The Irving Fine Memorial Concert on Saturday night brought together three venerables― Emanuel Ax, John Williams, and Tanglewood―for the world premiere of John Williams’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, with Andris Nelsons conducting the BSO in their smart summer whites. Williams composed the work for Emanuel Ax and at Ax’s request, not without some trepidation, he confesses, because of the “enormous canon” of piano and orchestra masterpieces. How does one expand the repertoire meaningfully?

The gripping first movement, labelled “introduction – Colloquy (Art Tatum)” revealed his ingenious and loving solution of commemorating the great jazz pianist Art Tatum, whom a teenaged Williams had heard play live in L.A.. Extracting Tatum’s “sound” from its jazzy context, Williams gave it a transfigured new life. After three introductory chords (a gesture that Williams remembered from Tatum), Ax produced impossibly sparkling high notes like drops of a quenching rain, which suddenly blurred just as impossibly into sheets of sound, prompting the orchestra to respond with a contrasting low brooding sound, somber and marvelously cavernous, as though turning a vast expanse of darkness into a protected place of ritual initiation – a rock shelter in the wilderness, a jazz club, a Shed. Strings then entered to create tension with a tinge of Stravinsky-esque barbaric urgency, horns and harp colluding to reinforce a feeling of angst while Ax’s luminous piano took on the joyous freedom of chimes, unbowed and unrepentant in its irrepressible vitality.

The Andante, “Listening (Bill Evans – Dreamily)” invited us into a moody, ethereal sphere of atmospheric meditation. Once again, as Ax beautifully understood, Williams had stripped Bill Evans’s delicate pianistic touch from its parochial context and set it free to soar into the balmy Tanglewood night to live a new life of pure quintessence. Responding to Steve Ansell’s opening solo viola that called forth a pensive melancholy gently bordering on the sublime, Ax imbued the piano with tenderness and nostalgia. He emphasized the emotion of regret by giving voice to a recognizably fin de siècle phrasing hinting at sentimentality, set against an aesthetics of kenotic indifference in the orchestra, reminiscent at times of Philip Glass. Angst emerged, even erupted, in the strings and briefly contaminated the keyboard, only to be vanquished by rippling scales affirming the inexhaustible pleasure of cherished memories in the face of darkness.

Held at bay through the force of memory, darkness returned with vitality and vengeance with Tim Genis’s opening timpani of the Finale, marked “presto (Oscar Peterson; Phineas Newborn Jr.)” Ax delivered the energy and sinister brilliance of a Totentanz, surging in raucous, pugnacious jabs at the macabre army of strings closing in as grimacing skeletons. When the trombone cornered the piano, Ax wrangled with it defiantly, waging a heroic but losing battle, succumbing to the trombone’s power and limping away, subdued and forlorn. The orchestra now came for Ax, who rushed frantically up and down his scales in search of an escape, pouring his last resources of vitality into an eagle’s flight, with the orchestra in close pursuit. Together Williams and Ax infused a Byronic grandeur into their homage to Peterson as though recognizing that every passionate musician is a prince of our Disorder – but also a recurrent and irrepressible figure of savaged innocence, like a gifted eternal child galloping through a thick Black Forest pursued by the Erlkönig.

And Byronic they were when Williams appeared on stage and he and Ax embraced, applauded by a deliriously enthusiastic audience saluting the youthful energy those hoary visages! Time dwarfs our bodies and eviscerates our bones, but is powerless against our devotion to tell our stories in music and commemorate each other limitlessly, joining the dead to the yet unborn.

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Mahler once attended a village fair and underwent a revelation when he heard the disparate sounds of shooting galleries in one corner, a Punch and Judy show in the other, and a military music band coming in from the back, crisscrossing to create a heterogeneous soundscape: “You hear? That’s polyphony, and that’s where I get it from!” he told Natalie Bauer-Lechner. “Just in this way – from quite different directions – must the themes appear; and they must be just as different from each other in their rhythm and melodic character (everything else is merely many-voiced writing, homophony disguised.” With a powerful grasp of Mahler’s most brilliant innovation, Nelsons conducted by far the most impressive, powerful, exciting and transformative First Symphony that this elderly reviewer has ever heard. WOW. Let me try to add some detail.

Nelsons took full advantage of Mahler’s instruction for “restraint” to give the “slowly, dragging” first movement its plenitude of surprises and edgy natural cries, but he also used extremes of dynamics to create dramatic and carefully chiseled phrasing, to emphasized sonoric contours and add a quasi-tangible dimensionality, as though wrenching creation into its first day out of light and receding shadows. Shifting unexpectedly from delight to danger and from brightness to hiddenness, with crescendo peaks of color and troubling valleys of mist, Nelsons evoked the first awakening to life of Mahler’s youthful Wanderer, yes, but he also evoked the magic of Nature’s polyglot soundscape – its polyglossia of animal cries and instincts and emotions shaping the phenomenal realm of awakening, cut off from their noumenal source and set free to clash with one another and crisscross on the verge of cacophony.

As a consequence of discovering the first movement with fresh awareness of its power, the second movement Ländler and waltzy trio took on a new meaning. Humankind, Mahler implies, strives to impose monophony on the world, thwarting Nature’s musical genius.  In our stupidity and fear of the unknown, we join hands in heavy-footed efforts to reduce nature’s effervescence into monoculture and monoglossia, rooting out dissident voices and minority viewpoints — whether we do it through “charming” rustic dances grounding us in the same soil or through elegant sentimental waltzes inside mirrored palaces. Nelsons took impish pleasure in joining with Mahler to denounce the futilities of these efforts. Despite the conventional ABA structure, monophonic sound-worlds failed to be contained and clashed with one another at marvelously vivacious “betwixt-and-between” borderlands. The sinister dream of hegemony — of making land, or social class, or language, or a “folk” into a unified force of survival and sensibility for success, must be put to rest.

Or maybe buried? As the bass started to hum Frère Jacques/Bruder Martin and voices inspired by the same transgressive freedom joined in, a new model emerged as a midway to true polyphony: the canon. Haunting in its growing strength because individual voices are inspired to collective action rather than shamed into conformity, Mahler’s famously controversial funeral march, dripping with irony but also with sympathy for the marginalized and the oppressed, unfolded as a hymn to mixitude — sun and rain, grief and joy, life and death, solitude and community, Thou and I, past and future. Erupting into the march like a celebration of the here and now, the Klezmer-band trio revealed the glory of emotional polyphony as the secret aim, all along, of the invention of canons and fugues. Nelsons called new attention to the blissfully tender, nurturing, celestial passage at the end of the first Klezmer eruption, suggesting (at least to me) that celebrating true polyphony is synonymous with immersing ourselves in nature in new ways and delighting in a new sort of heterogeneity.

This sketched idea helped me to experience the “Stormy, agitated and energetic” Finale in a new way. The opening catastrophe of jarring dissonance, rebellion, aggressivity, with its brassy sound and calls to challenge fate and stand heroically and fight for Meaning stood now in opposition to the ensuing serenity: hymnal and worshipful. Even the snarky cries of sedition (anticipating Stravinsky) subsumed into a simulacrum of bell tolling, implying a dichotomy to be resolved, an “either/or” to be subsumed into the freshness of a new morning. Indeed, the first morning returned, with its natural soundscape of near and distant bird calls, its light effects caressing hills and valleys, like the promise of a new humanity fueled by multiple voices and joy. Nelsons managed to turn the final collective triumph into a convincing but bold update of Beethoven’s Ode: “To Joy.” Rather than turn boldly to human voices to evoke a future of brothers and sisters working together to shape a new humanistic future, Mahler, with equal boldness, turned to his own invention of true polyphony.

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