Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra – Marin Alsop conducts Anna Clyne’s Masquerade & Mahler 5 — Ray Chen plays Bruch

Anna Clyne
Masquerade
Bruch
Violin Concerto No.1 in G-minor, Op.26
Mahler
Symphony No.5 in C-sharp minor

Ray Chen (violin)

Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
Marin Alsop

The annual Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert. Marin Alsop conducted the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, comprised of TMC Fellows who have been selected to participate in an intensive program of advanced study, instructed and mentored by a distinguished faculty of visiting artists and composers and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The curtain-raiser was Anna Clyne’s Masquerade, a rather complex five-minute work that was commissioned by the BBC and premiered by Alsop with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the Last Night of the Proms in 2013. The composer introduced the work, explaining that she was inspired by “the original mid-18th century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens” and that she sought to evoke their “exciting, yet controlled, sense of occasion and celebration.”

Alsop brought out the work’s exuberance and varied colors, showing off the talents of the TMC Fellows, yet the two themes – one original and the other a traditional song, ‘Juice of Barley’ – seemed lost in the celebratory chaos. Clyne’s score notably elicits varied contributions from percussion, starting with a sudden drumbeat and whipcrack. Dillon Akerman’s virtuosic playing of the intricate and almost non-stop bass drum part was especially impressive.

In the Bruch Concerto’s preludial opening movement, Chen and the orchestra exchanged thematic ideas in an ongoing conversation. His 1727 Stradivarius resonated with sighing lyricism and sparkled in highly ornamented passages. Chen threw his body into the music during orchestral interludes, and even his facial expressions – clearly visible on the Shed’s huge video screens – reflected his involvement in the music’s emotional content. The first movement segued seamlessly into the Adagio, Chen’s violin singing out gorgeously, with Alsop keeping the accompaniment subtly in the background. In the Finale, Alsop built up tension in the opening crescendo that exploded into Chen’s double-stopped principal theme, Alsop using her left hand to maintain dynamic balance as soloist and orchestra developed the theme. Roles were soon reversed, with Chen providing the buildup to the orchestra’s introduction of the grand second theme. There were pyrotechnics a-plenty as the music sped onward to a spectacular finish. As an encore, Chen played his own arrangement of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ the unofficial national anthem of Australia, where the Taiwan-born Chen was raised. Each variation was in a different style, ending with the ghost of the ‘jolly swagman’ portrayed in eerie harmonics.

After intermission, Alsop led an exciting performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, carefully respecting the tripartite structure of this five-movement work while tracing its emotional arc from grief to joyous celebration. The TMC musicians consistently played with a brilliance befitting a professional orchestra.

Jesdelson Vasquez’s trumpet fanfare began the work superbly, and the strings were radiant intoning the funeral dirge. Alsop imparted outbursts with great vigor and guided the music through gentler passages to a quiet conclusion. Then, consistent with Mahler’s grouping of the first two movements as Part I of the Symphony’s structure, Alsop plunged into the “stormy” second movement without a pause and carefully handled the interspersal of thematic connections with the opening movement. The cellos sang out gorgeously and the brass chorale was resplendent. After a brief return of the funeral music, the movement ended with a single, soft timpani beat.

Mahler calls for a “long” pause at this point, but Alsop waited only about fifteen seconds before cueing the jaunty opening bars of the Scherzo, which comprises Part II, featured delightful Ländler and waltz rhythms, chattering woodwinds, and marvelous horn solos by Connor Wood.

Alsop took a slightly longer break before starting Part III. The lyrical Adagietto, Mahler’s love-song to Alma, for strings and harp, was played magnificently. Alsop set a relaxed tempo, bringing out the music’s tender quality without either rushing or dragging it out, followed by the lively and upbeat Rondo-Finale, with Alsop deftly steering the Fellows through fugal passages, every section of the orchestra given an opportunity to shine. Fine solos on oboe, flute and clarinet preceded the return of the brass chorale, glorious over busy string figures, leading to a majestic finish.