After all the hoopla surrounding the arrival of the BSO’s new music director Andris Nelsons, it was something of a relief to finally settle into the subscription season on Wednesday night in Symphony Hall. The camera crews had packed up, the opera excerpts had been put away, and there was not a celebrity soloist in sight. Just Nelsons and the orchestra, ready to get down to work. They did so in a rewarding program devoted to music by Beethoven, Bartok, and Tchaikovsky.
In the night’s central spot was the harrowing Suite from “The Miraculous Mandarin,” Bartok’s expressionistic interwar pantomime. We may imagine this composer trudging through muddy villages of the Hungarian countryside in search of its folk music, but Bartok was also a chilling portraitist of newly modern urban life at its dark edges, a time when the city, as one writer said of Berlin, could stimulate “like arsenic.”
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In this scenario by Melchior Lengyel, a young woman is forced by three thugs to reel in men from the street so they can be robbed. She ultimately seduces a mysterious “Mandarin” whom the men brutally attack but cannot kill, as he is strangely inoculated by his own passion. In Wednesday’s performance, Bartok’s music spoke precisely without words, opening as it does in high helter-skelter, with rapid surging runs in the strings and winds and brass telegraphing anxious rhythms. The clarinets were duly seductive and the playing built to a wild, frenzied dance. Other accounts have ratcheted the tension still higher, but Nelsons’s had its own mesmerizing quality, especially in its closing pages, driven by an irresistible energy.
Setting up for a strong contrast with the Bartok, the night began with Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, a bastion of unrelieved cheerfulness and good humor. So much of it in fact that, as Wednesday’s program note pointed out, the work undermines our image of the composer’s severity and dignity, which may account for its status as one of the least performed of all nine symphonies. In this case, Nelsons and the orchestra gave the Eighth a light-footed reading that took its time to settle in but grew in confidence and profile as it went along. The inner movements in particular brought out the give and take of this music’s conversational flow with an appealingly earthy quality.
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Both scores in a way felt preparatory to the evening’s final offering, Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony, which received the night’s strongest performance, organically shaped, tastefully judged, and beautifully dispatched by the members of the orchestra. Nelsons’s conception of this work felt more deeply internalized and vividly personalized than his approach to the Bartok or the Beethoven. His account eschewed any wallowing or emotional indulgence, but did not stint on drama, tension, and excitement. The BSO played superbly for him. The woodwind work had a firm bite when necessary, and the lyrical passages in the first movement billowed from the stage with a cool radiance. Even the moments of silence had their own distinct qualities.
After each work Nelsons tried to direct the applause toward the orchestra, as a group and through myriad solo bows. At one point after the Tchaikovsky, concertmaster Malcolm Lowe declined to stand, in a show of the orchestra’s own appreciation.
Next up for Nelsons is a quick European jaunt to the Concertgebouw, the Berlin Philharmonic, and his other home orchestra in Birmingham. He returns in November with a keenly anticipated program pairing the Sibelius Second with the otherworldly, Bach-haunted “Offertorium” by Sofia Gubaidulina.
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Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.