Music for a Summer Evening

BU Today

There may be no finer place to be this evening than the Hatch Shell on Boston’s Charles River Esplanade. Oh, you’ll have to share space with a couple of thousand fellow citizens. But it will be worth it. For tonight marks the start of the Boston Landmarks Orchestra’s 2017 season of free summer concerts.
Comprising some of the Boston area’s finest professional musicians, the BLO has earned a reputation for presenting eclectic classical music concerts on the Hatch Shell, as well as for performing in city neighborhoods, youth centers, and public parks. Since its founding in 2001, the orchestra has played classical music from a range of composers in a fun, approachable way.
Tonight’s opening concert, titled Music for a Summer Evening, includes, appropriately, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a work for voice and orchestra that nostalgically recalls a child’s memories of summer. The lush piece is based on a largely autobiographical prose poem by Pulitzer-winner James Agee. First performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1948, Barber’s composition has become a staple of 20th-century classical music.
Led by musical director Christopher Wilkins, the orchestra will also perform Ralph Vaughan Williams’ English Folk Song Suite, one of the British composer’s most famous pieces, originally written for a military band; Frederick Delius’ Summer Evening, one of three tone poems created between 1888 and 1890; The Blue Planet, a 10-minute orchestral work by Peggy Stuart Coolidge that later became the official theme song for the World Wildlife Fund (Coolidge was the first female American composer to have a recording made of her symphonic works); excerpts from Giuseppe Verdi’s five-act opera I vespri siciliani; and Edward Elgar’s moving Enigma Variations, composed in 1899. The composition features 14 variations on a single theme—each said to be a musical sketch of various friends of the composer’s. Elgar’s most ...

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