Boston Classical Review

Hilary Hahn and Seth Parker Woods were the soloists in Carlos Simon’s Double Concerto Suite performed with Andris Nelsons and the BSO Thursday night. Photo: Hilary Scott

Sometimes it can be worth remembering that the notion of programmatic coherence—with all the elements of a concert’s offerings adding up to the sum of their parts—is a relatively recent fad.

To wit: the first performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto featured that masterpiece’s three movements split across intermission. In between, the soloist, Franz Clement, offered an unaccompanied number of his own devising played on an upside-down violin.

Thursday’s concert from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons didn’t quite go to such extremes. But its mashup of bleeding chunks of Tchaikovsky framing the local premiere of BSO composer chair Carlos Simon’s Double Concerto Suite at least marked a small departure from the ensemble’s recent norm.

The latter, a BSO co-commission, was written for violinist Hilary Hahn and cellist Seth Parker Woods. Though they withdrew from the work’s first performances at the Kennedy Center in March, the pair was present and accounted for at Symphony Hall this week.

Simon’s program note describes the score as drawing on both the concerto and Baroque suite genres. The first two of its five movements certainly channel the latter with their respective ostinato patterns and passacaglia structure. Meantime, the fourth section’s nod to the Delta Blues involves the Concerto Suite’s best and most affecting music.

In pre-performance comments, the composer said that writing for Hahn and Parker Woods was a “tall order.” But rather than take to the prospect like a kid in a candy shop, Simon, in this endeavor, seems to have circumscribed his muse.

Most frustratingly, the score doesn’t lean into its “concerto” moniker strongly or creatively enough. Instead, the soloists function as a unit rather than unique entities for most of its first four movements, including in cadenzas. Unlike similar compositions for multiple soloists—say, the double concerti of Bach or Brahms, or Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante—until the finale, there’s little consideration or time given to true dialogues between the violin and cello.

This has a flattening effect on the larger, thirty-plus-minute-long effort: by the time the third movement arrived Thursday, the lack of independence and definition between the solo parts lent the music a predictable quality that no amount of energy, syncopation, or colorful scoring could quite overcome.

Nevertheless, Hahn and Parker Woods navigated their contributions urgently.

The violinist sounds wonderful playing just about anything and hardly disappointed here. She brought clarity and light to her high-lying moments as well as rich soul to the bluesy fourth movement’s swooping melodicism.

Parker Woods was no less impressive when his instrument projected: his part wasn’t entirely helped by the second movement’s dense orchestrations and other low-tessitura spots didn’t always emerge. Still, he anchored the duo nicely, especially in the more conversational episodes during the Concerto Suite’s later sections.

Nelsons led the BSO in a rhythmically secure but texturally blunt accompaniment. The orchestra took to the music’s bright, cinematic aspects particularly well: there’s a Bach-meets-film-score-Copland vibe to stretches of the first and third movements while, rightly or wrongly, the fourth calls to mind Porgy & Bess.

But balances periodically felt askew and some faster tempos reined in. Ultimately, one came away from the overlong, thematically facile finale feeling that—even with the belated textural variety for the soloists—the work would be much stronger if the whole section were simply cut.

Even so, Thursday’s audience, which was dotted with students and families, was evidently charmed by the undertaking. They greeted the composer and performance with an extended ovation and multiple curtain calls.

Andris Nelsons conducted the BSO in Act II of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet Thursday night. Photo: Hilary Scott

The house responded in similar fashion to the concert’s Tchaikovsky installments, a swaggering take on the “Polonaise” from Eugene Onegin and the whole of Act 2 from The Nutcracker.

It’s a shame that Nelsons never got to lead a concert performance of Onegin with the BSO: some years back, he conducted an inviting account of that opera’s “Letter Scene” with Kristine Opolais. This shapely reading of the “Polonaise,” then, suggested some of what was lost with the non-renewal of the conductor’s contract earlier this year.

His take on the Nutcracker music was a bit more idiosyncratic. The “Dance of the Reed Flutes” and “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” were too slow, the glorious closing waltz lacked a measure of immediacy, and the “Pas de deux’s” coda was rhythmically over-exaggerated.

At the same time, the opening scenes were well-directed, the “Chinese Dance” was perfectly droll, and the “Waltz of the Flowers” unfolded with graceful style (the introduction was also plangently reedy). What’s more, Tchaikovsky’s ingenious handling of the orchestra came out with Technicolor force: whatever the quirks of the night’s interpretation, the BSO seemed to be having a lot of fun playing this music.

Before the Nutcracker, Nelsons, who concludes his fall residency with the orchestra this weekend, continued his new habit of occasionally addressing the audience from the stage. The most notable aspect of his comments came from his mention of growing up in the Soviet Union and the power of music as a unifying social force during the collapse of that empire.

His is a unique perspective and, though Nelsons pivoted before drawing any real connections with today’s global instability, his larger artistic point was, on the whole, welcome. In fact, he may as well have just quoted Beethoven: “From the heart, may it go back to the heart.”

The program will be repeated 1:30 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Hall. bso.org

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