BSO Welcomes Andris Nelsons

Kristine Opolais ad Jonas Kaufman Join the Maestro

By: Susan Hall - Sep 28, 2014

 

The Boston Community Welcomes its New Maestro.  Report from the BSO.

Marking a new era in the 134-year history of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons made his highly anticipated debut as the BSO’s new music director tonight, September 27, at 8 p.m. at Symphony Hall. When Mr. Nelsons officially took the stage as the new BSO Music Director this evening, he led the orchestra, at age 35, as the youngest conductor to hold that title with the orchestra in over 100 years. The fifteenth music director since the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s founding in 1881, Mr. Nelsons is also the first Latvian-born conductor to assume the post.

For this celebratory occasion marking his first concert as BSO Music Director, Andris Nelsons opened tonight’s program with the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser—the first live opera Nelsons ever heard as a child and the work that would set him on the path of becoming a conductor—putting a meaningful focus on this exciting new collaboration between conductor and orchestra. The acclaimed soprano Kristine Opolais, Mr. Nelsons’ wife, and Jonas Kaufmann, one of the leading tenors of our time, were featured in several beloved operatic masterworks, including solo and duet works by Wagner and Puccini. The orchestra and Mr. Nelsons returned to center stage for the concert’s grand finale performance of Respighi’s dazzling showpiece Pines of Rome.