Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and Boston Chamber Music Society

Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, Sunday, April 30th at 3:00 in Sanders Theatre. Tickets available through the Harvard Box Office, (617) 495-2222. Regular: $16-76, Students and seniors: $5 off regular.



Boston Chamber Music Society, Sunday April 30th at 7:30, in Sanders Theatre. Tickets available through the Harvard Box Office, (617) 495-2222. Regular: $17-46, Students: $8.



For those Harvard students who can’t be bothered to make the trip to Boston, two of Boston’s premier classical music groups will come to you. This Sunday, the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston Chamber Music Society will both perform in Sanders Theatre.

Eighteen-year-old violinist Caitlin Tully will solo for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Zander, in an afternoon performance of Shostakovich’s “First Violin Concerto.” According to Tully’s website, Yehudi Menuhin, one of the foremost violinists of the 20th century, said of the performer at age 10 that “she plays with more integrity than any young violinist I have ever heard.”

The program is filled with Russian composers. Where Shostakovich worked under Soviet rule—and was denounced in 1936 for composing “muddle instead of music”—both Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky were of the Tsarist era. The power and beauty of their compositions can be compared favorably to the works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Gorky.

The Philharmonic will play Tchaikovsky’s “Fifth Symphony,” a work composed after a long period of inactivity caused by his attempts to “cure” himself of his homosexuality, and one that reaffirmed his compositional mastery. Unlike many of Tchaikovsky’s other pieces, the “Fifth Symphony” was greeted with acclaim after its first performance.

But the Boston Chamber Music Society’s program, which will be performed later in the evening, will stand in sharp relief from the powerful and sometimes bombastic Russian masters featured by the Philharmonic.

The Chamber Music Society will play an arrangement of Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer”—actually a common mistranslation of the German, it is really closer to “Songs of a Traveling Journeyman”—a tender and anguished piece, as well as Schubert’s masterful Octet, a truly epic work whose six movements are modeled after the classical Divertimento.

During the compositional process, Schubert suffered from a severe, and eventually terminal, case of syphilis; shortly after the completion of the Octet he wrote to a friend: “Every night when I go to sleep I hope not to wake again, and every morning brings with it the memory of yesterday’s misery.” None of his personal pain, however, manifests itself in the stunningly lyrical and hopeful Octet, which is reminiscent of Beethoven’s famous Septet. This brilliant—and lengthy—piece will surely be the highlight of Sunday’s program.

Each orchestra will play a remarkably different program: the one steeped in the large and potent symphonies of the Russian steppe, the other focused on continental classicism and the fluid warmth of the chamber setting. But regardless of your tastes, both performances will offer vibrant music and varied methodologies, all within Cambridge’s comfortable bubble.

—Alexander B. Fabry