I attended each Friday’s and Saturday’s performances. Through the latter live performance, Music Director Andris Nelsons needed to withdraw resulting from sickness following the overture however was heroically changed by assistant conductor Samy Rachid. (Nelsons has recovered, per the BSO, and is scheduled to carry out on this week’s performances.)
Quick and vigorous, Mozart’s overture to his 1782 opera The Abduction from the Seraglio labored nicely as a live performance opener. The required playfulness was not fully evident at the beginning, however the BSO strings discovered extra of it when the opening materials returned following oboist Keisuke Wakao’s mournful solo.
Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 36 in C main, “Linz,” one 12 months after The Abduction. The piece incorporates references to Haydn’s symphonic kind and follows the conventions of the Classical type. Just like the BSO’s interpretation of Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 with Xian Zhang a number of weeks earlier, the orchestra was unapologetic in its extra Romantic tone, as if anticipating the early Beethoven symphonies. (They are going to sort out these with Nelsons in January.) With its repeated use of sonata kind, the Linz Symphony can often really feel weighed down by its frequent repetitions. But Nelsons sought to carry out a extra critical and introspective temper, significantly within the second motion Andante, whereas the ultimate motion Presto incorporates the same spiritedness to the opera overture. Rachid, against this, took an total lighter and swifter method to the symphony. As a substitute of emphasizing the third motion minuet’s punchiness like Nelsons’s stomping on downbeat, Rachid’s gestures floated with the dance rhythms and subdued the trio’s dynamics to a fragile, hushed piano.
Co-commissioned by the BSO, Places’s The Brightness of Mild acquired its Symphony Corridor premiere after its inaugural efficiency at Tanglewood in 2019. The work is a component tune cycle, half operatic with a story based mostly on the correspondence of artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. With Copland-like fanfares, hovering string melodies like John Williams, and repetitive textures, Places’s musical type considerably resembles the later works of John Adams and different post-minimalists. The 45-minute work was accompanied by Wendall Harrington’s video projections of O’Keeffe and Steiglitz’s works, documentary footage, and pictures of the letters themselves.
Louder moments for the brass, percussion, or piccolo typically coated the singers. Nelsons, who premiered the work, foregrounded the number of orchestral colours inside Places’s multi-movement work. A few of these stability points remained on Saturday, however Samy Rachid did an admirable job in holding the orchestra and singers collectively on such brief discover. Following a formidable BSO subscription debut final month with Saint-Saens’s Symphony No.3, Rachid is a conductor to be careful for.
Renée Fleming and Rod Gilfry sang the roles of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, respectively, having additionally premiered the work with Nelsons and the BSO. Dramaturgically, the 2 characters standing on both aspect of the conductor’s podium appeared to problem the musical intimacy of their “First Correspondence” by which O’Keeffe and Stieglitz develop nearer. But, conversely, this bodily distance mirrored the epistolary nature of the texts and supreme drift of their relationship, significantly when O’Keeffe strikes away from Stieglitz to New Mexico.
Gilfry’s highly effective voice suited his quasi-tragic function. Whereas his vocal line strained at moments, suggesting Steiglitz’s compassion for O’Keefe’s “residing, aching silence,” Gilfry’s darker decrease register imbued a way remorse as Steiglitz reminisces about his previous later within the work.
Fleming’s half shone brightest within the opening and shutting sections. Her voice soared as O’Keeffe praises the “holiness” of the sundown, matched by the orchestra’s placid scalar patterns depicting the ocean-like “flat prairie land” and chimes interjecting with “flashes of lightning.” Fleming sang O’Keefe’s ultimate strains, “it’s absurd the way in which I really like this nation,” with thoughtfulness, demonstrating a real connection to the artist’s sentiments.
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Georgia O’Keeffe’s work has had renewed consideration in Boston; the concert events coincided with an glorious exhibit on the Museum of Positive Arts juxtaposing her work with the British sculptor Henry Moore. The curator’s emphasis on Moore and O’Keeffe’s shared fascination with natural shapes and varieties heightened the sensation that Places’s piece misses a chance in not participating with this central side of O’Keeffe’s work. Harrington’s onstage projections showcase mesmerizing works like “Deer’s Cranium with Pedernal” and “Pelvis IV” (each on show on the MFA) ,which each have putting compositions and views as twin landscapes/anatomical research — may O’Keeffe’s signature imaginative and prescient of nature translate to Places’s orchestration?
The Brightness of Mild incorporates a number of situations of phrase portray and narrative impulse within the orchestra half, reminiscent of concertmaster Nathan Cole’s memorable scordatura to painting O’Keeffe’s newbie ardour for violin which elicited chuckles from the viewers. One other poignant second was within the motion “Mates,” depicting O’Keeffe’s solitary life in New Mexico after Stieglitz’s demise, by which Cole’s violin and a pair of clarinets echo Fleming’s phrases, then are joined by the bassoon and harp as O’Keeffe displays on her life and the way her pals have come and gone. But, total, Places’s music and the documentary-style projections may have engaged extra with the artist’s personal progressive compositions in kind whereas she labored at Ghost Ranch to strengthen moments of narrative and musical cohesion from part to part.
Fleming and Gilfry will carry out The Brightness of Mild work subsequent March with the New York Philharmonic (on a program with Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, maybe a extra apparent alternative than Mozart’s symphony for exploring colour and form in music). The Boston Symphony’s promotion of newer music like Places’s work is encouraging, although. Additional longer-length commissions can be welcome.
Photographs: Hilary Scott
