A scene from Boston Lyric Opera’s The Seasons, Pam Tanowitz choreography. Nile Scott Studio photograph
Boston Lyric Opera, The Seasons
March 15, at the Emerson Paramount
coproduced with American Modern Opera Company and SCENE
Bubbles?
Ray Chen performs the Tchaikovsky concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Teddy Abrams conducting, March 16 at Symphony Hall. Hilary Scott photograph
Boston Symphony Orchestra
March 16, Symphony Hall
Teddy Abrams conducting
Tchaikovsky, Tilson Thomas, Bernstein
Teddy Abrams’s Boston Symphony Orchestra debut last weekend veered from ridiculous to sublime.
At root of both: violinist Ray Chen, performing the Tchaikovsky concerto in front of his devoted iFans, playing sublimely but sharing the overall sublime with songs composed by Michael Tilson Thomas (settings of Whitman, originally for Thomas Hampson, here Dashon Burton). And some onstage antics.
I hate the Tchaik concerto, its beauty and length eagerly searching out emotional vulnerabilities. It’s a technical marvel, as is Chen.
The virtuosic concerto filled the first half of the program, which experienced much more phone shushing than usual—Chen’s devotees. Chen has long had an active life online, some comic, lots interactive, and those folks were in the house. And selling out a Sunday matinee—cheers to that.
The green line queue to see Chen at intermission for a photo was formidable. The line ran from the green room door down the hall, all the way to the bar. The second half of the program began with a hundred people still on line—lots of fan kids, but also lots of dating-something couples, dressed smartly for fun and a selfie with the star. It must have been that way for the other three performances, although I didn’t check.
And that was apex of the ridiculous/sublime moment. While the fans preened in line, inside the hall Teddy Abrams was conducting the second half of the program, which began with three gut-wrenching songs by MTT, his mentor. MTT has touched everyone; imagine what it was like for a nine-year-old (Abrams) to write a ten-page letter to MTT after seeing him conduct—and get a response. That was Abrams’s start, sort of, and they became friends and colleagues.
Anyway, the songs, three settings from Whitman, encapsulated here:
But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!
Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging
It was a moment. Bernstein’s West Side Story dances finished the program, glorious in the nostalgia of that moment. A busted cello string (first chair Alexandre Lecarme, swapping with Mickey Katz that somehow invoked hysteria—I was behind and couldn’t see anything except snickering) didn’t break the spell. Just added more ridiculous.
The Poet, underappreciated. Nile Scott Studio photograph
Finally, for those artists who present: if a production doesn’t match up to pre-conceived artistic vision, don’t ask reviewers not to review.
Unless you’re not going to charge money, or even invite the public. It draws far more attention to the problem than it deserves, not the opposite. In this case, an absurdly talented team, with months of work into a project that was brilliantly conceived, was left unappreciated.