In Sunday’s (7/21) Boston Globe, Jeremy Eichler takes an in-depth look at Andris Nelsons, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s new music director. “A few weeks ago, after his image appeared on a giant billboard above the Mass. Pike and before he threw the first pitch at Fenway Park on what the city had officially proclaimed ‘Andris Nelsons Day,’ the 34-year-old Latvian conductor stood in Symphony Hall and … said, ‘I’m really half in a dream now.’ … No one can exactly explain the chemistry between a conductor and an orchestra, or why the same musicians can sound so different depending on who is standing in front of them.… Nelsons on the podium [forges] alliances with players and [projects] his ideas through a striking full-body gestural language that is completely his own.… Until his 20s, Nelsons had never conducted outside [his native] Latvia, but that changed quickly as word drifted out from the Baltics about ‘this fantastic raw talent’ in Riga. … BSO artistic administrator Anthony Fogg first heard Nelsons in 2009, when he made his Met debut conducting Puccini’s ‘Turandot.’ Fogg was struck by ‘this tremendous vibrancy of sound’ Nelsons drew from the pit. His BSO debut came two years later.… Nelsons’s tenure in Boston officially begins in the fall of 2014.”
Posted July 22, 2013
