JUANJO MENA LEADS BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA IN AMERICAN PREMIERE OF FINNISH COMPOSER KAIJA SAARIAHO’S CIRCLE MAP, FOR ORCHESTRA AND ELECTRONICS, A BSO CO-COMMISSION, NOVEMBER 1-6 AT SYMPHONY HALL
CIRCLE MAP WAS COMMISSIONED BY SIX ORCHESTRAS IN SIX DIFFERENT COUNTRIES, INCLUDING THE ROYAL CONCERTGEBOUW ORCHESTRA, BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA,
GOTHENBURG SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, ORCHESTRE NATIONALE DE FRANCE,
ROYAL SCOTTISH NATIONAL ORCHESTRA, AND STAVANGER SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
PROGRAM ALSO FEATURES GIL SHAHAM IN BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S RARELY PERFORMED
VIOLIN CONCERTO, AND MR. MENA LEADS BSO IN DVOŘÁK’S SYMPHONY NO. 7
Performances to take place Thursday, November 1, Saturday, November 3, and
Tuesday, November 6, at 8 p.m., and Friday, November 2, at 1:30 p.m.
Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena, chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in four concerts Thursday, November 1-Tuesday, November 6, with a program featuring the American premiere of influential Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Circle Map, for orchestra and electronics, a BSO co-commission. Violinist Gil Shaham, a frequent guest with the orchestra, joins the BSO for Benjamin Britten’s rarely performed Violin Concerto, and the program concludes with Dvořák’s darkly majestic Symphony No. 7, which bespeaks both his love for his native Bohemia and the influence of his mentor, Johannes Brahms.
Circle Map was commissioned by six orchestras in six different countries, including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Netherlands), the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (Sweden), the Orchestre National de France, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra (Norway). The world premiere took place in Amsterdam on June 22, 2012 by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra led by Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki. The BSO’s upcoming American premiere of Circle Map follows a performance of the work by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra on September 28.
For complete programs, ticket information, photos, and artist bios, click here: https://www.box.com/s/bdc46390a330b3d7eba0.
PROGRAM DETAILS
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Circle Map, a new work for orchestra and electronics organized around text by the 13th-century Persian poet and theologian Rumi, receives its American premiere to begin the program. Saariaho, known for her exotic, unique sense of musical color, treats the recorded sounds of the spoken text as musical material, using electronics to modify and isolate aspects and textures of the voice and weave them together with the live orchestral performance. The poems featured in Circle Map include Rumi’s “Morning Wind”; “Walls closing”; “Circles”; “Days are sieves”; “Dialogue”; and “Day and Night, Music.” The BSO’s relationship with Ms. Saariaho goes back to October 19-21, 2000, when the orchestra first performed her Château de l’âme, five songs for soprano, eight female voices, and orchestra. The BSO also performed her 2001 composition, Nymphéa Reflections on April 20-25, 2006, and gave the world premiere performance of her Notes on Light for cello and orchestra, a BSO 125th anniversary commission, February 22-27, 2007.
Sharing the first half of the program is Britten’s Violin Concerto, dating from 1939, the first work the English composer completed after emigrating to the United States. A pacifist, Britten was deeply disturbed by the gathering storm in Europe, and this concerto is flavored with a sense of impending and inevitable tragedy. Despite the darkness of its character, Britten was very happy with the work, calling it “without question my best piece” upon its completion.
In January 1884, Dvořák traveled to Berlin to attend a performance of the Symphony No. 3 by his close friend and musical mentor Brahms. The inspiration gained from that experience, along with a commission from London later that year, became the impetus for his own Symphony No. 7. Reflecting Dvořák’s inner turmoil at the recent loss of his mother and the outer conflict of Bohemia’s rising nationalism, the Seventh is the composer’s darkest, most severe work. But it is also one of his greatest, and Dvořák was desperately proud of it, telling his publisher that it contained “not one superfluous note,” and writing to a friend that “wherever I go I can think of nothing else. God grant that this Czech music will move the world!”
JUANJO MENA
Juanjo Mena made his BSO debut at Tanglewood on July 31, 2010, when he filled in for James Levine and led the BSO in a program of Berg, Strauss, and Mahler. He made his Symphony Hall debut on October 13-18, 2011, on a program including Bartók’s The Wooden Prince and Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, featuring soloist Yo-Yo Ma.
Juanjo Mena is one of the most renowned Spanish conductors on the international circuit. He was Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Bilbao (1999- 2008) and Principal Guest Conductor of the Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova (2007- 2010). He is now Principal Guest Conductor of the Bergen Filharmoniske Orkestra (2007- 2013) and Principal Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra from 2011- 2012 season. He has conducted prestigious Orchestras in Europe and Asia, as the Oslo Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, BBC Scottish Symphony, RAI Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi or Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. His brilliant career in America has led him to conduct the Symphonic Orchestras from Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston, Indianapolis and Baltimore, among others. Juanjo Mena frequently collaborates with the best Spanish orchestras. Among his future engagements, he will conduct Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Yo-Yo Ma. He has also been invited to conduct the Denmark Radio Orchestra, Dresdner Philharmonie, Orchestre National de Lyon, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Orquesta Nacional de España, Prague Symphony, Sao Paolo Symphony, and Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona I Nacional de Catalunya.
KAIJA SAARIAHO
Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. Born in Helsinki in 1952, she studied at the Sibelius Academy with the pioneering modernist Paavo Heininen and, with Magnus Lindberg and others, she founded the progressive ‘Ears Open’ group. She continued her studies in Freiburg with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber, at the Darmstadt summer courses, and, from 1982, at the IRCAM research institute in Paris. At IRCAM, Saariaho developed techniques of computer-assisted composition and acquired fluency in working on tape and with live electronics. This influenced her approach to writing for orchestra, with its emphasis on the shaping of dense masses of sound in slow transformations. Significantly, her first orchestral piece, Verblendungen (1984), involves a gradual exchange of roles and character between orchestra and tape. And even the titles of her next, linked, pair of orchestral works, Du Cristal (1989) and …à la Fumée (1990) suggest their preoccupation with color and texture. In opera, Saariaho has had outstanding success. L’Amour de loin, with a libretto by Amin Maalouf based on an early biography of the twelfth-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel, received widespread acclaim in its premiere production directed by Peter Sellars at the 2000 Salzburg Festival, and won the composer a prestigious Grawemeyer Award. Adriana Mater, on an original libretto by Maalouf, mixing gritty present-day reality and dreams, followed, again directed by Sellars, at the Opéra Bastille in Paris in March 2006. Emilie, an opera and monodrama for Karita Mattila had its premiere in Lyon in March 2010. Saariaho’s vocal works include Château de l’âme (1996), Oltra mar (1999), the song-cycle Quatre instants (2002), and La Passion de Simone, portraying the life and death of the philosopher Simone Weil, formed part of Sellars’s international festival ‘New Crowned Hope’ in 2006-07. Saariaho’s awards include the Grawemeyer Award, the Wihuri Prize, the Nemmers Prize, and the Sonning Prize. In 2015 she will be the judge of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award.
GIL SHAHAM
A regular guest artist with the BSO since his debut with the orchestra at Symphony Hall in 1992, Gil Shaham last appeared with the BSO during Tanglewood 75th Anniversary season last summer during the John Williams’ 80th Birthday Celebration on August 18 and performing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the BSO and conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos on August 19. He last appeared at Symphony Hall on October 2-4, 2008, performing Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto with the BSO and conductor André Previn.
Gil Shaham is one of the foremost violinists of our time, combining flawless technique with inimitable warmth and a generosity of spirit. He is sought after throughout the world for concerto appearances with leading orchestras and conductors, and he regularly gives recital and ensemble appearances on the great concert stages and at the most prestigious festivals. Shaham continues his long-term exploration of “Violin Concertos of the 1930s,” which comprises performances at some of the most well-established concert venues with the world’s greatest orchestras. In January 2012, he begins the year performing Barber’s Violin Concerto with the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Virginia Symphony. He tackles Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto in February with the New World Symphony and fills out the rest of the season giving performances of the Hartmann, Berg, and Stravinsky concertos with the orchestras of New York, London and Atlanta, respectively. In October, Shaham brings Brahms’s Violin Concerto to Carnegie Hall with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and later in the season he reprises the concerto with the orchestras of San Francisco, Boston and Delaware. This fall also sees Shaham exploring several of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin on a US recital tour. Shaham has more than two dozen concerto and solo CDs to his name, including bestsellers that have appeared on record charts in the US and abroad. These recordings have earned prestigious awards, including multiple Grammys, a Grand Prix du Disque, Diapason d’Or, and Gramophone Editor’s Choice.
TICKET, SPONSORSHIP, AND OTHER PATRON INFORMATION
TICKET INFORMATION
Subscriptions for the BSO’s 2012-13 season are available by calling the BSO Subscription Office at 888-266-7575 or online through the BSO’s website (www.bso.org).