icture the familiar photographs of presidential encounters with foreign leaders: the handshake, the fixed smiles, the platitudes. There's a certain protocol that kicks in when two cultures are forcibly brought together. But what's said at such meetings isn't really the point of the exercise; at best, you get a few stilted words in the other's language. The real meat of the encounter, if there is any, is hidden behind closed doors, away from the flashing cameras.
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Cameras certainly flashed on Friday night at the opening of Tanglewood, and two cultures came together in a piece that, like a state meeting, was a wonderful political gesture: Wynton Marsalis's "All Rise," written for combined jazz and classical orchestras, which had its premiere at the New York Philharmonic in 1999. It's great when an orchestra commissions an evening-length work, rather than a 10-minute one, from a living composer. It's great when the people who first championed the piece continue to support and perform it after its premiere (Kurt Masur, the commissioning conductor, led the Boston Symphony and Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestras). And it's great to see symphony orchestras trying to reach out and open themselves up to other traditions.
Politically, then, the evening was a success. But works of art are also measured by their content. And for all the great, evident aspirations of "All Rise" to serve as a profound testimony to human experience, cradle to grave, it was (like so many state encounters) a rather one-sided discussion.
When the jazz orchestra had a chance to show its stuff - as it did for long stretches, particularly in the last 4 of the work's 12 movements - the piece came alive. But when the regular orchestra and chorus entered the picture, they did so rather stiffly, articulating little bursts of not-very-meaningful sound (even though Mr. Marsalis almost certainly had help with his orchestration, the orchestral writing was along the careful, elementary lines of "avez-vous la plume de ma tante?"). The classical artists came off as awkward and even nerdy, despite Mr. Masur's best efforts to cast off his aura of gravitas and to groove. The overall message was subversive, especially in the hallowed classical groves of Tanglewood: a jazz ensemble is cooler than a symphony orchestra.
That's not news. It also isn't news that Leon Fleisher can play the devil out of Ravel's piano concerto for the left hand, which opened the concert on Saturday night. If you were seeking connections, you could discern a jazz link between the evenings, since the concerto has a few jazzlike musings. But the effect was more one of thesis and antithesis, particularly since the orchestra was speaking fluently and at considerable length in its own language on Saturday, like a politician following a diplomatic encounter with a prolix lecture analyzing the situation. This particular analysis showed the Boston Symphony in quite good shape, despite the excesses of both Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, the conductor, and Ravel himself in "Daphnis and Chloé," a fulsome, even blowsy Romantic score, with choral inserts lending an overtone of film music to the proceedings.
Sunday afternoon was indeed a kind of synthesis, in that it showed representatives of two different cultures - Mozart and Shostakovich - each working masterfully in his own idiom with a symphony orchestra. Late Mozart - the final piano concerto, lissomely played by Emanuel Ax, and the "Magic Flute" overture - was juxtaposed with early Shostakovich: his ferociously precocious first symphony had its premiere when he was 20.
The German conductor Ingo Metzmacher, who made his Tanglewood debut the week before with the student orchestra, showed a slightly exaggerated public manner himself, overconducting simple phrases and notably failing to achieve clean entrances on a number of occasions. But he also allowed some fine things to happen in the orchestra: lovely liquid smoothness from the strings in the piano concerto; playing at once sensitive and forceful in the Shostakovich, which just before its close held its breath in a wonderful timpani solo, dying away to almost nothing before the rest of the instruments came flooding back to fill the void.
