BOSTON — During the 1950s, Pablo Casals found his late-in-life home: Puerto Rico. In the land of his mother, the Spanish septuagenarian cellist and conductor set about creating a legacy for classical music. He initiated structures for musical training, began the prestigious Casals Festival, and founded Puerto Rico’s symphony orchestra. His Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico, under his direction, made its debut in 1958 in Mayagüez, his mother’s hometown.
Sixty-seven years later, on Nov. 14, the Puerto Rican ensemble made its debut at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Music director Maximiano Valdés led a pastiche program for this memorable appearance, illustrating intentionally or not how classical music is just one of the artistic ways that Puerto Rico models fertile inter-cultural experiences.
The orchestra performs year-round with a schedule full of symphonic and pops repertoire, ballet and theater collaborations, recording, and touring. This inaugural visit forms part of a larger Boston Symphony Orchestra initiative — code name E Pluribus Unum — to reach out to diverse constituencies. Half-a-dozen programs have spotlighted Caribbean musicians, both as guests and with works on the subscription series concerts. Boston Symphony CEO and president Chad Smith has been active in exploring partnerships in the community, and he showed his skill here, finding another Boston-area constituency that would simply love an invitation.
The audience showed love in return. Boisterously appreciative, they waved flags and shouted out holas and encouragement to the 80 musicians/compatriots onstage. Families attended the event. Generations came together. The orchestra musicians clustered themselves onstage to take selfies during intermission. It took forever to regather the audience after the break, which felt like an oversized quinceañera.
Valdés programmed a dozen works, showing the orchestra’s acumen in a range of styles. A suite from the island’s first-ever ballet (Jack Delano’s 1956 La bruja de Loíza) segued to Luis Quintana’s spectral On the Ethereal Nature of Bioluminescence), rife with extended techniques. Composer/scholar Alfonso Fuentes offered a jagged commemoration of Hurricane Maria, and his students — Quintana and Angélica Negrón (her Morivivi, a 21st-century pastorale) — took the orchestra into more angular, contemporary ideas.
The orchestra performed movements from two Roberto Sierra symphonies, his Sixth and Seventh. (Long a friend of the Boston Symphony, Sierra was also represented during the week with BSO performances of his Concerto for Saxophones, with supercharged soloist James Carter.)
Over the decades, both Casals and his legacy have enticed starry international musicians like Domingo, Rostropovich, and Penderecki to visit the island. For this Boston appearance, Puerto Rican cuatro star Luis Sanz filled the soloist’s role, performing Ernesto Cordero’s Concierto Criollo, a showcase for the island’s signature guitar. Concierto Criollo closes with a rousing duet cadenza, cuatro/congas, which emboldened Sanz to offer a sizzling encore, complete with flashy playing with the cuatro turned backwards and above his head.
Associate conductor Rafael Enrique Irizarry concluded the set pops-style, which the dance-happy audience was eager to groove along to. The orchestra closed with some of the island’s musical touchstones: Cordero’s oft-quoted aubade Mariandá; a danzón selection from Juan Morel Campos; José Pujals’ arrangement of sentimental oldies. Irizarry coaxed a luxuriant sound from the orchestra for the chestnut, “En mi Viejo San Juan.” Numerous encores and general celebrating ended the evening.
Boston doesn’t boast New York City’s sizable Puerto Rican ex-pat population, but this audience knows its plena and its salsa, and exuberantly enjoyed the obvious point-of-pride at having their native orchestra finally visit Symphony Hall.
