The Verdi Project: Un ballo in Maschera

Giuseppe Verdi versus the censors of Naples.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Verdi (right) confronts an anonymous Neopolitan censor over the libretto to Un ballo in Maschera.
The original title Una vendetta in domino is visible. Image from 1857 by Delfico.

"Don't forget. I've got tickets for the opera tonight for Un ballo in maschera."
"Oh, stuff Un ballo in maschera!" -- John Mortimer

After the failure of the 1857 version of Simon Boccanegra, Verdi was looking for an easy success. He thought he had found it with Un Ballo in Maschera, a libretto by Antonio Somma that was itself an adaptation of an older libretto by Eugéne Scribe. Verdi had worked with that legendary (and well-named) Scribe on Les vepres sicillienes. The grand old man of the Paris Opera was the most successful librettist in Europe since Pietro Metastasio. What could go wrong?

Concert Review: Time-Scape

The Boston Symphony Orchestra returns to Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pekonen

Bernard Haitink.
Photo by Chris Christodoulu © 2013 London Symphony Orchestra.

The repertory of any major symphony orchestra spans centuries, with composers influencing each other's work over a vast ocean of time.  On Tuesday night, the Boston Symphony Orchestra offered a program that built bridges over that ocean, from the 19th century to the baroque era and from the England of the 17th century up to our own era. This was the first of two concerts this week under the baton of Bernard Haitink. The 85-year-old Dutch conductor is now in his sixth decade of conducting, and second decade of his long association with the BSO.

Concert Review: The Leftovers

The Boston Symphony Orchestra serves up Beethoven and Brahms.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Door busters: Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (left) and Peter Serkin serve up Beethoven and Brahms.
Photo by Sam Brewer © 2013 Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Black Friday is a weird tradition. Since the 1960s, American consumers gathered at the malls and "big box" stores on the day after Thanksgiving for so-called "door-buster" deals. All this consumerism an have injurious, or even fatal consequences. But for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its audience, today was just another Friday matinee at Symphony Hall, a civilized pause for high culture in the middle of all the holiday hype.

The program for this week's concert featured a crowd-pleasing pairing of Brahms (the Piano Concerto No. 2 with soloist Peter Serkin) and the Beethoven Seventh Symphony. With the sturdy conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos on the podium, this looked to be safe serving of holiday fare, sure to please the musically conservative audiences that attend the BSO's Friday concerts.

White Smoke Over Huntington Avenue

Andris Nelsons to take over Boston Symphony Orchestra.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Andris Nelsons is the new Music Director at the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Photo by Stu Rosner © 2011 Boston Symphony Orchestra.

There's a new sheriff in Boston.

The board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced today that Andris Nelsons will be the ensemble's new Music Director, filling a vacancy at one of America's "big five" orchestras. The post has been empty since James Levine's resignation in 2011.

Young Man With a Horn

Reflections on Boston and (briefly) Wagner's Siegfried.

Downtown Boston, and the Rainbow Bridge.

I'm going to go off topic here for a few minutes and shake out some feelings on this blog regarding yesterday's tragedy: the bombing of the Boston Marathon by person or persons unknown. I'm writing this off the cuff in an effort to put some of my feelings on paper in the time honored tradition of bloggers since the Internet was young.

Concert Review: The Out-of-Towner

Alan Gilbert conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
(Yes, you read that right!)
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Alan Gilbert conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Photo by Stu Rosner © 2013 Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Holding the position of Music Director at one of North America's "Big Five" orchestras is a time-consuming business. So it is rare to hear Alan Gilbert, who currently reigns at the New York Philharmonic, conduct an orchestra other than his own. When that "other" orchestra is the prestigious Boston Symphony Orchestra, that opportunity becomes an extraordinary one.

On Friday afternoon at Symphony Hall, Mr. Gilbert offered a potent mix of comparative 20th century rarities with stolid favorites. He started with the most radical work on the program: Henri Dutilleux' four-movement Métaboles. Dutilleux writes spidery music, subtle yet capable of great impact on the listener. This work consists of four  connected movements, each building on the chords and key signatures of the one before to create an organic structure of sound.

Although the score of Métaboles employs enormous orchestral resources, its utterances are often cryptic. A stentorian, short theme is blared. In its wake, one hears the keening buzz of a violin or viola answered by taps of percussion, a blurted note from the heavy brass. This intricate work was played lovingly by the Boston forces, who clearly enjoyed meeting the challenges of the score under Mr. Gilbert's precise leadership.

The Superconductor Interview: Misplaced Childhood

Julie Boulianne sings L'enfant et les sortilèges.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The destroyer: Julie Boulianne sings the Child in Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges
at Boston's Symphony Hall. Photo © 2012 IMG Artists.

It's not easy being a brat.

That's certainly the case for Canadian mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne , who sings the title role in the Boston Symphony Orchestra's two performances of Maurice Ravel's opera L'enfant et les sortiléges ("The Child and the Enchantments") at Symphony Hall this week. The concert marks Ms. Boullaine's debut at Symphony Hall.

"It's a little tough," she admits in a telephone interview with Superconductor, speaking of the title role in this opera, an obnoxious brat who destroys his possession and his surroundings only to have them come to life and take umbrage at his behavior. "He's all over the place. "He's so mean to everybody."

"It's really written like a child would sing it," she says. "The comments (in the score) are 'child-like' and vocally you feel as if you are a child too. I bring something different to the voice and the musical phrasing--I try to keep it as a younger child would sing it without taking away the beauty of the music."

Concert Review: On Wings of Fire

Esa-Pekka Salonen brings his Violin Concerto to Boston.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Photo by Clive Barda for
EsaPekkaSalonen.co.uk

On Friday night, the Boston Symphony Orchestra welcomed Esa-Pekka Salonen to the podium in Symphony Hall with a program featuring his own Violin Concerto with soloist Leila Josefowicz, bracketed by 20th century favorites by Ravel and Stravinsky. With no music director at the helm of the BSO this season, 2011-2012 has been a year of guest conductors. So a Boston visit by the dynamic Mr. Salonen--his first since 1988--was a welcome occasion for subscribers.

Mr. Salonen, who served a 17-year term as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is equally reputed as a composer as well as a conductor, but this weekend's concerts mark the first time that the BSO has played his music. The concert opened with Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, played with baroque delicacy. Mr. Salonen achieved his trademark "clean" sound, leading these four short movements without a baton. 

He then picked up a microphone to address the audience before his concerto was performed. He explained the history of the work's composition in 2008, its relationh to his difficult departure from Los Angeles, and its autobiographical nature. He also included some brief anecdotes to give the audience some valuable context before Ms. Josefowicz joined him onstage.

Mr. Salonen's concerto is on a vast scale, with four movements that require athletic playing and a firm command of the orchestra. Those qualities were present here, though the performance in Boston was not quite as raucous as one heard two weeks before in Philadelphia. Ms. Josefowicz shone in the difficult violin part, scraping out whole chords across the strings and chivvying out athletic runs up the neck of her instrument.

As explained by Mr. Salonen, the two central movements: Pulse I and Pulse II offer contrasting rhythmic ideas. The first is based around the composer's own heart arrhythmia, recalling Mahler's 9th Symphony in its faltering meter. The second evokes a girl that the composer met in his student years: a café waitress in Rome by day, a latex-clad club kid by night. 

This movement is the most gripping of the four. It is dominated by heavy, urban rhythms and percussion--including a full-on rock drum solo, almost unprecedented in a violin concerto--had arresting power. The last movement, Adieu resolved in a new, brilliant chord unheard before in the four movements: Mr. Salonen's way of expressing an optimistic future.

The concert ended with the full score of Stravinsky's Firebird ballet, a work that is familiar to BSO attendees from the tenure of former Music Director Seiji Ozawa. Here, Mr. Salonen chose a quicksilver approach to this enormous score, conjuring Stravinsky's folk-based melodies and washes of impressionistic orchestral color. He led the Firebird as its composer intended, as a sort of opera score without any words.

Some conductors are dull to watch on the podium as they beat time--but not Mr. Salonen. He sometimes turned his back completely on one half of the orchestra, leading the violins with laser-like focus or exhorting the woodwinds in their intricate lines. By the time the piece reached the final, celebratory dance, the conductor was red-faced. His face blazed with the effort as the orchestra rose to a fiery height, crashing down in the last chords.