Virtual Concert Hall

BU School of Music is proud to launch the Virtual Concert Hall, which is designed to showcase work performed by BU students and faculty. For the first time, we are proud to be able to present videos in High Definition. If you are experiencing difficulty viewing the videos, it may be due to your internet connection speed, and we recommended disabling the High Definition by clicking on the “HD” box embedded in each video.

Monday, April 2nd, 2012
“Requiem for a Generation: Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich”

Boston University Symphony Orchestra
and Symphonic Chorus

David Hoose, conductor
Janna Baty, soprano
Yeghishe Manucharyan, tenor
Anton Belov, baritone

Concert Program

Patrick Wood Uribe: Pre-concert lecture

Patrick Wood Uribe holds a PhD in Musicology from Princeton University, a BA and MA with honors in Modern Languages from Oxford University, and a postgraduate degree in violin performance from the Royal Academy of Music. He is an Assistant Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Boston University.

 

Sergei Rachmaninoff:  The Bells, Op. 35

Written in 1915 in response to an onomatopoeic Edgar Allen Poe poem of the same name, Rachmaninoff’s The Bells is a choral symphony sung in four parts, in allegiance to the poem.  The piece begins in glittering fantasy, with Silver Sleigh Bells and moves on to contentment tinged with reluctance in Wedding Bells; the two sections that follow move into more frightening, followed by funereal, territories, with only a twelfth-hour anticipatory tinge of redemption. Sung here by Janna Baty, soprano and Boston University alumni Anton Belov, baritone, and Yeghishe Manucharyan, tenor, this work embodies both the sonorous meanings held by bells in our cultural rituals and the quotidian, universal sadness created by the individual and societal struggles of the world’s citizenry.

 

Dmitri Shostakovich:  Symphony No. 11 (The Year 1905)

Casting an eye over the previous half-century, with his Symphony No. 11, Shostakovich produces musical images of immediacy appropriate to the lurid, Technicolor era of cinema in which the piece was written (1957). With the subject of bloody revolution in the foreground, such imagery is an effective demonstration of the role the arts can play in illuminating and reflecting the world’s most complex problems.