were many ways of viewing the work, but he chose to look at it under the aspect of abandonment — that the text suggests that the Christian feels abandoned by Jesus. Of course, on the Cross Jesus quoted the Psalm verse which asks, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" But traditionally we have been invited to sympathize with Jesus' sufferings, and feel sorrow for our responsibility for them, but until now I don't think I've ever heard that we are invited to feel as he felt, especially in that precise moment. (The "Stabat Mater" asks that we feel as Mary felt.)

Harbison played several examples. He started with the opening chorus, with its call to lament (klagen). There are lines such as "Jesus takes leave of us," (Jesus von uns Abschied nimmt) "So is my Jesus captured now," (So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen.) "Give me back my Jesus," (Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder!) and the address to the faithful as "you forsaken chickens." (Ihe verlaßnen Küchlein) Finally, there is the closing recitative and chorus where the faithful bid good night to Jesus and sit weeping by the tomb.

I find it a startling take on the work as a whole. As Harbison himself pointed out, this is a Passion and therefore it does not include Easter. Furthermore, if it represents the feelings of loss those present at the actual events would have felt, it also includes notions of clinging to Jesus and being rescued by him. Certainly, it seems unlikely that Bach and his librettist Picander would have intended that the hearers should take away from the performance of the Passion an idea that they had been abandoned by Jesus. But it gave an aspect to think about, and as someone who has conducted the work on occasion, Harbison is certainly able to see aspects which are not immediately apparent.

During the question period at the end, a college-age girl asked Harbison what his name was. He responded with name and a very abbreviated bit of background. I wonder how the questioner learned of the lecture and decided to attend without knowing who the lecturer was.

BSO — 2012/03/1-3

This week we get Berlioz and Ravel. On the BSO website (which contains the usual links to program notes and audio previews) we read:

French pianist Cédric Tiberghien makes his BSO debut with Ravel's scintillating Piano Concerto in G. German conductor Christoph Eschenbach leads these concerts, which begin and end with Berlioz. Opening the program is the fantastical overture to the composer's picaresque Italian Renaissance opera Benvenuto Cellini. Closing the program is Berlioz's most famous work, the Symphonie fantastique, which traces the evolution of an artist's feverish romantic obsession with a woman who does not respond in kind.

I wasn't there on Thursday — not part of my subscription — so I can't say anything about it, but the Globe reviewer was quite pleased.

As usual, you can listen to the live broadcast/stream, the Sunday rebroadcast/stream, and then on demand for two weeks over Classical New England.