“Under Andris Nelsons’s impassioned leadership, the BSO brilliantly essayed this challenging score… Nelsons led with complete command, brilliantly revealing every twist and turn”

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

“Barber’s opera made for an excellent kickoff to the BSO’s month-long E Pluribus Unum festival… It was also a terrific showcase for the orchestra, which had never performed Vanessa before, and music director Andris Nelsons.

Nelsons isn’t a conductor one immediately associates with the core American canon, though he’s led a handful of works by Barber in the course of his directorship. On Thursday, the Latvian maestro seemed perfectly at ease with the 20^th-century icon’s larger style and syntax.

Tempos were judicious, orchestral colors vivid, and the music’s sense of texture and space—both within the ensemble and between on- and off-stage forces—proved gripping… there were moments of extraordinary delicacy and beauty to be had. The sotto voce string textures in Act 1’s “Do not utter a word” were exceptionally focused and the gorgeous Act 3 Intermezzo was a thing unto itself. Throughout the night, the orchestra’s woodwind and horn sections clearly reveled in Barber’s voluptuous scoring.”

Boston Classical Review