Conductor Dalia Stasevska made her debut with the BSO on Saturday in Tanglewood’s Koussevitzky Shed in a program that explored the alternative modernisms of the monumental in Sibelius in 1919 and of the carnivalesque in Stravinsky’s second, neoclassical, period. Violinist Leila Josefowicz joined to give a delightfully brilliant reading of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto of 1931. A short Canzonetta written, in effect, by both composers opened the concert.

In 1963 Stravinsky received the prestigious (and lucrative) Wihuri Sibelius Prize. He responded to the honor by recasting a short dance, originally named “Rondino der liebensden” that Sibelius had composed in 1911 as incidental music for Kuolema, a Symbolist play about death. Later renamed Canzonetta, it casts maidens dancing in twilight to faint music heard in the distance. Stravinsky chose to recast this short piece into his own tonal language, reworking the original string ensemble into a chamber contingent consisting of two clarinets, four horns, a harp, and a double bass. Stasevska, who serves as Artistic Director of the International Sibelius Festival, brought to vivid light the translation effected by Stravinsky. By urging the clarinet to subvert the nostalgic voices of the horns with a hint of the grotesque, and by creating patches of sound with the harp and the bass clarinet, she remained true to the original symbolist mien of the Sibelius Canzonetta but expressed it in a Cubist idiom that cast nostalgia in a new self-perpetuating form, inherent to modern life and inescapable.

Wonderfully in sync, Stasevska and Josefowicz brought out the Commedia del’Arte magic of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto and indeed revealed the full extent to which Stravinsky’s neoclassical period elaborated on his Pulcinella of 1920 to frame a veritable alternative to atonal experiments. Stravinsky worked with and communed with Picasso and other Paris artists (Rouault, Max Beckmann) who had turned to clowns and circus life for aesthetic renewal. Together, conductor and soloist gave a jocose, mocking, precarious, vulnerable, circus-like feel to the first movement Toccata, with a seductive hint of tongue in cheek feline threat in the solo violin, interacting with bright, but subtly tarnished trumpets, to put all of life under a spell of make-believe and illusion. In Aria I, they evoked a nocturne, with a myriad little monsters scurrying in the violins, and owls and bats, threatening to well up into a crescendo of impulsivity kept in check by humor under a cosmos of stars. They made Aria II the heart of the work. Stasevska urged the orchestra to emphasize dissonances in a loudly dramatic heralding of Fate, the soloist contrasting now as a figure of solitude, a forlorn Pierrot, deserted and left to his own poignant lack of devices. A struggle between the artist and the world, between the individual and crushing impersonal forces of history? Josefowicz’s marvelous patchwork dress of vivid flat colors, worthy of Picasso’s set for Pulcinella and reminiscent of Sonia Delauney’s self-designed clothing, contributed to this magic rediscovery. The finale Capriccio expanded the circus metaphor to embrace urban modernity itself, jaunty and carnivalesque, with beautiful shifts of tempi in both the orchestra and the solo violin, as though going from dance to dance and bathing in crowds in order both to heal and to escape loneliness. The audience responded with immediate visceral enthusiasm, shouting out “Brava!” ― participating in the ambiguously comical modern spectacle, with its magnificent musical trapeze artists.

Tell us now about Sibelius, Stasevska! Deeply aware that Sibelius refrained from pursuing atonal options, Stasevska presented Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 in E-flat Major as an affirmation of, but also a reinterpretation of, monumentality.  Sibelius himself spoke of “receiving bits of mosaic from God with the task of discovering the pattern.” In the first movement with its five tempi markings, Stasevska created a vast encompassing soundscape made up of constantly shifting uncertain moods, using broad, sweeping gestures to bring the orchestra into her vision of the work. An arabesque of flutes began against a somber flat background only to be erased by hushed strings, which were then suddenly interrupted by brassy cries, only to give way to a bassoon lament. Through equally sudden shifts in dynamics, she kept us off guard, fragmented, unable to find our bearing, unmoored from our familiar expectations of development, recapitulation and order. Stasevska brought the movement finally to a coherent climax, but it was the coherence of great tolling bells, stranded in an indifferent cosmos.

Stasevska plunged deeper into the mosaic of swift mood changes in the second movement, again exploiting its five tempi markings to give us a sort of close-up of instability. She started by encouraging the pizzicato texture, intimating that the mood could gain a foothold if it could only spread to enough instruments. A summery feeling of leisure―expansive and confident―started to grow, but as it grew louder and more energetic, it turned frenetic and crashed like waves on invisible distant cliffs of silence. Pizzicato strings attempted to recover a balance, but now the plucking turned edgy as the effect spread to various instruments and soured into angst and further into fear before turning carnivalesque, then solemn and tragic.

Harnessing the five tempi of the third movement finale, Stasevska used an active, muscular resolve to bring about a confrontation between Winds of Change (buzzing strings) and a self-righteous, indignant Monumentality (horns). At first, the forces of static grandeur appeared to prevail through sheer determination, weathering the buzzing strings without being undermined or deterred. But the sheer mass of the strings and their seemingly unstoppable, insidious force relentlessly returned. As the prophet of modern instability proclaimed, change becomes the status quo when global forces of industry and markets mean that “All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air.” Struggling against erosion, civilization survives only by incorporating restlessness and transferring its deep-seated wish for monumentality to Sound and Symphony. “We civilizations know now that we are mortal. (Paul Valery, 1919)” A wounded, decaying but also phoenix-like grandeur prevails by transfiguration into collective energy, like the great tolling of bells that spreads far into space. According to Stasevska, Sibelius pioneered an alternative modernism that relentlessly discovers and rediscovers patterns out of divinely scattered shards of meaning.

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