Saturday, September 27, 2025
8:00 PM
The Boston Symphony Orchestra launches its 2025-26 season with the music of gods and heroes, conducted by Music Director Andris Nelsons. This program pairs Mozart’s final symphony—No. 41, which earned the name Jupiter in honor of its unprecedented ambition and majesty—with Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, or, A Hero's Life, a work of intensely personal emotion and orchestral virtuosity.
Andris Nelsons, conductor
W.A. MOZART Symphony No. 41, Jupiter
Richard STRAUSS Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life)
In the first of a three-part interview, BSO Concertmaster Nathan Cole describes his experience of the 2025 Tanglewood season and the challenges of the solo violin part of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. To listen, use the player below.
Learn more about the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 2025-2026 season.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath from WCRB at Symphony Hall with Nathan Cole, the 11th Concertmaster of the Boston Symphony. Nathan, thanks for a little of your time today. I appreciate it.
Nathan Cole Of course, great to be here.
Brian McCreath These first few weeks of the season have amazing music, amazing core orchestral music for the Boston Symphony. But before we get into that, I just want to check in with you, now at the beginning of your second full year as Concertmaster. What was your experience of Tanglewood in 2025 like?
Nathan Cole Oh, it was amazing. As I had never been a Tanglewood Fellow myself, this was really my first chance to experience the whole... Just to call it a place doesn't even seem to do it justice. I mean, it's a physical place. There are Tanglewood grounds and all that, but it really is a feeling. And people had told me this before I came, and I finally understood it having been there for a summer. But the synthesis between the Fellows at Tanglewood and the Symphony, the audience, and just all of the families. I mean, my own family and our children came to many concerts and rehearsals and just had a blast wandering around. It really is magical.
Brian McCreath That's right, it was your first full Tanglewood season as well, yeah.
Nathan Cole Right, I had played just a bit in 2024, but this time got to do the whole eight weeks, including some teaching at the TMC.
Brian McCreath And as we talked about earlier in this year, as a member of the LA Phil, you'd done Hollywood Bowl for years and years. So the pace of work and the pace of music wasn't that unfamiliar, but this was the first time to go through all eight weeks of the BSO at Tanglewood.
Nathan Cole It was, and you're right about the LA Phil and the Hollywood Bowl. That's its own iconic venue. But there, the mix of repertoire is slanted much more toward either straight pops or lighter classics, and some core repertoire, of course. But at Tanglewood, Andris was there quite a bit. And really a lot of big, meaty ...
Brian McCreath Huge things.
Nathan Cole ... yeah, classical works. So it's not that that's always harder. I mean, pops can be challenging and physically taxing too, but it was a lot. It was a lot of big pieces. So a well-deserved break, I think, after that, between that and this part of the season.
Brian McCreath Well, Nathan, you're great at radio because you gave me a good segue. So, tell me now about other big pieces that are starting this season. We're starting with the Jupiter Symphony by Mozart and then Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, the second week of the season, Debussy's Nocturnes and Mahler's Fourth Symphony, and then the Missa Solemnis by Beethoven. I want to go through these three concerts with you primarily because each of them has a major role for the concertmaster, well beyond what the concertmaster's core duties are of shepherding the section and being, as you described to me in our interview earlier, that go between, between the conductor and the orchestra. You have major solos. So let's take them on one by one. Ein Heldenleben has this amazing solo that Strauss wrote as part of the story of a hero's life. Tell me about this particular solo and your experience with it, going as far back as you want to describe.
Nathan Cole Sure, and you're right. It is a big concertmaster solo, maybe the biggest, although Missa Solemnis, which we'll get to, probably goes on for longer. But certainly, Ein Heldenleben, if you ever have thoughts of becoming a concertmaster, that's the one that you've got. You're gonna play it on every audition. And for that reason, it's really gratifying, actually, to play the piece. And I had gotten to do that with several orchestras. I used to be a member of the Chicago Symphony before LA Philharmonic as well. But still, that is a solo that, for auditions, you practice alone in a practice room. You obsess over every detail. And it can be easy sometimes to forget the story. And while A Hero's Life, Ein Heldenleben, Strauss would frequently say, well, I'm not the hero. This isn't about me. And then later he admitted, yeah, it is about me and my music, my critics, my wife. And so the violin represents Strauss's wife, who apparently was mercurial. The moods would shift at the drop of a hat. And so, the violin has to embody... Thematically, there's the love theme, right? So the love between the hero and the hero's companion, but then also how that character and those moods shift really suddenly. And I think that's a challenge of the solo, because a lot of times our default is to make transitions between characters to sort of round off the corners. And in this, really, you're asked to do exactly the opposite. You're here and then you're there.
Brian McCreath And it's a dialog in parts of that solo. You're literally in dialog with the orchestra. You're representing Strauss's wife or the hero's companion, however we want to look at it. And the orchestra is the other part of that relationship. So you're almost an actor.
Nathan Cole Yeah, the solo comes in really out of the blue and with a tartness before it turns sweeter. And right, there's dialog, there is interplay, and then she just goes off on her own. And the real highs and lows. Violinistically, it's challenging. I mean, he was not primarily a string player, although his knowledge of every instrument was so intimate that, even if it doesn't lie exactly well, it's ripe for real song, real singing.
Brian McCreath Interpretively, this is such a big solo and it is so characterful, if I can coin that word, that I wonder how much of the interpretation is how you like to do it and how you've practiced it for decades and how much Andris has a way of looking at it and how that relationship works so that you both are happy with how that solo goes.
Nathan Cole Well, Andris's nature, so far, in my experience here, I don't expect that to change, I mean, he really watches and especially listens to the other performers on stage. He's not one to just conduct in front of the mirror, so to speak, and say this is my way of doing it and follow me. He really wants for all of us to make the music, which is what we do. And then he helps and guides and shapes. And there have certainly been parts of the violin solo where the gestures that he's giving are a little different than I... Not necessarily a different character from what I would expect, but either more in that direction or perhaps less in a certain direction. And it's also my nature to love to try other things. So I'm having fun going along with that. And I expect, honestly, that it's gonna be different at the first performance tomorrow and then... Again, different at each subsequent performance because that's part of Andris's nature as well.