After only a year as their Music Director, Andris Nelsons has confirmed this week that he is extending his contract with the Boston Symphony Orchestra until 2022. In the wake of his name being linked with key posts at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Berliner Philharmoniker (whatever the truth there was), Boston’s strategy is clear: to put similar speculation to bed for any other jobs that may come up in the next few years.
There are the usual bouquets of musical mutuality. Nelsons said he “felt immediately that we understand each other, and respect each other. . . . . If you have only a few years, it’s not enough at all. And of course, hopefully 2022 will also not be final”, and the orchestra’s Managing Director Mark Volpe agreed that “we’re poised on the threshold of something quite special.”
British audiences have the chance to make up their own minds about the strength of this special orchestral relationship when Nelsons brings his Boston players to the Proms on the 22 and 23 of August, with programmes centred on Mahler’s 6th Symphony and Shostakovich’s 10th, the piece they have just recorded - spectacularly - for Deutsche Grammophon as the start of what could be a cycle of all 15 Shostakovich symphonies.
In Boston at least, Nelsons is already credited with having “energized the BSO’s local audiences and restored momentum for the orchestra after several years of drift without a music director”, as Jeremy Eichler writes in the Boston Globe. Along with the Latvian-born conductor’s seemingly impregnable and burgeoning international reputation, the orchestra’s distribution deal with Google Play Music, and their Deutsche Grammophon project, the Nelsons era has already brought visible dividends for the Boston Symphony.
But Nelsons has a lot to live up to at next week’s Proms: on the opening weekend he gave a blazing performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - his final concert in charge there. Can Boston outdo Birmingham? We’ll find out soon enough.
