Archive for September, 2010

Thinking small, winning big

By Andrew L. Pincus, Special to the Eagle, Monday August 23, 2010

LENOX – In music as in life, victories can be won as much through grace as power.

Ludovic Morlot, a former assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, returned to the Tanglewood podium Friday night in a program of small pieces with a small orchestra. It was a small success only in the sense that in music like this, big is the enemy of small.

Morlot arrived as the recently appointed director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, a sizable plum and his first directorship. Whether by design or coincidence, he followed another former assistant conductor who has turned into a success story, Robert Spano, to the podium.

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Premieres make for a memorable Tanglewood weekend

By Matthew Guerrieri, Globe Correspondent, August 24, 2010

LENOX -The past weekend at Tanglewood was dedicated to young conductors, familiar soloists, and patches to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s repertoire: Programs were sprinkled with BSO premieres. Some were understandable. Jennifer Higdon’s “blue cathedral” dates only from 2000, and Mendelssohn’s violin-and-piano Concerto is something of a rarity. But Franz von Suppé’s “Poet and Peasant” Overture? That venerable chestnut, it turns out, had never migrated from the Pops library.

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Tackling a fill-in role, and sometimes more, pressure brought out the best in them

By David Weininger, Globe Correspondent, August 15, 2010

In 1990, during Robert Spano’s first season as assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony, the orchestra was playing a concert at Carnegie Hall. Music director Seiji Ozawa had ordered that picture-taking be allowed only during the last minute of the performance, and Spano was charged with enforcing that decree. Vigilant in his task, he noticed one zealous photographer going for his camera before the appointed time. So the young conductor crawled over and tackled the rogue photojournalist.

“And I thought, how do you write up this job description?” recalled Spano, now music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. “You know, that’s the ‘other duties as assigned.’ ”

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