Three Chamber Works, Audacious and Beautiful

Especially with a maestro like Levine at the helm of the Boston Symphony, we've gotten used to hearing huge masterpieces—works that exploit the grandeur, the huge sound and dexterous playing of the BSO players.  So it's refreshing to hear the ensemble in smaller forces for a program of chamber orchestra pieces tonight and this past weekend.  The Boston Symphony Chamber Players takes care of the quartets, but what about the chamber symphonies?

Mozart's teenage symphonic masterpiece, the Symphony No. 29 (sound clip), opens tonight's program.  Scored for a smaller ensemble (no clarinets for instance), this symphony showcases Mozart at his most thematically intertwined.  Rarely does Mozart connect the themes of different movements as extensively as Haydn and Beethoven, but for the 29^th that's precisely what he does.

Berg wrote the second piece on this program, the Chamber Concerto, for his teacher Arnold Schoenberg's 50^th birthday, and while he missed the birthday deadline by a few months, the composer created one of his most motivically intricate and complex pieces.  This hefty tribute spells Schoenberg's name using the German letter notation system as well as Berg's and Webern's and develops them using serial techniques.  But it's the orchestral colors and interactions between the violin soloist (tonight, Isabelle Faust), the piano soloist (Peter Serkin), and the 13 accompanying wind players that bring this piece to life.

After the break, the violins leave the stage for Brahms's Serenade No. 2 (sound clip).  This strange scoring highlights the composer's natural propensity for darker string colors in spite of the generally light character of the piece.  Nowhere to be found is the drama of the highly anticipated First Symphony that Brahms had yet to write, yet this is vital, gorgeous music, and subtle and nuanced in Levine's hands.

Speaking of Levine, he returns to Boston to lead this program and most of the shows for the remainder of the season.  So come hear Levine's triumphant, yet perhaps subtler than usual, return to Boston.  This isn't Mahler 8, but it packs nuance that sometimes the big guns can't deliver.