Boston Classical Review

“How can you tell an American?” Washington Irving sings in Act 1 of Kurt Weill’s musical Knickerbocker Holiday. “Has he any distinguishing flavor?”

While there wasn’t any Weill on offer at Symphony Hall on Thursday night, those questions hovered over the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s season-opening subscription concert. Led by music director Andris Nelsons, the all-American program was, in its way, a throwback to the Golden Age of Serge Koussevitzky, whose advocacy for new music a century ago made the BSO the go-to ensemble for a generation of native sons like Roy Harris, David Diamond, Howard Hanson, and Samuel Barber.

Things are different today, though Nelsons, to his credit, has made a point of giving voice to living American composers across the racial and gender spectrum in his decade-plus at the orchestra’s helm. He’s also periodically dipped his toes into the repertoire of the past, exploring figures with whom he’s otherwise not usually associated and works that clearly fall outside his wheelhouse.

Thursday’s lineup looked to square that circle some more by offering two mid-century icons—Aaron Copland’s luminous Clarinet Concerto and Barber’s evergreen Adagio for Strings – to go along with newer works by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Carlos Simon.

Remarkably, the BSO hadn’t presented Copland’s concerto at Symphony Hall since 1997. Written for Benny Goodman, its relatively light scoring —solo clarinet, plus strings, harp, and piano—belies music of real textural, stylistic, and melodic vitality.

Thursday’s reading didn’t stint on warmth in the plush, slowly dancing first movement, though phrasings in the brisk second were sometimes precious and string textures periodically ragged. Even so, Nelsons seems to have solved one of the riddles of bringing Copland’s music to life: namely, treat the rhythmic ostinatos like they’re by Stravinsky and much of the rest takes care of itself.

That, and feature William R. Hudgins as your soloist. The BSO’s principal clarinetist was firmly in command from the downbeat, delivering a sumptuous account of the score’s dreamy lyricism that was easily counterbalanced by the stylistic assurance he brought to the music’s frolicsome, jazzy episodes. His rendition of the blistering cadenza was a model of swaggering, knowing character.

One wouldn’t have minded a bit more of the last in the night’s rendition of Barber’s beloved Adagio. Turning up on a BSO program in Boston for the first time since 1983, the chestnut was certainly welcome and Nelsons led a relatively swift account, clocking in at under nine minutes. That his take prized beauty of tone over expressive intensity and dramatic urgency was a bit disappointing, though the melodic lines did unfold with graceful lyricism.

The latter quality also marked Snider’s Forward Into Light, a 2019 New York Philharmonic commission commemorating the centennial of the 20^th Amendment. Essentially a meditation on, in the composer’s words, “faith, doubt, and what it means to persevere,” the fifteen-minute essay passes by like a dream, sometimes hazy, sometimes lucid, often accompanied by pulsing harp and percussion figures. If it wears its length a bit heavily, Snider’s mastery of both the orchestra and her material is never in doubt, as the music’s whistle tones and col legno strokes, as well as her deft handling of a quotation from Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women,” attest.

Another confident orchestrator is Simon, the BSO’s new composer chair, who was represented Thursday by Wake Up! Concerto for Orchestra. Written last year for the San Diego Symphony, his is a colorful, brash showpiece. At various times, brasses soar, strings surge, winds skitter, and an extended percussion section lights up the night sky.

Taking Rajendra Bhandari’s poem “Awake, Asleep” as a point of inspiration, Simon aimed to infuse his effort with a dose of social relevance. As he puts it, one goal of the work is to “leave those who hear the piece with the question: Am I asleep [to what’s going on around me in the world]?”

Certainly, one is challenged to physically doze off during Wake Up’s rhythmically driven, explosive, and exuberant passages. There are fetching quiet spots, too, like the limber scherzando section accompanied by pizzicato strings around the middle. But the concerto’s attempts at extra-musical significance are undone by the score’s digressive structure and shortage of strong thematic ideas.

Essentially a hodgepodge of contrasting types of music—open, Coplandesque textures; extended techniques familiar from film scores; jazz; call-and-response figures; and chorales all figure into its DNA— Wake Up never quite coheres. Nor does much beside the repeated, two-note “wake up” motto linger in the ear. Whether the random, Korngold-esque final cadence ties everything together is another open question.

Still, Thursday’s performance was involved and energetic. Nelsons drew kaleidoscopic colors from his forces, especially the BSO’s brass and percussion sections. That those groups tended to cover the rest of the orchestra was a mixed blessing: throughout the night, the violins’ ensemble was never pristine, though, by the end of the concerto’s twenty-minute runtime, the score had taken on something of a pummeling quality.

Nevertheless, Wake Up, Forward Into Light, and the Copland and Barber selections ultimately offered a striking response to Knickerbocker Holiday. Weill’s lyricist, Maxwell Anderson, wrote the show as an indictment of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; “How Can You Tell an American?” turns into a paean to individualism – “without the supervision of a governmental plan.”

Thursday’s programmatic allusions, stylistic cosmopolitanism, and the Barber Adagio’s historic function as a repository for public grief, suggested an alternative focused instead on a broader community. In fact, the foursome called to mind a different song entirely: “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.”

While the latter’s pure Socialism presents the polar opposite of Weill and Anderson’s hymn to self-reliance, the contrast between them forms one of the central tensions of modern American life. As Thursday’s concert ably reminded, at its best, the nation’s music reflects its soul and, along with that, all the messy, contradictory imperfections that comprise it.

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

Posted in Performances

---

One Response to “Nelsons & BSO open season with an American feast from Barber to Simon”

1. Posted Sep 28, 2024 at 10:15 am by sheila irvine

   I attended. Awesome program, all of it! New pieces were particularly awesome.

   Love BSO performances. Truly wonderful evening!

   Sincerely,

   Sheila Ievine

   PS

   Would have loved to see more of an audience.

Leave a Comment

Name (required):

Email (will not be published) (required):

Website:

Message:

Δ