Review: ASO has lovely (and a few ragged) moments under baton of Storgårds

Finnish conductor John Storgårds led the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in what should have been the most compelling program this season. Performed Thursday in Symphony Hall, the concert held many of the facets of why we attend concerts: a bracing new work, a crowd-pleasing concerto with a brilliant soloist, a fascinating rediscovery and, to cap the evening, a warm, flowing symphony full of heroic tunes. Architecturally, the theme-and-variations format helped connect the entire evening.

The orchestra opened with a new name and a fresh new voice. Outi Tarkiainen’s “Midnight Sun Variations” is about the glowing nighttime light in the Arctic summer. It’s also about, as the Finnish composer puts it, “Giving birth, when the woman and the child within her part company, restoring her former self as the light fades into autumn.” 

You don’t quite hear all that in the music. But the 10-minute work is gorgeous and suggestive of muted, shifting colors that are at once eerie, tender and affectionate. Nothing tangible actually happens, so it feels like a scene that’s just outside the listener’s perspective. Perhaps we’re witnessing someone’s reactions to a transcendent experience.

About halfway into it, echoing Doppler effects make it feel like we’ve entered a time warp — a kind of Lapland pastorale. Throughout, there’s no melody or sense of rhythm — no pulse — just sensations and impressions. The lovely fadeout at the end is more evidence that this is a composer with a sophisticated technique and a strong sense of poetic expression.  

Storgårds comes with a solid reputation, on the fringes of the international circuit. He’s done the rounds of major orchestras all over (Cleveland, Berlin, New York, etc.) and is principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In 2019, he led the premiere of Tarkiainen’s “Midnight Sun Variations” at the prestigious BBC Proms summer festival in London. On Thursday, I wish the ASO had played it twice.

Pianist Inon Barnatan was deluxe casting as soloist in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, 24 variations on a devilish violin tune blended with the Dies Irae, a medieval plainchant hymn for Judgment Day (and a cartoonish device, frequently deployed, by Romantic composers). Barnatan, known as a deep musical thinker with a chiseled technique and a winning charisma at the keyboard — he’s got everything, in other words — made the Rhapsody delicious fun.

In the meditative middle sections, when a soaring pop melody emerges, the Israeli-born pianist let it unspool elegantly, with minimal sweetness in his tone and with crisp, light touch — a combination of melancholy and delicacy and enormous weight.  

Storgårds was less confident in his accompaniment, and the orchestra wasn’t always together with their soloist or with each other. Some sour brass playing and ragged entrances didn’t distract from the joy of hearing Barnatan in his spectacular element.               

As an encore, Barnatan returned to the piano for variations of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” in a daredevil-crazy solo arrangement by Earl Wild. It ends with a giddy display of sonic saturation, where the pianist smashes both forearms down on the keys, playing all the notes. Triple fortissimo. You can’t help but laugh and cheer. Barnatan’s a showman at the highest level. The crowd ate it up.

After intermission we got a rarity: two popular piano pieces by the great Frédéric Chopin — the Nocturne in A-flat and the “Grande valse brillante” — transcribed for orchestra by the young Igor Stravinsky. These arrangements are a glimpse into a legendary moment from 20th-century music history. Even fanatics, the sort of people who own the 57-CD Complete Stravinsky Columbia/Sony Recordings box set, wouldn’t likely know them, since the composer himself never authorized a recording. 

Most everyone adores Stravinsky’s big ballets for impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, which relocated to Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution. The company’s biggest commissions, including The Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring, changed the course of music and have electrified audiences ever after. Turns out that a year before The Firebird, in 1909, Diaghilev had first approached Stravinsky to create a few Chopin arrangements for an update to a ballet called Les Sylphides. The not-yet-world-famous composer jumped at the chance for his music, for the first time, to be performed outside of Russia. 

So what do these transcriptions sound like? Do we hear hints of the harmonic and rhythmic earthquakes to come? As British Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh describes them, they’re “a translation of Chopin into the language of art nouveau.”

Well, it didn’t come across that way. Storgårds and the ASO offered these arrangements as linear and, in this context, charming to hear. You wouldn’t call the orchestrations lavish or full-bodied (or, indeed, “Stravinskian,” which might be the loftiest praise). They sounded the way a smiling child trying on his dad’s oversized hat and jacket looks, more adorable than convincing.

The evening closed with Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5, music from the ASO’s core repertoire. Storgårds has won European awards for his Sibelius recordings, so expectations were high. But he couldn’t seem to get the ASO to follow his baton. As in the Rachmaninoff, there were a great many small miscues and hesitations. The balances between sections were sometimes off, with long moments of indiscriminate blaring from the back of the stage. It all sounded under-rehearsed, or as if they lacked that essential conductor-orchestra chemistry. Still, the long arc of Storgårds’ interpretation was thoroughly convincing.  

The concert repeats Saturday at 8 p.m., and we might expect the cohesion on stage to be markedly improved.

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Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.