Premieres make for a memorable Tanglewood weekend

August 24, 2010|Matthew Guerrieri, Globe Correspondent

LENOX—The past weekend at Tanglewood was dedicated to young conductors, familiar soloists, and patches to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s repertoire: Programs were sprinkled with BSO premieres. Some were understandable. Jennifer Higdon’s “blue cathedral’’ dates only from 2000, and Mendelssohn’s violin-and-piano Concerto is something of a rarity. But Franz von Suppé’s “Poet and Peasant’’ Overture? That venerable chestnut, it turns out, had never migrated from the Pops library.

Friday night brought back former BSO assistant conductor Ludovic Morlot, soon to take over the Seattle Symphony. The soloist was soprano Dawn Upshaw, in superb voice in “Three Songs’’ by Osvaldo Golijov: dark, lyrical, long-breathed melodies, suiting her heady clarity and visceral phrasing. (The high, starry benediction of “Lúa descolorida’’ was especially fine.) In Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,’’ Upshaw was perhaps too interpretively generous, over-tinkering her voice to delineate the storytelling; it didn’t always work, but when it did — a yodeling yawn from chest voice into a piping sigh for the spoiled housewife of “Oï, ayaï,’’ for instance — it was delicious.

Gallic delights framed the concert. Mozart’s “Paris’’ Symphony, K. 297, is froth, but refined, structured froth, which Morlot particularly broadcasted in the outer movements: full-bodied fizz in the opening, pinpoint carbonation in the finale. Morlot’s conducting was natural and precise, an auto-focus survey of each score. The approach divested Maurice Ravel’s “Mother Goose’’ ballet of some dreaminess, but compensated with timbral clarity: Ravel’s colors popped in high definition.

Saturday’s concert featured Susanna Mälkki, conductor of the avant-garde Ensemble Intercontemporain. This program, however, was unabashedly Classical. The first half was Mendelsshohn: the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream’’ (crisp fleetness and roundhouse accents, Shakespeare’s forest a giddy, dangerous place), then the Concerto for Piano and Violin, with violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Jeremy Denk. The fun of the piece — which the 14-year-old Mendelssohn wrote for himself and Eduard Rietz — is the precocious composer showing his age: just what a ridiculously talented teenager would fashion for himself and a friend, the deck stacked toward their bountiful solo virtuosity. Bell and Denk were ideal advocates, their considerable technique and intelligent care producing a nonchalant dazzle that would have both impressed and piqued the composer’s elders. (Bell returned for Beethoven’s opus 50 Romance in F minor, weaving a line of consistently fine-spun, silken tone, but intermittently slippery intonation.)