In Friday’s (3/11) Boston Globe, David Weininger writes, “At a little after 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 24, Sean Newhouse stepped to the podium of Symphony Hall. Just two hours earlier, he had received word that James Levine, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s ailing music director, had withdrawn from that evening’s performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony—a piece whose technical and emotional demands give it a place in the repertoire all its own. Newhouse, one of the BSO’s two assistant conductors, had never led a public performance of the piece, with any orchestra—he had rehearsed just the first three movements with the BSO earlier in the week, when he (and the rest of Boston) still expected Levine on the podium.” Earlier that week, Newhouse had participated in the League of American Orchestras’s Bruno Walter National Conductor preview in New Orleans. “ ‘There were places where I was beating things the same way [Levine] had, just because I didn’t want to confuse anybody,’ he recalls. … By the time of the final performance, the following Tuesday evening, the dynamic on stage had changed. Newhouse’s gestures had become more precise; the flow of the music and the rapport with the orchestra were clearer. If the first concert was a compromise, this one was clearly his performance.”
Posted March 11, 2011
