Riccardo Chailly has as wide a repertoire as any conductor today, ranging from Bach right through to contemporary music. But Russian composers, except Stravinsky, have never been a prominent feature of his concerts, nor, I would guess, of those of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. But their first appearance together at Symphony Hall was a startlingly good, all-Russian affair, with Rachmaninov's Second Symphony preceded by Shostakovich's Second Cello Concerto.
It is always as much of a thrill to encounter a great orchestra in that exceptional acoustic, with all the tonal lustre and detail that is projected so truthfully, as it is to hear an outstanding conductor tackle something different. Chailly's view of the Rachmaninov was both wonderfully objective and fiercely dramatic, without a trace of indulgence in even the most lusciously lyrical passages. The transition from the slow introduction to the main body of the first movement seemed like imperceptible sleight of hand, while the huge lazy arc of music that followed, which can lose its direction so easily, always had a sense of direction and purpose. Small details, such as the fierce brightness of the string tone at the opening of the scherzo, or the reedy edge to the clarinet in the long solo of the adagio, were perfectly judged. The finale steadily ratcheted up the tension, never weakening even in its lingering slow episode, where it is all too easy to get dewy-eyed.
Lynn Harrell was the solo cellist in the Shostakovich. He was at his thoughtful best in the introspective ruminations of the opening movement, and seemed content to leave it to Chailly and the orchestra to inject the real venom into the central scherzo and the finale, so that the concerto emerged as stranger and more teasingly enigmatic than ever, and more profound, too.
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