It’s a pity Paganini never wrote a comic opera. His ebullient, bel canto- infused first violin concerto is often dismissed as virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake. However, given its melodic invention and demands on the soloist to sing in a variety of voices, it suggests such an opera would have been a memorable undertaking. Sunday afternoon at Tanglewood, Joshua Bell leaned into the pyrotechnics with panache, dazzling with his rapid, accurate finger work and his use of dynamic contrast for expressive purposes. Paganini employs displaced octaves to give the impression the violin is duetting with itself. Bell clearly individuated each voice. His cadenza not only recapitulated many of the movement’s high points but also many of its virtuosic gestures. This was virtuosity with substance and proved there is much more to this concerto than its well known technical challenges.
Three years ago, Bell performed this same concerto in Symphony Hall, leading the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. At that time he had to be the servant of two masters – his instrument and the orchestra. This time his focus and energy were undivided and that paid dividends. The first movement triggered a partial standing ovation and seemed on the brink of being interrupted by applause at several points. The plangent second movement leavened the high jinks of the outer movements with its tragedy. His unbridled high spirits in the closing movement were contagious.
Bell also had the boon of Anna Rakitina on the podium in her final appearance as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Assistant Conductor, leading a rhythmically nimble, spirited and well calibrated performance. Paganini tinkered with the orchestration over the years finally adding brass and a banda turca (timpani, bass drum, and cymbals). Often, that banda is too prominent weighing down the first movement with its martial thumping. Rakitina achieved the perfect balance, maintaining light textures while weaving the percussion as just another bright thread in the fabric of the concerto.
Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet requires a much larger orchestra, but Rakitina maintained a sharp rhythmic profile and clarity of textures in even the loudest passages. She put together her own suite, made up of sections from Prokofiev’s three, plus two episodes from the ballet itself creating a ten part representative mix of the ballet’s various moods. Her handling of the more purple passages showcased her strengths. “Montagues and Capulets” left no doubt that these were clans not to be trifled with while avoiding turning the episode into a parade of plodding pachyderms. “The Death of Tybalt” built to a searing climax. The more intimate, lyrical moments glowed with a warm light which flickered and faded through the last three episodes chronicling the couple’s parting and eventual deaths.
Ellen Reid’s prismatic When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist opened the evening. Commissioned as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, commemorating the centennial of the passage of the 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote, it begins in Reid’s own words in a “musical landscape of exhausted and disembodied questioning”, a disorienting space where successive spirals of melodic and rhythmic figures uncoil and take center stage. A recurring rhythmic ostinato gradually develops into a unifying thread as the music begins to roar with anger. There are some whiffs of jazz and a trio of women, singing wordlessly individually, together, or in rapid succession to create an otherworldly echo effect. Waxing more lyrical towards the end, the piece fades out on an affirmative, yet open-ended note. Rakitina led it all with confidence and flare, having given the BSO premiere in April of 2002.
