On a Friday afternoon in February, I got snowed out of a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert. There was a blizzard in the area and a tree fell on the train tracks, blocking the Green Line. The next day, I made it to the performance, of works by Shostakovich, Hans Abrahamsen (“let me tell you,” with Barbara Hannigan), and Prokofiev. Listening to Abrahamsen’s work that Saturday night, something strange happened: the work brought me back to the unheated subway car the day before, which brought me back to the lonely silence of shoveling neighbor’s snow for money as a teenager.
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