Composer Angélica Negrón smiles and bows with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico in Boston’s Symphony Hall Nov. 14, after the OSPR performed her “Morivivi.” Hilary Scott photograph
During the 1950s, Pablo Casals found his late-in-life home: Puerto Rico.
In the land of his mother, the septuagenarian cellist and conductor set about creating a legacy for classical music. He initiated structures for musical training, began the prestigious Casals Festival, and founded Puerto Rico’s own symphony orchestra. His Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico, under Casals’s own direction, made its debut in 1958 in Mayagüez, his mother’s hometown.
Seventy-something years later, this Nov. 14, the OSPR made its debut in Boston’s Symphony Hall. OSPR music director Maximiano Valdés led a pastiche program for this memorable appearance, illustrating intentionally or not how classical music is just one of the artistic ways that Puerto Rico models fertile inter-cultural experiences.
The OSPR performs year-round, a schedule busy with symphonic and Pops repertory, ballet and theatre collaborations, recording and touring. This inaugural OSPR visit forms part of a larger Boston Symphony Orchestra initiative—code name, E Pluribus Unum—to reach out to diverse constituencies. Half-a-dozen programs have spotlighted Caribbean musicians, both as guests and with works on the subscription series concerts. BSO CEO/President Chad Smith has been active in exploring partnerships in the community, and showed his skill here, finding another Boston-area constituency that would simply love an invitation.
The audience showed love in return. Boisterously appreciative, they waved flags and shouted out holas and encouragement out to the eighty musician/compatriots onstage. Families came for the event—generations of family came, together. The OSPR musicians clustered themselves onstage to take selfies during intermission. It took forever to regather the audience after the break, which felt like an oversized quinceanera.
Valdés programmed a dozen works, showing the OSPR’s acumen in a range of styles. A suite from the island’s first-ever ballet (Jack Délano’s 1956 La bruja de Loíza) segued to Luis Quintana’s spectral “On the Ethereal Nature of Bioluminescence”), rife with extended techniques. Composer/scholar Alfonso Fuentes offered a jagged commemoration of Hurricane Maria, and his students—Quintana, and Angélica Negrón (her “Morivivi,” a 21st century pastorale), took the orchestra into more angular, contemporary ideas.
The OSPR performed movements from two Roberto Sierra symphonies, his Sixth and Seventh. (Long a friend of the BSO, Sierra’s Concerto for Saxophones, with supercharged soloist James Carter, ran concurrently during the weekend on the BSO subscription series.)
Cuatro soloist Luis Sanz performs Ernesto Cordero’s Concierto Criollo, and Maximiano Valdés conducts the Orqestra Sinfónica de Puerto Rico, on Nov. 14 in Boston’s Symphony Hall. Hilary Scott photograph
Over the decades, both Casals and his legacy have enticed starry international musicians like Domingo, Rostropovich, and Penderecki to visit the island. For this Boston appearance, Puerto Rican cuatro star Luis Sanz filled the soloist’s role, performing Ernesto Cordero’s Concierto Criollo, a showcase for the island’s signature guitar. Concerto Criollo closes with a rousing duet cadenza, cuatro/congas, which emboldened Sanz to offer a sizzling encore, complete with show-offy playing with the cuatro turned backwards and above his head.
Associate conductor Rafael Enrique Irizarry concluded the set Pops-style, which the dance-happy audience was eager to groove along to. The OSPR closed with some of the island’s musical touchstones: Cordero’s oft-quoted aubade “Mariandá”; a danzón selection from Juan Morel Campos; José Pujals’s arrangement of sentimental oldies. Irizarry culminated by coaxing a luxuriant sound from the orchestra for the sentimental chestnut, “En mi Viejo San Juan.” Numerous encores and general celebrating closed the evening.
Boston doesn’t boast New York City’s sizable Puerto Rican ex-pat population, but this audience knows its plena and its salsa, and exuberantly enjoyed the obvious point-of-pride at having their native orchestra finally visit Symphony Hall.
The Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico, Maximiano Valdés conducting, Nov. 14 in Boston’s Symphony Hall.