Saturday, October 24, 2026
8:00 PM
Esteemed conductor Kent Nagano leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides Overture, inspired by one of Mendelssohn's trips to the British Isles. After, Nagano conducts two premieres: the world premiere of Tod Machover’s already and not yet, and the U.S. premiere of Alex Nante’s Ein feste Burg, based on the Bach Chorale “Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott,” BWV 302. That same Bach Chorale is woven into the musical fabric of Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 5, titled "Reformation."
Kent Nagano, conductor
Felix MENDELSSOHN The Hebrides Overture (“Fingal's Cave”)
Tod MACHOVER already and not yet (World premiere; BSO commission)
Alex NANTE Ein feste Burg (U.S. premiere)
MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 5, Reformation
Watch an in-depth discussion with composer Tod Machover, GBH Music's Brian McCreath, and NOVA's Caitlin Saks about already and not yet:
Watch PhD candidate Manaswi Mishra demonstrate how the live AI system works:
Learn more about the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 2026-2027 season on their site.
In a conversation with CRB's Brian McCreath, Kent Nagano recounts his deep personal history with Boston over the years, describes his friendship and collaboration with Tod Machover, and reveals the themes that tie all of the music in this program together.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity):
Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at Symphony Hall with Kent Nagano, and what a fascinating program. Thanks for a little of your time today. I appreciate it.
Kent Nagano It's a great pleasure to be here.
Brian McCreath I'd love to ask you about how this program came together, but before we even get into that, I'd love to hear from you a little bit about your history in Boston because it has been a little while. But tell me about your experience in Boston over the years.
Kent Nagano Well, indeed, Boston has a very special meaning for me, and it actually begins before I was born. My mother went to school here. It was during a very controversial time in the United States. It was called the relocation of the Japanese American citizens, and she was fortunate enough to have been given special sponsorship to come here to Boston to go to high school. And because of that, it left a great impression on her. It was such a high form of education that she had a choice of several universities to go to. This is not always the case for a young Japanese American farm girl growing up in California. So she always taught us kids that in terms of education, what she learned during her high school years in Boston opened the doorway for her to go on. So, fast forward one generation to me, the very, very first job I had directly coming out of conservatory and university was with Sarah Caldwell and the Opera Company of Boston.
Sarah Caldwell was really well known, of course, for her brilliant inventiveness, imagination, and in many ways she opened up a completely new horizon to how opera is experienced. She was very, very important for the development of opera in not only the United States, but it also reflected back to Europe. She was also really famous for giving young, very, very young students a chance to, in a sense, learn the craft through apprenticeship. So, she hired me to be her assistant conductor. I still laugh about it today because I really didn't have many qualifications. I think she maybe liked the fact that I played the viola like she did, so maybe that's why she had sympathy. But she took me on as her student assistant conductor, and for two-and-a-half years, which is a very long time, she formed together with the orchestra. The orchestra in those days were veterans or former members of the Boston Symphony. For example, the legendary Richard Burgin was our concertmaster, and he was so generous and so kind. He would spend hours discussing the scores with me. [Donizetti's] Don Pasquale, I remember, was with Armando Ghitalla, the great legendary trumpet player who explained to me how Don Pasquale trumpet solo is supposed to go. These legendary figures, together with Sarah Caldwell, you can just imagine what a fertile arena this was to absorb and to grow.
Because of that kind of formation, I got at a very young age a post in California, but through that post and the work with composer Olivier Messiaen, I was able to meet Maestro Seiji Ozawa. And we worked together in Paris and he invited me to come back a second time as his assistant with the Boston Symphony. And again, it was such a rich moment of learning. So many legendary players generously shared their knowledge with me and really helped me learn how to ask the right questions. That really is all about maturing as an artist. It's not so much nurturing your ego, but really learning how to ask the questions. So Dorothy Dwyer, I remember, Principal Flutist at the time, was asking me what I thought about certain solo passages that she was playing. And of course, I was very intimidated that she would ask me, but she was asking questions to, in a way, teach me to ask questions all of the time. This was a very, very special time. And to make full circle, together with the Boston Symphony, we toured Japan, and that was the first time that I had ever been to Japan before. So thanks to the Boston Symphony, I had the privilege of coming back to my ancestral homeland, so to speak. So, yes, in short, Boston has a deep and special meaning for me.
Brian McCreath Thank you so much for sharing that. That's amazing. And the names that you reference are certainly legendary. For myself as a trumpet player, if you say Armando Ghitalla, I am all ears. I mean, my gosh, what a player. Colors in his sound, inflection in his phrasing, just everything. What a musician.
Kent Nagano Yes, and it was also an indirect way of showing how tradition is passed on. Has nothing to do with ego, it has nothing to do with self-righteousness, it has nothing to do with confidence or whatever. It really is a question of playing today, anchored in the future, but clearly hearing the past. Learning that from these great figures, it was a lesson that I've never forgotten. And in a real sense of the word, it opened the doorway towards continued growth, continued exploration, and never stop asking the right questions.
Brian McCreath Amazing. Now, I did overhear you say in the rehearsal that just ended, at a certain point you said this orchestra sounds like no other orchestra, and I have a feeling that there's a little bit of what you're referencing as the history in what you're hearing in this orchestra. Is there more that you can say about what you hear when you stand in front of the Boston Symphony that's different from other orchestras?
Kent Nagano It is often said that an orchestra should be, when it's really playing well, and serving its, let's say, ambassadorial function, it should be a metaphor for society or a metaphor for the community. This is not Kent Nagano speaking. This is actually— you hear this often because an orchestra, yes, is partially divertissement, partially entertainment, of course. But it's much more than just an entertainment form. It is a reflection of the identity of the community itself. Ideally, when you leave a concert, you hear the compliment, oh, I very much like hearing my orchestra, meaning somehow when a public member comes to hear an orchestra, they identify with the sound. They identify with what they see, they identify with the dialogue between the stage and the audience, and make no mistake, that dialogue is an essential part of that performance. And of course, the community of Boston is different from the community of San Francisco, which is different from the community of Paris, different from Berlin. And in that sense, if an orchestra carries a tradition, especially a great tradition like the Boston Symphony, long great tradition, you hear the history of the community as well. You hear the past.
In terms of colors, it's not so much emotion like we might feel when we go to an entertainment form, but much, much deeper dimensions like nostalgia or maybe recalling the past, or maybe hearing the rhythm of social activity within, or maybe hearing the agogics of how an orchestra plays a rhythm. It's not mathematics, it's expression. But when you play a rhythm expressively, of course, it should mirror the way of speaking of that particular community. So, it's not a right or wrong, it's not a better or worse, but being unique is something that the arts really are all about. If you are imitative or somehow standardized, then it's not really an art form anymore. And that's what the Boston Symphony carries so strongly, is this long, long history and they're carrying it into the future. It's not a question of looking back. It's a question of hearing the past as you look forward. And that is the basis of this concert.
The first piece that was proposed was this new work premiere by composer Tod Machover, who would be working with, very closely with the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with his Media Lab to teach or educate artificial intelligence in such a way that artificial intelligence could understand how to dialogue with various solo instruments in an orchestra. This is brand new, it's never been done before. How to hear different impulses, kind of gestures from the orchestra, and to learn how to respond to that. Not by simply imitating, but to respond. That to me was the key of the future, the present, and the past. Because artificial intelligence, yes, we all realize it's coming, the future, but the future is here today. And what we are doing with a symphonic form is bringing a past tradition into the future, and that was what triggered the idea of Johann Sebastian Bach profoundly inspiring Felix Mendelssohn. The same year that he wrote the Fifth Symphony, he did the premiere of St. Matthew's Passion, by Johann Sebastian Bach, for the first time in 100 years, about, in Berlin. The audiences heard Bach's music fresh after 100 years. And of course he quotes Martin Luther's hymn realized by Johann Sebastian Bach in the last movement of the Fifth Symphony. In a way, the past provoked the future. And there are 2 other pieces. One is Fingal's Cave or The Hebrides where the legend of Ossian, the medieval powerful ruler, the ruins of his castle fell into Fingal's Cove. Mendelssohn saw that and was deeply inspired by the movement of the waves and the legend of Ossian, who was there. He wrote to his sister about it, Fanny.
And with that, I asked Alex Nante about Johann Sebastian Bach. And Nante, who's also a great, great musician, said, of course. And at this particular time, rather than the Reformation, he suffered a family tragedy. And the family was very fragile at the time, and they needed strength to go on. So Alex found that strength through Ein' feste Burg, give me strength through this feste Burg. And he realized the same Martin Luther hymn that Bach did. And that hopefully will tie the program together. How the past, we hear it in the present and it influences the future. Machover, Nante, Mendelssohn. That was the idea for this program.
Brian McCreath That is so fascinating. I love that you tied all of that together. Thank you for all of that. Wow, that's terrific. I'm curious about your experience of Tod Machover prior to this week. I would imagine you have encountered him before, maybe conducted some of his music before, I don't know, but what do you think of when you think of Tod Machover as you're entering into this project, knowing that this piece is coming? What are your thoughts about Tod and your perceptions coming into it?
Kent Nagano Well, we have a very, very long history dating back to 1972.
Brian McCreath Oh my gosh, wow.
Kent Nagano This is before most of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was born.
Brian McCreath I'm sure that's true.
Kent Nagano But we were very, very young teenaged composition students together. We took the same theory classes, we studied with the same composition teacher. And my earliest memory, one of our composition exercises was of course quite intensive analysis, and we were analyzing one of the great Arnold Schoenberg 12-tone pieces, and for some reason I misplaced the tone row. So Tod rescued me and he brought the tone row to me and said, here's the tone row, man. So this is my earliest memory of Tod, bailing me out for a 12-tone serial music exercise. We've stayed in touch ever since, And yes, of course. our paths have interwoven, I'm a student of Pierre Boulez and he worked for Boulez at IRCAM. When he came to the Media Lab, he was experimenting with a lot of really revolutionary inventions that were coming out and he would bring them to me in Berlin where I was stationed at the time. And we did several concerts together just exposing some of these experiments within an experimental music format.
And, yeah, regularly speaking over the years, we commissioned a piece from him while I was with the Montreal Symphony for many years. I've commissioned a piece for him now for my current orchestra. So it's one of those rare cases where a friend from the teenage years not only stays a friendship, but it's an active friendship today. It's one that, for lack of a better word, is very provocative. We provoke each other to go forward, and he certainly provoked me with this piece today by delivering me a score with passages that simply said, "A.I." I have had no idea what that was going to sound like until yesterday, and that is very provocative to conduct a score that you don't know what it's going to sound like because the artificial intelligence had not yet been educated and invented. So, at the least, that's provocative. I could use maybe other words as well.
Brian McCreath Well, it certainly fits the theme of everything you described, the past informing the future. Here we are. That's wonderful. Kent Nagano, it's so good to see you. I'm glad you're here in Boston. I'm so glad to hear about your rich history with this place and with this culture. And thank you for your time today. I appreciate it.
Kent Nagano Again, it's a great, great pleasure. Thank you for having me.