TEST!

Loading Flow

Downloading Image /

The Program in Brief…

To begin their 2016-17 Symphony Hall season, BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in an

all-Russian program featuring superstar Chinese pianist Lang Lang. Opening the concert is the ebullient Festive Overture of Dmitri

Shostakovich, the most enduring specimen of a once-flourishing 20th-century genre, the Soviet ceremonial piece. Composed in

1954 for the Bolshoi Theatre—allegedly on a twenty-four-hour turnaround—to mark the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Bolshevik

Revolution, the overture’s perky fanfares, frothy woodwind roulades, and rousing central horn-and-cello tune belie its origins in

music of a very different occasional character, the initial flourish having been borrowed from a droll 1945 piano miniature written

for the ninth birthday of Shostakovich’s daughter, Galya.

To continue the program, Lang Lang is soloist in Sergei Prokofiev’s most popular piano concerto, his brilliant and witty Piano

Concerto No. 3. Prokofiev wrote this most scintillating of his five piano concertos over several years straddling his departure from

Russia at the end of the 1910s. Prokofiev himself was soloist in the world premiere, given by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in

1921. The piece features Prokofiev’s astonishingly virtuosic writing for the keyboard, along with dramatically lyrical passages.

The concert concludes with a repertoire staple—the French composer Maurice Ravel’s spectacular instrumentation of Russian

composer Modest Mussorgsky’s solo piano Pictures at an Exhibition. Ravel created his instrumentation of Pictures at the request of

Serge Koussevitzky, who led the premiere in Paris in 1922 and the American premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1924,

during his first season as the BSO’s conductor. That Koussevitzky chose Ravel for this task made infinite sense: the Frenchman’s

brilliance at orchestration was thoroughly apparent in his own music, including orchestral versions of such piano works as the

Pavane for a Dead Princess, Mother Goose, and Alborada del gracioso. Whether in the haunting alto saxophone of “The Old Castle,”

the scurrying evocation of children at play in the Tuileries gardens, the lumbering, tubaweighted oxcart of “Bydło,” the balletic

pecking of “chicks in their shells,” or the varying guises of the opening Promenade, climaxing amidst tolling bells at the end of the

piece—to cite just a few examples—the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures have never failed to hold audiences rapt.

Matthew Mendez/Robert Kirzinger/Marc Mandel

“FESTIVE OVERTURE.” OPUS 96

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3 IN C, OPUS 26

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Downloading Image /

left

right

7 / 356

fullscreen

TEST!

Create your Flow