Andris Nelsons and the BSO continue their multi-season focus on music of Richard Strauss with his own Symphonic Fantasy on Die Frau ohne Schatten (“Woman Without a Shadow”), a 1946 orchestral distillation of his fabulist 1919 opera. The BSO hasn’t played music from the opera since the 1960s under Erich Leinsdorf. The concert opens with the great American composer William Grant Still’s Threnody: In Memoriam Jan Sibelius, composed in 1965. Though from very different traditions, Still and Sibelius were known to admire one another’s music. Closing this single-concert program is perhaps the BSO’s most famous commissioned work: Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, music premiered by the BSO under Serge Koussevitzky’s direction in December 1944.

Andris Nelsons, conductor
STILL Threnody: In Memory of Jan Sibelius
STRAUSS Symphonic Fantasy on Die Frau ohne Schatten
BARTOK Concerto for Orchestra