“A few decades ago, I would not have put money on the survival of the concerto, except as an antiquarian curiosity,” writes Justin Davidson in Tuesday’s (3/21) New York Magazine. “And yet composers have kept returning to the sturdy drama of a lone virtuoso (or a few) fronting a thronging orchestra, and new works by Sofia Gubaidulina, Lera Auerbach, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Timo Andres suggest that the genre is having a new heyday.… A few weeks ago, Andris Nelsons conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto, a sublimely restive meditation for violin (played by Baiba Skride), cello (Harriet Krijgh), and bayan, a Russian button accordion played by Elsbeth Moser…. Lera Auerbach lucked out with the violinist Leonidas Kavakos—who didn’t so much play her concerto, NYx, as emit it like a stream of high-energy protons—and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Gilbert. … Yo-Yo Ma showed up with another extravagantly beguiling new showpiece, this one by the orchestra’s resident composer, Esa-Pekka Salonen.… On April 20, Jonathan Biss arrives to perform Timo Andres’s piano concerto The Blind Bannister … In his final weeks as music director, Gilbert seems intent on reminding audiences what he’s wrought: an orchestra that treats the music of our time as a boon instead of a duty.”
Posted March 23, 2017
