A chestnut from the BSO’s commissioning history, a new addition to that catalogue, and a repeat performance of a hit from the current season adorned the orchestra’s all-Slavic program this weekend under Music Director Andris Nelsons, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus under James Burton. If that sounds a bit like inside baseball, just wait: it gets even more self-referential.

In 1930 the BSO under Serge Koussevitzky commissioned, by our reckoning, eight composers for the celebration of the orchestra’s 50^th anniversary the following year[i], the most consequential of which has turned out to be Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (if his symphonies had been numbered, this would be No. 2). For reasons that are not immediately apparent to us, when Nelsons determined to schedule the Stravinsky for this season it was thought to commission a piece that “went with” it.

The orchestra turned to Aleksandra Vrebalov, a Serbian-born former Tanglewood Fellow who has developed a reputation for creating music infused with spiritual values and that is adept at relating it to its visual, historic and environmental contexts. Whether at her initiative or the BSO’s (there was some discrepancy between her oral presentation and the program note), she signed off on commissioning terms that required her to set a text from the Book of Psalms, and to adopt substantially the same singular orchestration Stravinsky used (winds, brass, percussion, harp, two pianos and only cellos and basses for strings, to which she added a vibraphone, along with chorus). The strictness of the commission’s stipulations contrasts greatly with Koussevitzky’s statement to Stravinsky that he could write anything he pleased.

The resulting Vrebalov piece, Love Canticles (perhaps an echo of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles?), sets text heavily edited and rearranged from Psalms 103 and 104 using the New King James version, which slightly updates the 1611 original for verb conjugations (e.g. “gives” rather than “giveth”) and a few other light touches such as “like” for “as.” Curiously, one word, “servants,” from the stanza in Psalm 104 reading “Who makes His angels spirits, His servants a flame of fire” differs from both texts, which read “ministers”; and the concluding triple “Hallelujah” does not appear in these psalms but does, of course, famously occur in the SoP. The gravamen of the excerpts Vrebalov chose is, as the Biblical heading states, “Praise for the Lord’s Mercies.” In historical context, it’s a kind of “in the teeth of” praise, both in light of current wars and turmoil and also a reflection of the composer’s experience of being a refugee from the NATO-led bombing of Serbia for its suppression of and atrocities towards the Bosniaks and Kosovars in the 1990s. For a general refresher course, see HERE.

The musical means Vrebalov deploys both respond to Stravinsky and express her own stylistic preferences. Stravinsky uses his neoclassical style within a framework of key relationships, with key signatures, while sections and movements center on particular notes; Vrebalov also focuses on central pitches but without any specific key relationship, centering on C, G, E, and B-flat before closing on a radiant C major chord (as does Stravinsky). There are, though, numerous extended techniques here, with much choral and instrumental glissando, Sprechstimme, vocalise, and copious indeterminacies of pitch and rhythm. It must have been quite the challenge for Nelsons and the players to settle on a manner of execution, and sound as remarkably coherent as they did, and the TFC shone brightly. The complexity in the actual sound was much less than what appears on the pages of the score, so one might revise Mark Twain’s assessment of Wagner by saying the music sounded better than it looked.

The mode of expression drew the sharpest contrast between the two composers: Vrebalov eschewed the arm’s-length staccatos of neoclassicism for a more flowing lyricism, especially in the vocal lines. While there are sharp dissonances apparent in the score, it is in the nature of choral writing that these get smoothed out in performance, and that was certainly the case here, making the tonal underpinnings of the harmony more evident to the ear. With nothing that might be mistaken for a melody in the traditional sense the horizontal axis comprised chiefly textural gestures and some small motivic elements. Polyphony was generally limited to brief sections in which these kernels were passed from voice to voice, not like the formal double fugue in the middle movement of the Stravinsky. Nevertheless, we sensed at times a strong underpinning of Balkan or general Eastern European/Middle Eastern inflection, especially in the powerful central sections of the work.

As with any premiere, it is ultimately futile to attempt a qualitative evaluation of the piece’s merit. It appears mostly to have fulfilled the composer’s stated intentions, as well as the conditions of the commission though perhaps as a consequence of the BSO musicians’ and the TFC singers’ virtuosity, the complexity of the technical writing might have been unnecessary to carry the burden of the composer’s expressive intent. In some ways Love Canticles might have been a little too conciliatory to Stravinsky.

Speaking of whom, the BSO has evinced a long affinity for the Russian master, which the current programs continue, though in this century most of the heavy lifting has been done by guest conductors (of 398 total performances so far since 2000, and disregarding Pops movements of this or that ballet, 26 were under James Levine and 36 under Nelsons) and most performances have been of the early ballets. Nelsons conducted SoP in 2012 and 2024, both times at Tanglewood. As best we can remember, we have not caught any of Nelsons’s Stravinsky outings so lack a basis for comparison.

Having devoted a fair amount of space talking about SoP in relation to Vrebalov’s response to it, we will forgo much more in the way of analysis, if any were needed for such a famous work. The texts Stravinsky set, in three movements, come from Psalms 38 and 39 of the Vulgate (39 and 40 in most contemporary editions) in parts, and 150 in toto. As with Œdipus Rex, he used Latin as a means of distancing and ritualizing the setting, along with the herky-jerky staccatos and sharp attacks of his neoclassical idiom (which bore no relation to performance practice of actual Classical and Baroque styles). The absence of violins and violas from the orchestra also fed into this stripped-down esthetic inasmuch as the Romantic era against which composers (along with just about every other art form) reacted after World War I seemed to have been carried on the syrupy waves of violin vibrato. Indeed, one tends to think of the characteristic Stravinsky neoclassical sound as leaning in large measure on wind/brass/percussion sonorities until the 1940s.

There are many serious thinkers, professional and just listeners, who regard SoP as its composer’s supreme masterpiece, and it’s not an unreasonable assessment. It does not, however, play itself. And while it would be unreasonable to expect a live performance to correspond to an edited and produced recording (though certainly some do, and it goes without saying that live performance has many qualities that make it superior to any recording), we would be dishonest if we didn’t own up to a certain disappointment in certain aspects of what the home team gave us on Saturday. We found the winds strangely muffled in the opening of the first movement, and the forces seemed somehow unbalanced for a good part of the movement. The staccato woodwind accompaniment to the chorus could have been punchier (the chorus itself was wonderful, as per usual), and to our taste the tempo could have been pushed a little more. Conversely, in the slow(er) second movement, Nelsons and the orchestra were assiduous in delineating the lines of the fugue, while the choral polyphony was not nearly as distinct. It all came together much better in the finale, with the chorus angelic in the Laudate and Alleluia passages, while Nelsons highlighted the structurally significant minor third melodic motifs in the orchestra, though sometimes buried the melodic lede. Here, the brass, though exercising considerable restraint, were pellucid. So, not a disaster by any means, but just a little less than we had hoped for.

“It has to be a misprint,” we thought as we first casually perused the program listing for this weekend. “They just played the Shostakovich Sixth a few weeks ago; they’re not going to repeat it so soon.” This was before we realized that the first outing for Shostakovich 6 was on a truncated weekend with a substituted piece (the first cello concerto) on the only other performance, so this weekend’s finale was the second bite of the apple audiences would normally have (in fact, most weekends the audience gets three bites). All of which is to let you know that we have already had things to say about the work and the performance, which we’ll point you to and say not much else here other than to rave that, notwithstanding what we just said about the Stravinsky, the playing was if anything even better than the first time, with an even greater vectoral sense in the first movement paired with a breathtaking stillness at its center. Also, it was quite satisfying to have this piece at the end rather than the beginning of a program, allowing the audience to linger on the ironic and satirical implications of how it progressed from the first through the third movements. As with the first go, the callouts to just about every principal were well merited.

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.

[i] Namely, Edward Burlingame Hill (Ode for the 50^th Anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), Sergei Prokofiev (Symphony No. 4), Howard Hanson (Symphony No. 2), Aaron Copland (Symphonic Ode), Arthur Honegger (Symphony No. 1), Albert Roussel (Symphony No. 3), Paul Hindemith (Concert Music for Strings and Brass), and Stravinsky. This list goes in increasing order of performances they have received by the BSO, with Stravinsky topping all at 79 including this Saturday and Sunday.