The sparkling, scintillating final movement from Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G signals it’s the best part of our Monday: it’s time for GBH’s All Things Considered series “Turntable,” when we find out what our favorite music connoisseurs are listening to right now.
Brian McCreath, the director of production of GBH Music and host of CRB’s Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcast, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share what’s on his playlist. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: We’re already listening to your first selection. As I mentioned, this is the Presto —the third movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. You’ve got to fill in the rest for us. Who is this amazing pianist?
Brian McCreath: Oh, man. Seong-Jin Cho is an amazing pianist who has really come on strong in the last few years. He was a winner of the Chopin Competition several years ago, and he’s developed a really great working relationship with the Boston Symphony, so he wanted to record the two piano concertos by Ravel as part of a collection of all of Ravel’s solo piano music and concertos.
So these were recorded in concert last year — the Piano Concerto in G and the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand — and they’re just really amazing works. They’re some of my favorite piano concertos, and especially this Piano Concerto in G — as you say, sparkling and scintillating.
And, really, a piece that draws on Ravel’s fascination with jazz in the United States. Seong-Jin Cho — a real poet of the piano, as he has been described — draws on some ferocious technique as well.
[Piano Concerto in G Major, M. 83: III. Presto — Maurice Ravel, Seong-Jin Cho, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons]
McCreath: This turns out to be the 150th birthday month of Maurice Ravel, so it’s well-timed. And Seong-Jin Cho is going to play both of these concertos — the Piano Concerto in G, and the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand — in one concert coming up at Tanglewood this summer. So, not only can you listen to this new recording of these two concertos, but you can also hear it in person at Tanglewood.
Rath: That makes a nice transition to your next music selection, Brian, from composer Gabriela Ortiz, who will also be at Tanglewood this summer.
McCreath: Yeah. So, Gabriela Ortiz is a composer whose music was just played by the BSO, but I wanted to include her in our talk right now because this was the big winner at the Grammy Awards for the classical music categories. It won three Grammys at the awards in February, and it’s a disc called Revolución Diamantina.
Gustavo Dudamel leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Gabriela Ortiz is this amazing Mexican composer. She wrote this piece that is a depiction of what’s called the Glitter March in Mexico from 2019. It’s a very powerful piece of music that addresses issues of violence against women and, really, the hope that can come out of that pain when we all come together.
We experienced it at Symphony Hall just a couple of weeks ago, and it’s also on this disc that the Los Angeles Philharmonic released — along with a couple of other pieces by Gabriela Ortiz. And again, she’s going to be at Tanglewood, as you mentioned, as the director of the Festival of Contemporary Music. But I think you can hear in this music the vibrancy and the color that Gabriela Ortiz builds into her music.
[Revolución diamantina, Act V: Pink Glitter — Gabriela Ortiz, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Master Chorale]
Rath: We had Gabriela Ortiz on the show when she premiered this with the BSO a couple of weeks ago. We’re actually going to air the second half of the interview this summer when she returns to Tanglewood, and we’ll keep our listeners posted on all of that.
Brian, what’s so amazing about this music for me is that: it’s modern, it takes on difficult, violent material — but it’s also accessible.
McCreath: It is. She’s a person who draws on all kinds of influences, but not least of which is the indigenous music of her own homeland, Mexico. You can hear an enormous percussion section. So there’s this fascination just with the amount of sound and colors that she creates within her music.
But with her, there’s this combination that makes it really unique. She’s got a very distinctive voice, and that’s one of the things that’s exciting about this particular recording. It also includes, by the way, a violin concerto that she wrote for a young violinist named Maria Dueñas, as well as another shorter orchestral piece.
Again, I think it’s a really fascinating collection on the recording — and, a nice preview of what to expect if people can make it to Tanglewood for the Festival of Contemporary Music in July.
Rath: We’ve got time for one more, Brian. Tell us about the last track we’ll be listening to.
McCreath: So, one of my favorite ensembles that the Boston Early Music Festival has introduced to us in the last few years is Vox Luminis, with their director, Lionel Meunier. They’re from Belgium, and they’ve been a guest of the Boston Early Music Festival a few times in recent years.
We have another birthday anniversary here to acknowledge, which is that on March 21st, it’s the 340th anniversary of Bach’s birth. So I just wanted to offer one of their recent recordings of Bach. This is part of Bach’s Ascension Oratorio.
[Bach Ascension Oratorio No. 1 — Vox Luminis]
McCreath: You can just hear the sheer joy that Bach builds into this Ascension Oratrio. And what I especially want to highlight is the fluidity and the ensemble sound of the choral part of Vox Luminis. They’ll be performing at the Boston Early Music Festival in June. But this Bach recording is really one of my favorites from the last year.
Rath: And Brian, that says something — because you and I have talked a lot over the years about our own respective obsessions with the Bach cantatas. I wanted to talk a bit more before we go about this one because, I mean, there are hundreds of them. What is special about this one? Because it really is amazing.
McCreath: Well, you know, the thing about Bach’s cantatas is that they are all pegged to particular dates on the calendar that Bach was writing for in his job as the cantor of a Lutheran church in Leipzig. And so, whatever the character is that a Christian believer might assign to a particular date, that’s how Bach responds in the music.
You know, I think you may have heard it before, but it’s worth saying again that: the way that Bach writes his cantatas has often been compared to writing sermons — in music. It’s not as though it’s just a straight depiction of a story, but rather, it’s a response to a reading, or a response to a particular meaning of a day.
And so, for Ascension, this is one of the really joyful days in the Christian calendar. And the Ascension Oratorio, therefore, is one of those pieces that — you could’ve imagined going to this church in Leipzig for what would’ve been a holiday for that community, and coming out just absolutely transcendent, just uplifted by this music because it’s so joyful.
