The Philadelphia Orchestra with pianist Kirill Gerstein

The idea of pairing the two composers on this week’s program, Beethoven and Shostakovich, is no longer novel, especially in chamber recitals. The question is the music chosen: in Shostakovich’s case, the Second Piano Concerto, and a brief suite from his score for The Gadfly, a Soviet-era adaptation of an 1897 novel by Ethel Voynich about the Italian Risorgimento. The piece, Luke Howard notes, “allows Shostakovich to indulge in some light pastiche of Bellini, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Neapolitan songs, and folk tunes.” From Beethoven to Bellini via Shostakovich?

Actually, the results were not quite as strange as one might expect. There is a great deal of attractive, and occasionally experimental, music in Shostakovich’s film scores, the largest single segment of his prolific output. The Gadfly is one of the most popular, particularly for its Romance, whose soulful melody frequently pops up on the radio although it was absent from the pared-down version performed by Nézet-Séguin. The audience certainly liked what it heard and gave the orchestra a warm ovation. Everyone went home happy except Beethoven, on whose characteristic frown an extra crease clearly showed.

Time to re-up

Nézet-Séguin had perhaps a special reason for programming the Beethoven as he did, at least on the Friday concert I attended. The start of the concert was delayed as Yannick, flanked by Orchestra board chairman Richard Worley and president Allison Vulgamore, publicly signed his new seven-year contract with the Orchestra. Worley and Vulgamore themselves basked in the announced financial recuperation of the Orchestra, corporate pockets having opened again with the bitter wage cuts imposed on the musicians. The latter tapped and applauded for Yannick, who beamed happily, though their private thoughts about the other dignitaries onstage remained unexpressed. If you’re into union-busting, it was a very touching exercise.

In the Beethoven, which immediately followed, Nézet-Séguin was crisp and characteristically energetic, with the usual ritard on the last note of the opening motto clipped off and brisk tempos prevailing in the opening Allegro. This made for some striking coloristic accents in what is usually a more homogenized sound. It is superfluous to comment on the music itself, except to say that it is at once the most familiar and an ever-astonishing work in the repertory. Beethoven brought the classical symphony into the 19th century with the Eroica — hell, he invented the 19th century — but in the Fifth Symphony he achieved a level of thematic compression and emotional unity that even he could never surpass.

The Shostakovich concerto dates from 1957, the year in which he completed his tragic 11th Symphony. No two more dissimilar works could be imagined, and their juxtaposition in his corpus shows his mercurial range. Shostakovich, whose world reputation had been made by his graduation exercise at the Leningrad Conservatory, the First Symphony, wrote the concerto as a graduation piece for his son Maxim, like him a gifted pianist. It opens with a jaunty, striding theme in the winds, immediately overtaken by a rippling line in the piano, and we are off to the races. The Andante that follows is tender and almost Chopinesque, and a finale returns us to the high spirits of the opening Allegro. Among its other tricks, it features a rising, Czerny-like scale for the soloist, a playful joke by the father for his student son but one gracefully integrated into the musical texture.

Longing for Lenny

The evening’s Russian-born soloist, Kirill Gerstein, unfortunately brought a heavy, concussive sound to the music, particularly in the first movement. This might have worked in Prokofiev, but not here. Interested listeners may be referred to the sparkling performance of the Second recorded by Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic. Lenny got to the point. Gerstein loosened up as the music proceeded, but the first impression of clunkiness persisted. It was all the more puzzling as his encore piece, an etude for the left hand by Felix Blumenfeld, was played with great delicacy and charm.