At the Boston Symphony Orchestra, narrator Eli Danker and conductor Omer Meir Wellber joined the BSO for the U.S. premiere of Ella Milch-Sheriff's “The Eternal Stranger.” Photo by Hilary Scott.
“On Thursday night … Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber made his Boston Symphony Orchestra debut with an unusual program devoted to a kind of Beethoven mash-up framed by ‘The Eternal Stranger,’ a new monodrama for orchestra and actor by Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff, receiving here its American premiere,” writes Jeremy Eichler in Friday’s Boston Globe (login may be required). “ ‘The Eternal Stranger’ grapples with … what exactly to do with Beethoven at this late date … Milch-Sheriff’s score for actor and orchestra, with a text from a poem by Joshua Sobol … presents a Beethoven-like artist on a journey through lands where he is cast as other … The contemporary refugee crisis and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resonate between the notes of this work. Musically, Milch-Sheriff interweaves classical, Arabic, and Jewish idioms into a dreamlike mixture…. Following the Milch-Sheriff, Wellber went without pause into a kind of Beethoven medley featuring the Funeral March from the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and the ‘Leonore’ Overture No. 3, in theory tracing a program from estrangement to mourning to an exuberant celebration of freedom.” The first half of the program featured Midori in an “electrifying” performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.
