CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Boston Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Music Director and Conductor
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
John Oliver, Conductor

SCHUBERT Symphony No. 4
BRAHMS Serenade No. 2 in A Major, Op. 16
WILLIAM BOLCOM Symphony No. 8 for chorus and orchestra (NY Premiere)

Program Notes:

FRANZ SCHUBERT Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, D. 417, “Tragic”
Born January 31, 1797, in Liechtental, a suburb of Vienna; died November 19, 1828, in Vienna.

Completed by April 27, 1816, Schubert’s Symphony No. 4 probably had its first performance that year in Vienna under Otto Hatwig, with an amateur orchestra that had developed from the Schubert family string quartet. The subtitle “Tragic” is Schubert’s own and was added at a later date. The first documented public performance was given at Leipzig on November 19, 1849, with August Ferdinand Riccius conducting. The Symphony received its Carnegie Hall premiere on February 7, 1935, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Werner Janssen.

Scoring: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

After the “Unfinished” and the “Great” C-Major, the Fourth and Fifth of Schubert’s symphonies are the ones most often played, but even then not all that often. Schubert’s first three youthful and energetic symphonies—the First composed while he was a student, the Second and Third during his years of schoolmastering—are infrequently heard, while the appealingly inventive Sixth remains something of a rarity on concert programs.

Schubert’s Fourth Symphony, the “Tragic,” was completed in April 1816, the same month that he unsuccessfully applied for the post of music master at a training school in Laibach (Ljubljana). As a child, his strongest and most natural inclinations had always been toward music. He’d had his first real piano lessons from his eldest brother Ignaz, and his father taught him violin. In the family string quartet, the violinists were Ignaz and another brother, Ferdinand; Franz was violist, and their father played cello. Like his brothers, Schubert was sent to Michael Holzer, organist at the Liechtental parish church, for lessons in voice, organ, and counterpoint. Holzer recognized the boy’s abilities and later recalled that “if I wished to instruct him in anything fresh, he already knew it. Consequently I gave him no actual training but merely talked to him, and watched with silent astonishment.”

When Schubert was 11 he was accepted as a chorister in the Imperial court chapel and took up residence at the Stadtkonvikt, a communal boarding school that also housed the Choir School. There he sang and studied under the direction of Hofkapellmeister Antonio Salieri; there, too, he played in the school orchestra as first violinist and was occasionally trusted to lead rehearsals. It was this orchestra that played Schubert’s First Symphony, which he completed in October 1813.

The year 1813 was also Schubert’s last at the Stadtkonvikt. His voice had broken the previous summer, ending his time as a chorister, and he left there that November, turning down a fellowship, perhaps over a disciplinary matter. Now he was at a crossroads. In accordance with his schoolmaster father’s expectations, he entered a teacher’s training school and, after a year there, began assisting his father. He did this for two years, and the hours spent in front of the classroom were not happy. But during this time Schubert managed to produce his Second and Third symphonies, as well as piano and chamber music; several operas; his first Mass, in F major, which he successfully conducted himself at the 100th-anniversary celebrations for the Liechtental church; and, in 1815, about 145 songs, including “Erlkönig.” (The song “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” which supposedly elicited from Salieri the comment that Schubert was a genius who could do anything, was written on October 19 the year before, when he was just 16.) Despite all this, the break from schoolmastering came only several years later, after encouragement from close friends finally won out over the young composer’s uncertainties.

In the slow introduction to his first three symphonies, Schubert had already demonstrated the ear for orchestral color that is immediately apparent in the opening measures of this one. The Fourth, his first symphony in the minor mode—a hint, perhaps, as to the origin of its subtitle—may be viewed as something of a study in mood, color, and symphonic weight. (The Fifth Symphony would be marked primarily by lightness, grace, and economy of means.) The introduction’s dark chromaticism and dramatic breadth give way to an Allegro that is driving and grim in its first theme; the second theme is more lyric, but melancholy despite its major-mode leanings. The joyful exuberance with which the exposition closes comes as something of a surprise, but serves to anticipate the movement’s C major close.

The first statement of the Andante’s main theme—in A-flat major, reflecting Schubert’s inclination for key areas a third or sixth away from home base—is made poignant by the presence of the solo oboe. The contrasting material, first forceful and then wistful, is presented against a background of restlessly pulsating strings. The third movement contrasts a jagged, downward-thrusting, minor-mode minuet against a major-mode Trio of rising lines and a more legato, folklike character.

In his finale Schubert is successfully able to combine drama, grace, pathos, melancholy, good humor (in the rollicking second theme), and even grandeur (in the fanfare-like material that closes both exposition and recapitulation) with the relaxation over long musical stretches—again through use of third- and sixth-related key areas—that is so frequently a hallmark of his style. The symphony ends in unbridled, if chromatically colored, C major, on a threefold repetition of the same unison note with which it began.
—Marc Mandel


FRANZ SCHUBERT “Tränenregen,” D. 795, No. 10 (orch. Webern); “Prometheus,” D. 674 (orch. Reger); “Der Wegweiser” (D. 911, No. 20 (orch. Webern); “Ständchen,” D. 957, No. 4 (orch. Offenbach); “Erlkönig” (orch. Reger)
“Tränenregen,” D. 795, No. 10, is the tenth song of Die schöne Müllerin, which Schubert composed in October–November 1823; Webern’s orchestration (2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, harp, and strings) dates from 1903.

“Prometheus,” D. 674, was composed in October 1819; Reger’s orchestration (2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, two bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, harp, and strings).

“Der Wegweiser,” D. 911, No. 20 (the 20th song of Winterreise), was composed in late 1827; Webern’s orchestration (2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings) dates from 1903.

“Ständchen,” D. 957, No. 4 (the fourth song of Schwanengesang), was composed at some point between August and October 1828.

“Erlkönig,” D. 328, was composed in 1815; Reger’s orchestration (2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, harp, and strings).

“Tränenregen” was first performed at Carnegie Hall in its orchestrated form on April 15, 2004, with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Sir Roger Norrington; the orchestrated versions of the remaining songs on the program receive their Carnegie Hall premieres tonight.

“There is no song by Schubert that cannot teach us something,” Johannes Brahms once said; and throughout his life he was an ardent champion of his great predecessor’s music. He was among those who assembled the first complete edition of Schubert’s works; he performed, conducted, and arranged them; and he quotes Schubert in his own Lieder. (Though none of Brahms’s arrangements is on the present program, it is worth noting that some of them reflect his friendship with the great baritone Julius Stockhausen, who gave the first complete public performance of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin in 1856.)

Schubert’s mammoth song repertory (more than 600—the exact tally is all but impossible to determine due to his practice of composing alternative versions) drew other composers to its riches like bees to honey. Arrangements of his songs began appearing not long after his death—one need only recall the role played by Franz Liszt’s solo piano transcriptions in popularizing Schubert’s music. The wealth of musical ideas in Schubert’s songs, the richness of their development, the dramatic nature of certain songs, the many different sound-worlds they suggest—all of these aspects led later composers (Benjamin Britten among them) to devise orchestral garb for Schubert’s piano parts, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when orchestral song had become a staple of concert programs. (Schubert himself provided a point of departure in the orchestration for the charming, strophic “Romanze” from his 1823 incidental music to the play Rosemunde, Fürstin von Zypern by Helmina von Chézy.)

Two of the songs on this program—“Tränenregen” (the tenth song of Die schöne Müllerin) and “Der Wegweiser” (No. 20 from Winterreise), both on texts by Wilhelm Müller—are heard in arrangements by Anton von Webern (1883–1945), whose orchestrations of five Schubert songs date from 1903, when the 20-year-old was studying musicology with Guido Adler at the University of Vienna. There is no hint of his later pointillism in the instrumentation, no premonitions of Klangfarbenmelodie; these are conventional exercises in orchestration, but nevertheless to lovely effect. One might note, in particular, the division of the postlude of “Tränenregen” into halves, the first for winds only, the second—beautifully wistful—for strings. Somehow one feels that Schubert would have approved.

Besides being a composer, Max Reger (1873–1916) was also a prolific editor and arranger of other men’s music, including Lieder by Brahms, Wolf, Adolf Jensen, Grieg, Schumann, and Schubert. His orchestral arrangements of 15 Schubert songs were published in 1914 and, posthumously, in 1926. As one would expect from this late Romantic composer, his instrumentation is lush and rich, his propensity to double the vocal line on various orchestral instruments adding to the general plushness. Both of the Reger arrangements on this program are of songs to texts by Goethe. In the less well-known, recitative-like “Prometheus, ” the titan Prometheus—“forming men in [his] own image,” a race destined, like himself, to suffer, weep, enjoy and rejoice, and (the main point) disregard Zeus—contemptuously admonishes the god to restrict his concerns to heaven, and not meddle with the world below. In Goethe’s ballad “Erlkönig,” the atavistic fear of death is given unforgettable expression; Schubert’s setting, with its sound-and-fury, its radical dissonance treatment, its relentless motion, is so inherently dramatic that later composers—also including Liszt and Berlioz—were naturally tempted to heighten the drama still further by orchestral means.

The gentle, much-loved “Ständchen”—published the year after Schubert’s death in the song collection known as Schwanengesang, D. 957—offers a lighter mood in contrast to the other selections on this program. In his orchestration of this song, Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880) uses pizzicato strings to mimic the serenader’s guitar or lute, and he embellishes and charmingly Frenchifies Schubert’s music with additional trills, echo-effects, and frilly figuration.
—Susan Youens


WILLIAM BOLCOM Eighth Symphony for Chorus and Orchestra on William Blake’s Prophetic Books
Born May 26, 1938, in Seattle, Washington; currently living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Bolcom began his Eighth Symphony in 2005, finishing the short score on October 12, 2005, and completing the orchestration by March 2007 (with other projects intervening). It was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine, Music Director, with the generous support of Alan J. and Suzanne W. Dworsky and was written for the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver, conductor. It is a BSO 125th anniversary commission. James Levine conducted the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in the world premiere performances last week, on February 28-29 and March 1, in Symphony Hall, Boston. The score is dedicated “to James Levine for many years of collaboration and friendship.” Tonight’s performance marks the work’s New York premiere.

Scoring: SATBB chorus; 4 flutes (third and fourth doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets (second doubling E-flat clarinet), bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, percussion (4 players suggested: bass marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone, chimes, crotales, Thai gongs, snare drum, bass drum, three suspended cymbals, large gong, anvil, four tom toms, large suspended cymbal, two tam-tams, and triangle), timpani, harp, piano and celesta (one player), and strings.

“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.”
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

William Bolcom wrote the first of his eight symphonies in about five weeks’ time in 1957, when he was 19 and studying with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music Festival. It was there the same summer that Bolcom first met James Levine, a 14-year-old pianist with whom he shared the experience of a precocious musical childhood. Bolcom was himself a pianist of professional caliber by his early teens, and began composition studies at the University of Washington at the startlingly young age of 11. Since the First, a new Bolcom symphony has appeared every few years, his most recent before the Eighth being Seventh Symphony: A Symphonic Concerto, commissioned by the MET Orchestra and premiered by that ensemble under Levine’s direction in Carnegie Hall in May 2002. His Ninth will be a work for symphonic band, commissioned by the 11 bands of the Big 10 athletic conference schools, to be premiered by the acclaimed band of the University of Michigan, where Bolcom has taught for 35 years. (He retires from the position at the end of the current academic session.)

Active in all genres, Bolcom is a particularly inventive and all-embracing composer of vocal music. While at the University of Washington as a teenager, in addition to musical subjects, he minored in English and took a poetry course with Theodore Roethke, one of the great American poets, whose last teaching position was at Washington. Already at the time the composer understood that studying poetry’s architecture and affect was, for him, a key to finding its music. He has written every kind of vocal piece: cabaret songs with Arnold Weinstein, art song and song cycles, works for chorus, and orchestral song cycles including Whitman Triptych and, more recently, Canciones de Lorca, premiered by Plácido Domingo in fall 2006 in the inaugural concert in the Pacific Symphony’s Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Orange Country Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, California. He has also written several operas, including three for Lyric Opera of Chicago: A Wedding (2004), based on Robert Altman’s film; McTeague (1992), on Frank Norris’s novel; and A View from the Bridge (1999), on Arthur Miller’s play. The latter was also produced by the Metropolitan Opera (conducted by Dennis Russell Davies). Of his symphonies, the Fourth (1989) has a vocal component, a Theodore Roethke setting for mezzo-soprano and orchestra written for Bolcom’s wife, mezzo Joan Morris, with whom he frequently collaborates.

The seed of the Eighth Symphony was planted long ago. In an article on his piece for Symphony Magazine, Bolcom wrote, “It is fortunate when a commission allies exactly with a project one has had in mind for a long time. While I was a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, a musical phrase for chorus on ‘Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air,’ from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, came to me. It has taken 40-odd years for that phrase to find its home (through a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra), which is near the beginning of the first movement of my Eighth Symphony.”

Although Bolcom never took a course in the work of William Blake (1757–1827), he has been enamored of his poetry, which seemed to speak to him directly, since age 17. Around this time he vowed to himself to set the entirety of the poet’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a task he set to right away and completed only in 1982. That vast, two-hour-plus, oratorio-like work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra can be seen as a kind of catalog of the composer’s compositional stances, demonstrating the remarkable scope of his musical interests ranging from cabaret and popular-style songs to the learned techniques of classical concert music in the late 20th century. To Bolcom, whose styles are and would be as myriad with or without Blake, it was important to reflect the variety of Blake’s cycle, which straddles everything from nursery rhymes to Dante, Milton, and England’s metaphysical poetic tradition.

This latter tradition of the poetry of Richard Crashaw, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and others; the Christian epic poetry of Milton and Dante; and, most importantly, the Bible fed the poetic genius of Blake’s larger, visionary works, culminating in the illuminated Prophetic Books, of which America a Prophecy and Jerusalem The Emanation of the Great Albion are two, along with several others. These are modeled on the Biblical Prophetic Books—the books of the prophets Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, and so forth in the Old Testament—and Revelation, John’s prophetic vision in the final book of the New Testament. Blake invented a mythography that incorporates parts of the Biblical and Classical cosmologies, seemingly allowing his artistic/religious invention to be spurred on by the intellectual and individualistic tide of the Enlightenment. Never in a Christian country before the late 18th century could such a vision have existed, rejecting and reinventing far beyond what tradition and the controlled society could ever have allowed in earlier eras. Blake, an engraver and printer by trade, was completely self-taught in literature and philosophy, and his style and idea coalesced by sheer force of work and will. In fact Blake’s prophecies baffled and embarrassed early readers, who by contrast found his lyric poetry unimpeachable, but many 20th-century poets and critics recognized the sheer audacity and intensity of his imagination and, from the perspective of more than a century’s remove, the larger poems’ place within a great and long tradition (Dante and Milton again, and many others) of epic and speculative verse. Yeats and Ginsberg would have written quite differently had they known no Blake.

It is the “elevated,” or prophetic, visionary Blake that we encounter in Bolcom’s Eighth Symphony, four movements on four poems from three of Blake’s longer illuminated works. The first movement, “Rintrah roars,” sets THE ARGUMENT, the poem prefacing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), which is otherwise not in verse form. The second is “The shadowy Daughter of Urthona,” the Preludium to America a Prophecy. The third, “This theme calls me,” is from Jerusalem The Emanation of the Great Albion, and the finale, “A Song of Liberty,” is the closing prophecy from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Of his settings, Bolcom says, “I’m after that kind of theatrical style that one finds in Blake, the phantasmagorical, that supersaturation of color and emotion.” His description of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience as a “musical illumination” of Blake’s poetry analogous to the artist-poet’s own images is equally apt here, with the use of a large orchestra and rich harmonic language providing the necessary means for musical supersaturation.

I. Rintrah roars. Rintrah is a spirit or god of revolution, which in Blake’s time was manifest in world events that were the “actual” foundations of much of his prophecy and speculation, in particular, of course, the American war of independence and the French revolution. Note, in addition to the Revelation-like roaring and fire-shaking, the pastoral touches of Blake’s poem, for example “On the barren heath/Sing the honey bees,” which come from the world of Songs of Innocence. “Rintrah roars,” as the poem does for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, acts as an introductory passage to the rest of the symphony, and is the most concise of the four movements. The big triple-forte chords and wave-like scale figures in the orchestral accompaniment inscribe the unsettled, “perilous paths” and “barren climes” to which the villain drives the “just man.” The chorus is primarily homophonic, that is, singing the same words at the same time, and the rhythm of the text as sung reflects the natural rhythm of the poem as read.

II. The shadowy Daughter of Urthona. America a Prophecy (engraved in 1793) is, clearly, an allegory for the American Revolution. The relationship between the Daughter of Urthona and the Red Orc contains echoes of the Nordic mythology that later would inform the story of Sieglinde, Hunding, and Siegmund in Wagner’s Die Walküre; this exhibits Blake’s range of reference. Here, the Red Orc is America. According to Harold Bloom, who provided commentary for David Erdmann’s edition of the Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Anchor Books), the Orc’s “fourteen suns” represent the period in American history from 1762 to 1776. Note the implied condemnation of slavery here. He also suggests Orc as mankind, and Urthona’s Daughter as nature (as possessed by man).

The movement opens with chorus in a spoken line of approximate pitches, accompanied lightly by percussion; these phrases are suggestive of a Greek chorus. Gradually pitches are added; by the line beginning “Dark virgin,” the text is entirely sung. The rape itself is orchestral; Urthona’s daughter’s response is a subdued chorale preceded by a brief soprano solo (one of only two solo passages in the symphony).

III. This theme calls me. Jerusalem The Emanation of the Great Albion was Blake’s last illuminated prophecy, created over almost twenty years beginning in 1804 and representing the culmination of his art and poetry. Albion is a personification of Britain, and Jerusalem is, in part, a desire for England to recall its spiritual origin. Bloom also points out that the conflict here is Blake’s own internal struggle, but reflects the catastrophic Napoleonic Wars that were taking place as the artist worked on the book. Its textual model is the Old Testament Ezekial. This poem is the first part of the opening of Chapter 1.

This is the symphony’s “slow movement.” An introduction of flutes with E-flat clarinet and vibraphone prepares a tenor solo. Sopranos and altos are initially the voice of the Saviour. The music gathers intensity to the unpitched chorus statement of “Where hast thou hid thy Emanation lovely Jerusalem . . .” and is followed by a return to the movement’s opening music for the last section.

IV. “A Song of Liberty.” Although not written as part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, this prose-poem of numbered verses is printed as the last three pages of that book. According to Harold Bloom the “Eternal Female” is the Red Orc’s (see movement II) mother in labor, birthing revolution. The poem refers to the realignment of government and national interests, destruction as a prelude to resurrection in the form of a new society.

The music, though not serial, springs harmonically from a 12-tone series heard in the strings, and the structure of the movement is episodic, reflecting the poem. The vibraphone chord at the start of the movement is a marker for the start of each new (short) numbered section. The quick string figures might suggest, obliquely, the fast music of the opening movement, particularly given the similarity of Bolcom’s setting for the first line of this poem, “The Eternal Female groand,” to “Rintrah roars,” although here we have only soprano and alto voices. The declamatory choral setting deflates at “Cast thy keys O Rome into the deep down falling . . . ” and regains energy with music from the start of the movement before the infant Orc (the rebelling spirit, somewhat like Lucifer) is hurled to Earth. His flight down through the heavens is painted in the chorus’s chromatic falling lines. The “jealous king” Urizen, who had cast out Orc, himself falls to earth (“Down rushd . . . the jealous king”) with his host in the most aggressive part of the movement. The Chorus of the poem brings a flowing motion to the music, which culminates in the grand contrapuntal setting, in a glowing, Lydian/Mixolydian C-sharp tonality, of the closing line that stands as central to Blake’s spiritual world: “For every thing that lives is Holy.”
—Robert Kirzinger

Program notes copyright © 2008 Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights reserved.

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Music Director and Conductor
Now in his fourth season as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine is the BSO’s 14th music director since the orchestra’s founding in 1881 and the first American-born conductor to hold that position. Highlights of his 2007–08 Boston Symphony programs include premieres of new works by Elliott Carter, John Harbison, William Bolcom, and Henri Dutilleux; Mahler’s First and Ninth symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde; Smetana’s Má Vlast; the Brahms piano concertos with Evgeny Kissin; and season-ending concert performances of Berlioz’s Les Troyens. He also appears at Symphony Hall as pianist, performing Schubert’s Winterreise with Thomas Quasthoff. At Tanglewood this coming summer he conducts (among other things) concert performances of Les Troyens (with the BSO) and Eugene Onegin (with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra) and a Tanglewood Music Center production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; leads Tanglewood Music Center classes devoted to orchestral repertoire, Lieder, and opera; and is Festival Director for the Elliott Carter Centennial Celebration (Tanglewood’s 2008 Festival of Contemporary Music, the first time this annual festival is being devoted to the works of a single composer). Following their 2007 Tanglewood season, James Levine and the BSO made their first European tour together, performing in the Lucerne Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival (in Hamburg), Essen, Düsseldorf, the Berlin Festival, Paris, and the BBC Proms in London. Maestro Levine is also Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, where, in the 36 years since his Met debut, he has led more than 2,000 performances of 80 different operas. His 2007–08 Met season includes new productions of Lucia di Lammermoor and Macbeth; revivals of Tristan und Isolde and Manon Lescaut, and concerts at Carnegie Hall with the MET Orchestra (with soloists Alfred Brendel, Deborah Voigt, and Jonathan Biss) and MET Chamber Ensemble (joined by, among others, John Harbison, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Yefim Bronfman, Gil Shaham, and Anja Silja). Last month in New York he led Carter’s Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei (a New York premiere) and Cello Concerto with the Juilliard Orchestra to close the Juilliard School’s Carter Festival.

Tanglewood Festival Chorus
John Oliver, Conductor
The Tanglewood Festival Chorus opened its 2007–08 season performing Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Boston and at Carnegie Hall. Also this season with the BSO the chorus performs the world and New York premieres of William Bolcom’s Eighth Symphony and concert performances of Berlioz’s Les Troyens with James Levine; Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with BSO Conductor Emeritus Bernard Haitink, and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with Sir Colin Davis. In summer 2008 at Tanglewood, the chorus will perform Les Troyens, Eugene Onegin, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with James Levine; Beethoven’s Mass in C with Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos; and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Christoph von Dohnányi, as well as its annual Prelude Concert led by John Oliver in Seiji Ozawa Hall. Following its summer 2007 Tanglewood performances, the chorus joined Mr. Levine and the BSO in Europe for Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust in Lucerne, Essen, Paris, and London, also performing an a cappella program of its own in Essen and Trier. Made up of members who donate their services, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus was organized in the spring of 1970 by founding conductor John Oliver; it is now the official chorus of the BSO year-round, performing in Boston, New York, and at Tanglewood. It has also performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Europe under Bernard Haitink and in the Far East under Seiji Ozawa. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus can be heard on BSO recordings under Ozawa and Haitink, and on recordings with the Boston Pops Orchestra under Keith Lockhart and John Williams, as well as on the sound tracks to Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, and John Sayles’s Silver City.

In addition to his work with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver was for many years conductor of the MIT Chamber Chorus and MIT Concert Choir, and a senior lecturer in music at MIT. He has appeared as guest conductor with the New Japan Philharmonic and Berkshire Choral Institute, and made his Boston Symphony conducting debut in August 1985.