On a Personal Note: For violinist Alyssa Wang, the Boston Festival Orchestra’s 5th anniversary concert hits close to home
- Liam Crampton
- Jul 2
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 6
When violinist Alyssa Wang lost her father to liver cancer, she was at a loss for words. So, she turned to music.
“After he passed away, I was looking for a musical way to express all of the grief, the journey that I was going on, and just trying to find a way to honor his extraordinary memory,” said Wang, who co-founded the nonprofit Boston Festival Orchestra.
Eventually, Wang wrote a violin concerto, “Swept Away,” to express what her words couldn’t. That song will debut in Boston at the BFO’s July 13 Summer Stage concert at the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.
For Wang and BFO cofounder Nicholas Brown, a clarinetist, the upcoming show is a big deal for the group – marking its fifth year in operation – and an emotional debut for Wang.
“This is a really big year for us because it's our fifth anniversary, which is a big milestone for any nonprofit. We wanted to celebrate five, year five, and five also happens to be a very important number in classical music because there have been many composers throughout the centuries who have written some of their most famous music as their fifth symphonies,” said Wang.
Thus the focus around Beethoven Symphony No. 5 on July 13 and Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5, at a second show in August. Both pieces are iconic, important works of classical music, said Wang.
“We can also pay homage to the No. 5 with those. And all of the pieces surrounding those are all written by the leading composers of today, most of whom are still alive and continuing to write incredible new music, and all of those works are inspired in some way by that big fifth symphony.”
The July 13 concert will open with Chinese Canadian composer Dorothy Chang’s 2020 piece, “Skizzen,” which is a direct response to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, which will also be performed at the event.
“It's like a modern reorganization of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, a natural pairing with Beethoven,” explained Wang.
The Summer Stage concert, aptly called Beethoven 5, is a part of the BFO MusicReach program, a flagship initiative for education and community engagement, which will last from July 15 – 31. Another performance, Tchaikovsky 5, is slated for Aug. 3 and will included Emma Lou Diemer’s “Homage to Tchaikovsky,” Jessie Montgomery’s “Shift, Change, Turn,” and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 5.”
Community Approach
The MusicReach program is one example of the BFO’s focus on community engagement. It will work with the Chinatown group, the Kwong Kow Chinese School; Boston Children’s Hospital; Horizons for Homeless Children; Boston Center for Youth and Families; United South End Settlements; the German Center nursing home in West Roxbury; and the Cambridge and Roslindale Public Libraries.
“We connected with these organizations through a number of channels,” said Brown, noting that many of the collaborations come from a shared interest in music. “They're all born out of just conversations (about) sharing the BFO mission and the BFO approach and what we do and seeing if there's space to kind of bring that to different populations around greater Boston…. So much about nonprofit work is about sharing those resources and sharing the networks that we serve and that work with and for us, and finding ways to align interests, right?”
Wang added that BFO has been taking strides to become more involved with the Chinatown community and the Chinese population in Boston.
“We have been going deeper into the Chinatown community in an attempt to connect more with the Chinese population in Boston, and that has really coincided with my personal reconnection with that community and trying to understand that I am both American and Chinese at the same time, and I don't have to pick one,” she said. “I am both.”
Brown added that his work with the BFO has broadened his view of identity and what it means to be inclusive.
“It's me living inclusively, as being included in a community that just wants people to share a meal with, or share their heritage, or share a story, or share about their family lineage,” he said. “The purpose of what we do is about bringing people in and sharing stories and just finding ways to honor traditions and the past and the present and the future, and the BFO has been an incredible way to do it, and I'm super grateful for it.”
The two even recently discovered that Wang’s maternal grandfather and Brown’s grandfather went to the same High School together.
A Concert Close to the Heart
“We play music from all over the world,” noted Wang, “but definitely this summer, because of the violin concerto, it feels just like a lot more personal, even more personal than usual.”
She said while the concerto "Swept Away' is not about her being Chinese, “but because I am Chinese, it is imbued with this perspective just automatically. So yeah, it's definitely all related and all wrapped up in BFO.”
A big part of the July concert will be the first Boston performance of “Swept Away.”
“I called the violin concerto “Swept Away,” she said, “because the idea is that, you know, cancer or any other disease, not only take the lives of so many people, but also transforms the lives of all the people around who are still there when the person is gone. Anybody who's lost someone understands that you are a very different person on the other side, and so your previous life has sort of been swept away.”
Wang emphasized her intent with the piece was for listeners to be able to relate but also heal from their personal experiences with loss.
“I wanted to write something that anybody who's lost someone close to them could kind of relate to, and also hopefully hear it and feel a sense of comfort from it."
The creation of that song is an example of how Wang views her music and the BFO’s role in interacting with the audience and listeners.
“Even though it is about a very dark topic, ultimately, it has a very hopeful theme. The trajectory of the concerto goes from a place of darkness, a place where you are losing that person to the kind of shock and emptiness that follows, to actually feeling like more like yourself again, and using the memory of that person to kind of give you strength and realizing that they're with you always, even if they're not here on earth. And so with that trajectory, I think, I hope that it gives people who listen to it hope and a sense of comfort that those people are never really gone,” Wang said
Wang will not perform her piece, however. That will be BFO’s concertmaster, Jae Cosmos Lee. Wang will conduct the work in a role shift.
“It's never been played in Boston before. And until now, I've pretty much always been the one playing the solo. But this time I'll be conducting it. So I'll get to see it from a new perspective, which will be kind of interesting. I'm really excited to conduct it” Wang said.