MUSIC REVIEW: TMC Orchestra Sibelius

TANGLEWOOD
OZAWA HALL
TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER ORCHESTRA
HERBERT BLOMSTEDT AND TMC FELLOWS, CONDUCTORS
ALL-SIBELIUS PROGRAM
JUNE 29, 2009

By Clarence Fanto

(LENOX, Mass.) — The tumultuous, moody, thoroughly original sound world inhabited by the Finnish master Jean Sibelius turned out to be an inspired choice for the opening concert of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra at Ozawa Hall on Monday (June 29). Under the dynamic leadership of Springfield, Mass., native Herbert Blomstedt, the 100-plus TMCO musicians delivered viscerally thrilling, state-of-the-art performances — following only 10 days of preparation for this first concert.

 
About to turn 82, the vigorous, animated Blomstedt is one of the less well-known old masters of the podium despite an impressive pedigree — his Swedish parents relocated the family back to their native land when he was 2, but by 1953 he was studying with Leonard Bernstein at the Berkshire Music Center (as TMC was then known) and won the prestigious Koussevitzky Conducting Prize. During a distinguished career, he led the San Francisco Symphony for 10 years and became known as a specialist (not surprisingly) in the music of Scandinavian composers.

 
He exhibits great joy in the art of music-making and of training young musicians (as a Seventh-Day Adventist, he doesn't rehearse on Saturdays but conducts concerts, since he doesn't view that as work). The young professionals and advanced students of the TMCO demonstrated great enthusiasm for their teacher — the conductor-orchestra chemistry became quite apparent during thoroughly committed, often mesmerizing performances led by two young conducting Fellows mentored by Blomstedt.

In the well-known tone poem "The Swan of Tuonela," Ryan McAdams  — music director of the New York Youth Symphony — inspired Zachary Boeding, the English horn soloist, to lyrical heights depicting a majestically gliding swan plying the roiling, dark waters of a river flowing through Tuonela — a mythical isle of the dead.
 

Finnish mythology looms large in Sibelius's music — nowhere more so than in his final work, "Tapiola," the composer's 1926 ode to the forces of nature, specifically the rather threatening, frigid pine forests of northern Finland. Tapio, a fierce god rules over the wilderness, including the wildlife; the music conveys a brooding, moody, even depressing landscape where turbulence alternates with a preternatural sense of calm. The tone poem ends with a musical shaft of sunlight, but the overall effect is unsettling, even grim. The Hungarian conductor Gergely Madaras, 24, captured the essence of this 20-minute masterpiece and the winds, brass, percussion and string players all had opportunities to strut their stuff.

Even during Sibelius's prolonged eclipse from favor during the latter half of the 20th century, several of his works remained in the core repertoire. BSO music director Serge Koussevitzky was a prime advocate of the Symphony No. 2, which remains the composer's most often-performed work. As a bridge between 19th century European Romanticism and the adventurous stylistic advances of the early 20th, the work forges into unexplored territory, always with a uniquely Nordic spirit.

 In a hard-charging, briskly-paced interpretation that left little space for introspection or the nobility that some other conductors have discovered in the symphony, Blomstedt and his inspired young musicians delivered a seat-of-the-pants experience that had listeners at the edge of their seats, lifting them into the figurative stratosphere during the final brass-accented peroration

This was outstanding music-making, and the orchestra members accorded Blomstedt the ultimate honor by declining to stand for him during one of the repeated ovations. This was a textbook case of an experienced, inspired older maestro building a bridge to the musicians of the future. As a result, the TMC season opened with a burst of pre-Independence Day fireworks.

Clarence Fanto is BerkshireLive's music critic and a contributing editor to Berkshire Living