“The most remarkable thing in Boston classical music in 2016 was a trio of performances that not only upgraded the city’s profile as a locus for contemporary music but promised more to come,” writes David Weininger in Sunday’s (12/18) Boston Globe. “The common thread was composer-conductor-pianist Thomas Adès, beginning his three-year stint as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first artistic partner. That term has a dully bureaucratic ring to it, but there was nothing routine about Adès’s activities during his time here. With the Boston Symphony Chamber Players he devised a variegated program that stretched across centuries; with tenor Ian Bostridge he gave an idiosyncratic yet devastating performance of Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’; finally, he curated and conducted a death-haunted program dominated by his own vocal tone poem ‘Totentanz.’ … That program also demonstrated a composer’s depth of insight into scores by Sibelius and Britten.… Whatever his residency brings in the future—he will be at the Tanglewood Music Center next summer—it is already off to an inspiring start. It has also given the orchestra a high-profile collaborator at a time when its affiliation with music director Andris Nelsons is flourishing on a week-in, week-out basis.”
Posted December 19, 2016
