Elim Chan conducts Brahms, Brian Raphael Nabors, and Tchaikovsky featuring pianist Igor Levit
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Symphony Hall, Boston, MA
Hong Kong-born conductor Elim Chan, chief conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, makes her BSO debut and acclaimed Russian-German pianist Igor Levit makes his BSO subscription series debut in these concerts. Mr. Levit performs Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a work of grand scope and widely varying character and requiring great virtuosity. The young Alabama-born composer Brian Raphael Nabors’s orchestral work Pulse aims to suggest, in several contrasting episodes, the unifying energy of many different facets of life on earth. The nickname of Tchaikovsky’s colorful and dynamic Little Russian Symphony refers not to his homeland, but to a part of the Ukraine then known as “Little Russia”; the nickname comes from the Ukrainian folk melodies used in the piece.
Featuring
Program Notes & Works
Piano Concerto No. 2
It was the last work Brahms added to his repertory as a pianist, and for someone who had long given up regular practicing to have gotten through it at all is amazing.
Pulse
Pulse is an exuberant display of expressive virtuosity: a demonstration of Nabors’s ability, like a film composer, to shift emotional gears quickly while strongly maintaining the thread of the musical narrative.
Symphony No. 2, Little Russian
Rimsky-Korsakov and his crowd admired Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 for its extensive use of Ukrainian and Russian folk tunes as basic thematic material.
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