The Boston Symphony Children's Choir Performs Britten

Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra invite audiences to relive the whimsy and camaraderie of their youth during a program of works by Benjamin Britten, Nadia Boulanger and Claude Debussy, featuring the Boston Symphony Children's Choir and local female company the Lorelei Ensemble. 

Written specifically for a children's chorus, Britten's 'Friday Afternoons' kicks off evening. A song cycle written for his pupils at the Welsh Clive House School where his brother was headmaster in the 1930s, it merges light and dark humour, balancing seriousness and romance whilst evoke changing scenes and emotions. This is followed by Boulanger's 'D'un Soir Triste', the composer's 1918 companion piece to 'D'un matin de printemps'. Deeply moving, the impressionistic piece revels in bittersweet melancholy with soaringly beautiful, soft and slow violin parts. The program comes to a close with Debussy's three movement Nocturnes, a spell-binding triptych of masterful scoring and a virtuosic evocation of half-toned sound worlds.