This evening’s concert by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra was in keeping with the kind of music that conductor Fabien Gabel typically features on his programs – Franco-Russian fare – but with the inclusion of the Tragic Overture by Brahms as the curtain-raiser. It may not be quite as well-known as the composer’s “sister” Academic Festival Overture, but it's impactful in its own right, beginning with two heavy hammer strikes that start the work. Gabel and the ISO musicians delivered that punch, but also the lyrical passages that make this piece so full of musical invention. I sensed a certain tubbiness in the sound of the strings, and the overall feel of the piece seemed just a little on the heavy side.
Henri Tomasi’s Trumpet Concerto is one of the best-known concertante works for this instrument composed in the modern era and yet in recent years we’ve learned that the piece isn’t exactly what we thought it was. Thanks to the detective work of Gabel and Håkan Hardenberger, the soloist in tonight’s performance, the cuts that the composer made to the final movement have now been restored (these two musicians made the first recording of the restored concerto in 2022). It’s a high-spirited work, influenced by jazz/blues and remindful of Poulenc in more than a few places. Hardenberger played the sometimes-tricky solo passages with complete authority, holding the audience spellbound during the extended cadenza in the first movement. He was given superlative support by Gabel and the ISO musicians. As for those restored third movement cuts, they do make for a more balanced piece, considering how extremely short the final movement was up until now.
Following intermission, the ISO presented suites from two important ballet scores premiered nearly contemporaneously in Paris: Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé in 1907 and Stravinsky’s Firebird in 1910. Gabel chose Schmitt’s better-known 1910 reworking of the Salomé score (shorter, but with a greatly expanded orchestra). One of the world’s leading specialists in the music of Schmitt, Gabel has become a particular authority in the Salomé score and those chops were on full display here – bathing the opening Prélude in moiré-colored hues, while the lithe Danse des perles was edge-of-your-seat thrilling. The atmospherics darkened considerably in the second half of the piece, beginning with a sinuous solo oboe intoning Salome’s seductive voice, followed by the ISO delivering a frenetic Danse des éclairs capped off by the Danse de l’effroi to bring the piece to a cataclysmic close. In guiding the Indianapolis musicians through the many dramatic shifts in the score (a piece that had never been played by the ISO until now), Gabel left no doubt that he has the full measure of this music in a way that few other conductors do today.
Hearing any other work on the program following the drama of the Schmitt might risk being anticlimactic, but Gabel and the orchestra came back with their second helping of early 20th-century orientalism in the form of a beautifully shaped suite from Stravinsky’s Firebird. The dark opening passages in the orchestra’s lowest register set the scene, leading to the Firebird’s dance in which the woodwinds were particularly winsome. Other standout moments included a terrifically exciting Infernal Dance, a hypnotic dream sequence and a stunning finale; a triumphal note for sure, and a completely fitting way to end a concert that seemed to be a winner for everyone involved, the musicians, the audience and the composers' legacies.
