Latest news with #SymphonyNo.8
Edmonton Journal
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edmonton Journal
Concert news: Blue Rodeo, Sigur Rós and The Beaches all making their way to Edmonton later this year
Article content Tickets for the birthday celebration shows go on sale 10 a.m. Friday at Also on sale the same time at Icelandic post-rock icons Sugar Rós will be joined by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra Nov. 10 at Winspear. At it since '94, the indie cool trio of falsetto lead vocalist and guitarist Jón Þór 'Jónsi' Birgisson, bassist Georg Hólm and keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson have long been regulars on college radio, getting international acclaim from heavy hitters like Radiohead, Coldplay and the late David Bowie. If you're not familiar with the band, start with 1999's dreamy Ágætis byrjun with the headphones on in the bathtub — this is sure to be a moving night with our accompanying orchestra. While we're here, might as well mention the ESO is playing a couple of programs over four days in its Symphony Under the Sky at Snow Valley Aug. 20-23. Aug. 20 and 22 it's Summer Classics: Beethoven, Mozart & Haydn featuring Beethoven's Symphony No. 8, alternating with Sparkling Festival Hits Aug. 21 and 23 full of orchestral takes of pop, film and Broadway tunes.
Boston Globe
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A cutting history lesson from the BSO, and gorgeous imperfection from H+H
Friday afternoon featured a solid performance from the BSO, music director Andris Nelsons, and Latvian violinist Baiba Skride. The program was structurally balanced, and the juxtaposition of the two pieces made for an artfully delivered, poignant message about the whims of tyranny. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Symphony No. 8 was completed in 1943 and thus pre-dates the Violin Concerto by five years. The composer had already seen several friends and relatives sent to the Soviet Union's infamous gulags for alleged political crimes, and supposedly he kept a packed suitcase ready in case the secret police came for him. However, with the success of his patriotic Symphony No. 7, 'Leningrad', Shostakovich had rallied Soviet spirits and sustained his amicable official relationship with Party leadership, which he'd labored to repair after the 1936 denunciation of his opera ' Advertisement According to the program notes by Harlow Robinson, Symphony No. 8 was found insufficiently heroic by the Party officials, who craved unambiguous 'Socialist realist' musical praise of its ideologies, but the composer faced no immediate consequences. However, as Shostakovich worked on the Violin Concertoin 1948, he and other high profile Soviet composers were ordered to confess their 'mistakes' of writing music that failed to toe the Party line. The Violin Concerto's musical structure was already unorthodox, its affects alternately dark and brooding or grotesque, and it contained distinctly Jewish musical themes at a time when antisemitism was on the rise in the Soviet Union. Out of self-preservation, Shostakovich withheld the concerto from performance until after Stalin's death in 1953, and put bread on the table by writing unassailably Stalin-praising concert pieces and film scores. In the Handel and Haydn Society's program book later that day, musicologist Teresa Neff wrote that 'surely part of the magic of music lives in its ability to speak differently to each listener, and to the same listener in different ways.' Friday's BSO program demonstrated that that magic, more than any specific mode of musical expression, was surely what Stalin and his apparatchiks sought to quash. If music can speak differently to each listener, there's nothing to stop it from conveying ideas that threaten power. Skride, who will appear in Leipzig with the BSO, landed her bow on the strings for the violin concerto's sleepless Nocturne with the silent fluidity of an owl on the hunt, and the electrifying restlessness only intensified through the grotesque carnival of the Scherzo. Behind her, the large orchestra played like a tight band, the musical texture densely woven. The beginning of the third movement is one of the concerto's rare moments when the soloist does not play, and the BSO brass intoned the introduction with awesome weight, as if pronouncing judgement. Advertisement The soloist was sublime in the third movement's incendiary Passacaglia and the subsequent visceral cadenza, spiking the repeated musical ideas with mercurial accents and rhythms. The final Burlesque flagged by comparison. But that concerto is a marathon, and the cadenza is its Heartbreak Hill. Many a solid violinist has run low on gas around that point. She'll have another run at it in Leipzig. Symphony No. 8 bristled with lean intensity, and on the heels of the Violin Concerto the common points between the pieces were easy to hear. Abrupt textural and rhythmic shifts were plentiful, and the vicious circus conveyed by the second movement's militaristic march sounded quite familiar. Nelsons leaned into the final movement's fake-out, as it seemed to be building towards triumph (as the Party authorities would have expected) then swerved into quiet and uneasy reflection. More's the pity these pieces don't share a program in Leipzig; history sings in these notes. 06bso - Handel and Haydn Society artistic director Jonathan Cohen leading the orchestra at Symphony Hall. (Joseph Sedarski) Joseph Sedarski Later that day, in the same hall, the Handel and Haydn Society concluded its season with artistic director Jonathan Cohen on the podium and soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout at the fortepiano. The evening began with the society's teenage choruses performing Schubert's 'An die Sonne': a very difficult piece for young voices, and they made a heroic effort which Bezuidenhout gamely accompanied. Mozart's incidental music from the play 'Thamos, King of Egypt' was thoroughly entertaining, as was Haydn's Symphony No. 82, 'The Bear.' Perhaps anything would seem cheerful after a slew of Shostakovich, but a distinct joie de vivre seemed to spark behind the sound. This is what you get when you treat 200+-year-old music as a living tradition: Haydn's humor shone through the ample false endings of his symphony's final movement, some of which even got a few claps from the audience before they realized the orchestra was still playing. Centuries later, he's still full of surprises. Advertisement Paul Lewis, one of the greatest living players of Beethoven, once told me that if he were to make breakfast for the composer, he'd make 'a mess of eggs.' There are as many ways to approach Beethoven's music as there are to prepare said eggs, and even though it was only a few weeks ago that 06bso - Fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. (Joseph Sedarski) Joseph Sedarski The tuning of intervals on the fortepiano is somewhat different than that of a modern piano, and the piece resounded with little strains of blithe dissonance that nonetheless never detracted from the whole, but gave it an air of wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of beauty in the impermanent and imperfect. In the second movement, which sets up piano and orchestra as adversaries, Cohen led the orchestra through forceful and brisk retorts to Bezuidenhout's delicate tunes; the finale was all mischief and fun. In a side room, there was a Advertisement As an encore, Bezuidenhout graced the audience with another thoughtful turn around the Regier's keyboard: the songful slow movement from Beethoven's Sonata No. 4. BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA / HANDEL AND HAYDN SOCIETY At Symphony Hall. A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
Boston Globe
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
BSO's Beethoven festival concludes with three hits and one miss
But though those numbers 1 through 9 may look neat when lined up, the symphonies didn't fit so into four programs. For example, Nos. 8 and 9 two were completed a decade apart. During that time, Beethoven's hearing loss intensified to the point where he was totally deaf, and he went through several periods of composing almost nothing, allegedly prompted by family troubles and chronic illnesses. Conversely, Nos. 5 and 6 were performed on different programs during the festival, despite receiving their world premieres on the same day. Perhaps there wasn't an easy way to sort the pieces by where they actually occurred on Beethoven's timeline, rather than simply by number, but it would have added meaning had the symphonies been put in more context. The program book, with notes by Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford, pulled significant weight in that regard. I will never truly be objective about Symphony No. 6, 'Pastoral.' It appears in some of my earliest memories, when my grandparents would put the final movement on the turntable and silence the looming grandfather clock in their living room to help me fall asleep at their house; when played well, to me it invariably sounds like what being loved and protected feels like. The BSO's 'Pastoral' on Tuesday night was achingly nostalgic, all clear water and golden light, a picture postcard of the Austrian countryside that Beethoven loved so much. The sweetness was almost oppressive, akin to a Thomas Kinkade painting, but lively accents kept it grounded enough. Principal clarinetist William Hudgins conjured waterfalls and leaping fish from his instrument, and the rustics' dance in the third movement began well-mannered before becoming satisfyingly rowdy. Advertisement Symphony No. 7, the most sublime and ecstatic of Beethoven's symphonic scores, was substantial but strangely bland, as if someone had forgotten to add salt to it. The issue wasn't speed; there was plenty of that, especially during the third movement. Tuesday's performance also included some fine solo work, especially from principal flutist Lorna McGhee, who added the fiery edges of a Celtic dance tune to the first movement's flute solo. Still, the orchestra as a whole seemed to be on cruise control. The missing ingredient seemed to be Lust — in the German sense, with a capital L, not as a deadly sin but as an appetite for life. Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons leading the BSO in Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 on Jan. 18. Winslow Townson However, Friday afternoon's concert was an improvement. Symphony No. 8 was lithe and exhilarating, and Nelsons burgeoned with vitality on the podium as he drew out the piece's slapstick musical accents. In years past, when Nelsons would hang onto the podium's rail behind him, he seemed fatigued; these days, he still reaches for the rail, but in moments of high rather than low energy. At some points during the brief Symphony No. 8, it seemed to be the only thing keeping him from flying into the rafters. Advertisement The BSO performs the Symphony No. 9 yearly at Tanglewood as the closing event of the summer in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, but the Symphony Hall performance of the same piece proved itself an entirely different experience. The acoustics of Symphony Hall allow softer and subtler nuances of the sound to come through, and the orchestra reveled in those. The introduction of the 'Ode to Joy' theme in the low strings came after a pronounced silence, and it was whisper-quiet but no less solid, which allowed it to gradually gather momentum and power as the other instruments joined in. Transitions between sections were also fluid and graceful. The moment after the finale's jangling military march section was calibrated so that when the Tanglewood Festival Chorus re-entered in joyous full cry, it all but shook the ground. BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA At Symphony Hall, Jan. 21 and 24. A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
