Jonathan Blumhofer
A festive month of music, with The Emerson Quartet, A Far Cry, Tallis Scholars, and the Borromeo Quartet among the standout performers.
If the BSO wanted to make a statement about where it might be headed based on the strong artistic results of the current season, it certainly could have. That it didn’t is a missed opportunity and hopefully not a sign of things to come.
With “In Seven Days,” Thomas Adés seems to have developed a musical language that’s complex yet not forbidding: there’s no sense that his music is weighed down by expectations of the past, even as he freely refers to archaic compositional forms.
Handel & Haydn Society captured all of this and then some with a vigorous, focused performance that was a marvel of controlled fury.
Saariaho’s music is often lush and vibrant, to be sure, but it also can lose track of its musical purpose and meander excessively from time to time. Not so in “Circle Map.”
November features a number of visits from celebrated performers, from Kelly O’Connor and Thomas Adés to the Takács Quartet. Music for Food also presents its second concert/benefit of the season.
That Symphony Hall was probably a third empty is inexplicable, but, if you missed any of these concerts, it’s truly your loss. These were among the BSO’s benchmark performances of the last decade.
If you think contemporary music is the domain of fusty academics and has no bearing on (or relationship to) the outside world, you really need to check out “Canzonas Americanas.”
Herbert Blomstedt and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig present us here with what is easily the most memorable classical box set of 2012 and, possibly, the most important addition to the Bruckner discography in a generation.
It’s a pity we can’t hear the Discovery Ensemble every week – it’s a group that radiates energy and models inventive programming.
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