Pappano, BSO serve up a season highlight in short but insightful program

October 25, 2024 at 12:12 pm

By Jonathan Blumhofer

Antonio Pappano conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thursday night. Photo: Winslow Townson

Brevity, Shakespeare tells us, is the soul of wit. Yet concision needn’t come at the expense of depth, as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s shortish program on Thursday night demonstrated.

Led by Sir Antonio Pappano, the evening totaled only about seventy minutes of music. Still, the lineup of selections by Hannah Kendall, Franz Liszt, and Richard Strauss hardly stinted on musical insights.

That was especially true of the BSO’s rendition of the latter’s Also sprach Zarathustra.

Written in 1896, the tone poem is essentially a free meditation on Friedrich Nietzsche’s eponymous text, with its ruminations on the death of God and the rise of the Übermensch. Strauss’s shallow grasp of Nietzschean philosophy notwithstanding, the tension between an idealized spiritual goal and the constraints of the natural world come across profoundly in the score.

And they certainly did on Thursday night. Conducting with a sweeping sense of purpose, Pappano managed a first at Symphony Hall for the season: a compelling interpretation that commanded the BSO’s full attention from start to finish.

Playing with palpable responsiveness to matters of balance, dynamics, and phrasing, the orchestra ably mined Pappano’s essential warm and lyrical approach to Zarathustra. The famous “Sunrise” sang resplendently, almost as much, in fact, as did the as the gorgeous refrains of the hymn in “Of the Afterworldly” and the impassioned horn licks during “Of Pleasures and Passions.”

Throughout, textures were bracing. The falling woodwind lines in “The Tomb Song,” the dense counterpoint in “Of Science and Learning,” the cacophonous zenith of “The Dance-Song”: all spoke with invigorating clarity. So stirring was the reading’s play of character, in fact, that the culmination of “The Night-Wanderer’s Song”—the unresolved conflict between B major and C major—rang with devastating resonance.

Strife of a different sort marked Kendall’s O flower of fire, heard Thursday in its American premiere. Written last year for Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra, the seventeen-minute-long score after a poem by Martin Carter explores the composer’s fascination with musical and cultural syncretism.

Essentially an Ivesian concerto for orchestra lacking the obvious quotations of familiar tunes (they’re present, but discreetly hidden), O flower bristles more than it provides any measure of comfort. Slashing, violent gestures alternate with moments of eerie stasis. Periodically, the wheeze of harmonicas and the tinkling of music boxes emerge.

Though making sense of the work’s structure after a single hearing is a challenge, Kendall’s development of her materials is thorough and inventive. Her ear for sonority, too, is assured: between muted brasses, prepared harps, extended woodwind techniques, and exotic percussion, O flower’s musical point of view is, though never easy, decidedly singular.

So is that of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2. First performed in 1857, the effort showcases the composer’s fascination with through-composed cyclic form.

Though the concerto is often criticized for its superficiality, Thursday’s performance sounded anything but trivial. Then again, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as the soloist, how could it have been otherwise?

Jean-Yves Thibaudet performed Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Antonio Pappano and the BSO Thursday night. Photo: Winslow Townson

Playing with pristine textural clarity, a keen ear for tonal shadings, and a potent command of Liszt’s style, the French pianist delivered an account of his part that was grippingly poetic.

His cadenza near the start exuded character. The music’s filigree was dispatched energetically, yet it never distracted from Thibaudet’s efforts to illuminate the more important things, namely Liszt’s inventive transformations of his themes. What’s more, all of the score’s introspective spots held the night’s attentive audience rapt.

For his part, Pappano drew playing of warm repose from the BSO. The opening woodwind melodies dovetailed beautifully. Meanwhile, the concerto’s martial episodes were taut: tough, wheeling, stormy. The quicksilver finale barely touched the ground, an especially impressive feat given the vigor of the orchestra’s performance.

Afterwards, Thibaudet rewarded a fervent ovation with an encore of Liszt’s Consolation No. 3. As with the finest moments in the concerto, here, for a fleeting three minutes or so, the pianist held every ear in the house in the palm of his hands.

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

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