Nelsons’ Beethoven cycle passes the halfway mark in worthy style

Andris Nelsons conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies Saturday night at Symphony Hall. Photo: Winslow Townson.
As far as Beethoven was concerned, his Sixth Symphony is self-explanatory. “Anyone who has the faintest idea of rural life,” the composer offered, “will have no need of descriptive titles”—though, presumably just to be safe, he then provided subheadings for each movement and gave the larger work its “Pastoral” moniker.
To judge from Saturday night’s performance at Symphony Hall, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra dig country living. Though they might have underlined one or two of the Sixth’s inspirations a bit more insistently—the rustic scherzo was a touch heavy-footed and the fourth-movement thunderstorm lacked menace—yet their larger reading ably captured the music’s subtleties.
Picking up where Thursday’s lyrical account of the Fifth left off, this latest installment in the BSO’s complete Beethoven symphony cycle highlighted the “Pastoral’s” songfulness. Though the exposition repeat was omitted, its big first movement flowed warmly, the orchestra’s woodwind section adding touches of nimble color to the otherwise lush-textured proceedings.
Unexpectedly, Nelsons turned the “Scene at the brook” into a variation on a song-and-dance number, its long-breathed melodic lines ceding way to lilting burbles and birdsongs and vice versa. Throughout, there was an enchanting air of discovery to the orchestra’s playing, one that owed as much to technical niceties (principally close attention to matters of balance and dynamics) as to the collective’s knowing embrace of the music’s Haydnesque pictorialism.
Likewise striking was Saturday’s finale.While a touch spacious, it was also flowing and serene. Lit from within, the BSO’s shapely rendition kept the larger performance on track, while also finding in some of its 16th-note runs anticipations of the Ninth Symphony.
The night’s second half was devoted to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Premiered almost exactly seven years after the Sixth, the score inhabits a very different world than its predecessor.
Wagner famously described its first movement as the “apotheosis of the dance” and, on Saturday, Nelsons, a devoted Wagnerian, took him at his word. Interestingly, the conductor’s approach to what Jan Swafford calls the “titanic gigue” that is the Vivace exhibited a decidedly contemporary slant, the accented iterations of its downbeats and four-bar phrases recalling, in their blunt insistence, the pulsing strobe lights of a dance club.
The finale’s slashing, stormy refrains were treated similarly, in the process sometimes sounding more frenetic than triumphant. Yet the intimate spots in both outer movements—especially those involving the woodwinds—were beautifully discreet.
In between came a shapely, lyrical traversal of the great Allegretto. While its fugue didn’t quite manage an edge-of-the-seat pianissimo (those, and more, emerged bracingly in the scherzo), Nelsons presided over a reading of tight rhythmic control and plenty of dramatic sweep.
The latter quality applied, also, to the third movement, which came over as a wild, kinetic dance. In this context, the repetitions of its Trio were functional breathers, both for the orchestra and the audience. Though a couple of its more untamed moments threatened to derail, the interpretation was fully alive and downright rousing.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Symphony Hall. bso.org
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