Conductor Benjamin Zander picked three American works with a view to “celebrating the American spirit” at a time when it seems to lie mortally wounded. Like the patriots of Bunker Hill, the lads and lasses of the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (BPYO) at Symphony Hall on Sunday rose to the occasion with unrelenting valor, intelligence, energy, and grace.

Zander introduced his friend John Harbison’s Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra) by recounting that when he first met Harbison in 1965 in Harvard Square, the composer and his wife were getting ready to go down to Selma in support of the Civil Rights movement. Zander and Harbison have remained close friends ever since, and Zander listed the many ways that Harbison has affected every area of the music world in Boston.

Remembering Gatsby was composed in 1985, on the path toward Harbison’s 1999 opera The Great Gatsby. What marvelous density the youthful musicians packed into its six-minutes! Under Zander’s expert baton, they evoked the whole fateful but glorious labyrinth of American self-invention, full of innocence and bombast, wistfulness and tragedy, imagination and self-sabotage. The BPYO nailed the three distinct moods with artful clarity: impending doom; then foxtrot tinged with bravado and desperation, highlighted by soprano saxophonist Duan Hong; it finally descended into sadness and loss as technologies designed to speed up life (automobile) and to facilitate relationships (telephone) backfire as instruments of destruction. I had never heard so much depth and complexity in this gem of our repertoire. American Cool is dangerous: full of exhilarating possibilities and strewn with shipwreck.

If Harbison, in Zander’s words, “stood in” for our many talented contemporary composers, George Gershwin stood in for the generation that pioneered a new American sound. “Music must reflect the people and the times. My people are Americans. My time is now” Gershwin declared. He named Rhapsody in Blue after seeing a painting by Whistler, charmed by the erasure of boundaries between sound and color. Exemplifying a distinctive American impulse to seize the day, Zander and piano soloist Makoto Ozone turned Gershwin’s 16-minute work into the springboard for a joyous, lyrical, unapologetic hour-long jam session. Zander introduced Ozone by reading a spontaneous tribute by one of the orchestra musicians, violinist Aaron Wu, written right after rehearsal last week: “Ozone has shown us the freedom to experiment and to live our own lives! His playing embodies the human spirit. No AI could replace him!”

Indeed! Zeyu Dai’s nicely executed clarinet glissando, joined by Frederick Poor’s swaying trumpet wail captured the essence of cool blues. Ozone joined with forceful chords sprinkled from the outset with small, improvised embellishments, staccato scales alternating with smooth legato broken chords. The answering tutti was powerful and resplendent, accentuated by Grant Melloni’s elegant timpani. Deeply engaged interplay among the string sections emphasized the vigorous “train theme.” Ozone improvised gently, evoking soft rain and trembling trees in the first cadenza. In the next cadenza, Ozone invited trumpeter Poor to join him at the piano for a thrilling duet that brought enthusiastic applause from the crowd as well as from Poor’s peers as he returned to his seat at the back. Ozone then segued smoothly to the orchestral cadenza “love theme”, played gracefully and with swelling emotion. Ozone followed it with another long soulful improvisation, dotted with hints of the upcoming scherzando, combined with a lively dance theme before diving into the famous repeated notes of the concluding section. The brilliant finale burst out, driven by spectacular brass, leading to a rip-roaring finish with stomping tutti and jubilant percussion, embroidered by Ozone’s final riffs.

They were nowhere near finished. Ovations led to Zander catching Ozone’s attention and pointing down at the piano. Ozone took the microphone and called on double bass player Madalena Kozol to join him for an encore, Thelonius Monk’s iconic jazz standard, Blue Monk — with bits of the main Rhapsody theme thrown in.  What a delight hearing the two of them bounce themes back and forth! More enthusiastic applause resounded as Madalena carried her double bass back. In a more serious vein, Ozone cited his admiration for Oscar Peterson and recalled a performance in which he participated many years ago, along with musicians from countries around the world in Peterson’s Hymn to Freedom, written at the end of World War II. The collective emotion was tangible. What Ozone showed is that American Cool belongs to anyone who embraces it: it is a matter of values and soul — not of soil.

Zander prefaced Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony by pointing out that it had been commissioned by Koussevitzky and composed specifically with Symphony Hall in mind: “It needs Symphony Hall. Only this hall can contain the sound, but also let us hear the most ethereal music in the violins.” (Benefactor Henry Lee Higginson showered smiles on us from heaven.) Zander shaped each movement for maximal effect. He emphasized the “simple expression” and vast calm that opened and closed the first movement. Twice he led the music to swell almost imperceptibly, grow to an epic pitch punctuated by the masterful timpani of Camden Briggs, before receding back into vastness.

Zander elicited tension, energy and a gripping multiplicity from the orchestra in the bustling Allegro molto second movement. The winds danced happily, joined by notably joyful strings, ending with the brass hinting at Fanfare at the heart of the Symphony. The trio then emerged as a clearing where solo voices in the oboes and flutes dialogued with pizzicato violins, before the greater multitude of immigrant activity building farms and livelihoods from sea to sea took on a heroic dimension. As in the first movement, the dynamic range of the ensemble was impressive, moving smoothly from pianissimo to fortissimo.

“Freest in formal structure” according to Copland, the Andantino third movement served as the heart of the symphony. Led softly by Declan Johnstons’s bassoon accompanied by the violins, the separate portions of the movement flowed seamlessly together, strings and winds integrating beautifully.  The effect was to suggest the massive effort that pulled the states together, bringing individual citizens out of their pursuit of happiness to mount a war against fascism abroad. As Zander told us, Copland conceded that WWII had “of course influenced” the work. The massive effort, tinged with the most ethereal strings, culminated in strands from the “Fanfare for the Common Man” floating in softly on the flutes, led by Sadie Goodman, and clarinets led by Zeyu Dai. The Fanfare burst into its full glory, leading into a rousing and resolute finale, which Zander suffused with optimism and hope. Again, the orchestra’s range of dynamics was remarkable, culminating in an overwhelming flood of hope, enhanced by Briggs’s stunning timpani and the resplendent BPYO brass. Zander and the BPYO, in short, made Copland’s Third Symphony a hymn to freedom. May I, composed like them of Eros and of dust, show an affirming flame. (Auden)

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

A Collage of Paul Mardy Photos:

Top left: Bass player Madalena Kozol improvising during Makoto Ozone’s “Blue Monk” encore; Top right: Woodwinds including second clarinetist Andrew Lee, principal clarinetist Zeyu Dai and principal bassoonist Declan Johnston.
Below: Pianist Makoto Ozone and trumpeter Frederick Poor improvise a passage during Rhapsody in Blue;
Below left: Principal clarinetist Zeyu Dai plays Rhapsody in Blue’s opening solo; Right: Orchestra’s brass including (l to r) alto saxophonists Jonghwan Kim and Duan Hong, tenor saxophonist Jackson Taylor, and tuba player Mitch Brady;
Bottom: Violinists and violists during Harbison’s Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra).