Photo by Decca Kasskara. Soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet performance at Strathmore.

Published on: Tuesday, November 24, 2009

By David Cannon, Sentinel Arts Critic

One had to check the calendar at the recent Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concert at the Strathmore Music Center. Conductor Marin Alsop chose a great holiday program, but it felt more appropriate for Halloween than the week before Thanksgiving.

Once you got over the supernatural theme for the evening, what a great concert.

It featured the phenomenal young pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet performing the Liszt “Totentanz,” or “Dance of Death.” You know how some pieces are more difficult than they sound? Well, this one sounded fiendishly difficult, but Thibaudet made it all sound effortless.

Totentanz is more tone poem than a full fledge piano concerto, though no less demanding. The piece is based on the Gregorian Chant Dies Irae, a slow-moving theme used in the Mass for the dead. Liszt composed a set of variations that are funereal and creepy sounding, while making the solo part for each variation increasingly difficult. Thibaudet was amazing with his heavy chords, rapid runs, and swirling glissando, while Alsop and the BSO provided fine support throughout.

After intermission was the major work on the program – the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz. Hard to believe Berlioz wrote this work less than 20 years after Beethoven died. Where Beethoven pointed the way toward the future, here is Berlioz writing a totally Romantic symphony as if from scratch. There is a program and an increasingly bizarre set of events. There is a recurring theme, an “idee fixe,” representing the loved one that pops up in each movement. And there are five movements, because during the Romantic period, bigger was always better.

Alsop and the BSO were excellent in the passionate opening movement and the following glittering waltz. And the final movements were when things got really interesting – a nightmare sequence that includes a march to the scaffold that Alsop made relentless. The final witches Sabbath was an orchestral showpiece, with the loved one’s recurring theme high on a clarinet like a cackling crone and our old friend the Dies Irae with ominous bells tolling in the background.

Only the central slow movement lacked focus. This pastoral movement has some neat touches – that opening mountain horn duet and those oddly tuned timpani rolls to suggest distant thunder. Still, this movement lacked with intensity of the opening movements and the relentless drive of the final movements.

The concert opened with the “Red Cape Tango” by contemporary composer Michael Daugherty. It is the finale to his Metropolis Symphony, a touch in cheek homage to Superman comics that is full of modern gestures but still quite accessible. It pictures Superman’s final battle with the apocalyptic named villain Doomsday, and in the middle of the snarling brass, habernera rhythms, and tango style percussion, the Dies Irae theme makes its presence known more than once.

If anything, you certainly went home with that simple tune in your head. One could view the references to the Dies Irae as classical versions of sampling, or in the rather cheeky treatment of this solemn theme, early examples of “rocking the classics.” Or you could just immerse yourself in three very different composers creating their own fantasy worlds and paying their homage to the past in the process.

The BSO at Strathmore completes 2009 with a Gospel version of Handel’s Messiah called “Too Hot to Handel” on Dec. 10. The new year kicks off Jan. 23 with soloist Garrick Ohlsson in the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto followed by a pops concert “The Judy Garland Songbook” on Jan. 28. Another highlight is a three week celebration of the circus in March.For more information, call 1-877-BSO-1444 or visit http://www.bsomusic.org/.