Daniil Trifonov and Andris Nelsons inaugurate the 2023 Tanglewood Festival

Bringing a cohort of soloists and guest conductors, most of them longtime collaborators of the host Boston Symphony Orchestra, to the bucolic Berkshires, the 2023 Tanglewood Festival began with the BSO’s music director, Andris Nelsons, conducting a celebratory fanfare.

Wynton Marsalis’ Herald, Holler and Hallelujah! was premiered by the New Jersey Symphony in 2022. As with other recent Marsalis compositions, it nonchalantly bridges the perceived border between classical music and jazz. Scored for brass and percussion, the ten-minute work starts by evoking Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, quickly moving to jazzy harmonies and syncopations with trumpets, sliding trombones and boisterous percussion energetically swinging together to the end. As a former trumpet player himself, Nelsons appeared delighted to immerse himself in such a lively and exuberant sound.

An attention-grabbing fanfare – a metaphor for fate – also marks the beginning of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Nelson's rendition didn't primarily serve as a constant reminder of the inescapability of destiny, but rather emphasised the fleeting (musical) joys that can arise once one embraces its inevitability. More, in the conductor’s vision, the symphony was not perceived as a perpetual combat between romantic pathos and classical structure. Instead, he considered the music as a series of tightly integrated transitions – rhythmic, dynamic, melodic – between segments whose individual character was allowed to shine through. 

Nelsons was tremendously helped by a BSO in top form. In the first movement, the interchange between thematic strains representing “gloomy and hopeless feelings” and evoking “taking refuge in dreams” had a miraculous simplicity. Passing the baton between strings and winds or between solo woodwinds was always seamless. Phrases faultlessly merged into one another and gradual acccelerandos were wonderfully paced. Opening with a plangent oboe theme (superbly rendered by John Ferrillo) the Andantino was imbued with nostalgia and, at the same time, ballet-like lightness. Pizzicatos in the Scherzo navigated between delicacy and urgency. In the Finale, sentimentality was kept, as much as possible, at bay. Even if some listeners may have preferred a more electrifying performance, this reading was truly a well-calibrated one, full of remarkable individual colours.

There is little doubt that Daniil Trifonov, one the of the greatest pianists of his generation, was the primary reason why most people attended Friday night’s performance in the Koussevitzky Shed. He obliged with a performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in C major that was not only technically immaculate but also respected the letter and the spirit of a score whose three movements are as much abrupt and stormy, as they are full of lyricism and memorable melodies. 

There was no sign of grandiloquence in a reading shaped with great intelligence and sensibility from the very first bars. Balances between ludic and gravitas, sarcastic and mysterious were outstandingly maintained in the central theme with variations. Trifonov and Nelsons allowed the details – dissonant, poetic, even jazzy – to resound in all their splendour in the last movement, the section where too many pianists ignore the ma non troppo indication to display their prowess at unfathomable speeds. There was a clear chemistry between pianist and orchestra. In one of those scores where the ensemble’s contribution is as important as the soloist’s, the latter’s dialogues with different orchestral sections unfolded with verve and naturalness. Every piano intervention emerged organically from the orchestral tapestry.

A charming single encore, the Gavotte from Prokofiev’s Cinderella, was played in the same vein as the concerto’s middle section, with wit subsumed by delicacy.