Tag Archives: Samuel Barber

Jan 10

Love with A Bitter Core: The BLO & BSO’s “Vanessa”

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Photo credit: Winslow Townson, courtesy of the BSO

Presented by Boston Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with Boston Lyric Opera
Music by Samuel Barber 
Libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti
Conducted by Andris Nelsons
Staging coordination by Alexandra Dietrich
Tanglewood Festival Chorus: Betsy Burleigh, guest choral conductor
Boston Lyric Opera Chorus: Brett Hodgdon, chorus director

Boston Symphony Hall
Thursday, January 8, 2026 
Saturday, January 10, 2026
301 Massachusetts Avenue 
Boston, MA 02115
Online Playbill 

Sung in English with supertitles

Critique by Kitty Drexel

BOSTON — This critique discusses the BLO & BSO concert production of Vanessa currently at Symphony Hall. As you read, please keep in mind several truths: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board, the private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress to steward the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting, voted to dissolve on January 5 after 58 years of American public service. 

The President and his Secretary of War (lol) illegally kidnapped the Venezuelan President and his wife for oil, and Instagram hits. 

A trained ICE mercenary murdered unarmed citizen Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota on January 7 when Good began driving her civilian vehicle away from an enforcement operation. 

These things are not normal. Life under these circumstances, whether you agree with the media’s portrayal of them or not, is not normal.

During these unprecedented times under fascism, the BLO and the BSO are commended for their elegant production of Barber and Menotti’s Vanessa, a 1958 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera by two gay men, one an Italian immigrant. It was composed at a time when it was unthinkable (and frequently illegal) to be out, and Italians weren’t entirely white. Vanessa was a necessary distraction from the impending fall of democracy. Continue reading →

Aug 18

“Knoxville: Summer of 1915” and the Voyage of Nostalgia

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Soprano/Vocals by Sarah Moyer
Piano by Timothy Steele
Artistic Direction by Ryan Turner
Composed by Samuel Barber
Based on prose poem by James Agee

Emmanuel Music
15 Newbury Street
Boston, MA 02116
YouTube

Review by Gillian Daniels

ZOOM — You are here and you are not here. You are waiting in your bedroom for your next Zoom meeting to start, you are in the shower taking fifteen minutes for yourself away from your kids, or you are putting on your mask, ready to head into work where you’re considered essential staff, but not essential enough for customers to remember to wear their masks when you take their order.

Simultaneously, your mind is thinking about your family road trips to Iowa, the raucous laughter of your friends in eighth grade, and traveling, once, to Paris. It’s been months since you’ve seen your family all in one place. You’re in your body, living through a strange time and a terrifying plague, simultaneously overwhelmed and bored while sitting in your room for the ninth hour in a row, feeling the spray from the showerhead, or sitting as far as you can from other masked people on the T, some of whom let their masks sit beneath their nostrils because, apparently, the smell of the train is that important. But you’re also encapsulated in your memories.

You are inside a refuge of the mind, the kind Knoxville: Summer of 1915 invokes with Sarah Moyer’s voice and the parred down instrumentation of Timothy Steele. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is performed as part of a series called Summer Sessions from Emmanuel Music. Continue reading →

May 14

Quorum Boston presents “The Gay Spring”

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Boston is super gay!

Quorum Boston is a local LGBTQ vocal ensemble. We program music almost exclusively by queer composers, with the goal of combating the erasure of queerness from canonical composers and amplifying the voices of living composers.

This concert explores themes of love, spring, and water. It features the world premiere of Upallay, a piece by inti figgis-vizuetta, our Resident Composer. Other works included in our program are Britten’s “Heaven Haven,” Barber’s “To be sung on the Water,” Cage’s “Litany for the Whale,” Mari Valverde’s “En la noche entraremos,” a rare choral work by Tchaikovsky, and several of Hildegard von Bingen’s chants.

Come enjoy the gay spring with us!
Performance Schedule:
May 14, 2018
8PM
Josephine A. Fiorentino Community Center
123 Antwerp Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02134
Free!
Collected donations go to LGBTQ+ programming at the Josephine A. Fiorentino Community Center in Lower Allston.

Or,

May 19, 2018
8PM
First Church Somerville
89 College Ave, Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
Tickets:
Suggested Donation: $20
Student/Low Income: $10
No one turned away: Free if you can’t pay.

Both performance venues are accessible to disabled patrons. Rehearsals are too! Interested in joining Quorum Boston? Connect with us HERE.