In Tanglewood’s Koussevitzky Shed, two great war-horses came across in impressive new readings. Kirill Gerstein and Alan Gilbert offered a superbly modernist traversal of Rachmaninoff’s famous Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, before Gilbert led the BSO in a stunningly brilliant and equally modernist take on Stravinsky’s Suite from Le Sacre du printemps.

Rachmaninoff’s composed his third piano concerto at his lovely estate in Russia in the summer of 1909, but he intended it as the centerpiece of his first American tour in the fall. Indeed, the New York Philharmonic premiered it under the baton of Walter Damrosch. The Concerto acquired its glamour thanks to Vladimir Horowitz (who made it exciting) and Van Cliburn (who made it elegant). Gilbert and Gerstein teamed up to give us something very fresh.

From the outset, Gerstein interpreted the famous opening melody (about which Rachmaninoff claimed that “it wrote itself”) through strong accents and sforzandos, creating a fitful atmosphere, reaching us by sound bursts. Gilbert responded by allowing Gerstein to disrupt the vast, relaxed sound of the orchestra, forcing a quasi-syncopation and prompting brightness in the brass. Similarly, in the second theme, a tranquil orchestra jolted out of its complacency in response to Gerstein’s fitful ministrations, projecting textures by turns luscious and brittle. In the development, Gerstein continued to press the orchestra with his probing and questioning, eliciting a rumbling, cacophonic response. Growing in dynamic intensity, Gerstein forced the orchestra into battle, generating cracks that the orchestra filled with sinuous undulations, like the gold cracks in a Japanese kintsugi vase. All of this warring conflict prepared us for a masterful cadenza. Adopting the original version, Gerstein turned the battle inward into a war within himself. The key to its effectiveness came in his resisting the temptation to be merely virtuosic. Instead, he conveyed authentic suffering through force, silence, and dread; phrases burst in fortissimo climaxes. Gerstein’s profoundly original and sober interpretation, free of any inflated emotionalism, generated surprising emotional catharsis. Instead of some over-marketed “Russian soul” we got raw humanity.

Gilbert kept the intermezzo wonderfully sober, calling attention to the architecture. Gerstein repeatedly entered in a rush of notes, followed by elegant ritards. Together, Gerstein and Gilbert evoked a sustained human maturity that lives with suffering, rather than exorcising it through bathetic excess. In the end, this allowed the piano in the Finale to incite the orchestra to join in a new possibility of hope, to deliver a hard-earned faith in the future, rather than a shallow optimism. The closing interplay between orchestra and piano, an affirmation of joy, echoed Beethoven’s famous choral setting in calling for a new world,

In a spectacular and riveting performance, Gilbert brought Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to a new level of universalism. Gone were the local Russian costumes and Stravinsky’s“… knock-kneed lolitas.” Taking the Introduction at a leisurely pace, he turned it into a cacophonous soundscape, haunted by hushed strings, unpredictable shrieks, and sudden alarm. He turned the collectivist thumping of the Augurs into a generalized primitivism that encompasses the barbaric mindlessness of the machine age. Through fantastic tutti and boisterous timpani, he fashioned the Spring Rounds and the Ritual of the Rival Tribes into a thrilling locus of violence. Conversely, he gave the Procession of the Sage a terrifying material weight, a profound gravitational inertia that bonds us to the nightmarish idols that humanity carries on its exhausted shoulders. The loud, violently pulsating Dance of the Earth brought a hair-raising finish to Part I.

If Part I put us face to face with the terror of impersonal physical forces, Part II forced us to confront the equally impersonal aspects of the biosphere. The truth is, we have no idea what life is, we only know that it requires recurrent sacrifice, death, and resurrection. In the Introduction of Part II, Gilbert set huge sound masses against a misty and eerie background. The ensuing Mystical Circles of the Young Girls turned insemination and conception into a scabrous periodicity of lunar cycles and irrepressible growth. Through skillful timing and subtle syncopation, Gilbert terrified us in the Glorification of the Chosen One, identifying with both the victim and the perpetrators. Gilbert brilliantly amalgamated the three final dances into a protracted vision of irresistible biological forces: an entangled mass of pulsating life and throbbing destruction. 

Gerstein and Gilbert both get right to the bone and marrow of the works that they animate. We will be reckoning with the force of their profound impact for a long time to come.

Leon Golub is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and has been a lover of classical music for over 50 years.