Adès-Gerstein dream team take on Stravinsky concerto at Tanglewood

 

Thomas Adès and Kirill Gerstein performed Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds at Tanglewood. Photo: Hilary Scott

Kirill Gerstein and Thomas Adès continue to share a fruitful musical partnership. The pianist-conductor duo drew international acclaim two seasons ago, when Gerstein premiered Adès's Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. With Adès conducting, the performance of the blazing and haunting score seemed to capture in music a friendship connected by a similar artistic vision.

 

That was the sense conveyed Saturday night, when Adès and Gerstein tackled Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds with the BSO at Tanglewood's Koussevitzky Shed. The performance once again showcased Gerstein's technical prowess and searching expressivity. And Adès, who proved a technicolor conductor, led the way.

 

Stravinsky's thorny score dates from 1924 while the composer was exploring classical and baroque forms. His previous works—the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Octet—sought to combine old styles with bristly modern sonorities.

 

Adès and Gerstein rendered the concerto in bold colors. Biting brass sonorities brought immediate tension to the opening passages, which erupted in a flurry of activity under Gerstein's fingers. Full of crash-and-bang intensity, the pianist's phrases, which hint at ragtime rhythm, sounded with crystalline precision. The wind musicians of the BSO, under Adès's clear direction, answered in kind.

 

By removing most of the strings from the ensemble, Stravinsky created an emotionless, anti-Romantic sound world. Yet there was nothing overtly objective about Gerstein's rendering of the second movement. There, the pianist found a tender expression that perfectly suited Stravinsky's Schumannesque piano writing.

 

Gerstein also explored the movement's chamber-like intimacy. Brief solos from English hornist Robert Sheena and oboist John Ferrillo provided supple complement to the pianist's lines. The cadenza offered colorful effects, with Gerstein's phrases taking on a hazy resonance in the upper register.

 

The finale moved intently, with trumpeter Thomas Rolfs deftly handling the wide acrobatic leaps that accompanied Gerstein's percussive statements. Raucous flourishes from all players brought the concerto to a rousing conclusion.

 

The rest of the program found Adès exploring the lyrical qualities of two Haydn symphonies and his own O Albion for string orchestra.

 

The latter work originated as the sixth movement from Adès's 1994 string quartet, Arcadiana. Scored for string orchestra in 2019, O Albion is the gem of that setting: at once an idyllic nod to Elgarian pastoralism and spiritual serenity.

 

The music is deceptively simple, unfolding slowly from a falling phrase that takes on plush resonance and biting dissonance as it progresses over a three-minute span. Adès drew playing of radiant warmth from the BSO strings, the opening lines seeming to grow from a whisper, yet never rising above it.  

 

The Haydn symphonies that bookended the program showed just as much sensitivity for the musical line.

 

Adès has a fine feel for Haydn's music, and he drew attention to every dynamic shade and curve of the phrase in the composer's Symphony No. 64 in A.

 

Though cast in a major key, this work, nicknamed Tempora mutantur, bears some storm-and-stress intensity. Brief shifts to minor keys, handled with assurance by Ades and the orchestra, bring momentary tension to an otherwise sunlit score.

 

The Menuetto took on a sure-footed lilt, with clarion calls from the horns making for a resonant trio. The finale coursed with fleet and surging energy.

 

But the heart of this performance was the Largo, which Adès shaped in vocal arcs. Even the many stretches of silence that Haydn used to interrupt the melodic flow carried the intensity forward. This was a Haydn in which to revel as the conductor elicited a sensuous blend from the strings. A solo oboe phrase brought a touch of darkness; beaming horn phrases tilted the music briefly towards the light.

 

The concert's closer, Haydn's Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp minor, displayed equal amounts of sensitivity and drama. 

 

The opening movement was a true essay in  tension and resolution. The Menuet lilted, with horns again sounding harmonious in the trio.

 

Here too, Adès shaped the second movement as if it were an aria, the lines rising, hovering on shimmering harmonies, and falling away.

 

The final Adagio offered a light-hearted ending to the concert. Haydn had written this symphony to convince his employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, who tended to stay at his palace long into the summer months, to let the musicians in his orchestra take a much-deserved break.

 

Adès and BSO acted out the work's historic ending, with musicians leaving the stage in pairs and groups when their parts were completed. As Adès led, the ensemble gradually shrunk from orchestra to sextet, quartet, and eventually violin duet. When the last two violinists left the stage, Adès, ever the showman, kept conducting in silence. He then shrugged, turned to the audience, and took his bow to warm applause.