Nelsons, a leading Puccini interpreter, provided a remarkably sensitive account of the death scene, avoiding melodramatics yet observing the composer's skull-and-crossbones notation in the score's margin, requesting a "long pause" to mark the moment of Mimi's passing. The freeze-frame suspension of music and action was breath-stopping, and ineffably sad.
Andris Nelsons was the champion of the evening, drawing luminescent playing from the Covent Garden orchestra.
The Act 1 Prelude – an evocation of The Grail – was played with the curtain down and the house lights half up, gauzy strings shimmering and beautifully...
Over this coolly calculated staging an inspiring glow of light and warmth shines from the orchestra pit by the baton of Andris Nelsons.
Wagner conducting of this quality, so well-paced and richly involving, gloriously played and sung by the Royal Opera orchestra and a bolstered chorus, does not...
Nelsons’ gloriously comprehensive conducting, full of moments of quiet, rapt intensity and surging, tremulous excitement, superbly realised by the ROH Orchestra, is one of this new production’s biggest plusses of all.
Their chemistry onstage is unmistakable. The result so far is two consecutive Grammy awards for Best Orchestra Performances. With disarming sincerity, casual generosity, and boundless optimism, he
has released the potential of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
A reverence for the past surrounds virtually every square foot of Tanglewood, the beautiful summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The expansive lawn...
"A premiere and a persuasive start to Brahms cycle from Nelsons and BSO [...]
The Andris Nelsons era with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was largely grounded in the standard repertoire in the music director’s inaugural season. Yet new...
"BSO offers poignant election-night respite [...]
Spirits were calm for the most part, as the first half kicked off with the cinematic fanfare that began the world premiere of Eric Nathan’s “the space of a...
"Classical conductor Andris Nelsons will become an honorary professor of Jazeps Vitols Latvian Academy of Music, LETA was told at the academy."
Read the entire announcement via The Baltic Course
“The energy of an orchestra can be a great source of inspiration [...]
Young Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons, Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, ranks among the leading exponents of his art. Talking to...
"A Delicious ‘Rosenkavalier’ in Boston [...]
In a city regularly starved of quality opera, Andris Nelsons’s habit of conducting Strauss with his Boston Symphony Orchestra can only be welcome. First...
"Rosenkavalier Shimmers at Symphony Hall [...]
Many a moon has passed since Bostonians were last offered the rich feast that is Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Last night that famine was assuaged in...
"The BSO opens its season with a Russian bang [...]
The opening program for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2016-2017 season was all-Russian, and even without any Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, or Rachmaninoff on...
"Watch: Andris Nelsons Conducts Beethoven's Ninth at Tanglewood [...]
It’s become an annual tradition of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a rite marking the end of summer in the Berkshires: a performance of...
Andris Nelsons at the helm on two Gramophone Award-winning albums in 2016
Read the entire feature via Gramophone Magazine “let me tell you” – Andris Nelsons (conductor), Barbara Hannigan (soprano), and the Bavarian...
"Tanglewood: For Nelsons, last comes first [...]
On his arrival every summer at Tanglewood, Andris Nelsons submits to a ritual round of interviews with the media […] He lets the music speak for...
"The Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, and Deutsche Grammophon have expanded their award-winning recording partnership by extending their original agreement, which focused primarily on Shostakovich Symphonies 5-10 (works composed during the period of Shostakovich's difficult relationship with Stalin and the Soviet regime, mid-1930s to 1953), to include live recordings of the composer's entire canon of 15 symphonies, plus the masterpiece opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk [...]
The first album of the new partnership between the BSO, Nelsons, and DG, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, released in July 2015, won the Grammy Award for...
"For the Boston Symphony Orchestra music director and its soprano, music was indeed the food of love [...]
Considering the long, grueling hours of practice, rehearsal, and concertizing it takes to be a professional musician, it’s no surprise that musicians often...
"Nelsons, BSO stand strong in uncompromising Mahler Ninth [...]
Leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thursday night, Andris Nelsons had the air of a man fiercely concentrating on a challenging task: crafting a coherent...
"Two of the greatest artists in this city, usually thought of as soloists but appearing tonight, for the first time ever in an interview as a duo [...]
Andris Nelsons (@andris_nelsons) hails from Riva, Latvia, and after one year as the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he recently extended...
"Mr. Nelsons has brought a jolt of youthful energy, along with charisma and accomplishment [to the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall]. The audience gave Mr. Nelsons and the players an enormous ovation. Whatever the future, for now the Boston Symphony has placed its trust in a young dynamo."
"Album of the week" - Shostakovich: scandalously successful."
"Nelsons leaned forward into the sound, sculpting the music with surpassing tenderness."
"Nelsons’s performance [Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10] is mighty, marked by a wonderful nose for atmosphere [...]
What makes Nelsons so lethally impressive here is the precision with which he addresses every accent, every ferocious sforzando. He is the most rhythmic of...
'This [Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony] is thrilling music-making, already whetting the appetite for the next instalment: Symphonies 5, 8, and 9 next spring [Deutsche Grammophon]."
"This was a persuasive account [of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7]: texturally vital, musically alert, and sonically rich. […] Nelsons’s interpretation found a charismatic balance between weight and transparency of detail, from the diaphanous sheen of the pianissimo tremolos to the radiant brass-heavy climaxes of the first and second movements."
"Every time I’ve seen him conduct - in Boston, Tanglewood, New York, and Bayreuth - he has set off brushfires of intensity. […] Nelsons produces full-body impact: instead of shattering about your ears, the sound engulfs you. He is a master at controlling dynamics to create a kinetic, fluctuating mass."
"Nelsons’s Brummies [the CBSO] pump fresh air through the notes. […] His sunrise is sublime in the original, uncorrupted meaning of that word – an unfathomable beauty so awe-inspiring that it terrifies with the same intensity it beguiles [...]
A sensibly paced tempo that refuses to let Strauss’s material become weighed down by its own import helps; […] Nelsons keeps a discreet distance, letting...
"Andris Nelsons conducted with keen focus and vigor, eliciting tonal beauty, technical precision and obvious engagement from the orchestra."
"Friday’s concert, the last of Mr. Nelsons’s first subscription run [with the Boston Symphony Orchestra], was hardly lethargic. With an unusually large audience, the orchestra was engaged and the conductor infectiously dynamic with performances of Beethoven, Bartok and Tchaikovsky [...]
It was just his fourth concert in his new role, but it felt as if Mr. Nelsons had been working under Symphony Hall’s golden proscenium arch for years. The...
"New Boston Symphony Music Director Andris Nelsons: 'It's Not A Job — It's Life' [...]
Andris Nelsons is a bear of a man. The 35-year-old Latvian conductor, who will become the Boston Symphony Orchestra‘s youngest music director in more...
"Nelsons’ treatment of the Fourth [Symphony of Beethoven with the CBSO] was startling. Like all outstanding conductors, he has the precious ability to conjure something unexpectedly brilliant out of thin air [...]
He did it a year ago in another matinee concert with the CBSO in Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony, and Beethoven’s Fourth here was cut from the same cloth. Its...
"Andris Nelsons Gets Ready to Lead the Boston Symphony [...]
He was a terror at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, careening around the campus in a staff golf cart, his gangly 6-foot-2 frame...
"For his part, Nelsons has deeply internalized this score [of Salome by Strauss], its idiom, and its pacing, to the point of almost dancing along on Thursday during his delicately shaped 'Dance of the Seven Veils' [...]
Balances were for the most part carefully managed, allowing for a striking clarity of detail while also setting up for a handful of truly hair-raising moments...
"Charismatic young conductor Andris Nelsons is a talent in global demand. Since joining the CBSO in 2007 his reputation has soared – a thrilling debut at last year's Proms will be followed by the opening night at Bayreuth this year. He talks to Fiona Maddocks about growing up in Riga, Simon Rattle's legacy and Birmingham's bid for UK City of Culture 2013 [...]
Everywhere you turn in Birmingham, banners and hoardings urge you to “Join the Big Conversation”. This is the slogan for the city’s bid to...