The Score | Red-Letter Evenings

One of this fall’s hottest tickets was the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Strauss Elektra, with the incendiary Christine Goerke as the avenging title character, performed in concert versions at Boston’s Symphony Hall and New York’s Carnegie Hall. The performances, coming just two months after the BSO’s announcement that Andris Nelsons would continue as music director through 2022, drew rapturous critical reviews and ovations in both cities. Performances with vocalists and choruses have been hallmarks of Nelsons’s tenure at the BSO, from Strauss’s Salome in March 2014 at Symphony Hall, with soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin in the title role, to Mahler’s operatically proportioned Symphony No. 8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”) at Tanglewood last summer, with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, TMC alumni, Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston University Tanglewood Institute Chorus, American Boy Choir, and vocal soloists.