Cristian Măcelaru conducts Anna Clyne, Elgar, Debussy, and Enescu featuring Yo-Yo Ma, cello

Romanian conductor Cristian Măcelaru, a 2010 Tanglewood Music Center Fellow, makes his BSO debut. Masquerade, by the U.S.-based English composer Anna Clyne, evokes the unique milieu of mid-18th-century London promenade concerts; this is the BSO’s first performance of Clyne’s music. Tanglewood favorite Yo-Yo Ma joins for Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto, one of the English composer’s final works, in part a profoundly lyrical meditation on a world in turmoil after the devastation of World War I. Claude Debussy’s La Mer—a work given its American premiere by the BSO in 1907—is virtually a three-movement symphony miraculously depicting in music the changing states of the sea and sun over the course of a day. Closing the concert is Romanian composer Georges Enescu, one of the 20th-century’s greatest musicians. His familiar Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, based on his country’s folk music, is a delightful and finely wrought staple of Pops orchestras.