Navigating from the Pacific Coast to Nordic landscapes: Adès and Kuusisto at Tanglewood

Normally, when a conductor withdraws on short notice, his replacement often tweaks the scheduled programme to suit his own repertoire and interests. But in a sign of both Thomas Adès’ versatility as a conductor and his artistic kinship with fellow composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, Adès didn’t change an iota of Salonen’s concert conceived for his summer appearance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. While Adès has previously conducted both Sibelius works – even at Tanglewood – it may well have been his first time conducting the demanding, sonically imaginative Tumblebird Contrails.

Gabriella Smith’s piece opened the Sunday afternoon performance with a burst of colour and visceral energy. Composed in 2014, Tumblebird Contrails has earned a firm foothold in the modern repertoire. Rooted in a sensory encounter with the California coast at Point Reyes, it transforms seagull cries, wind gusts and the shimmer of light on water into an orchestral language of extended techniques and layered textures. If the work recalls her mentor, John Adams, it does so only on the surface; its inner logic feels more improvisatory, its path more meandering. 

The BSO’s percussion section rattled and hissed, while brass and strings produced sounds hovering at the edge between pitch and noise. Adès led with taut control, not only shaping the large ensemble but also managing the intricate layering of divided string parts, with individual strands overlapping and colliding to create a kinetic, immersive fabric. The imagery was vivid without being merely illustrative: the music never settled into depiction but flowed as an organic response to the natural world. Lasting just over a dozen minutes, Tumblebird Contrails left the impression of something both playful and urgent – an ecological postcard from a coastline in flux, alive with not just earthly but also sidereal motion.

Pekka Kuusisto’s interpretation of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D minor offered a welcome departure from heroic posturing and Romantic lushness: personal, understated, yet vividly communicative. His tone was slender but penetrating, his phrasing imbued with a freedom that felt instinctive rather than idiosyncratic. The opening unfolded with a kind of quiet daring – soft-edged, with lines etched rather than sculpted. The famous cadenza, with its extended role as structural fulcrum, emerged with natural shape and internal logic.

Musical polymaths, Kuusisto and Adès often seemed to breathe together, the conductor offering space while keeping the orchestral undercurrents moving steadily forward. They found a common language of restraint, especially in the Adagio: the violin’s lyrical outpouring flowed forward, eschewing sentimentality in favour of plainspoken intensity. The finale danced with sinewy grace and control, more about precision and bite than sweeping grandeur. Kuusisto’s encore, a bracing Finnish folk tune laced with impish embellishments, felt like a mischievous echo of the concerto’s ghostly dance rhythms.

In Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, the BSO played with the same sensitivity and clarity that had shaped their accompaniment of Kuusisto’s minimalist performance. The symphony shares much with the concerto: sudden shifts of texture, elliptical phrasing and a sense of form that emerges from momentum rather than architecture. Adès kept textures transparent and buoyant, attentive to both the music’s swelling arcs and icy stillness. He shaped the contrapuntal exchanges in the first movement’s string writing with a keen ear, and in the Andante, brought out the music’s inner currents with a quiet inevitability, letting dissonances emerge naturally. Wind solos – mainly from the horns and principal bassoonist Richard Svoboda – blended naturally into the sonic fabric, while the final hammered chords, widely spaced and rimmed with silence, were delivered with time-sculpting exactitude.