Leonidas Kavakos
REVIEW: Hannu Lintu and Leonidas Kavakos meditate on impermanence with the BSO
Kavakos’s keen rendition of Berg’s Violin Concerto and a manic joyride of a Schumann symphony rewarded listeners who braved the early darkness
By A.Z. Madonna
Say what you will about the merits versus drawbacks of Daylight Savings Time, but the combination of early darkness and soggy streets on Thursday evening probably didn’t make leaving the house an enticing notion for some music lovers. Symphony Hall looked around half full when Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu strode to the podium and raised his baton on this week’s program, but the end of each piece was greeted with enthusiastic cheering. For those listeners who did come out, braving the gloom was worth it.
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By contrast, Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto with soloist Kavakos flew by. To those who find the music of the Second Viennese School intimidating, the Berg concerto is a wonderful place to start and a rewarding one to revisit. The piece is dedicated to the memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and architect Walter Gropius, who had died of complications from polio that same spring at age 18. “To the memory of an angel,” reads the dedication, and Kavakos introduced the plaintive initial theme with broad strokes, laying a childlike and innocent foundation for the finely sculpted phrases that followed.
Kavakos has become Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma’s go-to piano trio partner as well as a frequent flyer on the BSO’s soloist roster in recent years, and as long as he keeps showing up with his signature sprezzatura, that probably won’t change. Every phrase he plays is obviously deeply thought out without sounding effortful; he puts on a show without letting anyone see he cares about how anyone perceives it. The approach keenly suited the Berg concerto’s diptych of elegy for Gropius and broad meditation on death and transfiguration, with an interweaved J.S. Bach chorale anchoring the rawer second movement to the earth. When the woodwinds joined in with that hymn, their dulcet, even timbres uncannily mimicked a baroque organ.
I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen Kavakos play anything but solo Bach as an encore in the past few years. Rarely is that inappropriate in any context, but on the heels of the Berg concerto, the Sarabande and Double from Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B minor was the perfect coda. Significantly longer than the typical wham-bam-thank you Boston encore, it felt like a bonus piece on the program. Kavakos held the audience rapt, and by the look of many faces, the orchestra’s musicians were similarly taken in.