Musical postcards from the ‘new world’
LENOX — When Walt Whitman famously eavesdropped on America singing, he was listening not to a single tune but rather a collection, in his words, of “varied carols.” A few such variations — iconic works of American music — bookended this summer’s third weekend of Boston Symphony Orchestra performances at Tanglewood.
It would be hard to find a more iconic pair than Copland’s Suite from “Appalachian Spring” and Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony. Together they made up Friday night’s program in the Koussevitzky Music Shed under the baton of Xian Zhang, music director of the New Jersey Symphony, in her Tanglewood debut.
Copland’s work, which began its life as a ballet for Martha Graham, tells the story of a young couple setting out on their lives together in rural Pennsylvania. From the outset, Zhang projected a vibrant presence from the podium, choosing flexible tempos and projecting a strong sense of the music’s character, including the searching tenderness of Copland’s prayerful writing for woodwinds. In the suite’s whirling kinetic moments, she coaxed vital, emphatic playing from the BSO strings. And lending some novelty to what was otherwise a rather conventional program, the orchestra presented the Copland together with “Spring,” a new ballet to the Suite from “Appalachian Spring,” commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony for its recent centenary celebrations, and created and performed here by Nimbus Dance (Samuel Pott, artistic director and choreographer).
After intermission, Zhang’s account of the Dvorák opted for fervency over grandeur, yet notwithstanding a few breathless passages in the outer movements, it made a strong impression on the gathered crowd. Robert Sheena’s account of the famous English horn solo was notable for its elegance of phrasing and obsidian beauty of tone.
On the other end of the weekend, Sunday afternoon’s program brought us back to Appalachia in light and easygoing style, courtesy of Jeff Midkiff ’s bluegrass-inflected mandolin concerto “From the Blue Ridge.” Midkiff himself was on hand to perform the virtuosic solo line with proprietary ease. He also received an impressive assist from BSO violinist Elita Kang, who dug into the solo fiddle passages with fearlessness and fluidity.
Sunday’s program was capably led by Thomas Wilkins, the BSO’s artistic adviser for education and community engagement, who opened the afternoon with the orchestra’s first performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s intriguing Ballade in A minor, and closed it with selections of the orchestral suite arrangement of “The River” by Duke Ellington. The Ellington was given a deft, stylish performance that felt like its own strong case that the “carols” of this particular American composer take up their rightful place somewhere near the center of the American classical canon.
Not all of the weekend’s notable action, however, took place at Tanglewood. On Saturday night, a short drive south of Lenox, the Aston Magna Music Festival wrapped up its 50th anniversary season at Saint James Place in Great Barrington with a particularly festive program.
This venerable period-instrument operation may cater to more of a niche early music audience but it does so with broadly inviting performances imaginatively curated by artistic director Daniel Stepner. And within what might seem like a narrower band of repertoire, Saturday’s celebratory season-closing affair had a delightful sonic and stylistic variety, from the mellow-toned elegance of a two-viol work by Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, to the caffeinated ebullience of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto (in which harpsichordist’s Peter Sykes’s account of the first-movement cadenza was a marvel of jangling virtuosity).
While anchoring itself in the world of the Baroque, Aston Magna also makes occasional forays into the 20th century, as it did earlier this summer with Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du soldat” and as it did once more on Saturday with an engaging rendition of Villa-Lobos’s much-loved Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, with soprano Kristen Watson as the eloquent vocal soloist. Most memorable of all, however, was a sequence from Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen,” in which an excellent quartet of singers — Watson, Deborah Rentz Moore, Jason McStoots, and David McFerrin — offered paeans to each of the four seasons, framed by a rousing chorus praising the “great Parent of us all.” All told, it was a fitting celebration for a treasured local institution now forging ahead into its sixth decade.