This week, GBH’s Executive Arts Editor Jared Bowen looks at new leadership for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a mesmerizing nighttime sculpture exhibition in Gloucester and recommends a fantastical book from a local author.
New leadership at the Boston Symphony Orchestra
In an exciting moment for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Gail Samuel is taking over as the organization’s first female president in its 140-year history. Samuel comes to Boston from Los Angeles, where she had leadership roles in the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl. Bringing fresh eyes and ears, Bowen says Samuel will be figuring out how the BSO can broaden its scope, be more integrated in the city as it emerges from a pandemic, and be mindful of criticisms that its programming is too Euro-centric.
Samuel told Bowen that she is thinking about diversity at all levels of the organization. “I think we need to think about our staffing,” she said. “I think we need to think about the artists on stage and we need to think about how we are welcoming to everybody. Everybody doesn't have to want to engage with us, but everyone should feel welcome to.”
“Boston Sculptors ALight on MARS: A Nocturnal Exhibition” on view at The Manship Artists Residency grounds in Gloucester through November 7th
Paul Manship, the famous 20th-century sculptor best known for creating the Prometheus Fountain at Rockefeller Center in New York City, used to escape to his home studio in Gloucester, where he was mesmerized by fireflies. Years in the making, the nocturnal exhibition “ALight On MARS” is best viewed at twilight to experience the “magical” transition to darkness, Bowen says, and see the works from the Boston Sculptors Gallery shine.
“You'll have this marvelous walk around with each piece getting more and more exciting,” co-curator Belinda Rathbone told Bowen about the experience. “You'll see the flames in the stained glass sparkling, and the piece by Mags Harries, these are monumental — it’s sort of like they sort of become more solid. So each piece does a different thing with light.”
“The Brides of Maracoor,” in bookstores now
Gregory Maguire, the local author who wrote “Wicked,” which was adapted into the smash hit musical, had vowed to retire but is now back to the world of Oz. In this return, Elphaba’s granddaughter, also green-skinned, finds herself on Maracoor, a foreign island with other women who can’t escape. The book is the first in a three-part series, and Bowen says it reflects the pandemic times we are currently in.
“I've always used these particular creative efforts as a kind of way to consider what is happening in the contemporary moment in which I'm living and try to find a way to survive it,” Maguire told Bowen. “So the book ‘The Brides of Maracoor’ starts on an island that not only the seven inhabitants can't get off, they don't even know anything about the world beyond the island in which they've been raised since infancy. So that feels sort of pandemic-y doesn't it?”
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