In direct competition with the Boston Red Sox’s opening day at Fenway Park, the Boston Symphony Orchestra drew a quite respectable audience on Friday afternoon for a variegated program of Finnish and Czech works conducted by Andris Nelsons and the two most recent Tanglewood Conducting Fellows in their Symphony Hall debuts. As in recent weeks, the orchestra members wore red carnations to convey support for Music Director Andris Nelsons whose contract the BSO Board Trustees recently chose not to renew after it expires in summer 2027, and the audience similarly communicated warmth with standing ovations before Nelsons conducted the opening and closing works.
Two Finnish works bookended the show, the first in its American premiere: Day Night Day by Outi Tarkiainen (b. 1985). The composer derived the musical material of this tone poem from her opera Day of Night, describing the former as “an orchestral work about the northern light and ice that every winter invade the land but that reflect the early spring light in brilliant spectra.” As this statement would suggest, the piece is a study in colors, separate and commingled, simple and iridescent. Tarkiainen scored it for a large orchestra with a number of seldom-heard instruments, in particular, an 11-piece percussion ensemble including Thai gong and rain stick. In a style that could be termed neo-Impressionism, she often utilized instrumental choirs within the ensemble in a fashion not dissimilar to a symphonic organ’s families of stops. I was struck especially by the opening figures—celesta and harp glissandos with murmuring woodwinds—and the lullaby in the woodwinds at the end. While Day Night Day may not be overtly melodic, Nelsons identified its salient thematic ideas and motifs, bringing them out with subtlety and engagement.
Music historians sometimes note Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) as the “other” composer who became deaf in his prime though, like Beethoven, he was able to continue to compose magnificent music which he could only hear in his mind. One such work is Smetana’s orchestral masterpiece, the cycle of six symphonic poems, Má Vlast (My Country), inspired by important locales, legends, and historical events of his native Bohemia. The two 2025 Tanglewood Conducting Fellows, Leonard Weiss and Yiran Zhao, hailing from Australia and China respectively, communicated both the folkloric charm and the beauty of this music to the audience. The first poem, Vyšehrad (The High Fortress, overlooking Prague and the river Vltava), opens with a bardic harp solo (duet, to be precise) akin to a singing poet invoking the muses: the harpists played with expressive freedom and deep feeling. The orchestra, of course, took up their melody in due course, beginning softly and growing gradually to grand full orchestra, but always evoking the age and powerful nobility of the high fortress. Weiss and the string sections handled a faster fugato section crisply with admirable clarity of texture. After numerous intriguing divagations of keys and moods, the musicians made the peroration—the grandest statement of the opening theme—quite affecting before concluding serenely. Conducting with economy of means, Weiss yet managed to create a large dynamic range, elegant rubato where appropriate, and most importantly, a sense of spiritual connection to the music for players and listeners.
Vltava, the second poem better known to non-Czech music-lovers as The Moldau, paints a musical portrait of the eponymous river. Its remarkable depiction of many aspects of this beloved waterway and, indeed, of the motions of water itself, has made it arguably Smetana’s most popular piece. Opening with rippling figures in the flutes—a Leitmotiv that returns in multiple forms throughout the piece—it progresses to the beautiful main theme, played movingly by the violins while the lower strings adopt the rippling accompaniment. Conductor Yiran Zhao responded sympathetically to the peripatetic quality of the piece, similar to the previous poem though with somewhat more dramatic contrasts: the moderate turbulence underneath the sustained main theme, the cheerful rustic dance of detached string chords, the utter enchantment of the nocturnal water nymphs’ bath (high praise to the caressing muted strings and murmuring flutes here for their exquisitely delicate playing), the sudden terror of the very turbulent St. John’s Rapids, the triumphant return of the main theme (now in the major) as the river reaches Prague, and a moving recurrence of the harp theme (now from the full orchestra) of Vyšehrad as the river passes the high fortress. I was once lucky enough to take a cruise on the Vltava at twilight, and this performance recalled the frisson of passing that monumental fortress and hearing Smetana’s music in my mind some 22 years ago. I am grateful to Zhao and the BSO for letting me relive that cherished memory.
Nelsons led us back to Finland for the closer, the Symphony No. 1 in E Minor of Jean Sibelius from 1898-99. As Matthew Mendez’s handout essay noted, although this was his first numbered symphony, “…it was hardly his first attempt to come to grips with problems of symphonic construction.” Moreover, while his contemporaries of various nationalities had some influence on his music, Sibelius had by this time developed a distinctive style, albeit one that would evolve further over his long lifespan. His full-blooded Romanticism here is similar to Tchaikovsky’s even if his music generally has quite a different flavor. The symphony began daringly with a lonely, desolate clarinet solo in minor mode, accompanied only by a barely audible timpani roll. At length, however, the strings and soon the full orchestra entered with a major-mode melody at a much-increased tempo. Nelsons highlighted the many-such stark contrasts in tempo, mood, instrumentation, and the continual tug-of-war between major and minor. In the first movement he elicited two large accelerando-crescendos, with exemplary ensemble and ever-mounting adrenaline.
Though Sibelius was making his official debut as a symphonist, his slow movement bears comparison with those of his elders. The muted but rich strings supplied the gorgeous first tune basking in the glow of quiet brass harmonies. Here too, though, Sibelius introduces numerous different moods, textures, and subsidiary themes, though eventually always returning to the first tune. A central section heated up to a very fast tempo, with scurrying figures displaying the virtuosity of the woodwinds and strings as much as anything in the previous movement. As before, Nelsons and the orchestra delivered impressively. In the end the lush opening tune returned like a blissful dream in this sumptuous rendering.
The scherzo’s commencement with forte low-string pizzicatos under the bowed main theme in the violins, echoed by powerful timpani strokes, demonstrated the composer’s striking off in a new direction and made a powerful impression. Very soon, though, the woodwinds took over with a variety of laughing figures, the only sustained humor in the symphony. A return to the opening strings and timpani theme was abruptly interrupted by the arrival of the becalmed trio section, rather reminiscent of the glowing second movement tune. As if by karma, the trio itself seemed to be interrupted later by a return of the initial theme, building to a pulse-pounding ending. A special note of praise to the galvanizing timpani-playing that gave crucial rhythmic impetus to the movement.
The finale, marked Quasi una fantasia, burst in with an anguished cri de coeur in the strings, a transfiguration of the lonely clarinet theme that opened the symphony. After pairs of woodwinds partially repeated the theme, a transition led into a stirring Allegro molto. In fantastical style, Nelsons and the players delivered multiple and marked contrasts. For instance, following this Allegro, a new, slower theme began in the tenor range; this felt like a close relative of the luscious main tune of the second movement but greatly extended, rising in pitch and ardor to a climax capped by trumpets and lower brass, aching with yearning. An interlude characterized by scampering lines in the strings supporting themes in the woodwinds eventually grew to the whole ensemble in a scintillating climax. Just after the peak of excitement we descended back to the low registers as the great slow tune made its final return; this time, however, a new modulation allowed it to rise to the soprano range, permitting the violins to play it in opulent octaves with the cellos, warmly accompanied by brass. In the end the brass took over the melody before a passage of quite unorthodox harmonies transported us from major back to minor, ending with a sudden drop-off from fortissimo to a final pizzicato string chord, as if emotionally wrung out from the symphony’s odyssey. Much gratitude to Nelsons and the orchestra for their emotionally generous performance of this too infrequently heard work from Sibelius’s early maturity.
This concert illustrated some of the many forms love of country can take in music as well as the way gifted musicians can enable listeners who are of neither Finnish or Czech extraction (in this case) to share in these feelings. Received with thanks.