Dutoit conducts Grieg and Shostakovich

As so often happens in Philadelphia Orchestra programming, the new season's second concert paired composers who have little to do or say with each other. There's nothing wrong with strong contrasts, but some relation ought to be suggested between pieces on the same program. Try as I will, I'm stumped to find one between Grieg and Shostakovich— and there aren't many composers Shostakovich doesn't relate to, from Bach to Berg to Johann Strauss.

This is not, I hope, to carp at two performances that, taken separately, were rewarding in themselves. But it was like attending two separate concerts, each of a single work, separated by 20 minutes of shuffling feet as the hall ritually emptied and filled up again.

Andre Watts was the soloist in the Grieg A minor piano concerto. Grieg, a relentlessly self-critical composer who kept revising his most famous work even in the last year of his life, was also fortune's favorite in many respects. He had the good business sense to be born in a small country, Norway, that hadn't yet produced a major musical eminence and, despite worthy peers and successors, still hasn't (apart from him).

He wrote his only concerto— indeed, his only purely instrumental work of any kind to occupy a place in the repertory— at 25, and its success was instant and incandescent. Anton Rubinstein, the foremost pianist of his day, championed it; and Liszt, who knew a thing or two about the piano, was ecstatic in his praise. The young Tchaikovsky, three years Grieg's elder and just making a name for himself in Moscow, was similarly impressed: "What warmth and passion," he wrote, " . . . teeming vitality . . . originality and beauty."

Well, what's not to like? The striding, noble theme announced fortissimo by the piano, a quintessentially Romantic opening; the sweet second subject; a lyric adagio in the composer's best manner; a bravura finale that closes maestoso. The only problem is, indeed, the concerto's enduring popularity: It has never been out of the repertory, and thus it falls into the category of a piece that hardly needs, and hardly appears to sustain, a fresh hearing.

Watts in maturity

Andre Watts himself must have played the Grieg a thousand times, but such is his musicality and integrity that he impressed at once with his commitment to the score, and made it impossible not to respond to its felicities anew. Nearly half a century has passed since Leonard Bernstein introduced Watts with the New York Philharmonic; and although the skinny kid has given way now to the gentleman with embonpoint, the astonishing technique and command remains, deepened by interpretive maturity.

Here is a life spent in devotion to music, with none of the self-aggrandizement of some younger artists we can all think of. Here was a performance that brought back the all the poetry that appealed to Tchaikovsky, and the brilliance admired by Liszt. No musician can play as sloppily as listeners can afford to hear, but Watts makes one listen up in the best sense of the term, and he made an old warhorse charge again.

Suppressed by Stalin

Much has been lost to time, but there has never been anything like the self-censorship of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, which, written in 1935-36, wasn't performed publicly until 1961. Imagine if The Rite of Spring, composed in 1913, had been suppressed until 1938 despite general knowledge of its existence.

Of course, Stravinsky's score changed the history of 20th-century music as Shostakovich's does not. But the Fourth was the most ambitious orchestral work he had yet written, and it not only changes our perception of the composer's development but also of art music in the 1930s.

That decade is generally viewed as a period of retrenchment after the hectic experiments of modernism, as such diverse figures as Copland, Hindemith, Prokofiev and Stravinsky himself adopted neo-classical or neo-Romantic styles, and even Bartok turned to a more accessible idiom. That Shostakovich— himself regarded as part of this trend— should have written a major modernist work in the middle of that decade certainly casts a different light on the period as a whole.

The audience walked out

How modernist— i.e., in terms of average concertgoer tastes, off-putting— is the Shostakovich Fourth? I remember vividly a performance by the New York Philharmonic under Andre Previn when the music was still relatively unfamiliar, and a sizable portion of the audience left after the half-hour-long first movement. Previn, hearing the commotion behind him, turned to see the retreating backs. The look of astonishment and dismay on his face couldn't have been greater when Mia Farrow walked out on him.

Mahler is often cited as an influence on the Fourth, which is true enough, but Berg may be equally significant. That monster of a first movement is certainly a cauldron of pure energy. The scherzo-like middle movement offers little relief from the tension and dissonance, and the finale throws elegies, dances and marches together, as if boiling an 80-minute Mahler symphony down to a 20-minute stew. The whole concludes with a stunning peroration that, built on preceding thematic material, nonetheless seems to come from a quite different and profoundly tragic work.

But it takes only the outburst with which the symphony begins— a shaken fist that unfurls into a brutal march— to understand why this symphony had to be shelved in Russia not only for the duration of Stalin's lifetime but even after. People don't walk out on the Shostakovich Fourth any more, but it will never provide comfortable listening for the dowager set.

Dutoit's discipline

Conductor Charles Dutoit set a firm beat and a steady hand on the score from the beginning, as he did in performing the Mahler Third last June, with similarly gratifying results. There are other ways to do the Fourth, and a rawness and bite that a Gergeiev or a Jurowski might have drawn from it that Dutoit did not. But discipline certainly does not disserve the music's teeming activity.

The Orchestra was on its best mettle, notwithstanding a brief lapse in energy during the finale. Dutoit might simply be marking time until Yannick Nézet-Séguin assumes the musical directorship in the fall of 2012, but he is not, and it's becoming increasingly clear that he intends to leave his own legacy. Dutoit has earned this opportunity, even if he might still program works with more affinity— say, a Berg with the Shostakovich. Or would that empty out the hall completely?