ChristophEschenbach joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) last weekend as the guest conductor from the National Symphony Orchestra to head up a Hector Berlioz?centric program featuring the overture to "BenvenutoCellini" (1838), Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major (1931) with pianist C?©dricTiberghien and Berlioz's 1830 masterwork "SymphonieFantastique." All three works are squarely within the standard repertoire, and the performances were clean, clear and generally solid if a little unadventurous.
In a break from recent BSO concerts, this program was a classic overture?concerto?symphony setup. Berlioz's overture to the opera "BenvenutoCellini" was a fine start to the program; the orchestra was able to highlight the bright orchestrations of the work with relative ease. Like any good overture, it showed off the emotional range of the orchestra with an exuberant start and a slower, more tender second theme, culminating in a classically triumphant climax. Eschenbach's conducting seemed clear, and the orchestra was able to pull off the overture without much fuss.
Ravel followed the overture. Both Berlioz and Ravel were French, although Ravel's sensibilities are quite far removed from Berlioz's. Where Berlioz's work favors a dramatic narrative and big orchestral gestures, Ravel's orchestral writing retains an intimacy more often associated with chamber music. He tended to write pieces that seemed to derive their form from visual art - one moment in time expanded for the listeners' enjoyment - rather than from narrative art forms. That being said, both were excellent orchestrators - arguably two of the best the world has ever seen - with a penchant for bright sounds.
From the opening use of an unusual percussion instrument, the whip, it is clear that Ravel's piano concerto is an atypical work. At once it evokes American blues, jazz and folk music, as well as Spanish folk music and Igor Stravinsky's early ballets. He manages to interweave these elements, as well as his own Impressionist style, in an admirably seamless fashion, and the BSO's performance reflected that.
In light of how many composers since 1931, notably Aaron Copland, have built upon Ravel's approach, Ravel's concerto must be markedly easier to perform today than it was at its premiere. French soloist Tiberghien was at his best in the quieter passages. His performance of the more animated sections of the outer movements was as flawless as one expects of a concert pianist in this day and age, but he lacked the stridency necessary to make them wholly convincing. Tiberghien more than made up for this, however, with the contemplative second movement, which was rapturously beautiful.
Tiberghien wisely chose an encore that played to his strengths: the second movement, "Oiseaux Tristes" ("Sad Birds") of Ravel's piano suite "Miroirs" ("Reflections"). It is by no means a conventional encore piece - it is not a showpiece, and it clocks in at about four minutes at a slow tempo. But it was clear that Tiberghien relished the alternating sparseness and lusciousness of Ravel's slow music, and no one begrudged him a meditative encore.
Berlioz's piece, "Symphonie Fantastique," followed intermission. It is so often performed and the programmatic elements surrounding its inception so heavily emphasized that they don't bear repeating. Eschenbach led the BSO in a strong performance. While the first three movements sufficiently evoked Berlioz's clearly autobiographical protagonist's all?encompassing love, Eschenbach stayed away from other conductors' tendency to play up the "lovesickness" by overemphasizing the rubato and generally taking too much time.
The fourth movement, which is an orchestral tour de force, was powerful and unsettling, as called for in the score. The flip side of the emotional reserve Eschenbach displayed in the opening movements, however, was the unfortunate lack of raucousness in the final movement. The fifth movement is percussion?intensive and includes several fantastic opportunities to get dramatic, colorful sounds not usually drawn out of the 19th?century orchestra, which Eschenbach failed to seize. The clarinet solo near the beginning of the movement could have been far more brazen and folksy, and the use of col legno (string players striking the strings with the wood of the bow) to evoke the clattering of bones was a little too subtle for full effect.
On the whole, however, the clarity of the performance was refreshing enough to outweigh the somewhat unfulfilling final movement.
