Word: concert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Ozawa does not need to choose a repertoire filled with the lite classical music that we hear in television commercials and Au Bon Pain's front foyer. His allegiance is not to music that is popular, but to music that is earth-shattering. And indeed, the BSO's last concert, featuring Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and Bela Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin, might have been earth-shattering enough to crack fault lines into Symphony Hall...
Expanding on the theme of mortality, the concert opened with Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin, Bartok's own exploration of life and death. This one act opus was more of a pantomime than a musical suite. In fact, it was almost a miniature play. While there were no actors, no costumes, no sets, there was one staple of drama--an unmistakable storyline. Ozawa took the role of the narrator and the instruments assumed the voices of characters. The Miraculous Mandarin's format was vaguely reminiscent of the children's symphony, Peter and the Wolf. Its plot, however, was drastically different...
...highlight of the concert, however, came after intermission with the performance of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, his adaptation of Hans Bethge's collection of translated poems The Chinese Flute. At this point, Ozawa was not only conducting the BSO, but also two singers, Ben Heppner and Thomas Quastoff, who rounded out the tenor and bass-baritone voice parts. The work was divided into five parts that explored a different facet of Mahler's self-contemplation. In the first piece, known as the "drinking song," a man laments that "Dark is life, dark is death" and copes...
With acute sensitivity, Ozawa used the work of these two composers to probe mortality. But the concert he put together was not as morbid and ponderous as such subject matter might suggest. Rather, with artistic mastery, Ozawa performed a concert about death that, surprisingly, left us unambiguously joyful about life...
...recorded in the '50s. After hearing the tape and reading the score, Allanbrook Jr. became convinced, that "it was a good piece and meant to be preformed." Ethan Frome is hardly a simple musical undertaking, demanding not only a well-appointed string section, but also a full brass section, concert bassoon, bass clarinet. English horn and piccolo. After informing his father of his production plans, Allanbrook Jr. spent 12-hour days throughout the summer entering the score into the computer program Finale in order to produce the orchestral parts...