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Boston Globe
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
BSO triumphs with Shostakovich's 6th Symphony
The links between the Vrebalov and Stravinsky pieces are numerous and intentional. The BSO asked Vrebalov, who won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for composition last year, to score Biblical psalm texts and use an orchestra similar to the ingeniously odd one Stravinsky assembled for the 'Symphony of Psalms' – replete with winds and brass but omitting violins, violas, and clarinets. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up They make for an even more fascinating contrast, though. 'Love Canticles' has a numinous air to it, its laudatory texts set against largely dreamy, diaphanous textures. As God's virtues are enumerated, things begin to fragment, and the music becomes more muscular and martial. After a tremendous climax and dissipation, the closing 'Hallelujah' brings echoes of Byzantine chant, intoned by the chorus over flickering harmonics from the orchestra. This is a beautiful and mysterious piece, expertly orchestrated to create that impression. Advertisement Next to the Vreblaov's cosmic warmth, the 'Symphony of Psalms,' an apex of Stravinsky's neoclassical period, was bound to come across as even more rigorous and ascetic than it already is. If 'Love Canticles' offers the psalms as a mystical embrace, Stravinsky presents them as solemn statements of fact. The blocklike choral writing, the intricate counterpoint in the middle movement, and the oasis of calm with which it concludes create an atmosphere that is profoundly moving in its sheer austerity. Nelsons, the BSO, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus were equally good in both works. The clarity of the choral singing was notable, as were the perfectly managed balances between the two large forces. Occasionally during the Stravinsky one wished for more variation in the dynamics, as everything seemed to exist on the same plane of loudness. As for the Shostakovich, it is one of the composer's strangest symphonies. It opens with an immense slow movement — so slow as to border on stasis —followed by a fast scherzo and an even faster finale. Especially in comparison to the symphonies Shostakovitch composed before and after it, the 6th seems largely free of both a political program and the angst that colors so much of Shostakovich's other music. It is, as they say, a hard nut to crack. Sunday's performance didn't really shed any light on what the composer might have 'meant' with this unusual work. As a purely musical experience, though, it was a comprehensive triumph. It is difficult to imagine an orchestra playing this music better than the BSO did – a model of depth, transparency, and cohesive power. Nelsons' pacing was expert, especially in the first movement, which never lost momentum despite its span. In the finale, he pushed the tempos to an extreme to show how antic and unironically witty this music is, almost as if Shostakovich were taking his cue from Haydn, music's great comic master. If that was the 'decoding' intended, mission accomplished. Advertisement The final program of both 'Decoding Shostakovich' and the season – consisting of the Violin Concerto No. 1 and Symphony No. 8 – is this weekend. David Weininger can be reached at globeclassicalnotes@
New York Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Conductor Who Has the Ear of Red Sox and Classical Fans Alike
It's hard to fathom what the Boston Pops gets itself into with its annual Holiday Pops marathon, which takes up most of December at Symphony Hall. Last year, this orchestra played essentially the same program, with a few tweaks for family shows, 42 times in a bit less than three weeks. Santa Claus attended every concert. Boston audiences have come to expect that certain items will appear on the bill: Leroy Anderson's 'Sleigh Ride,' for example, and a dramatic reading of Clement Clarke Moore's 'A Visit From St. Nicholas.' The best of them, at least for wit, is David Chase's monstrously inventive arrangement of 'The 12 Days of Christmas,' which quotes Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, 'Oklahoma!' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' Sung with gusto, usually by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, it surprises every time you hear it. Then again, the whole Holiday Pops enterprise is something of a surprise. In the performances last December, the musicians of the Pops — essentially the Boston Symphony Orchestra without most of its principals — never seemed to look bored, and some had enough ho, ho, ho in them to wear a seasonal hat or even dance onstage. Musical standards remained admirably high. At the center of it all is Keith Lockhart, who is marking 30 years with the Pops this season. Hosting and conducting almost all of the dates in December, he often led three a day, sometimes following a pair of gigs at Symphony Hall with an evening concert at the helm of the freelance Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, in places as far afield as New Hampshire or Connecticut. You would never know from seeing him kick a cancan in 'The 12 Days of Christmas' that he has conducted 'Sleigh Ride' more than 850 times, or that he is 65. Surviving this startling display of podium endurance with regular naps, he shows little sign of flagging. The Pops offers a December and a spring season, this year beginning on May 8, plus a smattering of Tanglewood concerts and its annual July 4 celebration, played by the Esplanade Orchestra before hordes thronging Boston's Hatch Shell. During Lockhart's tenure, Holiday Pops has become the centerpiece of the calendar. Created in 1973, the revels grew gradually under his predecessors, Arthur Fiedler and John Williams, but have since come to rival Boston Ballet's 'Nutcracker' for sprawl: They sell about 90,000 seats, equivalent to roughly 70 percent of the tickets that the Boston Symphony sells in its entire regular concert season. Factor in food and drink receipts, and this is the kind of thing that it's easy to think cynically about. But that is not what is going on, or at least not only what is going on. Lockhart gives an eloquent speech, or three, on the meaning of the holiday season in a fractured world. He makes sure there is always new music, most recently 'Carol of the Brown King,' a David Coleman setting of Nativity poems by Langston Hughes. Nobody makes him include 'L'Adorazione dei Magi,' a decidedly obscure work by Respighi, but it's his favorite piece of holiday music, so he does it every few years anyway. Even Chad Smith, the avowed progressive who serves as president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony, admires 'the beautiful, quiet subversiveness of the way that Keith programs it.' For many in Boston, attending Holiday Pops is a tradition; Lockhart sees it serving the same role that church once did. 'I try to make the concert not just play 'All I Want For Christmas,' but have some spiritual significance to it, something that ties it together,' he said. 'In other words,' he added, 'not just crassly commercial.' At one concert near the end of the run last year, Lockhart conducted the crowd in a Joe Reisman medley, 'A Merry Little Sing-Along.' Phone flashlights soon appeared, hundreds of them, swaying in the dark. By some weird magic, it wasn't cringe-worthy but enchanting. THE BOSTON POPS has spent 140 years figuring out how to offer popular entertainment that is artistically meaningful, with an orchestra of quality at its heart. Other dedicated Pops orchestras are still around, not least the Cincinnati Pops, and every major orchestra gives pops concerts in one form or another. The Boston outfit still dominates the field. Lockhart is its inescapable face, and recently extended his contract through 2027. He has drawn more than his fair share of flack over the years: He came to the job young, quickly became a local celebrity, and is presiding at a time when it has proved impossible for the Pops to maintain the imperious position in American popular culture built by Fiedler from 1930 to his death in 1979, when he was eulogized as 'the maestro of the masses.' But Lockhart remains a crucial, beloved figure for the Boston Symphony, most of whose players he conducts far more often than their music director. And he has the experience and skills of a proper musician: He led the Utah Symphony for 11 years and has been artistic director of the Brevard Music Center Summer Institute and Festival since 2007. 'He comes in knowing what he's going to do, and we just follow him,' said Suzanne Nelsen, a Pops bassoonist. His collaborators are similarly effusive. 'Keith and the musicians, they know where the beat is,' said Branford Marsalis, the jazz saxophonist, 'so it never feels like it falls into affectation or stereotype, which are the worst experiences ever.' Ben Folds, the singer-songwriter, applauded the Pops for keeping the dignified environment of a symphony orchestra intact. 'When you're playing with Keith,' he said, 'he's taking the inside of your music seriously.' Bernadette Peters, Broadway royalty, confided that on her phone, she keeps a secret recording of the Pops performing a lullaby she wrote about a dog. 'He gets all these players to play as a whole, and make music with me,' she said of Lockhart. 'It's basically a miracle.' Lockhart is also one of the few conductors today who is deeply rooted in his community, so much so that even its baseball team speaks highly of him. Alex Cora, the manager of the Boston Red Sox, appeared at the Holiday Pops in 2018, and last year invited Lockhart to talk to his players at spring training. 'It was good for our guys, especially seeing it from a different perspective,' Cora said. 'Probably for them, it was like: 'Oh, he's a conductor, what is it, what's the big thing? He's just, you know, moving his hands and whatever.' No, no, no, no, he's doing a lot from that platform. It was good to have him around.' WHEN LOCKHART TOOK OVER the Pops, it was still recognizably the institution that Fiedler had made famous. Henry Higginson, who founded the Boston Symphony in 1881, created a series of spring Promenade Concerts four years later, offering overtures, waltzes, marches and so on. It was a populist enterprise from the start; the scholar Ayden Adler has noted that the public called the concerts 'Pops' long before the Symphony adopted the brand. Symphony Hall, finished in 1900, was designed to serve both, with rows of seats that could be replaced with tables. Over time, the blurry line between 'classical' and 'popular' concerts became clearer, leaving the Pops free to chase commercial success, though not at the expense of musical values; only at the end of Fiedler's concerts did he let loose with Broadway medleys or Beatles tunes. From 1980 to 1993, Williams, his successor, took the Pops in new directions, above all in film music, but left the format much as he found it. 'My 45-year association with this brilliant ensemble continues to be one of the great joys of my musical life,' he said in an email. Lockhart has kept the Pops standing even as many of the pillars on which it was built have crumbled. If anything beyond dropping Old Glory in 'The Stars and Stripes Forever' made the Pops 'America's Orchestra,' as Lockhart called it early on, it was television. But PBS ended 35 years of 'Evening at Pops' broadcasts in 2005, and the July 4 concert more recently met a similar fate. Fiedler was one of the great studio artists of his era, selling 50 million records, and Williams shipped plenty of his own; Lockhart has made some, but he has not escaped the collapse of the classical recording industry. Subtler forces are at work, too. Classical music has moved further from the mainstream, so finding an audience that knows the lighter repertoire that the Pops made its own has become impossible on the scale it once did. Entertainment has been repackaged: Fiedler's Pops barely announced its programs in advance, but Lockhart's is driven by guest artists, thematic concerts and film screenings. Even the way that the Pops sells tickets has changed tellingly. 'One of the secrets of the Pops' success was building ticket sales on a wholesale, not retail, model,' the former Symphony general manager Thomas W. Morris recently wrote. For decades after the 1930s, the Pops sold tickets primarily to groups rather than individuals, to the alumni associations and Rotary clubs that helped knit the ensemble into the fabric of community life. Going to the Pops was an inherently social affair; now, though, we bowl alone. Group sales peaked at 90 percent and remained near 80 percent in the 1980s. They accounted for 16 percent of Holiday Pops tickets last year. 'It's not just cultural consumption, it's sociological,' Lockhart said of the transformation of the Pops. 'It's the way people interact with each other.' CAN THE POPS retain its place in American musical culture? The question is most urgent outside the festive season, when there is less of a hook for audiences to grab hold of. Holiday Pops sold at 87 percent of capacity last year, but Spring Pops languished at 69 percent. Projections look more promising for the coming season, which includes a night with Cynthia Erivo; a cosmic program starring the astronaut Suni Williams and George Takei of 'Star Trek' fame; and 'Jaws' and 'Frozen' with live soundtracks. 'Sometimes Pops feels a little bit like a genre without an identity,' Smith said. 'The identity of Pops has to be contemporary. It has to be urgent. It has to be trying to be on the bleeding edge, but recognizing that it is a populist art form.' Charting a future for the Pops is crucial for the Symphony broadly; it brings in roughly half the revenue that the organization earns from its orchestral concerts. Pops concerts are starting to spread across the calendar, and Smith said that it is finding more ways to serve the city, pointing to a Day of the Dead concert last November and an annual Pride celebration. Whatever the Pops plays, and whomever it plays with, Lockhart wants to make sure that it adheres to at least one of its founding theories. 'We've always insisted that the orchestra, at some level, remain the star of its show,' he said. 'We want to make sure the audience realizes we're there.'
Boston Globe
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A show of unity with Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus
The program's focus on the ensemble as a whole was palpable even before the orchestra played a single note. In most American orchestras, including the BSO, musicians tend to take their seats on their own, individually warming up on stage or quietly talking with their colleagues before the tuning note signals everyone to hush. However, the small 'Tabula Rasa' chamber orchestra of strings and prepared piano evidently tuned backstage before emerging from the wings together with Slobodeniouk, Lin, and Velinzon, with no separate pre-piece applause for conductor or soloists. If that was a way to grab the audience's attention and minimize chatter going into the whirlwind of 'Tabula Rasa,' it worked. Lin and Velinzon attacked the piercing first note, an A played several octaves apart; during the weighty seconds of silence that followed, you could hear your neighbors breathing. The first movement of 'Tabula Rasa' is called 'Ludus,' Latin for 'game,' but playful is the last descriptor I'd use. Mesmerizing, perhaps 'apocalyptic,' it recalled Yeats's poem 'The Second Coming' in a way as Slobodeniouk guided the orchestra through several ever-intensifying, expanding gyres of variations. Each statement was separated from the next by Vytas Baksys's muted, bell-like intonations on the prepared piano, until at last the center could not hold, and orchestra and soloists rose to the shattering cascade of arpeggios that led to the extended final chord. The solo violin parts often echo each other nearly note for note, and in doing so call to attention the differences between the players; here, Velinzon's tone was temperate and matter-of-fact while Lin's was crisper and mournful. Advertisement 'Silentium,' the longer second movement, was ominous and implacable, rife with precise harmonies that could be sonic pitfalls for a less attuned orchestra, but not this BSO; the slow but steady forward motion conjured images of Yeats's beast slouching toward Bethlehem. After the final descent, with the melody passed downward through the sections to one single double bass, Slobodeniouk kept on conducting silence for several measures, unwilling (rightfully so) to let the world in until he said as much by slowly lowering his hand. Dima Slobodeniouk conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra with violinists Alexander Velinzon and Lucia Lin in Arvo Pärt's "Tabula Rasa" on Thursday. Hilary Scott With the 'Requiem,' the Tanglewood Festival Chorus gave a stunning and profound display of unity. Their quality of performance has been on a distinct upswing lately, and the fruits of their work showed in the precise intonation in the 'Kyrie,' explosive dynamic variation in the 'Dies Irae,' and elegant phrasing in the 'Lacrimosa' — staples of the choral repertoire where rough patches tend to make themselves visible. The tenor parts of the 'Requiem' choral book can be especially punishing, and the TFC tenors deftly shouldered the demands, letting their high notes bloom. Advertisement Swanson and Amereau made fine showings in their BSO subscription debuts. Morley, a BSO veteran who brings her 'Rose in Bloom' has he sung this piece?) Slobodeniouk only made his BSO debut in 2018, but since then he's led around a dozen programs at Tanglewood and Symphony Hall. Next week's wartime program of Hailstork, Stravinsky, and Elgar makes one more for the Finnish conductor, who previously held positions at the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia. He's here often enough that the BSO may as well give him some kind of title; I certainly wouldn't object, and the fact that he keeps getting invited back for multi-program engagements in both venues suggests the musicians might not have an issue with it, either. This hobby pilot knows how to fly the BSO. BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA At Symphony Hall, March 27. Repeats March 29. 617-266-1200, A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
