Boston Symphony Orchestra
Yan Pascal Tortelier, conductor
Joshua Bell, violin
Symphony Hall, Boston
November 24, 2009

Really, I do go to hear other things besides the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but Joshua Bell was in town to play the Brahms concerto, and my lovely wife is a big Joshua Bell fan, so we went. However, by concert night, this season’s BSO conductor curse was back—Sir Andrew Davis was out, due to a family illness; Yan Pascal Tortelier, longtime conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, was in.

Tortelier might just be the most ornate conductor I’ve ever seen: if there was a note in the score he didn’t try to account for with some physical gesture, I must have missed it. He often started a beat from his shoulders, used a flex of the wrist to indicate something else, and then, seemingly, remembered he had ten fingers left for further cues. It’s really rather entertaining, although distracting as well—I had to divert my gaze in order to actually listen to what was going on. How effective it all is was hard to tell—this was all music the BSO could probably play without any conductor whatsoever. But the readings were precise.

They didn’t breathe much, though. Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” was something of a hot house miniature. Tortelier conducted through Elizabeth Rowe’s opening flute solo—and not just beating time, either, but actually shaping each sub-phrase and local contour. That’s how the rest went, too, obsessively detailed and hermetically sealed. Davis had scheduled Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements,” but Tortelier replaced it with the suite from “The Firebird.” (Grrrrr—I was looking forward to those three movements.) Tortelier led a reading that could have flipped Stravinsky’s reference to Ravel as a “Swiss watchmaker” back on Stravinsky himself, a jeweled automaton of a “Firebird,” with the conductor offering full, one-man choreography. It wasn’t an implausible approach, and the “Infernal Dance” was a ripping good time (Tortelier went airborne more than once), but the tight leash really sucked the breadth out of the final hymn, which was loud without being cathartic.

So I was wildly curious to see how Tortelier’s fastidiousness would combine with Bell’s usually impetuous playing—the Brahms Violin Concerto could almost go either way, but I’m not sure it could go both ways at once. The pairing, though, was much less Oscar-and-Felix than it could have been. Tortelier was a fine accompanist, and his micromanaging was beneficial, keeping the orchestra with Bell through every momentary twist and turn. (There were a couple of moments where, I swear, Bell was having some fun trying to see how long he could keep Tortelier waiting through a bit of rubato.)

Bell has always been a heart-on-his-sleeve violinist, but he does it extremely well. Bell is an old-school player, but instead of ubiquitous old-school plush vibrato, he offered extraordinary timbral variety, an entire range of sound, from a lean, almost early-music tone, to a tightly-wound intensity. He’s got the technique to turn on a dime, throwing a fair amount of caution to the wind. It wasn’t an interpretation to stand back and appreciate Brahms’s architectural proportions, but a moment-to-moment narrative, Bell distilling as much emotion as possible out of every phrase. Sometimes, it was kind of like hearing, say, Barry White read Hegel: by the time the discourse would reach a conclusion, the seductive voice had long since distracted you from the subject at hand. But Bell conjures the Romantic illusion of a searching protagonist better than almost anyone going. And his cadenza is a grand, 21st-century-Kreisler blast.

Tortelier pulled sound out of the orchestra that was a little top-heavy for me—I like my Brahms carved in darker wood—but still pretty luxurious. Interpretively, he deferred to Bell; the orchestral interludes were like comfortable waiting rooms between chapters of Bell’s storytelling. So the concerto ended up being more of a star turn. But Bell has the star power to sustain it. The man puts on a show.

Email