Following Thursday’s Opening Night, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra stuck to the tried and true for Friday afternoon’s first subscription concert of the season. Opening Night had brought audience favorite Yo-Yo Ma in the Elgar Cello Concerto; Friday started off with another audience favorite, 77-year-old Emanuel Ax, in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 (K.482) and concluded with one of the orchestra’s signature pieces, Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. The Berlioz was intriguing and at times revelatory; the Mozart—which Ax first did with the BSO 46 years ago—was sublime.    

Mozart composed K.482 toward the end of 1785, for a series of three Advent-season subscription concerts. He was writing Le nozze di Figaro at the time, so it’s not surprising that the concerto reflects the themes of the opera. Appearing for the first time in a Mozart piano concerto, the clarinets enrich the opening tutti. The C-minor Andante made such an impression at the premiere that the audience demanded an encore. The 6/8 Allegro finale, back in the home key of E flat, is the customary rollicking rondo, but it pauses midway for an Andante cantabile interlude in 3/4 that’s been likened to Count Almaviva’s closing plea for forgiveness from the Countess.                

Running close to 35 minutes, K.482 is Mozart’s longest piano concerto (primarily because of that interlude), but it’s never been as popular as its neighbors, Nos. 20, 21, and 23. Prior to Friday, the BSO had programmed it on some 60 occasions, and on 16 of those Ax had been the soloist. He did it with guest conductor Erich Leinsdorf in 1980, just two years after his BSO debut; that same year, RCA released his recording with Eduardo Mata and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He’s since played it with the BSO under Seiji Ozawa, James Conlon, Bernard Haitink, Lionel Bringuier, Charles Dutoit, and Nelsons, most recently in 2019.

As has become the norm since BSO management announced that it will not be renewing Nelsons’s contract after the 2027 Tanglewood season, the orchestra tuned up backstage and then entered en masse in a show of unity, about a third of the players sporting red flowers. A standing ovation greeted Nelsons and Ax, and as the Mozart was about to begin, we got—what has also become the norm—a shout of “We love you, Andris” from an audience member. Nelsons turned, smiled, and, speaking for the orchestra, replied, “We love you.”  

The concerto calls for flute, two clarinets (no oboes), two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings—40 in this instance, about the same number Nelsons had when he led K.467 with Mao Fujita in March. Mozart, when he performed his concertos, would improvise the cadenzas. Those for the first and third movements of K.482 have not survived; Ax, like many Mozart-concerto pianists, plays his own. 

The opening tutti is a martial fanfare led by the trumpets and the timpani, but perhaps because the key is E flat rather than C or D, it all sounds no more menacing than Figaro’s “Non piú andrai” aria describing Cherubino’s future in the Count’s Seville regiment. Nelsons gave more attention to the brief but gracious second theme than it usually gets, and then, when you might have been expecting the piano to reprise the orchestral exposition, Ax entered with a completely different tune, the first of Mozart’s little jokes. Nelsons and the orchestra returned after 30 seconds with a reminder of what this Allegro movement’s themes were supposed to be, but Ax continued to go his own way, a cheeky Cherubino with teasing phrases and immaculate passagework. His cadenza paid lip service to the initial fanfare and then went right back to the piano’s melodies.   

The C-minor Andante belies K.482’s reputation as a lightweight concerto. Ax made a dark lament of the movement, phrasing as if he were breathing; you could just about hear the Countess’s doleful “Dove sono” aria. The seven winds served up an E-flat-major serenade in an attempt at consolation, but Ax was undeterred, giving weight and sorrow to the first variation. The second episode, in C major, found Elizabeth Klein’s flute conversing with Josh Baker’s bassoon; they might have been Susanna and Figaro offering the Countess comfort. Ax grew more anguished still in the last variation, allowing just a glint of C major at the end.

The trumpets and timpani, which had sat out the Andante, were back for the Allegro finale, but it’s the horns that color this hunting rondo. Ax here was so playful, so natural, he seemed almost to be improvising; then in the Andante cantabile, he let the somber aura of the slow movement gradually release into a thoughtful cadenza before the boisterous celebratory conclusion.

His single encore was in the spirit of the concerto’s Andante: an early Chopin Nocturne, Op. 15 No. 2 in F-sharp major. Moonlight over a sea that was calm to start before growing turbulent; passion rather than perfume. He looked to have enough energy to keep playing, and the audience was certainly up for a second encore, but as it was, the afternoon ran well past two hours.

Former music director Charles Munch’s two BSO recordings of the Symphonie fantastique (1954 and 1962) are often held up as the standard for this work. Nelsons’s interpretation Friday could scarcely have been more different. Like Munch, he omitted the repeat in the opening “Reveries, passions” and the one in “Marche au supplice,” as well as the cornet solo in “Un bal” that doesn’t appear in the printed editions but that Berlioz later added to the autograph score. Munch’s second, longer BSO recording runs 49 minutes; Nelsons Friday took close to 56.

It was clear from the protracted opening phrase that we were meant to hear every nuance of Berlioz’s luscious orchestration. Nelsons made the languid Largo introduction both delicate and dramatic. As opposed to the interpretation Klaus Mäkelä gave here with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra back in February, there was ample menace from the basses, and the first “Plus vite” was just that. But when the idée fixe theme of “Reveries, passions” arrived, Nelsons’s “Allegro agitato e appassionato assai” was, like Mäkelä’s, short on “agitato” and “appassionato.” The entire movement was more “reveries” than “passions”; it had impulse but not impulsiveness. Perhaps that was the cost of the clarity with which Nelsons brought out Berlioz’s burbling winds and tart inner strings. The final 15 bars of chords, marked “Religiosamente,” seemed to stretch out forever.

“Un bal” eschewed giddy and dizzy in favor of lilting and lavish, with gentle accents and not much sense of Berlioz’s “con fuoco” and “animez” indications. A relaxed tempo in this movement does leave room for the brilliance and rhythmic counterpoint of the cornet; its absence seemed a missed opportunity. “Scène aux champs” opened with a poignant “ranz des vaches” duet between Robert Sheena’s English horn and new associate principal Kip Zimmerman’s offstage oboe and closed with Sheena calling and getting in answer just the thunder of the four timpanists. What came in between was breathtakingly beautiful, with climaxes that bespoke resignation rather than heartbreak.

Chattering bassoons were a highlight of the atmospheric “Marche au supplice,” no surprise since the entire wind section had been stellar all afternoon. Nelsons didn’t stint the cymbals or the bass drum, and the brass weren’t overpowering, though the underlying string figurations at the beginning of the development might have emerged more clearly. And though the wind glissandos that open “Songe d’une nuit du Sabbat” were creepy enough, Nelsons’s very measured Allegro for the entrance of the idée fixe took some of the “nyah-nyah” out of Thomas Martin’s E-flat clarinet. At least the offstage church bells, so often tinny imitations, had real depth, and the round dance throbbed with raucous energy.          

Nelsons last did the Symphonie fantastique with the BSO in March 2022. Writing for the Intelligencer on that occasion, David Patterson wrote that “Nelsons pretty much took the Fantastique out of the Hector Berlioz.” That’s a fair reflection of what I heard Friday. It was not an interpretation for all tastes. It did seem to me more coherent and idiomatic than the one I heard from Mäkelä. And I don’t go to Symphony Hall to hear standard readings of familiar fare. So kudos to Nelsons for pushing the envelope.

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.