Program

• ROSSINI

  Overture to The Barber of Seville

  1 min note

  One Minute Note

  Rossini’s overture sets the stage for an opera full of wit and comic intrigue. A slow introduction builds to an exciting Allegro con brio, with a well-known “laughing” main theme, and the music crescendos to a sparkling close.

• BOTTESINI

  Bass Concerto No. 2

  1 min note

  One Minute Note

  Bottesini did for the bass what Niccolò Paganini did for the violin, and his Bass Concerto No. 2 is a hallmark in the bass repertory. Rich with lyrical melodies and plenty of virtuosic writing, the work allows the soloist to put their full mastery of the instrument on display.

• HILLBORG

  Through Lost Landscapes

  1 min note

  One Minute Note

  Hillborg’s Through Lost Landscapes alludes to the disaster-struck state of the planet today. Its greatly varied scoring includes dense tone clusters, jazz-style piano, solo passages for soprano saxophone and haunting imitations of bird calls.

• TUBIN

  Bass Concerto

  1 min note

  One Minute Note

  Estonian composer Eduard Tubin wrote his Concerto for Bass and Orchestra for fellow countryman Ludvig Juth, who was a bass player in the Boston Symphony. The work is suffused with expansive melodic ideas and contains a unique cadenza which Juth called “unprecedented for the bass.”

• PUTS

  Concerto for Orchestra

  1 min note

  One Minute Note

  In composing his recent Concerto for Orchestra, Kevin Puts found a “creative entry point” in Amanda Gorman’s poem Hymn for the Hurting about the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Other varied inspirations include a Mozart opera and a 14th-century musical form, the caccia.