“The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra opened its season at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, its home house, on Friday night,” after musicians and management agreed to a new one-year contract on September 23, writes Anne Midgette in Sunday’s (9/29) Washington Post. “When conductor Marin Alsop and the musicians took the stage … they were greeted with a long ovation. ‘I’m not sure I can talk,’ said a visibly moved Alsop…. All of this background puts any concert under a kind of existential filter. What is the purpose of the orchestra? How necessary is it to the city? How glad are people that it’s back? The answer to the last seemed to be ‘very.’ … To add another existential touch, fate was the theme of the program, with … the overture to Verdi’s ‘Forza del Destino;’ Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (which winds around a ‘fate’ theme from the start); and the Voodoo Violin Concerto written in 2002 by the dynamic Daniel Bernard Roumain, a piece shot through with otherworldly implications…. The night started on a sober note with [‘Processional: Death of Poe’] by Christopher Rouse, the Baltimore-based composer … who was BSO composer-in-residence in the 1980s and who died this month at the age of 70.”
Posted September 30, 2019
In photo: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Marin Alsop in performance. Photo by Margot Schulman
