More from the Concert Vault Dept.: While perusing some 1987 material, I found the following. The piece is an “advance,” written to promote an event, in this case a concert I very much wish I hadn’t missed, as I, too, am a Berlioz fanatic. I usually only post reviews, but this casts an interesting light on the Berlioz piece. Nelson remains active as a conductor, although he doesn’t seem to be holding down any regular positions at this point, preferring to travel and work throughout Europe when he’s not in Chicago or Costa Rica.
Conductor John Nelson warns right from the start that you will be surprised by the “Sympbonie fantastique.”
“I’m a hopeless Berlioz fanatic,” Nelson admits. “And this new Behrenreiter edition is hair-raising, especially if you’re used to the old one.
“There’s a repeat in the fourth movement that has been omitted for decades, and, because that movement is a march to the scaffold, it’s even more ominous.”
Berlioz wrote the symphony as a tone-poem describing a young artist’s macabre dreams under the influence of opiates (young artists were the 19th-century French equivalent of major-league pitchers today).
“There’s also a cornet solo in the second movement that Berlioz wrote ten years after he finished the symphony for a player the editors assume was the virtuoso J.B. Arban.”
(Arban wrote a number of virtuoso cornet pieces, a selection of which Wynton Marsalis played at Proctors recently.)
Nelson has also conducted this edition in Paris, “where I had a marvellous experience with it. The piece still remains so modern, despite the fact that it was written just after Beethoven’s time. I mean, it’s mind-boggling to think that he was writing for bells, double tubas, and four tympanies playing chords.”
The Troy program also includes a new work, Toru Takemitsu’s “1 Hear the Water Dreaming.” It was commissioned by flutist Paula Robison, who will be soloist at Tuesdays concert.
I’m not too sure what the title means,” Nelson says. “But it, like the piece itself, is typically Japanese, very detailed and with a very subtle use of color. It reminds me of ‘The Afternoon of Faun.”
It has just premiered in Indianapolis, and a performance at Carnegie Hall precedes the trip to Troy.
Nelson is in his final season as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony. “I’ll be a gypsy conductor for the next three years. It’s probably crazy for a young person to be doing that, but I want to take some time off, dig a little deeper into the music I like, regain my objectivity, which is hard to do when you’re worrying about a season.
“I still have long-term relationships with the Orchestre National de Lyon, for which I’m principal guest conductor, and the Orchestre Nouvelle Philharmonique, a young orchestra with much more discipline and vigor than the older groups in Paris.”
This will be Nelson’s second appearance in the Troy Music Hall. “It’s a stunning little place,” he says. “I expect the Symphonie fantatisque may blow the walls down.”
The program also features Robison performing Cecile Chaminade’s Concertino for Flute and Orchestra and the overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s “Oberon.”
Tickets are priced from $10 to $18 and are available at the Troy Music Hall box office and Community Box Office outlets.
– Schenectady Gazette, 4 April 1987
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