The BSO Performs Britten, Heads To China And Japan

The Boston Symphony Orchestra released details of its upcoming season Tuesday with a slate of novel concerts and excursions. In May, 2014, the orchestra will tour Japan and China with Lorin Maazel. This marks the BSO’s first return to China since 1979 when former music director Seiji Ozawa broke ground with a four-concert trip to his birth-country. (His family returned to Japan when he was a young boy.)

Also of note: the season opener. The BSO kicks things off with an all-Brahms program conducted by Christoph Von Dohnanyi that will also feature prodigy violinist Augustin Hadelich.

Now 29, Hadelich picked up the violin at 5, but when he was 15 his upper body was dramatically burned in a fire on his family’s farm in Germany. After 20 operations and two years of therapy he went on to win the International Violin Competition in Indianapolis. I saw him perform in 2007 and remember his clean style and physicality clearly. Today Hadelich is a busy touring soloist and his BSO performance next year will be his subscription series debut with the orchestra.

Here he is performing the Dvorak Violin Concerto, which will be played later in the season by Anne-Sophie Mutter:

Other soloists include Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Lewis and Susan Graham. Thomas Adès will be back on the podium, as will Bernard Haitink and Robert Spano, conducting Osvaldo Golijov's "La Pasión según San Marcos."

The BSO will also celebrate the 100th anniversary of composer Benjamin Britten’s birth with a number of free public events in collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Library, Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts and the New England Conservatory. The American Boy Choir will perform Britten’s War Requiem Nov 7-9. That work combines elements of the Latin Mass for the Dead with war poems by Wilfred Owen, who was killed during World War I.

In March Beethoven takes center stage during an initiative designed to explore the iconic composer’s legacy as an accomplished pianist. Soviet-born, Israeli-American piano master Yefim Bronfman will perform all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos with the BSO.

Also, the BSO will screen a newly remastered print of West Side Story while the musicians perform Leonard Bernstein’s score live. That happens next February.

There will also be three world premieres and one American by Marc Neikrug, Justin Dello Joio, Bernard Rands, and Mark Anthony Turnage.

The full schedule is scheduled to be on the BSO website at 10 a.m. Tuesday.