Classical Music
The Anonymous 4 went through their medieval and early Renaissance paces, vibrato-less but historically informed and performed.
After the “Lobgesang”’s premiere, Robert Schumann declared this movement “a glimpse of heaven filled with Raphael’s madonnas,” and Saturday’s performance by the BSO came about as close to that as one could imagine, sensitively phrased and beautifully blended.
Though there were differences in quality between the compositions in the BMOP concert, all of the pieces fulfilled the primary requirement of a concerto: they showed off the capabilities of the solo instrument in question, often memorably so.
Guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, is a big man who conducts with big gestures. In the first half of “The Rite of Spring” I wasn’t quite sure if his podium mannerisms (which culminated in jumping jacks during the concluding “Dance of the Earth”) were helpful or distracting.
In a nice twist, no piece on the Concord Chamber Players program was written before 1907, and that oldest piece came from a fine composer, Camille Saint-Saëns, whose music has fallen somewhat by the wayside since his death in 1922.
The extraordinary intensity the ensemble achieved at soft dynamic levels and their very natural sense of the movement’s pacing were both quite impressive.
Highlights in classical music during January include a visit by the acclaimed cappella group Anonymous Four at the Gardner Museum’s new concert hall, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project performing “Strange Bedfellows: Unlikely Concertos.”
Most importantly, there were the amazing, booming acoustics of St. Paul’s, which favored the soaring soprano voices that were, for me, the reason to see this excellent ensemble.
As nicely played as the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky were, I left feeling that there was something distinctly anticlimactic about the Aviv Quartet’s programming choices. I would much rather have heard the Erwin Schulhoff close the evening –- or at least heard it sandwiched between the Romantic selections.
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