As the season closes, a tide of talent rises

Dutch violinist Janine Jansen (left) made her first appearance with the BSO over the weekend. Also appearing at Tanglewood, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet (right) played Aram Khachaturian's 1936 Piano Concerto 37 years after the BSO last performed the piece. (Photos by Hilary Scott/BSO)

LENOX - On its penultimate weekend, the Tanglewood Festival began its usual crescendo, pulling out its biggest star soloists and favorite guest conductors, for big works. On Friday, it was all-French music under Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, and the next night, an all-Russian evening with André Previn. Both evenings had the programming imprint of music director James Levine in their tight focus, and balance of the familiar and unfamiliar.

Perhaps not quite unfamiliar enough. It would have been nice to hear a recent work -something, for example, by Messiaen, or Gubaidulina, or even more recent - to prick up our ears and stretch one's sense of tradition. Levine has made a loud point of doing that with American works. We've come to expect a little bit of the unexpected.

The nearest thing to a "new" piece was Aram Khachaturian's 1936 Piano Concerto -which, remarkably, was having its Tanglewood premiere. The BSO last performed this colorful, jazzy, loud and finally banal work - Rachmaninoff on steroids - 37 years ago in Symphony Hall. The long delay is not surprising. There aren't many pianists with the technique of a Horowitz, a feeling for jazz, and the chutzpah to work this up. Jean-Yves Thibaudet is one of them, and he projected the full wild Gershwin-influenced dazzle of the piece. He plumbed no mysteries, because there are none, but he made something lovely of the blue notes in the quieter middle movement. The rest was a happy blur of fingers.

Previn at 79 moves a bit stiffly, but he's intensely alert and the orchestra gave a crisp reading of the overture to Glinka's "Ruslan and Ludmila," and, following the concerto, a truly virtuoso performance of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony.

Such discipline was missing on Friday in Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique." It's hard to know why that was. It could have been a lack of rehearsal time, with three programs in one weekend. My theory is it was a mismatch of sensibilities. The "Symphonie" is a young man's piece (Berlioz was 27 when it was first performed) about desperate lovesickness and drugged fantasies. It's as wild and Dionysian as 19th-century French music gets. Does de Burgos really feel it? He's an Apollonian conductor: careful, structural, precise. You can read every phrase and dynamic contrast and punctuation mark in his hands. He is warm and emotional, but every emotion seems to have gone through his head. When he began pressing the tempo, finally, at the end of the last movement, it was exciting, but it seemed applied to the music, not to grow out of it.

So it was generally. The first movement was very slow, with no accenting of the tugs and lurches that create the feeling of restless longing. (Compare Gustavo Dudamel's thrilling recent recording with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; you can hear him breathing the accents.) In the pastoral third movement, his slow, deliberate approach was more fitting and the results splendid, starting with a lovely duet of English horn and offstage oboe. Elsewhere, however, there were patches of sloppy ensemble that I took to be a sign of low investment in de Burgos's view of the piece.

Friday's concert also saw the first BSO appearance of Dutch violinist Janine Jansen, a hugely popular star in Europe who is being packaged as the latest in a line of beauty-violinists. She hasn't let that hurt her. Onstage, she is a coiled cobra, all fierce business. And she had a triumph in Camille Saint-Saens's Violin Concerto No. 3, a showy mixture of flamenco-flavored fast playing, bits of Wagnerian reverie, and second-rate salon music. She has a big, handsome sound, with a thick, rather unvarying vibrato. She didn't relish the quiet parts of the score as much as the hot licks of the first and third movements. Other music will show us what else she's made of -and one hopes that's sooner rather than later.