BSO and Barenboim set the right tone

Boston Symphony Orchestra
At: Symphony Hall, Thursday night
(repeats tonight)

Thursday night, the Boston Symphony Orchestra plunged ahead in its two-year seminar on musical revolution, also known as the Beethoven/Schoenberg Project . Both composers pioneered radical innovations at the same time as they built on inherited traditions. James Levine has sprinkled some of their best works over five orchestral programs this season.

This one opened with Schoenberg's most popular composition, the beloved ``Verklärte Nacht" or ``Transfigured Night," in an arrangement for string orchestra. First conceived as a sextet in 1899 , it is an exquisite product of Schoenberg's youthful, pre-bogeyman days, before his break with tonality. The real challenge in any orchestral performance is to maintain the transparency of lines, the clear interplay of musical voices, and the febrile intensity of the original chamber version. Levine and the BSO for the most part met this challenge in a reading with spacious tempos and an unhurried feel. The orchestra's sound had all the requisite shimmer; the work's final measures took on a distant silvery glow.

It was a wide leap from ``Verklärte Nacht" to Schoenberg's Piano Concerto , written in Los Angeles in 1942 . The piece traces a vast emotional arc possibly alluding to the upheavals of the Second World War. Its bracing 12-tone language naturally subverts the form of the classical concerto while the composer also leans heavily on its familiar expressive gestures. Or to use a Schoenbergian metaphor, the air may be from another planet but one can still breathe as normal.

Daniel Barenboim was the soloist in what was billed, surprisingly, as his BSO subscription series debut . To be sure, there were no debut-style nerves in evidence as Barenboim calmly negotiated the giant leaps in the solo part and made himself heard through the pulverized melodies and martial blasts of the orchestra.

In the wake of all this Schoenberg, the concluding piece, Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto , sounded completely fresh, as if the ear recognized in hindsight that the music's powerful tonal moorings could not be taken for granted. It helped that Barenboim, Levine, and the BSO gave an excellent performance. The orchestra displayed impeccable ensemble and Barenboim's playing showed strength through flexibility. Tempos and dynamics seemed to follow organically from the music, an interpretive goal that Barenboim sketched out in a recent Norton lecture at Harvard and here demonstrated clearly.

Part of what Levine hopes to achieve in his ongoing Beethoven/Schoenberg Project is reciprocal illumination, with each composer shedding light on the other. The first program of the season accomplished this with style. It should be fascinating to see how the series evolves from here.