2012-04-29

The Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall - NYTimes.com

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March 12, 2012

A Little-Known Guest Arrives to Make an Impression

By JAMES R. OESTREICH

As the Boston Symphony Orchestra enters a second year without a music director, a parade of guest conductors continues to cross its podium. Some are legitimate candidates to succeed James Levine, who resigned last March, though two heavyweight contenders had to cancel appearances with the orchestra this season: Riccardo Chailly, for health reasons, and Andris Nelsons, for the birth of his baby. The conductors of the first two of the orchestras three concerts at Carnegie Hall last week, John Oliver and Christoph Eschenbach, have no chance. Among other reasons, both are 72, and the post-Levine Boston Symphony has every reason to look for someone young and vital. But Stphane Denve, the 40-year-old French maestro who conducted the Friday evening concert, must be considered at least a long shot. Though still relatively little known in America, Mr. Denve is chief conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and he made a mostly favorable impression here. In his hands, Ravels Ma Mre lOye (Mother Goose) shows what a great French orchestra Boston can still be, a half-century after the directorship of Charles Munch. Wisely, Mr. Denve played just the five movements originally written for piano duo, not the interstitial material added to the orchestration for ballet, which undercuts the works essential economy. Tempos were a little logy, but the sonorities were gorgeous, especially in the strings, and the proportions were elegant. Mr. Denve held the end of the finale, The Fairy Garden, which can so easily be overblown, in good restraint. Next came Stravinskys quirky Concerto for Piano and Winds (and double basses), hardly less French in spirit. Written in the composers Neo-Classical mode and teeming with wellbehaved dissonances, the work had its premiere in Paris in 1924, a year after the Paris premiere of Milhauds jazz-inflected ballet score The Creation of the World, and some funky harmonies in Stravinskys central Largo closely resemble Milhauds.
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2012-04-29

The Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall - NYTimes.com

Mr. Denve and the pianist Peter Serkin achieved a fine balance, though in truth, Stravinsky deploys pianist and orchestra as much in alternation as together. Mr. Serkin conveyed well his parts manic energy and angularity. Mr. Denve seemed less fully at home in the moodier parts of Shostakovichs Fifth Symphony. Whether you buy the works ostensible triumphalism or sense an underlying sarcasm, there is no denying (at least since Leonard Bernstein made it clear) the sense of foreboding in the slow, murky sections of the opening movement. Mr. Denve seemed to find little mystery there, raising fears for what might come (or not) in the third-movement Largo, but by then he seemed more attuned to the works ebb and flow. And he fully captured the dynamism of the Allegretto and the finale. The orchestra played well for him everywhere. Malcolm Lowe, the concertmaster, provided excellent solos, as did the woodwind principals, especially the clarinetist William R. Hudgins.

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