In the concluding BMOP concert, the festival’s largest orchestra — 72 players — attracted the largest audience. Haimovitz returned for 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Moravec’s 2000 cello concerto, Montserrat, which celebrated another great cellist, Pablo Casals; it was rhapsodic and sentimental, as opposed to Thomas’s more playful yet deeper Rostropovich tribute. Two scintillating pieces from the 1940s and ’50s by Boston’s Harold Shapero and Leon Kirchner alternated with premieres by Arthur Levering (a glistening if predictable Debussyan seascape) and Andy Vores (two dizzyingly inventive Fabrications, one based on a monumentally labyrinthine Richard Serra sculpture). The evening closed with John Harbison’s intricate and mesmerizing elaboration of contrasting Baroque formal procedures, Partita for Orchestra (2000).
The next Ditson Festival, in 2010, will be in a different city. What are Boston’s chances for a follow-up of its own?
Related:
Grand finales, Women on the verge, Happy feet, More 
- Grand finales
Jeffrey Rink has just ended his 18th and final season as music director of Chorus pro Musica. He’ll be missed.
- Women on the verge
At next week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, Hillary Clinton’s delegates will get just about everything they’ve wanted — aside from the nomination of their candidate, of course.
- Happy feet
The architectural team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the new Institute for Contemporary Art as a 325-seat jewel box, its transparent walls allowing the Boston harbor and skyline to serve as a scenic backdrop or turn opaque as the performance requires.
- L’Allegro, fuss and feathers, and the ICA blues
This year we were looking forward to dance performances at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater in the new ICA.
- Dancing across the city
The ICA’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, with its sprung wood dance floor and wrap-around windows framing the harbor, is positioned to become Boston dance’s most significant venue.
- Dullsville
I waited in a crowd for two hours before finally getting into Boston’s new Institute of Contemporary Art on opening day, December 10. Just then a mother rushed out the door, telling her husband and their four little girls, “They say another hour.”
- Year in Classical: Celebrate!
In Handel's Hercules, the demented Dejanira's loss is still so painful, I was afraid to listen; now I don't want to hear anything else.
- Portland scene report, March 17, 2006
Now Transmissioin, Hi-Fivin' White Guys, Radiation Year, and Seekonk poised to issue new releases; plus, JD's Medicine Hat forms
- Building blocks
New ballets must be one of the world’s most expensive consumable products.
- Ebb and flow
The good news is that we still have our own major company, Boston Ballet, and it made its first international tour — to Spain — in more than a decade.
- Live and kicking
Yes, we suffer from an embarrassment of riches when it come to live music here in the Boston area.
- Less
Topics:
Classical
, David Kravitz, Entertainment, Sheila Jordan, More
, David Kravitz, Entertainment, Sheila Jordan, Charles Fussell, Gil Rose, Karyl Ryczek, Leon Kirchner, Ezra Sims, Alice Ditson, Donald Sur, Less
