BSO Shines in the Short and Long of Rachmaninoff

This past week, BSO musical director Andris Nelsons led the orchestra in works that showed the two sides of Sergei Rachmaninoff.

By Robert Nesti

Two sides of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s orchestral imagination were on display at last week’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts. In the program’s second half came the sound most associated with him: the lush, late-Romantic sweep of his Second Symphony, played with leisurely grace and fervor under Andris Nelsons’s direction. The first half offered the quick-witted, more modern style of his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, in an enthusiastically received performance by South Korean piano virtuoso Seong-Jin Cho, whose young superfans brought the audience’s average age down considerably.

Cho’s deadpan demeanor seemed at odds with his fervent playing of one of Rachmaninoff’s most popular works. Written in 1934, the Rhapsody is something of an outlier. Lasting roughly 24 minutes, it comprises 24 variations on Niccolò Paganini’s famous Caprice No. 24 in A minor for solo violin. Its compact, ingenious construction reworks the familiar theme with a modern sensibility. With its lean, transparent orchestration and jazzy syncopations, it brings to mind Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G.

Playing from memory, Cho displayed remarkable command. At times he was playful, then dramatic, as when he lurched back from the piano after several variations, and finally lyrical in the work’s most famous passage: the 18th variation, whose soaring melody was taken up by the orchestra. Under Nelsons’s direction, the BSO neatly balanced the work’s crisp orchestration and shifting pace. Ironically, despite the Rhapsody’s modernity, its best-known passage is that 18th variation, a clear throwback to Rachmaninoff’s late-Romantic style that has found a second life in film. For his encore,Cho returned with the pensive and moody “October, Autumn Song” from Tchaikovsky’s “The Seasons” Op. 37A, which was certainly appropriate for the season.

Tchaikovsky comes immediately to mind in the Second Symphony, with its sweeping melodies and dramatic climaxes. The late Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer described the pitfalls of conducting the work: “This is music that brings out too much of the Susan Hayward in everybody.” (Thanks to George Hungerford for unearthing the quotation in a comment on the concert review in the Boston Musical Intelligencer.) The symphony’s extravagant emotion needs to be kept in check. Nelsons did so in a leisurely performance that, to follow Dyer’s analogy of 1950s Hollywood starts, felt more Deborah Kerr than Hayward: never melodramatic, but dramatically assertive nonetheless. The Adagio was sumptuously rendered, particularly by the BSO strings, and the finale built to a forceful conclusion.

The work has its longueurs, which helps explain why many leading conductors once made substantial cuts, even during Rachmaninoff’s lifetime. Although the composer tolerated some of them, he reportedly told Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy that they were “cutting out a piece of my heart.” Nelsons’s performance played to the symphony’s strengths, and the prolonged ovation suggested that the audience agreed.

For information on upcoming Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts, visit the orchestra’s website at this link.