Brahms: Ignat Solzhenitsyn, cond., Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia Chamber Chorus, Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, 21.5.2007 (BJ)

 

A visit back to my old stamping-ground proved timely, because it coincided with the last and, for me, most attractive program of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia’s season, an all-Brahms evening offering three wonderful but relatively rarely performed works. Still in his early thirties, Ignat Solzhenitsyn goes from strength to strength. Already in my estimation rivaled only by Leif Ove Andsnes as the leading pianistic talent to have emerged in the past decade or two, he shows comparable gifts as a conductor, and since taking over as the Chamber Orchestra’s music director three seasons ago he has both dramatically raised the ensemble’s already high playing standards and begun to show a welcome new flexibility and grace on the podium to go with the stylistic insight, musical probity, and interpretative intensity that has been evident in his work from the start.

The first half of this program prefaced a dynamic reading of the great Schicksalslied with the earlier Begräbnisgesang, Op. 13. It can surely be only its idiosyncratic orchestration that prevents this little masterpiece from being heard more often: a potent blend of the ancient and the forward-looking in musical style, the hymn-like setting of a 16th-century text by Michael Weisse is scored only for pairs of oboes, bassoons, and horns, three trombones, a tuba, and timpani, with no flutes or trumpets, and no strings at all. The plangent colors evoked by these forces were beautifully realized under Solzhenitsyn’s compelling leadership, and the voices of the Choral Arts Society’s Chamber Chorus enhanced the effect with their pinpoint accuracy of pitch, delicacy of tonal shading, and clarity of diction.

After intermission Solzhenitsyn gave us the expansive and delightful Serenade No. 1, first performed in 1858 as a nonet, and recast by the composer shortly afterwards as a work for full orchestra. Fittingly for a piece by a composer in his middle twenties, the Serenade is a cornucopia of homages to Brahms’s predecessors, especially Beethoven and Haydn, but it is also full of pointers to his own mature style, and it abounds also in irresistibly catchy and subtly shaped tunes. At least three of its six movements demand particularly virtuoso playing from the principal horn, and in that capacity Lyndsie Wilson, standing in for a colleague currently on leave, covered herself with glory. But indeed the entire performance was a triumph, lithe yet never hurried in pace and pulse, according equal play to the wit of the music and its often wistful charm, and balanced with an unerring ear for Brahms’s trademark richness of texture.

 

Bernard Jacobson