At the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Music Director Andris Nelsons and Principal Trumpet Thomas Rolfs perform Detlev Glanert’s Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra. Photo by Robert Torres.
In Friday’s (4/26) Boston Musical Intelligencer, Victor Khatutsky writes, “The penultimate week of the BSO season started on April 25th with unequivocal dominance of brass. Sofia Gubaidulina’s Wrath of God opened with a triple forte of the tuba, of the sort that makes one realize that no subwoofer in one’s home theater can replicate a live performance. Dedicated to Beethoven and hinting at his question-shaped motifs, the mighty blast surely made the three-quarter full Symphony Hall pay attention to life’s persistent questions. The strings picked up some of the rhetoric, and it developed into a powerful and harmonious noise juxtaposing strings with possibly season’s most powerful wall of brass, with a quartet of Wagner Tubas … [Led by Music Director Andris Nelsons] the BSO sound was so powerful and glorious … The celebration of brass continued with BSO Premiere of Detlev Glanert’s Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, commissioned for and once performed by the Principal Trumpet Thomas Rolfs in Tanglewood with TMC orchestra…. The concerto ended harmoniously and nostalgically, though ultimately leaving the listener with one main impression: that of witnessing some miraculous trumpet playing.” Also on the program was Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 4.
