The Boston University Symphony Orchestra and Symphonic Chorus return to Boston’s Symphony Hall tonight to perform Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D minor and Igor Stravinsky’s Perséphone. The concert marks David Hoose’s last time at the podium before he leaves his post as a College of Fine Arts professor and director of orchestral activities.
“David and I made a wish list of pieces that we would just love to work on and that we’d never gotten to work on,” says CFA lecturer Scott Allen Jarrett (CFA’99,’08), who will conduct the Fauré. “The beautiful thing about the BU orchestra and chorus is that it’s large and not limited by professional budgets and numbers of string players. Both David and I are huge fans of Stravinsky. And Perséphone is obscure, sung in fast, sophisticated French.”
With a libretto by French novelist André Gide, the Stravinsky is particularly challenging because it mixes singing with spoken parts. And unlike typical choral scores, which show all the parts, the Perséphone score is specific to each group—altos see only their part, sopranos their specific parts, and so on, he explains. To complement the Stravinsky piece, the ethereal, 35-minute-long Fauré was the “best and most obvious choice, a piece that a lot of people will have heard, though most are familiar with the chamber version rather than the fully orchestrated performance they will hear tonight,” says Jarrett, who is also the Marsh Chapel music director and director of the Back Bay Chorale.
Sometimes referred to as the greatest Stravinsky masterpiece we’ve never heard, Perséphone recounts the timeless story of the Greek goddess and majestic queen of the underworld, who represents both fertility and the harvest. The work’s “luminous serenity floats, rather than stomps, and its radiant sheen, as well as its religious undercurrent—sacrifice, resurrection, rebirth—finds a perfect companion in the reflective, eloquent Requiem of Gabriel Fauré,” says Hoose. Perséphone premiered as a ballet in Paris in 1934. Fauré’s Requiem was first performed in 1888, but was revised and enlarged by the composer in 1901, being scored for full orchestra—that is the version being performed tonight.
“Perséphone opens formally, and with a formality that soon gives way to delicate and irresistible charm,” Hoose writes in tonight’s concert program notes. “The music’s dramatic core is at its center—Perséphone’s descent to the underworld—but throughout its 50-minute span, calmness,” which a student of Hoose’s called ‘cool to the touch, like marble,’ prevails. “All the more moving, then—and unexpected—are the increasing shadows of sadness that envelop the closing pages.”
Featured soloists in tonight’s concert are soprano Sara Heaton (CFA’07), a Metropolitan Opera competition regional finalist who has performed with Boston Baroque and the Santa Fe Opera, baritone Benjamin C. Taylor (CFA’16), soprano Ruby White (CFA’14,’17), and internationally acclaimed tenor Yeghishe Manucharyan (CFA’01).
For Jarrett, the concert reflects a “beautiful pairing” of styles and themes. “In the Fauré, there’s a simplicity of tone and approach, a lightness that’s quite a bit more sophisticated than the simplicity might indicate,” he says. “By contrast, the Stravinsky text poses enormous challenges. Its subject really requires abstract thinking and a cultural intelligence.” The student performers benefited, he says, from prerehearsal lectures by composer Rodney Lister, a CFA lecturer and scholar of Stravinsky, and Jeffrey Mehlman, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of French, who spoke to them about the life and times of librettist Gide, winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature and a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and Victor Hugo.
Phyllis Hoffman (CFA’61,’67), a CFA professor and chair of voice, pays tribute to Hoose in the concert program. Hoose has been conductor of the BU Symphony Orchestra since 1987, and his leadership “has been informed by superior musicianship, a vast and deeply probing knowledge of the repertoire, imaginative programming, and uncommonly effective orchestral training skills,” writes the former director of the School of Music. “Hoose is among the rarefied few as an essential, superlative trainer of orchestral musicians. He leaves a legacy of artistic integrity, brilliance, excellence, and the enduring truth that music is the ultimate barometer of the human condition. We salute him as colleague, conductor, teacher, and mentor. We salute him with our abiding admiration, appreciation, and affection.”
The Boston University Symphony Orchestra and Symphonic Chorus concert, presented by the CFA School of Music, is tonight, Monday, November 23, at 8 p.m., at Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Ave., Boston. Seating is general admission. Tickets are $25; student rush tickets are $10, available at the door today from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Members of the BU community receive one free ticket at the door on the day of the performance. Purchase tickets here or call 617-266-1200.