Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis, at Symphony Hall, last night; repeats today, Saturday and Tuesday.
Not every concert, even at Symphony Hall, can be The Greatest Concert Ever Played. Last night's by the Boston Symphony Orchestra wasn't. But if it was an example of what we can expect from an average night with the BSO, we can be most thankful.
Things started off poorly with the American premiere of Judith Weir's 1995 ``Moon and Star.'' It's one of those short (15 minutes), bland, pointless pieces that orchestras present to show their ``commitment'' to contemporary music in a way that won't overly annoy their audiences. (You can even manage to be just a few minutes late and miss it altogether.)
``Moon'' is a bland setting of the poem by Emily Dickinson - always a safe choice - that is tiresomely pretty when it's not look-at-me-I'm-modern angular. It demands a huge orchestra and chorus (the Tanglewood Festival folks), but to what purpose? Good night, ``Moon.''
Next up was Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, a work whose outer movements seem more like pastiche - a pound of Gershwin, a cup of Stravinsky and a dash of Rachmaninoff - on every hearing.
But, oh, the glorious middle movement! In pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard's hands, each of its notes positively glistened. The high point of the concert's first half was that movement's sweet-sad dialogue between piano and English horn, played so eloquently by the BSO's Robert Sheena.
Prokofiev's ``Alexander Nevsky'' cantata formed the concert's second, altogether superior half. It's the composer's arrangement of music from his score for the 1938 film from Russian director Sergei Eisenstein of ``Potemkin'' fame.
Intended as a piece of anti-German propaganda, the film leads up to a climactic battle in which the title hero defeats a German invasion in a battle on a frozen lake that took place in 1242. Each of the cantata's seven movements depicts a scene from the film, climaxing with Prokofiev's vivid orchestral portrait of the battle.
Davis, whose direction of the concert's first half was entirely competent, gave this music a real muscular energy. There wasn't a lot of clarity in the massed sections, but he elicited a sense of grand drama from both orchestra and chorus.
Nancy Maultsby, as a Russian woman searching for her beloved after the battle, impressed with her rich, dark mezzo, so ideally suited to voice the work's only nod to the individual cost of war.
Speaking of which: The concert was dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in Pakistan after Sept. 11. Part of a worldwide music day organized by the Daniel Pearl Foundation, it took place on what would have been Pearl's 39th birthday.
