Christoph von Dohnányi conducts BSO in Lutoslawski, Schumann, and Ravel

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Tuesday, 26 April
Christoph von Dohnányi, conducting
Alban Gebhardt, cello

Lutoslawski, Concerto for Orchestra
Schumann, Concerto for Cello in A minor, Opus 129
Ravel, La valse, poème choréographique

Christoph von Dohnányi

April 26, 2005 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

On one of the BSO concerts I attended earlier this season, a big, thorny piece by a living composer, was paired with an unabashed ‘war-horse’ - a classic so well known, that there were probably two dozen in the audience who might have stood in to conduct it, had James Levine wished to sit out and rest.

This latest concert was of a roughly inverse image: combining a little-known gem from the classical literature, with two well-established (to some degree, we must even be able to say, well-loved) twentieth-century works.

The Concerto for Orchestra serves as a brilliant concert opener. It invites superficial comparisons to Bartók. The elder composer wrote a Concerto for Orchestra as a BSO commission in 1944. Bartók is famous, too, for his wide travels collecting folk-songs before the advent of radio (with its unanticipated effect of tending to displace native musicality). But these accidents are misleading. Lutoslawski designed his piece completely differently. And his employment of Polish folk music is in a manner distinct from Bartók; each composer, simply, has his own personality.

Lutoslawski wrote his Concerto for Orchestra in Poland, over a period which straddled the end of Stalin, and the year following his death; the composer himself was already in his late 30s. Through subsequent decades, Lutoslawski pursued an artistic balance of remaining true to himself, yet of engagement with some of the musical currents of the West (so many currents, that it would be folly for any one composer to try to do justice to them all). At any rate, he traveled some musical distance from 1954. So if the Concerto for Orchestra is not necessarily an index of his work as a whole, at least Lutoslawski has the consolation of being best-known by a remarkably substantial work. There were times in the careers of Ravel and Prokofiev when each composer commented wrily on the tenacious popularity which an unrepresentatively light piece of theirs had earned (the Boléro and the March from The Love for Three Oranges, respectively).

Alban Gebhardt cut something of a Paganini-ish figure in playing the Schumann Concerto for Cello, a long-haired, energetic virtuoso, and a piece whose character was essentially contemporary to Paganini. While debate sometimes rages over the orchestration in Schumann’s symphonies, this Concerto plays out with delightful clarity and grace.

If we were to judge Ravel solely by his representation on certain “low-impact” classical stations, we would conclude that if you know the Pavane pour une infante défunte and Le tombeau de Couperin, then you know pretty much all there is to know about Ravel. Not surprisingly, this summary judgment is far from justice. The elements of sweetness, nostalgia and restraint are indeed part of La valse; but over the course of this tone-poem, a reflection on an elegant Past and its uneasy denial of a difficult Present, there are surges of something harsh making itself felt through the thin gauze of sweet nostalgia; the waltz may (by sheer determination) go on, but there are times when the going is none too pretty.