As the next season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra approaches, this is an ideal time to visit the BSO web site and take a look and listen at the features our producer Brian Bell has archived there. If you've heard Brian's work at intermissions during our live broadcasts from Symphony Hall and Tanglewood, you already know how thoroughly he digs into all kinds of things, from straight ahead interviews with conductors and guest soloists to guided tours of specific works on the program to profiles of BSO players. In fact, a friend of mine who recently moved to Boston from Cleveland, where he was a subscriber to that city's great orchestra and listened to them on the air on WCLV, was astonished and delighted to hear one of our broadcasts and the context Brian and host Ron Della Chiesa gave to the concert.Especially interesting at this time are the pages Brian put together devoted to the first music director of the BSO, Georg Henschel. When you take a listen to the feature about him and check out the programs from that fall of 1881 when it all got started, you'll find one particular name figuring as prominently on programs as it does now physically at Symphony Hall: Beethoven. During that first season, Henschel conducted the orchestra in all of Beethoven's symphonies, and, in fact, did the same thing during each of the next two seasons. And I think it's safe to say that running the entire cycle wasn't born out of a lack of new ideas. Rather, it was no doubt because Henschel knew that Beethoven's symphonies as a unit make up one of the best ways to forge an orchestra's sound and put it on display. And James Levine is now ready to do the same thing, with all nine of Beethoven's symphonies scheduled within three weeks, from late October to early November.
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