BOSTON — Given the histrionics in Boston’s Symphony Hall over the past few months, it was a relief simply to focus on music.
On March 6, the Boston Symphony Orchestra abruptly terminated music director Andris Nelsons’ contract. The resulting uproar has pitted musicians, audiences, and others in opposition with CEO Chad Smith and the board’s decision. No substantial information explaining the executive bombshell has been made public, but Nelsons has stated emphatically that he does not want to leave.
Since the stunning announcement, Nelsons’ appearances with the BSO have been citizen uprisings. In three separate subscription programs, the audience and the musicians loudly stamped and applauded the conductor, with everyone onstage and many in the audience sporting red carnations in support. Repeated ovations opened and closed each performance, a frenzy that extended to the orchestra’s two recent appearances in Carnegie Hall. This poorly managed drama threatens to be long-running as well, since Nelsons still has two Tanglewood seasons and another in Symphony Hall remaining in his contract.
But for now, Nelsons’ Symphony Hall season has ended, and a focus on the music did return — as did regular BSO guest conductor Susanna Mälkki on April 16 for a world premiere of Andrew Norman’s double piano concerto Split, along with works by Ravel and Rachmaninoff. Mälkki was interrupting a stint at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she is conducting Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence in April.
Norman’s Split first premiered as a Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra in 2015, with Jeffrey Kahane soloing and James Gaffigan leading the New York Philharmonic. This newest version has been revised for two pianos, retooling the work for Dutch brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen, who have also become regular BSO guests.
Two pianos cause twice as much chaos, if that was possible, in Norman’s hectic vision of soloists trying to articulate musical ideas, and failing. The composer regularly references how his music mimics the changing pace of life, and how video games and devices provide as many distractions as they do simplifications. Split engages both soloists and the orchestra in jump-cut, abrasive cells of musical dialogue. There’s loads of loveliness and humor, but everyone snaps off everyone else in mid-sentence.
All concertos involve soloist-orchestra interaction but rarely this compartmentalized. The soloists combat orchestral interruptions, and they cause their own as well. They are duo pianists, but they rarely duet. Both piano parts are prodigiously virtuosic, and virtuosically interwoven.
A break, midway through the single movement, promises a different mood. It does arrive, with the soloists making some ppp attempts at duet ideas. There was more stability, but not complete stability: The soloists kept establishing ideas, or phrases that suggest ideas, amid the constant chatter. Over time, the interruptions grew fewer, and the ideas more resonant. Split does not resolve the cross-talk completely, but overlays understandable ideas above the mayhem.
Encoring, the Jussens played a Bach arrangement, “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” from the St. Matthew Passion, slowly and tragically, a calming dose of sonic medicine for all.
The Finnish conductor needed both arms and plenty of energy for Norman’s duo-piano premiere, but Split was framed by two quite different settings. For Ravel’s characterful Mother Goose Suite, originally for piano duo as well, later a ballet, and here an orchestral suite, Mälkki kept a child-like touch befitting the composer’s idea of rendering fairy-tales in music. Tom Thumb lost in the forest, an Empress’ pentatonic serenade at bath, Beauty and the Beast — Ravel loved children and their stories, and imbued them worthily.
Rachmaninoff wrote only four major works after he left Russia in 1917; Symphonic Dances (1940) was the last, just two years before his death. Initially intended to be a ballet collaboration with Mikhail Fokine, the piece exists now as three (somewhat) danceable movements for orchestra.
The music is rich in ensemble ideas but outstanding for its solo lines, which run throughout the winds and brass (alto sax, too). A recurring Dies irae theme gives a clue that this might not be a story ballet, as do other off-balance gestures, including a fractured waltz that underpins the second movement.
At the conclusion, Mälkki and the orchestra bathed in the warm embrace of an audience yearning just for music. The unseemly Andris Nelsons story will develop over the next two years, but for this evening the sound of Norman, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff, under Mälkki’s persuasive guidance, were enough.
