Name: Boston Symphony Chamber Players
Start: 2024-03-31T15:00:00
Location: New England Conservatory

Garrick Ohlsson

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Returning for his second BSO program this season, Dima Slobodeniouk leads one of the American composer John Adams’ first major works, Harmonium for chorus and orchestra. Written in 1981 for the San Francisco Symphony, this grand, half-hour work sets a poem by John Donne and two by Emily Dickinson in gradually unfolding, majestic textures. With its slowly evolving harmonic fields and rhythmic energy, Harmonium marked the future Pulitzer Prize winner and composer of the operas Doctor Atomic and Nixon in China as an important and original voice in American music. Beethoven's larger-than-life, ecstatic Symphony No. 9 closes the season.

Beethoven Symphony No. 9

Andris Nelsons leads some of the most acclaimed stars of opera today in performances of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, a work considered by many the greatest American opera. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1958, Vanessa premiered at the Metropolitan Opera that year. Barber wrote the opera on a libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti; they aimed for a cosmopolitan, nostalgic work on lost love and the consequences of self-delusion. Barber’s romantic lyricism is ever-present in this powerfully affecting work, a centerpiece of this season’s E Pluribus Unum: From Many, One focus.