Prometheus | Music for the Senses
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Symphony Hall, Boston, MA
Andris Nelsons, conductor
Yefim Bronfman, piano
Anna Gawboy, lighting research
Justin Townsend, lighting designer
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
James Burton, conductor
Anna CLYNE Color Field
WAGNER Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde
Intermission
LISZT Prometheus
SCRIABIN Prometheus, Poem of Fire, for piano, color organ, chorus, and orchestra
This week's performances by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus are supported by the Alan J. and Suzanne W. Dworsky Fund for Voice and Chorus.
A program of color: It opens with Anna Clyne’s Color Field, inspired in part by the vibrancy of a Mark Rothko painting. Followed by Richard Wagner’s ecstatic Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, and Franz Liszt’s Prometheus. The program closes with Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus, Poem of Fire. When Alexander Scriabin wrote Prometheus, Poem of Fire, he conceived of a “light organ” that would project colors corresponding to his music. Prometheus premiered in 1911 with future BSO Music Director Serge Koussevitzky, whose 150th birthday year we celebrate in 2024.
The April 5 Friday Preview will be with Robert Kirzinger, Director of Program Publications, and Anna Gawboy, lighting researcher. The talk will begin at 12:15pm, and admission is included with a ticket to that afternoon's performance.
Saturday, April 6, at 6:15pm
Admission included with 8pm concert ticket on April 6
Anne Chao, flute
Cynthia Tseng, piano
MESSIAEN Le Merle Noir
Panel Discussion: How We Hear – the evolution of music perception
Dr. Lisa Wong, moderator (Associate Co-Director, Arts & Humanities Initiative, Harvard Medical School)
Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel (Tufts University, author of Music, Language, and the Brain)
Alexandra Rieger (Cognitive Neuroscientist, Mechatronic Sensory Design Engineer, and Multi-Instrumentalist; Ph.D. candidate, MIT)
Thursday's performance will end around 9:15pm, Friday's performance will end around 3:15pm, and Saturday's performance will end around 9:45pm.
- The Walter Piston Society Concert
Performance Details
Apr 4, 2024, 7:30pm EDT
Featuring
Program Notes & Works
Color Field
Anna Clyne’s Color Field (2020) is a musical response to the painter Mark Rothko’s vibrant Yellow, Red, Orange. A painter as well as a composer, Clyne is stimulated by correspondences between visual art and music.
Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde is about love: love repressed and unacknowledged, then helplessly and haplessly expressed, and fulfilled, after emotional torment, only through death.
Prometheus, Symphonic Poem No. 5
Franz Liszt based this symphonic poem on Johann Gottfried Herder’s Prometheus Unbound, conceived as a sequel to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.
Prometheus, Poem of Fire, for piano, chorus, and orchestra, Opus 60
For Prometheus, Alexander Scriabin conceived a visual dimension: a “color organ” that would correspond to the work’s musical content.
"Music, really, is something that’s incorporated into the brain."
– Dr. Lisa Wong, Harvard Medical School
