Andris Nelsons conducts Wilson, Szymanowski and Copland

The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili joins Andris Nelsons and the BSO as soloist in the important Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1, a brilliant piece colored by both French Impressionism and German late Romanticism. American orchestral works open and close the concert. The St. Louis-born Olly Wilson, who died in March 2018 (and whose Sinfonia was commissioned by the BSO for its centennial), was a longtime faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. His well-traveled orchestral work Lumina is a scintillating, single-movement orchestral landscape. Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3, premiered by the BSO under Serge Koussevitzky in 1946, is a substantial, expressively rich work incorporating the composer’s familiar Fanfare for the Common Man as the theme of its final movement.