Russian original brings a Czech menu to a bold BSO performance
Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe.
More than half a century ago Gennady Rozhdestvensky must have been the class cutup at the Moscow Conservatory. One wonders how such a free and inquisitive spirit survived the Soviet system. His technique is as unconventional as his wide-ranging repertoire. He often seems to be conducting in circles, but somehow he always makes his musical intentions clear, and orchestras deliver for him.
The Russian conductor is back at the Boston Symphony this week with a program of unusual Czech music full of internal links -- Dvorak was present Thursday night, of course, but also his son-in-law, Josef Suk, and one of Suk's pupils, Bohuslav Martinu, who contributed many works to the repertory of the BSO between 1927 and the mid-1950s. Yesterday afternoon Jakub Skalnik, the cultural counselor at the Czech Embassy in Washington, bestowed the Martinu Medal of the Martinu Foundation in Prague on the orchestra.
Suk was represented by a sumptuous 50-minute symphonic poem, "A Summer's Tale." The music, composed between 1907 and 1909, occupies a territory between the glamorous orchestral mysticism of late Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin and the equally glamorous impressionism of Debussy.
Over the course of its five contrasting movements, the piece traverses a day, a season, the stages of life, all shadowed by a gentle, inconclusive melancholy; none of the movements ends in affirmation or certainty. One of them looks backward to a bardic past; harps accompany duets of violin and viola and of English horns.
The orchestra hadn't played the piece before, but Rozhdestvensky presided over an atmospheric and affectionate performance. Martinu's Fourth Piano Concerto, also a BSO premiere, is called "Incantation." Its associative logic is sometimes difficult to follow, but individual episodes are compelling. Much of the piano writing is percussive, rhythmical, and proclamatory -- well-suited to the boldly authoritative, laser-intensity attack of Viktoria Postnikova (the conductor's wife).
But this wasn't the whole story in a work written for the fastidious and lyrical pianist Rudolf Firkusny. There are contrasting passages -- more inward, but elusive, wispy, and unsettled. Often paired with the harp (Ann Hobson Pilot), Postnikova offered sensitivity, too.
At the end came four "Slavonic Dances" from Dvorak's Op. 72 set, beginning with the famous No. 2. As it started, Rozhdestvensky shuffled his hand into his pocket and turned and grinned at the audience as if to say, "And now for something you know and love."
The performances were full of idiomatic lilt and vivacity, and in some of the more extravagantly free passages Rozhdestvensky trusted the orchestra enough not to beat time with his rapier baton, although who knows what his eyebrows were doing? They were probably dancing.
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Gennady Rozhdestvensky, guest conductor
At: Symphony Hall, Thursday night (repeats tonight)
