In Wednesday’s (6/6) Washington Post, Anne Midgette reports, “ ‘Our focus, increasingly, will be on international touring,’ Rita Shapiro, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, said in an interview in April, when the orchestra announced its tour of South America from June 12 to 28. That was no idle boast. Tuesday, the NSO announced that only eight months after its return from South America, the orchestra will go on another tour, of Europe, for 11 days in January and February. … When the NSO went to China in 2009, it was the orchestra’s first tour in seven years. Now, it appears that touring, as NSO Music Director Christoph Esch¬enbach promised, is becoming a matter of course. … The five countries the NSO is visiting on its South America tour are not frequent stops on North American orchestras’ touring calendars. But with this European trip, the NSO is entering the epicenter of Western classical music, traveling from Madrid to Paris, and making four stops throughout Germany, the home turf of the repertory Eschenbach most loves. … The programs include Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, a renowned orchestral showpiece, and a string-orchestra edition of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, the towering string quartet movement originally written for, and sometimes still performed as part of, the 13th Quartet in ¬B-flat.”
Posted June 6, 2012
