Boston Classical Review

Benjamin Zander conducts the opening concert of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra’s final season Sunday at Symphony Hall.

“Britten saved my life,” Benjamin Zander casually lets drop.

The conductor is not being metaphorical. It seems the great English composer played an inadvertent role in shaping Boston’s recent musical history.

“I was swimming in the sea,” Zander says (he studied at Aldeburgh with Benjamin Britten and his assistant, Imogen Holst, for several summers in his youth). “I was knocked over by a wave—which I remember—and I remember trying to get up and I passed out because I was knocked out by another wave. And the only person who saw me was Britten, and he ran over and pulled me out. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”

Musing on decades-old twists of fate isn’t exactly a Zander pastime—his is generally a forward-thinking, in-the-moment type personality. But as the 87-year-old conductor prepares for the final season of both the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, the years leading up to this moment loom large.

“[The coming season is] a journey about my life, basically,” he explained when we recently met at his Cambridge home. “I come from a German family. My father was born in 1898. He wasn’t a [trained] musician, but he was a profoundly gifted musician and intellectual. 

“He had an extraordinary musical life. He played under Nikisch when he was young and Nikisch was the closest to Brahms of anybody. And my father lived next door to Reger and he knew Liszt’s housekeeper…he heard all the stories about Wagner from the horse’s mouth, as it were. That’s how he grew up. And I absorbed all that culture; that’s how I grew up.”

Appropriately, then, each orchestra’s final programs take a robustly Germanic view of things. But, while Zander, who’s been a musical fixture in Boston for more than six decades, has opted to go out with monuments from the canon, each selection comes with a personal association attached.

“I decided to go to the pieces that made the biggest impact,” he says. “And that repertoire is the repertoire that I have studied, taught, and performed. Each one of the pieces on the programs [reflects] a particular experience I’ve had, that’s shaped me and the orchestra I conducted. So [if we] did one of them three years ago, that doesn’t matter. This is the final statement. There’s no filler.”

The Philharmonic’s first concert on October 11^th brings together what Zander—who is not one to shy away from superlatives—describes as “a perfect overture, possibly the greatest violin concerto ever written, and maybe the greatest symphony.”

As it happens, the latter, Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, figured prominently in the conductor’s musical development. It was in this score, he points out, that he “discovered a new way of solving a problem in music: we all change the tempo to express different things and it’s kind of inevitable. It became very prominent as a way of expressing music in the Romantic era. In Brahms, though, it doesn’t work, because [the music] is so structurally coherent.

“But, I discovered if you teach an orchestra to play with rubato”—that is, treating phasings flexibly within a set tempo—“you can change the feeling without changing the tempo. And that has been a central idea of my whole musical life. I’ve taught every orchestra I’ve ever conducted to play with chamber music rubato.”

Zander began his career as a cellist.

The “greatest violin concerto”—Beethoven’s—reunites the BPO with soloist Guy Braunstein. The former concertmaster of the Berliner Philharmoniker has in recent years become, as Zander describes him, “our house violinist,” having appeared with either the Philharmonic or Youth Orchestra to play the Elgar concerto, both of Brahms’s string concerti (the Violin Concerto and Double Concerto), and Bruch’s first concerto.

Though Braunstein is a new friend of the institution’s, many of the Philharmonic’s members have been around for the long-haul. After rehearsing the culminating item on the first concert, Weber’s Overture to Der Freischütz, Greg Vitale, the BPO’s concertmaster, noted to the conductor that this was the first music he’d performed with him decades ago as a 12-year-old in New England Conservatory’s Youth Philharmonic Orchestra.

“I counted up the number of years the horn players have been in the orchestra,” Zander said at one point. “It’s well over 100 years [between the four].” That collective will be showcased throughout the coming season, not least in the Philharmonic’s November 22^nd concert, which pairs Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony with Bruckner’s Fifth.

Zander’s connection to the latter is as fascinating as it is singular. “My father was seventeen when he joined the German army in the First World War and he was sent to the Eastern front,” he relates. “His mother sent him scores. He wasn’t a musician by profession, but he could read a score and hear it in his head. And he had a score of Bruckner Five and he often told me that I should conduct it.”

It took until after his father’s death, though, for Zander to connect with the work (once he made his way in, he found the sprawling opus “incredibly great”). Since then, it has been an occasional presence on BPO programs. This last time through promises to be special: “I have the actual score my father had in the trenches—inscribed June 8, 1918, from his mother—and so that feels right. And the orchestra just loves to play Bruckner.”

The ensemble’s remaining concerts are built around a pair of Ninth Symphonies: Beethoven’s and Mahler’s. A “fantastic quartet of soloists”—Angel Blue, Jamie Barton, Nicholas Phan, and Solomon Howard—plus Chorus pro Musica join the Philharmonic for the former.

And the April 11^th finale brings everything back to where it began. “Mahler Nine is the reason the orchestra started,” Zander notes. “We had twenty-two rehearsals and we all had to learn it from the beginning. So, this is [coming] full circle.”

In addition to the Philharmonic’s four programs, the BPYO presents three concerts, culminating in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, which will be taken on the group’s final European tour next summer.

Their first program, though, is an all-Russian affair on November 6^th: Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan & Ludmilla, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.

Stravinsky’s ballet has a special significance for the conductor. He last led it with the BPYO on March 12, 2020, in a virtually empty Symphony Hall the day before Massachusetts entered its long Covid lockdown. The performance, though, was streamed and, among the viewers, was the 10-year-old daughter of a teacher of one of the orchestra’s violists. The girl was so taken with the music that her mother wrote a letter that made its way to Zander, wondering what it was about the score that so captivated her child. In response, he embarked on the first of many pandemic-era educational projects, creating an in-depth analysis of Petrushka.

Perhaps more such undertakings are in the offing once the maestro lays down his baton: he’s a natural teacher and his spoken introductions to the canon are typically outstanding and illuminating. Besides, “the lifetime is not over,” he remarked at one point in our conversation. “A lot of people think I’m retiring, which I’m not. I’m going on to do all sorts of other things. But I’ve been doing this now for forty-eight years… there are all sorts of things beginning to emerge and I’m excited about just having a chance to do [them].”

Though ultimately a season of farewell, Zander’s putting a hopeful face on the coming months. “It’s not the end of anything, except this institution,” he acknowledges. “Life is going to go on…It may seem a little bit centered around me, but the institution, in a sense, was made that way.

“People are, no doubt, upset. But many people are also saying, ‘Great! It’s been a wonderful journey. No institution has to go on forever.’ And there isn’t anybody else who can do this.

“Harvard did a study at one point about whether BPO could continue without me,” he continued. “Well, the person has to live in Boston, not need housing, not need a job, be able to fundraise at this level, donate $300,000 a year as well as [lead the organization] for nothing, and be enough of a musician to bring people in. It’s a rather unique combination and this institution is particular and created in a certain kind of way.”

At the very least, then, this means that he and the Philharmonic get to write their own ending.

“It’s a time for celebration and that’s what the season is about,” Zander says, summing everything up. “Last season, I had a very particular end, which was where there’s a progression from darkness to light. This is just more a celebration of a journey, a particular story of an individual and his family coming from Berlin to London and Boston and all (or at least much) that has happened…It’s been a very good journey. And isn’t over—but it’s had a nice start!”

Benjamin Zander conducts the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra 3 p.m. Sunday October 11 at Symphony Hall. The program includes Weber’s  Overture to Der Freischütz, Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 and Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Guy Braunstein. bostonphil.org

Benjamin Zander conducted the Boston Philharmonic in a 2025 concert. Photo: Paul Mardy

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