Gilbert conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra

The odd man out, never performed before by the Orchestra, was the Jean Sibelius tone poem, Night Ride and Sunrise, which opened the program. Sibelius was in mid-career when he wrote it, having already earned a European reputation with his first three symphonies. Yet Sibelius complained of the formal constraints he felt with the symphonic form, even as he was considerably redefining it. He said he preferred the structural indeterminacy of the tone poem, which gave freer rein to his rhapsodic invention, and even suggested that he would express himself thereafter in this medium.

Of course, Sibelius subsequently wrote four more symphonies, and he is now remembered primarily as a symphonist. But he would actually compose more tone poems than symphonies, and his last major completed work, Tapiola, is one of the last significant works in the form by any important composer. If Sibelius was widely considered the final successor to Beethoven as a symphonist during his lifetime, he is actually, with Ottorino Respighi, the last in the line of great tone poem composers from Liszt to Richard Strauss.

The tone poem grew out of the concert overture, pioneered by Beethoven in his Coriolan Overture. It was further developed by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. There is no clear-cut distinction between the concert overture and the tone poem, except that the latter tends to embody a narrative rather than depict a scene or a single character.

Night Ride and Sunrise conveys the simplest of story lines: a lone rider traversing a forest until dawn. It may have served only as a stimulus for Sibelius to engage the problem that he wrestled with in the symphonies as well: the germination of a theme from fragmentary elements that slowly cohere until they find full, powerful expression.

Night Ride and Sunset begins — atypically for Sibelius — with a sharp orchestral plunge, rather like a switch applied suddenly to a horse. This image yields to a rocking figure in the strings — a device often employed by Sibelius — intercut by passing woodwind phrases. The horns announce dawn itself, whose theme emerges slowly and grandly until it reaches its final peroration. It makes for an effective conclusion, but in some respects the night music, tonally uncertain and for long stretches almost static, is the more arresting, showing a Sibelius for whom form was only a momentary function of a deeper, primary chaos. It’s surprising to think that the Orchestra had never before performed this work, especially given Eugene Ormandy’s long association with Sibelius.

Dvořák’s morbid side

Antonín Dvořák’s corpus included several concert overtures, but not until the end of his career did he produce a tone poem. At that point, however, four tone poems appeared in rapid succession as his opp. 107-110, all based on the rather grim tales of the Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben. The Golden Spinning Wheel, Op. 109, tells of a king who falls in love with a forest maiden, whose witchlike stepmother carves her into pieces that are magically restored to life by a sorcerer. Slasher films don’t have much on this fable, and the fact that it got Dvořák’s creative juices flowing suggests the more mordant side of a composer usually viewed as a buoyant personality.

Dvořák makes no particular attempt to follow the plot, but, as he noted, a free fantasy unfolds, suggested by various episodes. The material is top-drawer and the orchestration characteristically fresh and adroit, but — as with the Sibelius work — it took a firmer hand than Gilbert’s to make its elements fully cohere. Another rehearsal or two wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Towering masterpiece

Things went much better in the program’s second half. Leoš Janáček’s life lies chronologically between those of Dvořák and Sibelius; he was 13 years older than the former, and 11 years younger than the latter, yet Janáček seems in many ways the most contemporary composer of the three. This is partly because his work was the last to be fully appreciated, but also because, whereas Dvořák fell silent after his 50s, Janáček only got going at that point, producing almost all of his major compositions in the last third of his life.

He got consistently better as he aged, too, and was at the very top of his form when he died in 1928. His Glagolitic Mass, which premiered in 1927, is one of the 20th century’s towering choral masterpieces, yet it had to wait until 1991 for its first Philadelphia Orchestra performance under Charles Dutoit — at the Mann Center, of all places. This, then, is the first time the Mass has been heard properly in Philadelphia, and, happily, the performance was first-rate, with the Orchestra digging firmly into the knotty score and David Hayes’s Philadelphia Singers Chorale projecting the Old Slavonic text in thrilling washes of sound.

Nonbelieving Catholic

The four soloists — placed with the chorus rather than Orchestra because of space limitations — were at some disadvantage, but soprano Tatiana Monogarova, at least, overcame them fully. Janáček’s conception of the Mass is idiosyncratic, with a purely orchestral introduction and finale, and an organ solo as the penultimate movement. Thus, only six of the work’s nine movements are sung, and the Mass text itself is somewhat abridged.

Since Janáček (born a Catholic) firmly rejected the imputation that he was a believer of any sort, the work is perhaps best seen as a dramatic cantata utilizing a devotional text. From whatever angle, though, it’s a magnificently realized work of art.

The concert, in juxtaposing its three composers, showed each in a distinctive light. Dvořák appeared in a decidedly post-Brahmsian guise, and Sibelius in an almost Modernist one, while Janáček’s debt to Dvořák’s own sacred music was highlighted. I’ve said it before, but the best programs are the ones that make you see how musical tradition evolves and reflects upon itself. This was one of them.

Music for Dummies

One other event of the evening was decidedly less welcome. We’ve all become inured to museumgoers wired into their audiophones, as if they needed to hear in order to see. The Orchestra brass — I mean the management and marketers, not the trumpets and trombones — have seen fit to trot out their latest gimmick, an app that enables you to distract yourself from the music at hand by punching up various tidbits of information about the composer and the score.

Happily, I noticed no one seizing this wonderful opportunity, and perhaps it will pass the way of last season’s experiment in screen projections. But if you’ve ever been irritated by seat neighbors who can’t seem to put away their iPhones until (or after) the last second, you can now add this latest installment of Music for Dummies to the hazards of concertgoing: pocket screens flashed in your face just as the house lights dim.