NEC Philharmonia at Symphony Hall

Symphony Hall—that's where the Boston Symphony Orchestra performs, right?

True most nights, except for April 7, when Hugh Wolff conducted an NEC orchestra in Symphony Hall for the first time in 15 years.

Did you miss this historic concert? Were you there and would like to hear it again? You're in luck—NEC makes its Instant Encore debut with this concert. To play or download the performances, go to instantencore.com/necmusic and enter the redemption code NECHW47. You will need to have or create an account to complete the process—there are no fees involved.

NEC's partner in recording the Symphony Hall concert is 99.5 All Classical, who will also broadcast the concert on May 2.

2010-04-10 The Boston Musical Intelligencer reviews this concert. Read the review.

2010-04-02 The Boston Musical Intelligencer talks to Tony Woodcock and Hugh Wolff about the "dramatic contribution" they have made to NEC's orchestral program. Read the interview.

About the program

Hugh Wolff constructed a program that showcased Narek Hakhnazaryan and the NEC Philharmonia in music of Fresh Starts: Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, and Robert Schumann's Cello Concerto. Wolff has conducted other music by all three of these composers during his time at NEC, and in the countdown to April 7 our Music Player offered a Hugh Wolff playlist, with a new track added each week.

The connection between two Boston musical powerhouses, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and New England Conservatory, goes back to the BSO's origin, and many of NEC's orchestra players study with their BSO counterparts. More on this. But NEC appearances in the BSO's home, Symphony Hall, have been rare during the past 40 years. One exception was NEC's 1995 Commencement concert, which took place in Symphony Hall, as work was just beginning on Jordan Hall's restoration. The orchestral component of that concert was a sampler of concerto exerpts—nothing like the 2010 program of full-length works. And in the intervening 15 years, no NEC orchestra has performed a full concert in Symphony Hall. One interesting footnote: the concertmistress for the 1995 concert, Mei-Ann Chen '95, '98 M.M., was recently named music director of the Memphis Symphony. (Photo by Stu Rosner/courtesy BSO)

Twenty-one-year-old cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, who won the 2008 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, was born in Yerevan, Armenia, and grew up in a family of musicians. After early studies in Yerevan, Narek began training at the age of 12 at the Moscow Conservatory. A winner of the Young Concert Artists competition, among many others, he came to NEC last fall to study with Laurence Lesser as part of a new generation of Artist Diploma students endorsed by a committee that includes leading concert artists. Watch a short video portrait of Narek.

Narek Hakhnazaryan is the recipient of the Abraham Skernick Memorial Presidential Scholarship, and the Alice and Violeta Ohanasian/Friends of Armenian Culture Society Scholarship. He plays a Jean Baptiste Vuillaume cello, circa 1860, on loan from the Ravinia Festival.

Conductor Hugh Wolff was named NEC's Stanford and Norma Jean Calderwood Director of Orchestras in 2008, and has brought the Conservatory's orchestral program to a new level of eminence. Since his first appearance here in 2007 he has conducted more than 30 works by 23 composers, ranging from Haydn to Wayne Shorter. More on this. Leading our orchestra's first appearance in Symphony Hall in 15 years, Wolff has conducted many of the major orchestras around the world, including frequent appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The concert's "Fresh Starts" theme proceeds from the noteworthy occasion of the Philharmonia's much-anticipated return to Symphony Hall, and continues with a program of music that signaled new beginnings in the lives of the composers.

Barber, still a young and emerging composer, got a big career boost when Arturo Toscanini performed the now universally famous Adagio for Strings (along with the First Essay) on an NBC Symphony radio broadcast in 1938.

Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 10 in the immediate aftermath of the death of Josef Stalin, the composer's nemesis. It was Shostakovich's first symphonic work since his second denunciation by the Stalinist regime in 1948. According to Phillip Huscher, program annotator for the Chicago Symphony, "This is music of a new beginning, at once summing up all that Shostakovich had to say in the form of a symphony, releasing everything that the years of Stalin's oppression had buried, and anticipating a fresh and enlightened era ahead."

Finally, the Schumann Cello Concerto, composed in 1850, was one of several new works that flowed from Schumann's imagination in the happy and energetic first days of his appointment as municipal music director of Dusseldorf.