Samy Rachid and Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Kevin Puts’s Seven Seascapes at Jordan Hall, Nov. 17. Robert Torres photograph
The Boston Symphony Orchestra staged Kevin Puts’s The Brightness of Light in November, with the composer’s own libretto fashioned from letters between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz. The performances ran during the Museum of Fine Arts’ compelling O’Keeffe/Henry Moore exhibition, although there were no collaborative efforts. I wish I had heard the original version of The Brightness of Light, and the previous staging at Tanglewood (it’s been elsewhere). Puts’s earlier version simply told O’Keeffe’s story.
Renée Fleming and Rod Gilfrey sang the roles. Both soloists had friendly-to-the-voice music, and sounded great. The Brightness of Light didn’t seem to require an entire orchestra often enough, and Steiglitz plays the heavy too easily in this revised libretto. The relationship seems complicated, but the libretto did not make it appear so.
The Brightness of Light was far less engaging than Puts’s chamber work Seven Seascapes, which the Chamber Players included in a Jordan Hall program the previous weekend.
My only takeaway (I had wanted to appreciate The Brightness of Light more deeply) came to this: If you can’t hear the Boston Symphony Chamber Players—and you only have four chances each season—you miss many of the subtly complementary programs the BSO offers.
Face it: BSO musicians are in top playing shape. They perform/rehearse too much to get out of form. And when they sit to read chamber music, not only do they bring that technique, it seems that they play liberated as well. They spend most of their time blending into the collective sound; in the chamber repertory, individual voice has a chance.
Mezzo Sophie Michaux and soprano Corrine Byrne perform Kevin Siegfried's arrangements of Three Shaker Songs, part of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players Nov. 17 program. Robert Torres photograph
A septet for strings, flute, horn and piano, Seven Seascapes skips movement markings, Instead, Puts gives the audience a single line of poetry to describe each movement, and with each seascape, a distinctly etched mood. It ends in a startlingly ppp outro that takes minutes to finally arrive—the kind of hushed moment every regular concertgoer seeks.
Covering the fall season has not worked as planned on Leonore Overture. Let’s look forward to more active winter months: the BSO’s Beethoven symphony cycle—all nine in four programs in January—will certainly find some space here (with Yulianna Avdeeva playing Hammerklavier for Celeb Series in the middle of the cycle), and I’ll be covering the BSO’s subsequent semi-staging of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt for CVNA. Lots of other interesting performances in January as well: Hamelin, Camerata’s Daniel, Jaime Barton, Claremont, Cho. Cheers till then.