The sky above the ancient oaks and hemlocks of Tanglewood had cleared of smoke and returned to its usual serene blue when we gathered at the Koussevitzky Shed on Friday to hear Andris Nelsons conduct the BSO in works by three American masters while affirming a living artistic tradition. Carlos Simon, one of our young but creatively mature standard bearers, came on stage to introduce the opener, his Meditations on Grace.  

Featured here for the first American performance as a stand-alone piece and excerpted from the greater context of Simon’s Good News Mass, the brief musical meditation served as a sort of blessing before a feast, reminding us of our own distinctive American rootedness, moral and ideological rather than ethnic. Few tunes are dearer to Americans, or more familiar, than Amazing Grace, composed by the English poet and one-time-sinner of the highest order John Newton in 1772; he had engaged in the enslaving of fellow human beings before becoming an enlightened abolitionist.  Principal Harpist Jessica Zhou initiated the Meditation with a mysterious aura of celestial surmise. Hints of Amazing Grace grew out of the orchestra as out of a fertile American soil. It flowed into jazzy uptakes, tranquil and oceanic, liquid and irresistible, full of reminiscences but also of mixed emotions. Simon captured the sense in which grace may fill us with new peace and confidence while also bringing us face-to-face with the unknown, the unscripted: the slow unfolding of grace became imbued with a distinctive urgency and even a sense of peril as gratitude yielded to a growing resolve, highlighted by a richly textured brief violin solo by Nathan Cole before turning into a Gershwinesque tribute to ordinary daily sweetness and a brightly promising brass fanfare. “Music is my pulpit. That’s where I preach.” By taking the time to “say grace” before the night’s feast, Simon succeeded in taming our disordered individualistic appetites and prepared us to hear Barber and Adams with a keen sense of collective fraternity.

Not that Samuel Barber in any way avoids individualism. Rather, he celebrates it and explores it as tragic but robust in his first concerto, for violin. He composed it in the summer and fall of 1939, first in Switzerland and then in Paris before the imminent outbreak of war compelled him to retreat back home to New York. Barber had put strenuous effort into the problematic violin score, which the intended premiere performer, Barber’s fellow Curtis Institute musician Violinist Iso Briselli, turned down.  No score, however better-suited the Tanglewood début of Boston-born violinist Keila Wakao. From the start, she revealed a distinctly clean and clear intonation, her violin’s voice soaring into the night as a soulful searching, speaking directly to us. Dramatic and emotional without ever appealing to sympathy, Wakao intoned a magnificent solitude while seeming to ponder the unavoidable question “Must it be?” through a precise articulation of the logical architecture of emotions. The radiant sincerity of her soul searching awakened the orchestra from its slumber, triggering strings and horns and timpani into sudden outbreaks of anguish and raucous agitation, as though eruptions of collective violence stemmed from a fusion of a myriad cases of individual despair. Wakao’s cadenza pierced us as a cry in the night.

The second movement Andante reinforced the underlying theme of Man’s Fate as Nelsons gave it a Descente aux Enfers atmosphere. A poignant expression from assistant principal oboist Keisuke Wakao helped to spread the melancholy but also perfectly handed off the sense of orphanhood, of bereavement, to his soloist daughter Keila to expand and elaborate against sinister grunts and ominous grimacing in the infernal orchestra. Wakao imbued the concluding violin cadenza here with a ruminative, introspective and personal appreciation of human tragedy, bold and tearful.

Oh, but Man’s Fate is not to give in to despair, but to seize the day and act! Barber’s controversially brief last movement, marked Presto in moto perpetuo, suddenly made new sense. Effortlessly keeping up with the agitated timpani, Wakao led the orchestra on a swift-paced, arduous but rewarding hike upward through cliffs and mountains to the Light: alternatively aggressive and playful, embracing challenge as opportunity, building momentum with the help of nicely edgy brass, at times evoking Mazeppa’s mad cavalcade, at others dwelling on the sheer glory of thankless effort and muscular prowess. What Barber means to tell us about Man’s Fate, basically, is that “we must imagine that Sisyphus is happy (Camus).” Responding to audience acclaim, Wakao encored with Fritz Kreisler’s solo Recitative and Scherzo-Caprice, Op. 6, composed in 1911 for his violinist friend Eugene Ysaÿe. Wakao beautifully etched Kreisler’s lines into stone as she displayed a full range of violin acrobatics as well as a subtle parlando bowing technique with delight and verve. In moments like this, each us mortals feels a deep happiness.

It is interesting to remember that Malraux set his existentialist novel “Man’s Fate,” widely popular in both Paris and New York, in China on the eve of WWII. It was a bold decision to program Four Scenes from Nixon in China by John Adams as a stand-alone suite of key moments extracted from the exceptionally coherent opera narrative. It worked, thanks to the captivating power of Adams’s music, to the brilliantly poetic libretto by Alice Goodman, and to the exceptional voices of Renée Fleming, Hye Jung Lee, Thomas Hampson and John Brancy.

It impressed us to hear how Adams inflects minimalism into a post-minimalist idiom that preserves all of the power of minimalism while pioneering new paths beyond and above it. Departing from a pure Glassian aesthetic of deceptive repose, Adams here used minimalism to transfix fleeting events and their ephemeral protagonists into “history” and mythos. Scene One, featuring Nixon’s arrival in Beijing on “The Spirit of ’76” displayed an urgent, energizing minimalism pregnant with possibilities, static but also forward-driven with a touch of bravado triumphalism in the brass. Against this inflected rhythmic laceration, where repetition hammers disparate gestures into reality, Thomas Hampson’s Nixon repeated “News! News! News!” in a similarly lacerating excitement, vividly caught up in the modernist mediatized transfiguration of events. Scene Two featured Pat Nixon’s earnest but self-defeating antidote to power narratives. Fleming gave us an unforgettably gorgeous interpretation of a woman’s shy but resolute questioning of truth and hope for new solutions to conflict. Here, Adams imbued minimalism with a stumbling, fractured aesthetic seeking coherence through a sort of madly unjustified trust in the marriage of opposites: “Bless this union. Let it remain inviolate.”

Scene Three brought us a brilliantly strident and unhinged Chiang Ch’ing in the guise of Hye Jung Lee proclaiming “I am the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung!”. With an impact reminiscent of the Queen of the Night, Hye Jung Lee delivered stunningly clear lines — “At the breast of the book I sucked and pissed” — and succeeded especially well in modulating “The book! The Book! The boo-oo-oo-k!” to emphasize the many different forms of myth-making to which humanity in its insignificance and malice resorts. (Pascal: “We see that we are small. We want to be Great.”) In this scene, Adams and the BSO succeeded in transforming minimalism into a palpitating psychotic debauchery of immobility. Scene Four brought the Nixon in China Suite to a nicely ambiguous close with a three-voice “after hours” harmony pitting Pat Nixon’s naïve but immovable optimism against Chou-en-Lai’s manly realism, contrasted with the President serving liminally as a “betwixt-and-between” pragmatist willing to accommodate shifting realities and hopes. “Spring is as good as come” he repeats after Pat, without believing a word of it. But pretending to believe is required of him, and it just might work in the moment, right? Don’t you agree, Chou, here and now, in private, off the record? Here, Adams imbued his post-minimalist idiom with a mesmerizing laboring aesthetic, signaling effort at every step, with every word, through every negotiation — open-ended, with little chance of a positive outcome, despite our trust and systems of belief.

What Adams transformed into myth and etched into the stone of “history” is his own motum perpetuum of agency and effort, erasure and renewal: Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.

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