Around the Music Festival

On the 17th during the European tour of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, 110 people happened to be unable to move from Paris to Amsterdam. The cause was a charter flight failure which was supposed to take off at 11 am. From Paris to Amsterdam is over 4 hours by bus, bus transfers by a long time are not allowed under the agreement with the musician association. Following that, the orchestra caught up with a new 76-seater charter flight, but at the same time it turned out that takeoff could only be allowed at 17:30, and arrived in Amsterdam at 19 o’clock.

Besides, 76 people changed to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 because there are not enough people to play Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 which was originally planned. The orchestra side downloaded the music score as a PDF file, sent the data and output it to Concertgebouw. Concertgebouw also changed the start time of the concert from 20:15 to 21:00 and waited for the arrival of the member.

In the end, 76 people arrived in Amsterdam as scheduled, from which the orchestra hurried to the venue by bus, and came to play without rehearsals. The Boston Symphony Orchestra played the Beethoven ‘s symphony for the first time in two years, but the orchestra’ s members were impressed by the generous applause sent to the performance. This European tour started from London on September 2. In the Vienna, Lucerne, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, the performance was repeated and Amsterdam on the 17th was the last day.

Photo: Boston Symphony Orchestra / Marco Borggreve