Based in Boston, MA (USA), Kristo Kondakçi is the music director of the Kendall Square Orchestra, the Narragansett Bay Symphony, and the founder and conductor of the critically- acclaimed Eureka Ensemble. He also makes appearances as guest conductor with the National Orchestra of Albania and the Vienna Summer Music Festival.

He has appeared with Boston’s Enigma Chamber Opera featuring sold-out performances of Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw”

Kondakçi has served on the faculty at University of Massachusetts Amherst as interim director of orchestral studies (2019). He has also made a significant contribution to Mahler research through his reconstruction of the original version of Mahler’s 1st Symphony (2012). He currently teaches young conductors in a private studio and coaches chamber music at Harvard University as a non- resident music tutor with Pforzheimer House.

Off the podium as a creative entrepreneur, Kondakçi has helped launch six different non-profits dedicated to enacting social change, including Boston Hope Music (2020), an organization devoted to using music to aid the healing and recovery of COVID-19 patients, frontline healthcare workers in partnership with New England Conservatory and Mass General Hospital; and, the Women’s Chorus (2018), a choral program for women experiencing homelessness & poverty in Boston, that has engaged more than 100 people, ages 17 to 82, in partnership with Women’s Lunch Place.

As a speaker and leadership coach, Kondakçi works closely with corporate and executive leaders from around the globe on leadership development in collaboration with Kendall Square Orchestra. He has given a TEDx@ BeaconStreet talk on the power of classical music to enact social change (2018), presented on the role of the orchestra and community at the national conference of the League of American Orchestras (2019), and makes regular appearances at schools, companies, and other institutions to advocate for the role music can play in addressing social issues. He also sits on the Arts Advisory Council for BioMed Realty’s 585 Third Street complex in Cambridge and the Arts Access Grant panel of the Rhode Island Council on the Arts.

Kondakçi resides in Boston, MA with his fiancé and spends his free time gardening, hiking, and is an avid reader.

Michigan-born, Manhattan-based American composer Stephanie Ann Boyd (b. 1990) writes melodic music about women’s memoirs and the natural world for symphonic and chamber ensembles. Her work has been performed in nearly all 50 states and has been commissioned by musicians and organizations in 37 countries. Boyd’s five ballets include works choreographed by New York City Ballet principal dancers Lauren Lovette, Ashley Bouder, NYCB soloist Peter Walker, and

XAOC Contemporary Ballet’s Eryn Renee Young. Eero, a ballet commissioned by Access Contemporary Music and Open House New York, was written for the grand opening of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. She holds degrees from Roosevelt University and New England Conservatory. Boyd was one of the last violin students of renowned pedagogue John Kendall, and her music has been praised as “attractive lyricism” (Gramophone), “[with] ethereal dissonances” (Boston Globe), “[music that] didn’t let itself be eclipsed” (Texas Classical Review), “arrestingly poetic” (BMOP), and “wide ranging, imaginative” (Portland Press Herald).

Moncayo incorporated three traditional Veracruz huapangos – “Siqui-Siri,” “Balajú,” and “El Gavilán” – into his orchestral masterpiece. Colorfully orchestrated with an emphasis on instruments typical of the Veracruz style (trumpet, harp, and violins) and driven by the distinctive huapango rhythm, Huapango has become an enduring classic. Chávez premiered it in August 1941 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

I had the opportunity to visit my one and only childhood best friend , Jane, for the first time in 10 years. Jane and her mother Mary have both been tremendously influential in my artistic endeavors, and now they have something very special in common: they both study the stars; Mary as a brilliant astrologer and Jane as a NYU Gallatin School astronomy student. This piece is both dedicated to their influence and inspired by their shared fascination with our universe.

This piece was aptly written over four consecutive late spring evenings in my childhood bedroom with the windows open, letting in the eerie voices of the highway close by. I grew up listening to the night choir of the highway, hearing its melodies and eagerly absorbing its earthly harmonies, many of which have been incorporated into this piece.

As the hosts spin round and round
the ethereal sound of the heavens is spun
the melody, in fourths and thirds
is given in ancient tempo

– Stephanie Ann Boyd

The emotional turbulence of Tchaikovsky’s mature masterpieces often suggests a confessional quality around which it’s tempting to construct a narrative. Compounding this tendency is the simple fact that Tchaikovsky was a particular favorite in the early days of radio and the recording industry. This is when classical music was first becoming available to a mass audience, and such narratives abounded as a strategy for making sure the music didn’t seem forbidding. Nowadays it’s with bemused detachment that we come across the impossibly flowery commentaries (quite apart from Tchaikovsky’s own descriptions) to which the composer was subjected. They’re of the stereotypical “fickle finger of fate” variety, where melodies chastely pick themselves up despite bruised wings to soar aloft, newly armed for spiritual victory. Tchaikovsky’s popularity as a source for Hollywood scores and Tin Pan Alley tunes of that period is hardly coincidental.

All of this eventually led to an unfortunate critical backlash. Tchaikovsky became a whipping boy for the worst excesses of Romanticism: sentimental self-indulgence, emotional exposure, even an out-of-control “hysteria” – “too much information” was the uncomfortable response from the guardians of taste. But the court of popular opinion has proved more far-sighted than that of the critics. Tchaikovsky’s best music has remained firmly entrenched in the repertoire because it “says” something far richer, more passionate, and more profoundly moving than any dated characterization could convey.

Tchaikovsky himself showed ambivalence about the issue of program music. For his Fourth Symphony he supplied an elaborate program detailing the content of each movement, centered around the idea of Fate. The most programmatic of all his symphonies, the unnumbered Manfred Symphony of 1885, is based on Lord Byron’s poetic drama and its Faustian hero. The Fifth Symphony seems to occupy a middle ground. The composer supplied a bare minimal description in his working notebook.

By the time of his final Symphony No. 6, Tchaikovsky developed an esoteric, “private,” and unpublished program. Nevertheless, he drew attention to it by the somewhat provocative working subtitle, “Program Symphony,” and by the dedication to “Bob” Davidov, the nephew with whom he was in love in his final decade. According to one of the many legends that surround the work, Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest (as he later claimed) came up with the name “Pathétique” – which suggests “impassioned suffering” in its Russian context. Whether or not the composer acquiesced to this christening before his sudden death just a little over a week after the world premiere (Oct. 28, 1893 in St. Petersburg) it has come to seem uncannily suitable for the devastating psychological drama the Symphony lays bare.

The circumstances of Tchaikovsky’s death have further enshrouded the Pathétique in mystery: was an accidental drink of cholera-contaminated water what killed him, or did the “scandal” of his gay affairs result in Tchaikovsky submitting to a kind of Socratic suicide? The debate – much like the one surrounding Shostakovich – rages on unresolved. Meanwhile, a long series of commentators claiming to decipher the Symphony’s internal musical codes have contributed to its aura of intrigue, thereby ensuring that this remains the most controversial of all his works (and indeed of the symphonic repertoire).

The first movement – around twice the length of each of the other three – immediately ushers us into a world of bleak despair that attains a crushing intensity. Tchaikovsky employs the mastery of his technical skill to give his emotional power resilient shape. He manages his traditional orchestral forces in unexpected ways, with brass chorales as rousing as Judgment Day and delicately sprung wind solos. Even the composer’s trademark roulades possess a shattering, nervous energy that seems unique here.

In the middle of the movement, the explosive rupturing of the pppppp called for in the score must come as a shock, not a hammy and bathetic gesture. This is just one of the formidable challenges interpreters of the Pathétique face, along with establishing a coherence behind what seem on the surface such sharply marked-off, disparate sections (for example, the pause and tempo change before the indelibly lyrical second theme, inspired by Don José’s “Flower Song” in Carmen, a favorite opera of the fate-obsessed Tchaikovsky).

Two inner movements of entirely different character turn out to be interludes rather than actual shifts of direction. The second movement’s flowing, dance-like charm is given a subtle displacement through the use of 5/4 meter (two beats followed by the triple pattern of the waltz). In the third movement, Tchaikovsky presents a blazing but hollowly triumphant, brass-reinforced march that revels in aggressive, swaggering rhythms.

It’s often been pointed out that had Tchaikovsky simply switched the order of the final two movements, he would have preserved the optimistic, Beethovenian model of light over darkness. Yet by reversing that model and ending with the nihilistic, dying fall of the Adagio (the same tempo with which the Symphony began), he introduces a radically new concept of the symphonic journey (Mahler’s Ninth would follow a similar pattern). Indeed, Tchaikovsky writes about his novel approach to form here as an aspect that excited his creative fancy. The valedictory plunge into silence from a sustained B-minor chord deep in the strings sets the stage for a new century of bleak requiems. Tchaikovsky declared that he had put his “whole soul into this work.” And there it remains – beyond all attempts at reductive explanations – for us to encounter anew.

– Thomas May