Press preview Beethoven concerts

The Montreal Gazette previews the NJSO’s January calendar:

Jacques Lacombe is turning his New Jersey Symphony Orchestra into a formidable Austro-German instrument this month, starting Thursday with Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies (plus the U.S. première of a cello concerto by André Previn, with Daniel Müller-Schott as soloist). On Jan. 17 he gets into Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Elizabeth Bishop, mezzo-soprano, and Russell Thomas, tenor) in a program that includes the U.S. première of Tan Dun’s Earth Concerto. On Jan. 24, watch out for Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, arguably the biggest purely symphonic piece in the repertoire. I have reserved my suite at the Newark Hilton.

Each of these programs is given three times, at various venues around the state (although the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark is generally viewed as the headquarters). One is led to conclude that Lacombe is doing well as NJSO music director, a position he occupied in 2010.

Read the full feature at montrealgazette.com.

The Bergen Record chats with NJSO Principal Flute Bart Feller about the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, which the NJSO performs (along with the Seventh Symphony) this week in Englewood, Red Bank and New Brunswick.

[Beethoven’s] Eighth — the last symphony of the so-called middle period – has its own significance: both a kind of happy respite from the sometimes-dark Seventh Symphony, and a gathering of titanic forces for the world-changing Ninth.

“You could imagine the artist kind of wanting to take a breather,” says Bart Feller, principal flutist of the New Jersey Symphony, conducted by Jacques Lacombe, which will be playing both the Seventh and Eighth symphonies (along with works by Andre Previn and Edward T. Cone) on Thursday at bergenPAC in Englewood.

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“The Eighth couldn’t be anybody but Beethoven: It’s not that it’s not mature and developed,” Feller says. “But it’s less of a powerful, life-changing statement than the Seventh ...”

Grand or small, Beethoven was always Beethoven. Beyond this, he speaks to us, 200 years later, because he's the first great people’s composer.

“Beethoven had a hunger to express all this stuff inside him, and the public was ready to accept that,” Feller says.

Beethoven was a rebel for a revolutionary age. He wrote for ticket-buyers in the concert hall, not aristocrats in the salon. He was a “personality” in the modern rock-star sense – tempestuous, romantic, difficult. His music, by the standards of the time, snarled, raged, thundered.

Read the full feature at northjersey.com.