Andris Nelsons Makes Carnegie Hall Debut as BSO Music Director This Week

BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons will lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in three programs at Carnegie Hall, this week, April 15-17. For his first Carnegie Hall concert as BSO Music Director on Wednesday, April 15, Mr. Nelsons will open the program with the New York premiere of Gunther Schuller's Dreamscape, a BSO commission, inspired by a dream the composer had and featuring Schuller's characteristically kaleidoscopic mastery of the orchestra (Click here for the program note for Gunther Schuller's Dreamscape). The Schuller work will be followed by Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat, K. 595, with soloist Richard Goode, an acclaimed Mozart specialist, and Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben.

In his final appearances of the 2014-15 season Thursday, April 9-Tuesday, April 14, Music Director Andris Nelsons leads a program that showcases the orchestra in a crystalline Classical concerto, the lush late-Romanticism of Richard Strauss, and the modernism of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gunther Schuller. At the heart of the program is Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat, K.595, with eminent Mozart specialist, American pianist Richard Goode. To begin the concerts, Mr. Nelsons leads the BSO in Schuller's Dreamscape. According to Schuller, this sparkling, witty, symphony-like work, commissioned by the BSO for Tanglewood's 75th anniversary and premiered by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in 2012, came to him wholly in a dream-hence its title. Its personal aspects and use of quotation make it a neat companion for Richard Strauss's epic, episodic, novelistic, and brilliantly colorful tone poem Ein Heldenleben, which is based on the composer's own life and incorporates quotations from several of his previous works.

The following night, on Thursday, April 16, Mr. Nelsons and the orchestra are joined by German violinist Christian Tetzlaff for Beethoven's lyrical Violin Concerto, which-like the composer's symphonies-expanded and transformed its genre far beyond what had previously been attempted. Opening the program is the rarely heard Passacaglia from Act II of the composer's darkly humorous and musically adventurous opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and to conclude the program, the Symphony No. 10, an intense and emotionally draining work that is contentiously claimed to represent the Stalin years of the Soviet Union but certainly represents one of the composer's highest achievements in the symphonic genre. Musically and emotionally rich, the Tenth is evidently an exorcism of conflicted personal feelings, whether toward the Soviet dictator or someone or something else that remains unknown.

Mr. Nelsons brings the BSO's three-concert Carnegie Hall series to a close on Friday, April 17, with a performance of Mahler's monumental, intricate, and devastatingly tragic Symphony No. 6, the finale of which features three cataclysmic hammer blows that the composer later believed presaged three great misfortunes in his life: the death of his daughter, the loss of the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, and the diagnosis of the heart condition that would ultimately lead to his death.

As part of Carnegie Hall's 2015-16 season, announced on January 28, 2015, BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform three concerts, October 20, 21, and 22, 2015. On Tuesday, October 20, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra are joined by pianist Paul Lewis for the opening concert of their three-night engagement at Carnegie Hall, featuring Mr. Lewis in Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto and the BSO in Sebastian Currier's Divisions, a BSO co-commission, and Brahms's energetic and lyrical Symphony No. 2. The following night, Wednesday, October 21, Mr. Nelsons leads a concert performance of Strauss's tragic one act opera, Elektra, featuring soprano Christine Goerke in the title role. Concluding up the BSO's 2015-16 Carnegie Hall programs on Thursday, October 22, Russian mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Serdyuk joins Maestro Nelsons, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky Cantata, assembled from music originally written for Sergei Eisenstein's nationalistic film about the 13th-century Russian prince. Maestro Nelsons closes the program with Rachmaninoff's colorful and energetic Symphonic Dances.

For further information about the Boston Symphony Orchestra, visit www.bso.org or click here for complete programs, ticket information.

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