The warm yellow lights of Symphony Hall lit up on Sept. 30. After 568 days, the hall once again opened its gate to embrace musicians from Boston Symphony Orchestra and music lovers who had waited too long for a live concert put off endlessly by the pandemic. Queuing in front of the box office, the audience was restless. All felt that the concert was a sign of revitalization.
The concert started with Consecration of the House of Beethoven. The piece itself was composed as the symbol of a new beginning: Beethoven wrote it for the reopening of the Josefstadt Theater on Oct. 3, 1822. More importantly, it had always been a special one to the orchestra. The BSO program book introduces it as “the first work performed by the BSO to open the orchestra’s very first subscription program in Oct. 1881.” Looking back at the panic about the pandemic and the new vision of life that unfolds beyond, the piece seems all the more fitting for the opening of this season.
After the stimulating opening, John Williams presented his Violin Concerto No. 2 with Anne-Sophie Mutter. It was not the first time the two musicians cooperated, and it was as appreciable as always. John Williams introduced the piece as one written for Anne-Sophie Mutter and about the violin itself. Certainly, as Jonathan Blumhofer mentioned in his review for the concert given at Tanglewood, the “portamento phrasings, flexible vibrato and affinity for jazz” reveal to the audience not only how skillfully and elegantly Mutter plays but also how rich the sound of the instrument itself can be.
As a special present for the audience, they then presented The Long Goodbye. Written for the 1973 film, the song had probably never been played by an orchestra—they don’t seem to be compatible with one another. Yet the performance proved to be captivating. Mutter’s violin-playing and the orchestra in the background deprived the piece of some of its freedom and melancholia yet endowed it with a quality sonorous and grandiose.
The last piece presented was Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, concluding the concert on a lively energetic note. Walking out of the Symphony Hall, I felt that the late autumnwind of Boston announced an imminent winter. Yet a spring had just bloomed in the Hall: the desire for music imbued the air with liveliness. Music and hope outlive the pandemic, and now, a new life force is awakening.
