Regrettably, tenor Johan Botha is ill and has been forced to cancel his appearances here next week, April 17 and 18. We are fortunate that Ben Heppner is available to replace him. The program remains unaltered.
Audio Concert Preview by Robert Kirzinger, BSO Publications Associate
Listen Live!
Sunday, April 20, 3pm on WGBH 89.7 (3pm on All-Classical WGBH) The Saturday, April 18, 8PM Harbison and Mahler performance will be broadcast on WGBH 89.7, Sunday, April 20, 3pm!
About The Music
Maestro James Levine will lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a program including the world premiere of John Harbison’s Symphony No. 5, featuring mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and baritone Nathan Gunn. Also on the program is Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and tenor Ben Heppner.
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison’s Symphony No. 5, a BSO commission, is the third world premiere of the BSO’s 2007-08 season.
Harbison's four-movement symphony sets texts on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The first two movements are based on a poem by Czesław Miłosz, sung by baritone Nathan Gunn. The third movement, a song on a shorter poem by Louis Glück, is for mezzo-soprano, here featuring soloist Kate Lindsey. In the last movement, a poem from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus serves to bring the two voices together. Mahler’s “song symphony” Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”) is a German setting of Chinese poems on the topics of life and death as described through imagery and music prosaic and sublime.
Maestro James Levine will lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a program including the world premiere of John Harbison’s Symphony No. 5, featuring mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and baritone Nathan Gunn. Also on the program is Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and tenor Ben Heppner.
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison’s Symphony No. 5, a BSO commission, is the third world premiere of the BSO’s 2007-08 season.