Boston Philharmonic Orchestra: Kodaly/Liszt/Dvorak

The third Boston Philharmonic concert for the 2019-2020 season takes us to the Bohemian countryside and its environs. Kodaly’s popular Galanta Dances, inspired by the music of his hometown in Hungary, display the brilliant playing of principal clarinetist, Rane Moore.

The Liszt Second Piano Concerto introduces the extraordinary pianist Lucas Debargue to Boston. I was listening to the winners of the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition—including our own local star, George Li, a frequent performer with the BPO and BPYO—when by chance my ear fell on the fourth-place winner. You can do the same thing by going on YouTube. You will probably have the same experience I had: sheer amazement. A self-taught genius, there is an uncanny communicativeness and intelligence that I have rarely come across.

“I have no hesitation,” wrote the great musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey, “in setting Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony along with the C Major Symphony of Schubert and the four symphonies of Brahms as among the greatest and purest examples of this art form since Beethoven.” In the heat of composing it, Dvorak wrote, “wherever I go I think of nothing but my Seventh Symphony, which must be capable of stirring the world.”