Over the last decade, Boston Symphony Orchestra audiences have seen more than their fair share of conductor cancellations, often for typical reasons (medical or family), though once, memorably, thanks to the force majeure of offended Slavic pride.
But a work visa issue? This week conductor Vladimir Jurowski withdrew from his BSO concerts because of bureaucratic travel problems and what the orchestra said was “a miscommunication with his own management team.” This rather embarrassing turn of events drew skepticism in some quarters, and even some wintry online self-pity, as commenters wondered if Jurowski might have preferred the weather in Siberia — or if perhaps the eminent maestro was secretly stuck somewhere on the Red Line.
The cancellation was a big disappointment, especially in the wake of Jurowski’s most recent BSO appearance in Symphony Hall, in which he led a shattering account of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony that might still be ringing in some distant corner of the second balcony. This week’s program offered wine from different barrels — Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite — but also contained a major American premiere: Harrison Birtwistle’s new piano concerto, which Jurowski had introduced in the UK in December.
The BSO covered its bases by dividing conducting duties among two replacements. But Jurowski’s laser-like focus and his ability to unleash a work’s power by laying bare its essential architectonics were sorely missed, especially in the Birtwistle. Simply put, this program needed him.
The title of Birtwistle’s concerto, a BSO co-commission, is “Responses,” hinting at the nature of a work that explores a kaleidoscopic variety of rhetoric between soloist and groups of orchestral musicians. The concerto also bears a subtitle at once evocative and slightly mischievous, taken from an essay by architecture critic Robert Maxwell: “Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless.” The distinguished British composer, now in his 80th year, told the Globe it was “an apt description of where my brain is.” Yet it also hints at the tension between a surface abundance of details and the penetrating core vision at the heart of this grand, teeming work, which clocks in at almost 30 minutes.
The piece was written for the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and its solo line is virtuosic, yet at the same time sublimated into the building of a multifaceted sound world at once spikey, fractured, dialogic, and glittering. Aimard played the work on Thursday with coloristic imagination and a remarkable incisiveness of attack. The BSO caught a lucky break in that the conductor Stefan Asbury, who led the world premiere in Munich last fall, was available to step in here. If moments of the orchestral playing might have benefited from a more sharply etched clarity, overall Asbury projected a steady confidence born of his deep new-music expertise.
The rest of the program was taken up by BSO assistant conductor Ken-David Masur, who has recently been earning his keep, stepping in for the second time in three subscription weeks. This program seemed more suited to his strengths. The Debussy (with Elizabeth Rowe’s lissome flute solos) was duly atmospheric and the “Firebird” Suite (in the 1919 version) was fastidiously drawn, even if room remained for bolder characterizations.
The program’s worthy rarity was Liadov’s tone poem “From the Apocalypse,” a staple of the Koussevitzky era that had been left in hibernation since its last BSO performance in 1943. Liadov famously passed up Diaghilev’s “Firebird” invitation, but he wrote plenty of other scores that Koussevitzky championed. The BSO is showcasing a handful of these works in February, but why not spotlight over time more of Koussevitzky’s vanished core repertoire, to say nothing of his commissions? Selections from the BSO archives are often displayed around Symphony Hall, but needless to say, music like this is the most vivid institutional time capsule of all.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.