Andris Nelsons conducts Still, Strauss, and Sibelius featuring violinist Lisa Batiashvili
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Symphony Hall, Boston, MA
Acclaimed Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili returns to Symphony Hall for performances of Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. A violinist himself, Sibelius employed his distinctive, Finnish folk music-influenced style in this fiery and lyrical concerto, the final version of which was premiered under Richard Strauss’s direction in 1905. Strauss’s own Symphonic Fantasy on Die Frau ohne Schatten (“Woman Without a Shadow”) is a 1946 distillation of his fabulist 1919 opera; the BSO hasn’t played music from the opera since the 1960s under Erich Leinsdorf. The concert opens with the great American composer William Grant Still’s Threnody: In Memoriam Jan Sibelius, composed in 1965. Though from very different traditions, Still and Sibelius were known to admire one another’s music.
Program Notes & Works
Threnody: In Memory of Jan Sibelius
In paying homage to Sibelius, the Threnody memorializes a figure whose music, though shaped decisively by his own Finnish identity, had itself attained the status of something like a “universal idiom” by 1965 (if popularity on global concert stages is any metric).
Symphonic Fantasy on Die Frau ohne Schatten
Strauss's Symphonic Fantasy on his earlier opera Die Frau ohne Schatten served several purposes: it was relatively brief, employed a smaller, more manageable orchestra, and contained music that was still unfamiliar enough to be novel.
Violin Concerto
In no violin concerto is the soloist’s first note—delicately dissonant and off the beat—so beautiful.