Boston Symphony Orchestra at United in Sound: America at 250, Part 1
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 16 April 2026 14:30
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Chris Lee
At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Thursday, April 9th, I had the exceptional privilege of attending the first of two outstanding concerts on consecutive days—presented by Carnegie Hall as part of its festival, United in Sound: America at 250—performed by the splendid musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the brilliant direction of Andris Nelsons.
The event started strongly with an impressive realization of John Adams’s marvelous concert suite, Three Scenes from Nixon in China, excellently sung by the now legendary soprano Renée Fleming—she wore a fabulous gown—and baritone Thomas Hampson, along with the superb Tanglewood Festival Chorus conducted by Lisa Wong. Robert Kirzinger provided some background in a useful note on the opera from which the selections were drawn:
Composed between 1985 and 1987, Nixon in China grew out of a suggestion from the director Peter Sellars, who, along with librettist Alice Goodman, collaborated with Adams on most of his stage works. Adams has also worked frequently with Nixon in China choreographer Mark Morris. The plot of Nixon in China is based on historic events that took place just 15 years before the opera’s premiere.
The music is written in the minimalist idiom forged by artists like Philip Glass and Michael Nyman.
The second half of the evening was even more remarkable, consisting of a terrific account of Antonín Dvořák’s magnificent Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95, “From the New World,” completed in 1893. The composer was quoted in an interview as saying the following about the United States of America:
The future of music in this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies … These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil [with] nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.
The main theme of the initial, Allegro molto—which has a solemn, Adagio introduction that ushers in a highly dramatic series of statements—is stirring, as is the movement on the whole, but there are subdued, often very beautiful, quasi-pastoral passages—the composer’s prodigious melodic invention is on full display here and throughout the work. The music builds to measures of climactic intensity more than once before finishing forcefully.
Annotator Steven Ledbetter explains:
According to the composer, the two middle movements were inspired in part by passages in American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, on the subject of which he had considered writing an opera. The slow movement was suggested by the funeral of Minnehaha [ . . . . ] (His student William Arms Fisher later wrote the lyrics to the song “Goin’ Home” to fit the melody.) Dvořák’s image for the third movement was the dance in the scene of Hiawatha’s wedding feast.
The ensuing Largo at first recalls the gravity of the first movement’s introduction, but with the articulation of the exquisite primary theme, a predominantly lyrical inspiration becomes manifest; a lovely, contrasting motif that emerges later has a more wistful quality, but a brief, bucolic interlude momentarily summons back some of the portentous grandeur of the symphony before the movement’s haunting, if gentle, conclusion. Much of the succeeding Scherzo, which is also marked Molto vivace, has a suspenseful, seemingly inexorable, forward momentum, but again there are alternating, charming, leisurely, dance-like sections that exude a cheerful spirit; the movement ends abruptly and emphatically. The Allegro con fuoco finale begins dynamically but again there are quiet passages that project a graceful affirmation that differs from the powerful exuberance that ultimately triumphs before it closes softly.
The musicians deservedly received a very enthusiastic ovation.