Opera Review: Hot Rails to Hell

The BSO brings back The Damnation of Faust.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Charles Dutoit (on podium) leads Paul Groves, Susan Graham and John Relyea in the trio from
Part III of The Damnation of Faust. Photo by Hilary Scott for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I'm going open this review on a personal note.

Ten years (and change) age, I posted the first review on Superconductor, of the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Hector Berlioz' The Damnation of Faust. That concert (you can read about it here) was at Carnegie Hall under the baton of James Levine. In honor of that anniversary, I took an early morning Amtrak to Boston yesterday to see the BSO perform The Damnation of Faust.

It was worth the trip.

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.

Concert Review: A Song for the Departed

Bernard Haitink conducts Mahler at Symphony Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Camilla Tilling sings "Der Himmlische Leben" at Symphony Hall as Bernard Haitink
conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Stu Rosner © 2013 Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Bernard Haitink has enjoyed a four-decade association with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, culminating in a successful term (1995-2004)  as the orchestra's principal guest conductor. (He currently holds the title of Conductor Emeritus.) This week, Mr. Haitink returned to Symphony Hall for a program exploring the lighter repertory of two great symphonists: Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler.

Concert Review: From Familiar Composers, Unfamiliar Sounds

Christian Zacharias conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra
by Paul J. Pelkonen

On Friday afternoon at Symphony Hall, Christian Zacharias conducted from the keyboard.
Photo by Stu Rosner © 2012 Boston Symphony Orchestra.

In the modern classical music world, programming a weekend concert exclusively with the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven can lead to accusations of conservatism or (worse yet) pandering to the taste of an audience whose age has gone up even as their tolerance for "modern" music (anything written in the last 100 years) has gone down.

However, as Friday's afternoon concert at Symphony Hall proved, the choice to bring back German pianist-conductor Christian Zacharias proved a wise one. For this concert, Mr. Zacharias dug deeply into the vast catalogues of these three composers, crafting an appealing program from some of their least-performed compositions.

This was the BSO's first performances ever of Haydn's Symphony No. 76, a work that falls between his fertile Sturm und Drang period and the late compositions which thrilled audiences in Paris and London. This is Haydn at the height of his powers as a spinner of inventive, constantly changing melodies laced with ease and good humor. Mr. Zacharias led a crisp performance, with the Boston players sounding as if this was a symphony that was part of their regular repertory.

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. 

Concert Review: Who Needs Black Friday?

Ludovic Morolt conducts Harbison's Fourth, Mahler's First.

Composer John Harbison.
 Photo by Kathrin Talbot, © 2010 G. Schirmer and Associates.

James Levine vacated the position of Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in March of this year. But this week's program, conducted by his former assistant Ludovic Morlot, is very much a continuation of the programming idea prevalent in his seven-year tenure.

The program, played to a full Symphony Hall on the afternoon after Thanksgiving, opened with the Fourth Symphony by John Harbison. This was part of a two-year BSO initiative, to perform all of Mr. Harbison's extant symphonies by the end of this season. It will conclude in January with the premiere of his Sixth.

The Fourth is a bleak, unsmiling work in five movements. In his thoughtful program notes, the composer describes the work as a five-movement cure for his Gatsby hangover, following that work's mixed reception in 2000. Indeed, the first movement is jazz-inflected and brassy, almost strident until stopping dead against its own momentum. The second is indecisive, the sound of a man  beginning anew.

The third finds the composer emulating the work of Shostakovich with a dour double scherzo, Complicated dance rhythms tumbling over each other in and effort to express themselves. The funereal Threnody that followed was grim, terse effective. The final movement was bold and determined, the sound of a composer finding his groove, and moving on to what should be a brighter, more optimistic future.

Under Mr. Morolt, the Boston Symphony Orchestra played the Harbison work with taut power. They brought the same quality to the second Suite from Maurice Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloë. The large ensemble tackled these furious rhythms with glee, playing the closing "Danse generale" with gusto. 

The concert concluded with a Mahler First played with bold strokes. Despite a few balky notes from the bassoons, Mr. Morolt summoned the spirit of spring into Symphony Hall, making Mahler's chorales of offstage trumpets and onstage horns come together in a celebratory manner. 

The reeling, wine-tippling peasants of the second movement lurched groggily in. The joy was visible on the faces of the Boston players as they moved into the elegant trio before returning to Mahler's clod-hopping Ländler rhythms. played the famous funeral march, drawn from the children's rhyme "Frere Jacques" before slipping into Jewish wedding music and letting out some very merry sounds from the eight-man horn section.

Those horns move to their feet in the last pages of the tumultous finale, a treacherous, long movement made more difficult by a tricky repeat that forces the orchestra to reprise the entire main theme in a different, higher key Still, the players stood up to the challenge. Mr. Morlot slowed a little in the middle of this movement, but regained his footing and brought the First in with a blaze of sound and a loud, approving applause. 

With stunning playing like this, who needs a door-busting sale to be truly happy?