In Tuesday’s (2/11) Boston Globe, Jeremy Eichler reviews the Boston Symphony Chamber Players’ February 9 concert at Jordan Hall, which marked the ensemble’s 50th anniversary. “In keeping with Sunday’s local theme, all of the composers had links to Boston with varying degrees of closeness,” he writes. The concert was “bookended” by two works from the early 20th century—Charles Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies and Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet—and included four world premieres: “Games,” an “instantly appealing work” by Gunther Schuller for wind quintet and strings; Yehudi Wyner’s “brief but important” wind quintet “Into the evening air”; Kati Agócs’s septet “Devotion,” which “boasts some angular yet lyrical horn writing over churning harp lines”; and Hannah Lash’s “Three Shades Without Angles,” a work that “borrows its instrumentation from a famous Debussy sonata (for flute, viola and harp) but takes those instruments on a very different journey. … All of the afternoon’s premieres received alert and exacting performances, with BSO assistant conductor Andris Poga stepping up deftly whenever a conductor was needed.”
Posted February 12, 2014
