Music Director Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In Sunday’s (4/27) Boston Classical Review, Jonathan Blumhofer writes, “On Saturday night, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons unveiled [its ‘Decoding Shostakovich’] series’ penultimate program.” The orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 as well as Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms, commissioned by the BSO in 1930 … Aleksandra Vrebalov’s ‘Love Canticles,’ a BSO-commissioned response to the Symphony of Psalms … received its world premiere on Saturday night…. The Serbian native’s setting of parts of Psalms 103 and 104 invoked commands to praise—though the composer’s pre-performance comments indicated that she is less interested in extolling a deity than in celebrating humanity, nature, and music…. Vrebalov crafted a potent realization of her chosen texts. The score is clearly structured and its deployment of aleatoric gestures cogent. Though often homophonic, the choral writing breaks into counterpoint at strategic moments. While her instrumentation is the same as Stravinsky’s, ‘Love Canticles’ sounds nothing like it…. ‘Love Canticles,’ which Nelsons, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and BSO delivered with stylistic verve on Saturday, manages to capture the nervous tension undergirding the relationship between a finite creature and an infinite divinity. There is, throughout, a sense of wonder in its floating vocal lines, as well as invention in its unpredictable instrumental turns.”
