Paul Lewis reunites with the BSO at Tanglewood in measured Mozart and adrenaline-charged Copland – Seen and Heard Worldwide

United States Tanglewood Pageant 2024 [7]: (CSa)

24.7.2024 – Boston Symphony Chamber Gamers: Haldan Martinson (violin), Steven Ansell (viola), Blaise Déjardin (cello), Edwin Barker (double-bass), Elizabeth Rowe (flute), John Ferrillo (oboe), William R. Hudgins (clarinet), Richard Svoboda (bassoon), Richard Sebring (horn) with Paul Lewis (piano), and BSO members: Alexander Velinzon and Tatiana Dimitriades (violins), Cathy Basrak and  Daniel Kim (violas), Blaise Déjardin and Oliver Aldort (cellos). Seiji Ozawa Corridor, Lenox.

Alison Loggins-Hull – Homeland for solo flute
Mozart – Quintet in E-flat for piano and winds, Ok.452
Brahms – String Sextet No.2 in G, Op.36

Following his spectacular collection of Beethoven piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons at Tanglewood in 2022, British pianist Paul Lewis made a welcome return final week for 2 excellent occasions: a chamber recital by which he joined members of the Boston Symphony Chamber Gamers in an intimate and finely balanced efficiency pf Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat for piano and winds, Ok.452, and a full blooded Sunday afternoon live performance that includes Aaron Copland’s not often heard Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.

Writing to his father in March 1784, Mozart declared that he thought of his Quintet in E-flat for piano and winds, ‘the very best work I’ve ever written’ and knowledgeable him that an viewers of over 130 could possibly be anticipated to attend its first efficiency in Vienna’s Burgtheater. The 28-year-old Wolfgang would likely have been thrilled that, 240 years later, on a sultry summer season’s night time in Lenox, Massachusetts, nearly all of Ozawa Corridor’s 1,200 seats could be crammed, with many a whole lot extra unfold out on lawns behind to listen to Paul Lewis and 4 Boston Symphony wind companions reprise this miniature masterpiece. You will need to stress the component of partnership on this Tanglewood efficiency. Lewis has beforehand commented on how a lot much less confrontational the connection is between piano and the opposite devices and his measured, fine-grained pianism by no means fought for preferential therapy. He remained a group participant all through, a accomplice in a dialog between equals. Divided into three actions, the opening Largo resonated sumptuously all through the auditorium and contrasted vividly with a sprightly Allegro moderato. The tempo of the luxuriant Larghetto was completely judged with some high-quality unhurried interaction from the agile winds, adopted by a fantastically balanced and crisp third motion Rondo and Allegro. Right here was ensemble taking part in at its best.

The Mozart Quintet was preceded by Alison Loggins-Hull’s Homeland for solo flute performed with ethereal magnificence by the BSO’s soon-to-retire principal flautist Elizabeth Rowe. The composer describes how Homeland was written shortly after Hurricane Maria stormed via Puerto Rico in 2017, and the way she used this lethal meteorological occasion as a musical metaphor not just for the stark realities of local weather change, but in addition for political and social unrest in the USA and past. The opening bars of Homeland, a collection of timbral trills which conjure the picture of troubled waters, have been adopted by darkish fretful passages suggestive of the enormity of the issues dealing with us all for which there aren’t any prepared sensible options. Within the absence of solutions, there may be all the time the non secular comfort of music.

This got here after the interval within the type of Brahms’s richly autumnal String Sextet No.2 in G. Written in 1866, it mirrored his tumultuous however in the end doomed love affair with Agathe von Siebold to whom he was briefly engaged. From the outset, the six string Gamers – fashioned from the ranks of the BSO – demonstrated their mastery of the work’s appreciable technical calls for. They carried off the advanced counterpoint of the stunning opening Allegro with panache, whereas capturing the melancholy and light-hearted playfulness of the succeeding Scherzo. An achingly unhappy Adagio was dispelled by a gently paced and splendidly sunny account of the closing motion which concluded in a mighty fugue.

28.7.2024 – Boston Symphony Orchestra / Andris Nelsons (conductor), Thomas Warfield (narrator), Paul Lewis (piano) Tanglewood Pageant Refrain / James Burton (conductor). Koussevitzky Shed, Lenox.

James Lee III – Freedom’s Real Daybreak, for narrator and orchestra
Copland – Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Randall Thompson – Alleluia
Stravinsky – Symphony of Psalms

Copland’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was the centrepiece of a live performance celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of Serge Koussevitzky, a champion of recent music and a conductor without end linked with the BSO. The concerto was the results of his private encouragement and, certainly, he performed the BSO in its first efficiency in 1927 with Copland on the piano. The composer recognized jazz as an ideal medium by which to mix his growing curiosity in modernism, jazz and American music, an enthusiasm which was not shared by up to date Boston concertgoers who have been shocked by what they thought of to be ‘cacophonous’ and ‘lowbrow’ leisure. Revived in New York 4 many years later, Leonard Bernstein knowledgeable his viewers that they may anticipate ‘[A kind of] jazz of the twenties, filled with Charleston rhythms and boop-boop-ba-doops, and a sure Gershwin-like sentimentality’ including ‘The great factor is, that as outdated as it’s, it nonetheless sounds as contemporary and charming and filled with zip because it did in 1927.’ Below the baton of Andris Nelson, and with Paul Lewis on the keyboard in full virtuosic mode, this inexplicably uncared for concerto’s mixture of symphonic modernism, jazzy riffs and ragtime rhythms have been as zippy and energetic as they have been nearly 90 years in the past. Fragments of in style tunes later ‘borrowed’ by different composers corresponding to Gershwin and Bernstein abounded, together with a definite precursor to the music ‘New York, New York’ from the latter’s 1953 musical On the City. Within the opening motion Lewis successfully evoked the smoky blues world of Jelly Roll Morton and early Duke Ellington, whereas the syncopated passages within the high-voltage second motion have been executed with diamond tipped accuracy, and brilliantly co-ordinated with the orchestra.

A efficiency Freedom’s Real Daybreak for narrator and orchestra by the Black American composer James Lee III preceded Copland’s Concerto. With a textual content impressed by stirring phrases from Frederick Douglass’s speech ‘What to a slave is the 4th of July?’ Because the origins of American jazz are rooted in its enduringly painful historical past of slavery, it was each enlightening and logical to program this arresting work initially of the live performance. A passionate treatise on oppression and inequality, it’s also a searing indictment of constant racial injustice, concluding with the startling accusation ‘There may be not a folks extra responsible than the folks of the USA of America at this very hour’. The work’s energy lies within the textual content. A disgrace then that Thomas Warfield’s exaggerated singsong supply dominated and distracted from an essential and profoundly related historic query.

The second half of the live performance featured two choral works, each of which have been commissioned by the enlightened and enterprising Koussevitzky. Randall Thompson’s a cappella Alleluia was written in 1940 to inaugurate the primary summer season of the Berkshire Music Centre. Kosssevitzky had hoped for a jubilant celebratory fanfare slightly than the non secular work that ensued. Nonetheless, he instantly recognised its calm radiance. Sung right here magnificently by the Tanglewood Pageant Refrain, the Shed felt momentarily like a cathedral, its congregation bathed within the lambent great thing about the choir.

Nelsons selected to finish the live performance with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. It was supposed not merely to rejoice the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the BSO, however as an expression of Stravinsky’s honest Orthodox religion. Every of the three actions are set to psalms, (particularly numbers 38, 39, and 150) and are poems of reward, anger and judgment. Neo-classical in model, there are numerous references to the works of previous composers, significantly Bach’s Musical Providing which surfaces within the double fugue of the second motion. Below the vigilance of Nelsons, Stravinsky’s distinctive soundworld, conjured by two pianos, harps, woodwind and low strings, was meticulously detailed. The Tanglewood Refrain exerted nice emotional energy all through, whether or not tackling moments of ferocious biblical anger or passages of infinite peace, sustaining a superb stability with the orchestra to make sure that, to cite Stravinsky, ‘the 2 parts are on an equal footing, neither outweighing the opposite.’ It was a shifting conclusion to an anniversary live performance of which Serge Koussevitzky would have been proud.

Chris Sallon