Tanglewood Festival (1) : Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, Jean-Philippe Collard (piano)   Boston Symphony Orchestra / Andre Previn Orchestra Tanglewood, Massachusetts 8.7. 2007 (CA)

 

Tchaikovsky, Romeo and Juliet, Fantasy-Overture after Shakespeare
Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Opus 1
Prokofiev, Music from the ballet Romeo and Juliet

The opening weekend of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2007 Tanglewood season featured lots of Tchaikovsky, and for the Sunday afternoon concert, Russians was all that was being served; a musical history lesson, perhaps? Like chicken Kiev, a little bit is delicious, while a lot is to be avoided.

Nonetheless, the warm and breezy afternoon suited the program, and this is music that suits the warmth that is a hallmark of  BSO’s playing. André Previn, a regular at Tanglewood, has become old and a bit stooped, but he remains an incisive leader. His marvelously graceful and articulate hand gestures convey meaning and even energy, and the orchestra responded beautifully to his bidding. I was dreading an enervated rendering of can be a worn-out war horse, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. But there was no sleep-walking through this performance. It was alternately tightly-packed, when emotions boiled over, and romantic without dissolving into triteness. The story (which Tchaikovsky only loosely based on Shakespeare’s) moved right along and held up well in the musical telling.

This was followed by a Tanglewood premiere! It’s hard to believe, but Rachmaninoff’s first piano concerto doesn’t have the following of the much more famous second and third concerti. These two became so popular that Rachmaninoff, tired of performing them, rewrote his opus 1(originally written in 1892) in 1931. And while this rewritten version of the first concerto is full of the speed, power, and even the pianistic brinksmanship that made the second and third concerti so popular, it lacks the overarching romantic themes that we’ve come to associate with Rachmaninoff.

The pianist, Jean-Philippe Collard, known primarily for his interpretations of the French repertoire, brought plenty of fire and technique to the task. He brimmed over with racehorse-like speed, and one felt Previn and the BSO panting to keep up. But there was never a loss of control or the sense that a fight was brewing between soloist and orchestra. One could not help but admire the bravura performance.

But the real highlight of the afternoon was Prokofiev’s Music from the ballet, Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev wrote the ballet upon returning to Russia to live out his days with his family there, and it is considered one of his great masterpieces. It combines plenty of the the irony that earlier Prokofiev is so with a lush romanticism that serves to heighten the ultimate tragedy. There was disagreement over the original score, first with the Kirov, then with the Bolshoi; the ending was changed so that Romeo and Juliet could dance off happily together at the end, and then it was changed back. The suite from the ballet was performed before the ballet itself was ever mounted, and Prokofiev actually assembled three distinct suites of mixing various movements from the ballet.

For this performance, Previn put together a combination of eight movements from the first two suites, which gave the performance fresh feeling. But in any combination, this is wonderful music, energetic, emotionally charged, and exciting; listening to it, one wanted to get up on the edge of one’s seat.

And it was a good, if not great, performance. In the slight raggedness of some of the entrances, one was aware of how much more difficult, and ultimately rich, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is than Tchaikovsky’s. Even though one thinks of Tchaikovsky as the great 19th century orchestrator, the two pieces, based on the same story, but separated by over half a century, aren’t at all similar. Tchaikovsky feels a bit like A Midsummer Night’s Dream fairy music next to Prokofiev’s Godzilla. So, in the end, the comparison isn’t particularly meaningful.

Clay Andres

 

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