Romanticism has proved more adaptable than its obituaries suggested. Across the 20th century, composers continued to return to music grounded in subjective expression, even when critical fashion leaned elsewhere. Placed side by side on this Seattle Symphony program and shaped with keen stylistic awareness by guest conductor Alevtina Ioffe, the music of Barber, Bernstein and Rachmaninov revealed distinct, largely American-inflected guises of the lingering Romantic impulse. That perspective extended even to the Rachmaninov, composed late during his long exile in the United States.
This third engagement with the orchestra since 2023 was a strong showing for Ioffe, who began her post as Chief Conductor of the Bern Opera this season. Her affinity with the musicians was especially rewarding in the program’s first half.
The Intermezzo from Barber’s only opera, Vanessa, distilled the work’s mid-century Gothic despair, its exquisite lyric beauty shadowed by unease and inescapable doom. Drawn from the final act, where love is deferred and resignation sets in, the music moves in long-limbed phrases of pain-edged wistfulness. Ioffe avoided sentimentality without shortchanging emotional intensity, building toward an anguished central climax of real force. Even without knowledge of the opera’s storyline, the atmosphere registered with immediacy, the oboe’s plaintive lyric line – touchingly played by guest principal Donovan Bown – adding a distinctly human presence.
The stage then thinned to strings, percussion and harp for Bernstein’s 1954 Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium), a de facto violin concerto and another strikingly individual take on Romantic expression. Composed just a few years before Vanessa, Serenade trades Barber’s sense of inwardness for a sequence of sharply profiled musical arguments, each movement advancing a distinct rhetorical persona drawn from Plato’s dialogue.
The work’s very premise – a musical-philosophical dinner party exploring competing definitions of love – felt strangely apt. Though clearly unplanned, Bernstein’s humane engagement with Plato’s Symposium, with its frank discussions of desire, gender and same-sex love, coincided with reports of a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University being officially censored for teaching the text – an irony hard to miss in contemporary American life.
Bernstein’s reference to being spurred by a “rereading of Plato’s charming dialogue” is disarmingly modest, even coy. The score itself makes clear how thoroughly he knew the text, tucking in sly allusions such as the drunken hiccups and lurching gestures in the jazz-inflected Alcibiades movement, alongside contrasts ranging from the witty sparkle of the brief fugato scherzo (Eryximachus) to the Mahlerian intensity of the Adagio portraying Agathon’s rhapsodic vision of the god Eros.
This was a compelling meeting of minds between Ioffe, violin soloist Vadim Gluzman, and the orchestra. Gluzman’s playing leaned unapologetically into the work’s Romantic side, his richly saturated vibrato lending warmth and immediacy, complemented by wit and bite in the piece's more incisive moment. His rapport with the ensemble was evident in lively exchanges with the orchestral violins and in a tenderly passionate dialogue with principal cellist Efe Baltacıgil. Ioffe seemed especially attuned to Bernstein’s purposeful stylistic range.
The second half was devoted to Rachmaninov’s Symphony no. 3 in A minor, premiered in 1936 by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. For all its ambition and craft, the Third poses some formidable interpretive challenges, not least a finale that can feel more episodic than cumulative. Ioffe offered a dramatic, carefully detailed reading, especially in the second movement, whose dualistic character embeds a volatile Scherzo within an Adagio of involving emotional breadth. Yet the last movement’s sectional momentum, with its final turn from the composer’s signature Dies irae fatalism to hasty affirmation, proved less coherent, to this taste, as a point of culmination.
