Making it New, The Boston Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestras join the Callithumpian Consort in going modern
Lloyd Schwartz, the Boston Phoenix, December 2, 2005
Posted: 2005-12-06 11:11:04
SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION Gabriela Montero improvised on 'Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair' and 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.'
"A performance extraordinary for its freshness, its rhythmic alertness, and its stupendous but unforced mastery of every technical demand," I wrote in March 2004, describing Garrick Ohlsson's traversal of the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto with Robert Spano and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. "Big tunes emerged as touching, not sappy. Even in the most gigantic climaxes, Ohlsson's playing never lacked clarity or nuance." I thought I'd have to wait a long time for another Rachmaninov performance to bowl me over in just this way. But along comes 35-year-old Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, who played her first concerto with the extraordinary Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Caracas when she was eight (she'll be making her New York Philharmonic debut in March), and her Rachmaninov Second Concerto with Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic had those very qualities of unsentimental freshness, spontaneity, rhythmic vitality, and supreme technical mastery.
Montero plays with big, open-hearted tone that she can also scale back to the most delicate, scintillating flights of fantasy, or meditative quietude, which the orchestra at Sanders Theatre at times overwhelmed, though Zander's warmth underplayed the tendency of conductors to turn this concerto into mere showpiece. He and Montero made me believe the concerto actually expresses complicated feelings: melancholy, passion, playful humor. The last movement's famous "Full Moon and Empty Arms" theme had the lilt and lift of a dance rather than the mush of the song Tin Pan Alley turned it into. A special highlight was Bruce Creditor's eloquent phrasing of the tender clarinet song in the slow movement, which Montero echoed with equal, unsappy inwardness.
The crowd went bananas. Montero returned for two encores, improvisations on tunes suggested by the audience: "I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" (in the style of Bach and Scarlatti, then Brubeck) and then, having asked for a Christmas song, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Rachmaninov turning into Gershwin).
Zander then offered Danish composer Carl Nielsen's rarely performed Fifth Symphony, which he wrote in 1922, in the wake of the Great War. Mahleresque rustlings of nature turn into a horrific and riveting depiction of military onslaught (ending with the sound of distant drums coming from the balcony), with Creditor (once part of the Naumberg Award–winning Emmanuel Wind Quintet and Boston Symphony Orchestra personnel manager) again stealing the show in the plaintive clarinet lament at the end of the movement. The second movement seemed less compelling, more repetitive (yet another way Nielsen is a precursor of Shostakovich), but Zander and the orchestra made the strongest possible case.
