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Event is Live
Carnegie Hall Presents

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Berg’s Wozzeck (concert performance)
Tuesday, March 15, 2022 8 PM Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Andris Nelsons by Marco Borggreve
Music director Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra return for a night of drama, spectacular singing, and superb orchestral playing with Berg’s deeply moving opera Wozzeck. The New York Times raved about the orchestra’s “seething, inexorable concert performance” of R. Strauss’s Elektra in 2015. Three years later, Opera Wire was “spell-bound by the expressive and sonorous performance” of the impassioned second act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Enjoy a scintillating night of opera at Carnegie Hall, where all music sounds best. 

Performers

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, Music Director and Conductor
Bo Skovhus, Wozzeck
Christine Goerke, Marie
Renée Tatum, Margret
Christopher Ventris, Drum Major
Mauro Peter, Andres
Franz Hawlata, Doctor
Additional soloist to be announced

Program

BERG Wozzeck (concert performance)

Event Duration

The program will last approximately 90 minutes with no intermission. Please note that there will be no late seating. 
This concert performance is generously underwritten by Robert L. Turner.

At a Glance

Austrian composer Alban Berg began his opera Wozzeck on the eve of World War I and finished it in its aftermath. The opera is based on the play by German playwright Georg Büchner, left incomplete at his early death in 1837. The opera’s poor, uneducated antihero is a soldier in the Hessian army. His strange ways have made him a figure of fun to his superiors, the Doctor and the Captain; he makes scarcely enough money to support his common-law wife, Marie, and their illegitimate son. Wozzeck’s nature and circumstances lead to his madness and to the work’s tragic and strange conclusion. The score is dedicated to Alma Mahler.

 

Berg was still a relatively untried composer with few real successes when he completed Wozzeck, though he was known for his association with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg. A successful performance of two of his Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, and a copy of the opera’s vocal score convinced conductor Erich Kleiber to stage the work at the Berlin State Opera. A critical success, this intensely expressionistic and poetic work was slowly taken up by other companies in Europe; its American premiere was given by the Philadelphia Opera Company and Leopold Stokowski in 1931, and it has since become a standard work in the major opera houses of the world. Until the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concert performances of Wozzeck in Boston last week, the only previous BSO performances of the complete opera were under Seiji Ozawa’s direction in April 1987, with Benjamin Luxon singing the title role.

Bios

Andris Nelsons

The 2021–2022 season is Andris Nelsons’s eighth as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s (BSO) Ray and Maria Stata Music Director. The 15th music director in the BSO’s ...

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Bo Skovhus

Born in Ikast, Denmark, baritone Bo Skovhus studied at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, the Royal Opera Academy in Copenhagen, and in New York. His career began in 1988 at the ...

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Christine Goerke

Soprano Christine Goerke appears in the major opera houses of the world, including the Metropolitan Opera; San Francisco Opera; Houston Grand Opera; Glimmerglass Opera; Royal Opera House, ...

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Renée Tatum

Mezzo-soprano Renée Tatum is rapidly gaining critical acclaim on the most prestigious opera stages in the United States. This season, she sings Cornelia in Handel’s Giulio ...

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Christopher Ventris

Christopher Ventris is one of the world’s leading heldentenors, enjoying an unparalleled reputation as the preeminent Siegmund and Parsifal of his generation. Following his acclaimed ...

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Toby Spence

An honors graduate and choral scholar from New College, Oxford, tenor Toby Spence studied at the Opera School of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He was the winner of the Royal ...

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Mauro Peter

In the 2021–2022 season, Swiss tenor Mauro Peter joins the Munich Philharmonic in Mozart’s Requiem, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Bach’s St. John ...

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Franz Hawlata

Highly sought-after in opera as well as in concert and lieder, bass Franz Hawlata performs in great halls throughout the world. Mr. Hawlata was born in Eichstätt in Bavaria, Germany, ...

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Zachary Altman

Bass-baritone Zachary Altman is gaining notice in wide-ranging repertoire in major theaters across Europe and the United States. His 2021–2022 engagements include Bottom in ...

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David Kravitz

Acclaimed baritone David Kravitz’s recent opera engagements include leading roles at Washington National Opera (Davis Miller in the world premiere of D. J. Sparr’s Approaching ...

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Alex Richardson

Tenor Alex Richardson returns to the Metropolitan Opera in the 2021–2022 season to cover the role of Laertes in Brett Dean’s Hamlet and joins Santa Fe Symphony as a soloist in ...

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Linus Schafer Goulthorpe

Praised for the remarkable purity of his voice, 13-year-old Linus Schafer Goulthorpe enjoys performing modern opera, Baroque oratorio, and art song. His professional stage debut was as the ...

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