The Curtis Symphony Orchestra at the Kimmel Center

The Curtis’s winter concert went east of the Elbe for its program, with works by the first and most recent of Russia’s great composers, Mikhail Glinka and Dmitri Shostakovich, bookending a rarity by Bela Bartók. Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila is always an infectious concert opener, with its high spirits and unflagging drive. Brief as it is, it is also a primer on the varying elements that went into the Russian symphonic tradition, from modally derived folk and church music to Italian bel canto and Germanic counterpoint. Conductor Kensho Watanabe, a 2013 Curtis graduate, led the orchestra with a sure hand and evident pleasure in the music-making.

The remainder of the program had a distinctively different cast. Béla Bartók in 1940 and Dmitri Shostakovich in 1941 were working under extraordinary circumstances. The ailing Bartók had arrived as an impecunious refugee in New York. Shostakovich was living in Nazi-besieged Leningrad, already a starving city — more than a million people would die during its 900-day ordeal. Bartók had been vilified in the Fascist press, and Shostakovich, caught between two of the 20th century’s most brutal tyrannies, had narrowly escaped Stalin’s gulags a few years earlier.

Bartók was in fact largely silent during his first years in America. The period preceding his emigration had been a very fertile one, producing such masterworks as the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, the Second Violin Concerto, the String Quartet #6, and the Divertimento for Strings. He would produce no original music of consequence in America until the Concerto for Orchestra of 1943.

He did, however, turn the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion into a concerto at the suggestion of his publisher. It was this work that the Curtis revived, with pianists Benjamin Hochman and Natalie Zhu, both Curtis graduates who have already embarked on impressive careers, and percussionists Don Liuzzi, the principal timpanist of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1989, and Mari Yoshinaga, Mr. Liuzzi’s former student at Curtis.

The performance went well, but the problem is in the music. In its original form as a sonata, it is one of Bartók’s finest and most daringly coloristic works. The orchestral wash laid over it, although it has its own touches, obscures the fascinating sonorities of the sonata without creating anything like a work on its own terms; indeed, the best parts of the score are the moments of orchestral silence when the soloists have the music to themselves. The concerto served its purpose as a vehicle for Bartók and his wife Ditta, who performed it with some success. Their audiences would have had little if any familiarity with the sonata, however, and could only take it at face value. It is at best a curiosity today.

From a city under siege

The major work on the program — for many orchestras, a full program in itself — was Shostakovich’s Mahler-sized Seventh Symphony, still known by its subtitle, “The Leningrad.” Shostakovich began it in Leningrad in the summer of 1941 during the first shock of the Nazi invasion, when it appeared that the Soviet Union itself might collapse in the onslaught. He had completed the first three of its four movements when he was evacuated to Moscow in October, and thence to the more secure provincial city of Kuibyshev, where the score had its premiere before being flown in microfilm via Teheran to New York. It immediately became a symbol of the newly forged Grand Alliance and was so frequently performed that an irritated Bartók parodied one of its themes in the Concerto for Orchestra.

The Seventh will always be seen against the backdrop of its composition, but Shostakovich himself warned against interpreting it in overly programmatic terms. This is particularly relevant to the first movement, whose middle section consists of 12 restatements of a deliberately banal tune that grow increasingly clamorous as they build to a prolonged and shattering climax. Many have taken it as a depiction of the approaching Nazi horde, but one can now listen to the way in which Shostakovich slowly builds musical tension and menace to the breaking point and observe how he repeats the pattern of a climactic middle section in the succeeding two movements. Similarly, the wayward finale now reveals its affinities to the last movement of the Fifth Symphony, with its introspective midsection and its final climax, at once resolute and desolate.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin was on the podium for the Shostakovich. He took a brisk tempo in the opening section of the first movement Allegretto, but then settled into a more spacious reading that was among the finest I have heard, and which carried the orchestra along fully. The strings were splendid, and the wind solos, which always carry great weight in Shostakovich, were beautifully realized. The brass had heft too, and balances were always maintained. Nézet-Séguin clearly believes in this score, and his delight in the orchestra’s performance was fairly bursting at the end. One would be very interested to hear him program it for the Philadelphians.

Shostakovich was 35 when he wrote the Seventh, but his life experience was already three-score and ten. The young Curtis performers would no doubt have heard something about its provenance, but the agonies of World War II are long removed from them. That they were able to project its feeling and intensity with such conviction of their own is a tribute to their talent and training no less than the emotive power of the music itself. It is no wonder their conductor was proud.