As programming initiatives go, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Shakespeare and music celebration, now in its third and final week, could easily have been a somewhat banal smattering of Shakespeare-themed chestnuts in polished performances by guest conductors.
But happily, the BSO has instead taken the Shakespeare theme as an opportunity to frame a genuinely exploratory mini-festival that should be a model for future seasons. Music director Andris Nelsons has been leading all of the orchestral programs, with each containing new or recent works. And a stimulating series of related Insights events has allowed this festival to reach far beyond the confines of the subscription schedule.
Over the last three-plus weeks, these parallel events have tapped the city’s intellectual capital (the scholars Thomas Kelly, Stephen Greenblatt, and Gordon Teskey have been involved); they have pulled in the musicians of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra (which performed Verdi’s “Otello”); and, not least, they given BSO players a chance to shine as chamber musicians in Symphony Hall. Last week, seeing cellist Mickey Katz alone onstage deftly navigating formidable terrain from Ned Rorem’s “After Reading Shakespeare,” or watching violinist Victor Romanul and pianist Randall Hodgkinson joyfully sail through Korngold’s music for “Much Ado About Nothing,” provided more than just the standard rewards of well-performed chamber music. Programs like this deepen the public’s understanding of the BSO not as a faceless monolith, but as a collective of gifted individuals with their own musical interests and styles.
For the final subscription offering, artistic administrator Anthony Fogg, the festival’s less-visible guiding hand, steered a commission that’s been in the works since the Levine days toward Shakespearean waters. The American composer George Tsontakis was asked to write a new Shakespeare-themed work for BSO English horn player Robert Sheena and the orchestra. Rather than attempting yet another work inspired by one of the well-known plays, Tsontakis wisely turned to the Sonnets, responding in each of his four movements to an individual poem (Nos. 30, 12, 60, and 75 were chosen).
The English horn’s distinctive dusky timbre, its piquant inwardness, has of course inspired many composers in moments of intimate song. Just think of the beloved solo in the slow movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. That wistful, elegiac tone is present at the opening (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”) of Tsontakis’s score, titled “Sonnets.” The second movement (“When I do count the clock that tells the time”) interweaves turmoil and classical poise as soloist and orchestra, mirroring the text, ruminate on the passing of the hours of a life.
The third movement (“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore”) contains the work’s fleetest and most agitated music. The finale (“So are you to my thoughts as food to life”) ventures into darker and more violently dissonant territory, before ending with a gesture of hard-won tranquility. Overall, it is a resourceful, expertly crafted, and appealing score, delivered by Sheena with virtuosity and insight in Thursday night’s premiere. Especially with the sonnet texts offering audiences an additional point of entry, one can imagine Sheena performing this work widely.
Tsontakis, perhaps somewhat playfully, calls his movements “tone poems,” though for Richard Strauss, the tone poem was serious business as both early proving ground and a forum for the musical experimentation through which he became, well, Strauss. It was fascinating and obviously apropos in this context to hear the rarely performed “Macbeth,” among his first efforts in this genre. For its part, the orchestra under Nelsons’s baton sounded more at ease and eloquent in subsequent selections by Dvorak (the “Othello” Overture) and Tchaikovsky (“Romeo and Juliet”), the latter combining sweep, fantasy, and detail in gratifying proportions. Tchaikovsky, like so many others, clearly found in the Bard a key to unlock his own creative stores. “It is as if I was made to set this play to music,” he once wrote. And who are we to disagree?
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
At Symphony Hal, Thursday (repeats Friday and Saturday)
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com