April 04, 2008
In this corner...
The Boston Symphony Orchestra has announced their 2008-09 season. I'll leave you in the able hands of Jeremy Eichler for the details (of which some remain state secrets—which version of Simon Boccanegra is that going to be, maestro?), but it's interesting to see the inevitable Mozart crammed into the sort of three-concert marathon dumping-ground normally reserved for new music. (World premieres by Carter, Schuller, Kirchner, and André Previn, who must be the designated driver.)
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6 comments:
This one looks interesting:
MESSIAEN
Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum
BOULEZ
Notations I-IV
BERLIOZ
Harold in Italy, for viola and orchestra
If they indeed do the Berlioz last, I guess the strategy is "Trap 'em in the first half and reward them in the second". I don't get this kind of programming, actually, why not pair the Messiaen and the Boulez (where's Notation VII?) with something like Strauss or Ravel?
No Charles Wuorinen, hmmmmm....
Levine's been on a big Berlioz kick for the past couple seasons—no complaints here. He may be deliberately putting Berlioz in a modernist context, as with that series of Schoenberg-beethoven concerts last year. Or maybe he just needed another French piece to fill out the concert.
I went to another front-loaded program a couple years ago: Ives, Carter, Foss, and then Gershwin's Concerto if F. Worked, too.
If they don't say otherwise, I'd say it's a near certainty that Boccanegra is the 1881 revised version, not the 1857. It'd be darned interesting if they'd do the original, though. In the space that became the Council Chamber scene, there's a riot that sounds like something out of Traviata, I seem to recall, from having heard it a million years ago.
I'd guess the revised version, too, given last year's 4-act Don Carlos, but no indication. Maybe it's a canny way to build up suspense among the, oh, couple of dozen people obsessed enough to care.
Yep, plus, it's not like staging Boheme, where the pool of players who know the range-appropriate part approaches 100% of living singers. Not many singers know Boccanegra and even fewer know the 1857 version.
Or maybe he just needed another French piece to fill out the concert
Hahaha. I heard Gustavo Dudamel conduct Daphnis et Chloe last weekend at Disney Hall and it reminded me, since I haven't heard it in a while, what a great piece Ravel wrote. That would be French enough, right? :-)
I too really like Berlioz' music, it's just Harold in Italy seems kind of....slight after the first half. Oh well.
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