Boston Classical Review

Sometimes good things come in threes. Other times, they happen in fours.

Take the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concert at Symphony Hall on Thursday night. There were, on the one hand, a trio of debuts: conductor Teddy Abrams and violinist Ray Chen made their first stands with the ensemble while baritone Dashon Burton took his inaugural bow on a BSO subscription series.

The program also included an ensemble premiere in the form of Michael Tilson Thomas’s Whitman Songs. Though best known as a conductor, the music director laureate of the San Francisco Symphony (and former associate conductor of the BSO) is an accomplished composer with a small but distinct body of music to his name. His setting of three poems from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was originally written for baritone and piano in 1994. The orchestral version first appeared five years later and was revised in 2023. 

Fittingly, given its texts, the Songs’ fifteen minutes are packed with multitudinous points of reference and a bristling array of instrumental colors and gestures. Crabbed, punchy riffs define the orchestral fabric over much of the opening “Who Goes There?” 

Yet by the time its swaggering climax arrives, there are snatches of something sounding not too far removed from Gershwin, while James Brown’s ghost hovers in the near distance. The central “At Ship’s Helm” provides a sumptuous, meditative respite, while the marching refrains in “We Two Boys Together Clinging” suggest Ives in one of his sunnier moods; its zenith—proud, warm, affirming—offers a whiff of ecstasy all its own.

On Thursday, the Songs’ quest to answer, as Abrams put it in his introductory remarks, “what it means to be an American” rang with stirring timeliness. Nothing sounded dated about either Tilson Thomas’s edgy, dramatically alert musical language or Whitman’s poems, first published 170 years ago in July. Instead, this was a quarter-hour for the near and distant pasts to speak directly to the present. 

Burton, singing with majestic tone and prophetic purpose, intoned the opening number’s observation that “In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less” with unbowed strength. So, too, the finale’s proud declamations about “fulfilling our foray.”

Abrams, who is currently music director of the Louisville Orchestra, counts Tilson Thomas as his mentor and he presided over the night’s reading with assurance. There’s more than a little of the older maestro in his 37-year-old former charge: to watch Abrams’ wiry podium manner, with his clear, energetic beat and crisp cues means, sometimes, to see an apparition of MTT himself.

That the maestro drew such sensitive playing from the BSO in this complicated, unfamiliar music speaks to his considerable abilities. The Songs’ unpredictable rhythmic schemes spoke securely. Balances, too, were smartly managed, this despite Tilson Thomas’s frequent low-tessitura writing for the soloist.

Ultimately, Thursday’s account brimmed with character. “We Two Boys” was suffused with stirring shapeliness and the larger score’s nods to both Americana and cinema—the second movement’s coda might accompany a luminous tracking shot—were gracefully underlined. 

The conductor accomplished much the same in music by Tilson Thomas’s one-time cicerone, Leonard Bernstein. 

Surprising though it may seem, before this week the BSO had only played the complete Symphonic Dances from West Side Story once before at Symphony Hall. One wouldn’t have guessed that from Thursday’s vigorous traversal, though the performance’s want of starker dynamic contrasts, periodically touchy transitions, and moments of unfocused ensemble suggested either under-rehearsal or some unfamiliarity with the man on the podium.

To be sure, the latter seemed to occasionally lose himself in the proceedings—Abrams broke into a bona fide “Lenny shimmy” at least a couple of times. But his clear affinity for the energy and style of Bernstein’s score was hard to miss. Tempos in fast sections drove pertly. Both the “Mambo” and “Cool” Fugue swung into high gear. The finale, tender and gorgeous, was a picture of fragile beauty. 

A bit more of the last would have been welcome in Chen’s account of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, which kicked off the evening. A major social media presence as well as one of the day’s charismatic fiddlers, the Taiwanese-Australian violinist drew a large, appreciative crowd to his BSO debut.

It’s easy to see what makes Chen a star. He’s electrifying onstage and has technique to burn. But for all the flashiness of his playing, he’s no dilettante: Thursday’s Tchaikovsky was consistently well-directed and brilliantly projected.

It was also perpetually ardent and urgent. That’s a tack that works, to a point, in the outer movements, which are, essentially, sunny and extroverted. But Chen’s intense tone in the Canzonetta proved superfluous and took on an unrelenting, insistent air.

Better was the first-movement cadenza—here the soloist was clearly having a blast—and the finale, where Chen’s approach to the bucolic second theme relaxed a bit and brooded. In these moments, and in his encore of Eunike Tanzil’s lyrical Serenade, one got the fullest sense of the violinist’s artistry.

For his part, Abrams drew an accompaniment from the BSO that wasn’t quite here or there. Some moments in the first movement were blurry and the second’s opening chorale sounded raw. Nevertheless, the orchestra’s big moments—as well as its drives to the outer movements’ climaxes—were reliably focused and invigorating. 

The program will be repeated 1:30 p.m. Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday at Symphony Hall. bso.org

Posted in Performances

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