Conducted by Emmanuel Krivine, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's performance on Saturday was rich with lush emotions and deep, minor keys. Lovely works by Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Brahms painted a musical evening of disparity and drama.
Opening with Modest Mussorgsky's overture to the opera "Khovanshchina," the performance started surprisingly lightly. The overture itself is subdued; it's wistful, spring-like, and very quiet: a dawning of sorts, unrepresentative of the serious plot of the opera that it preludes. The lightness of the piece sharply contrasted with the majestic works that followed.
And that contrast came immediately, with a full-force Tchaikovsky violin concerto. Audiences may not always identify with his "Slavic fatalism," as Boston Symphony Orchestra's former annotator Steven Ledbetter referred to it in the program, but the Russian composer remains, by sheer exposure, one of the most recognizable names in classical music for veterans and novices alike.
Seasonal favorite "The Nutcracker" notwithstanding, Tchaikovsky really can be dark. His work is touching; it's deep, mysterious and often manages to be inexplicably emotional and introverted all at once.
Pyotr Tchaikovsky was a secretive, albeit tensely passionate figure. Disorderly, moody and very guarded in his personal affairs, Tchaikovsky was an emotional, private man. His own life - marked by a loveless marriage to a woman in order to hide his homosexuality - was unhappy. And yet, to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy (a contemporary of Tchaikovsky's) in "Anna Karenina," all joyful people are happy similarly, but all those forlorn are discontent in their own way.
Such was Tchaikovsky, and his melancholy swings paved the way for the wide range of passionate expression in his music. The slightly erratic nature of his work as well as the lyric richness of his harmonies now identify him as one of the most beloved Russian composers of all time, the one that first separated the standard of Russian music from that of his contemporaries of the mid-19th century.
Tchaikovsky's persona is poignantly expressed in his famed Violin Concerto in D, Opus 35, performed on Saturday by violinist Joshua Bell, a guest performer with the BSO. A Grammy-winning classical performer, Bell was also named one of Billboard Magazine's 2004 Classical Artists of the Year, among numerous other accolades. And, by golly, it showed.
Tchaikovsky does not cut the violin any slack in this piece. The concerto is incredibly difficult technically; the violin flies like a perfectly tuned mosquito, jumps up to ridiculous heights, falls down and saws through the lows like there's no tomorrow. Bell swiftly and deftly pranced through the melodies, but allowed enough time for us to understand every jump's intricacy, with every minute expression polished.
To the untrained ear, the concerto might have seemed unmanageable and, at times, even wild. Still, in Bell's performance, everything was quick and controlled. True to Tchaikovsky, the piece sounded both impulsive and melancholy - and so very alive.
With Johannes Brahms' last symphony, No. 4 in E minor, Opus 98, however, the listener experienced a dark treat of symphonic proportions. This piece by Brahms, a perfectionist, is perhaps the swan song of his symphonic work; it was his last symphony and a bravura effort.
No. 4 consists of four movements in minor (with the notable exception of the third, Allegro giocoso, that is romantically and inexplicably in C-major), culminating in the last section of powerful, knowing chords and cascading beauty in Allegro energico e passionato. Its tragedy is bountiful and boundless.
And yet, the highlight of the evening was the BSO's pairing with the violin virtuoso in Tchaikovsky's passionate, personal concerto. Krivine's conducting and Bell's fiery leading performance complemented each other wonderfully.
Even the moody Tchaikovsky would have been proud.
