Joyful Beethoven night at the MSO

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 contains his joy at getting away to the Austrian countryside, and that joy is plain to hear in the most pedestrian reading of this Pastoral Symphony. The challenge is to convey the gradings and shadings and types of joy.

I never heard them all as clearly as I did Friday night, when Edo de Waart led the Milwaukee Symphony through this happiest Beethoven symphony. For example:

De Waart started fast and piled phrase upon phrase in the opening exposition, as the urgency of first-blush joy at trees and sunshine overwhelms our protagonist as he emerges from his coach. The music hastened and tumbled as if rushing to take it all in.

Not so in the repeat of the exposition. Now we’ve had a moment to settle that initial exhilaration. De Waart relaxed the tempo just a bit, but more important, he left a little room between phrases and here lingered over a harmony and there took a little more time going into a cadence. We’ve caught our breath and can take time to appreciate a single flower as much as a field or a mountain.

Such vivid, dramatically right detail informed every moment and made each moment specific. And those moments accumulated into a satisfying panorama of joy. De Waart showed not only great musical and dramatic intelligence for parsing out the music as he did, but also sensitivity and imagination. He imposed nothing on the music and revealed every treasure within it.

De Waart’s vision of the work made sense to the musicians, too. Soloists and sections alike filled his gestures with sound that was precise, relaxed and fit the grand plan.

Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, with soloist Vadim Repin, stands nearly opposite the Pastoral Symphony. De Waart punched out its introduction like so many profound questions. The exposition followed like as series of tentative and inconclusive answers. This is searching, rhetorical music that rarely lights on the home-base note (the tonic, to you music theory majors). De Waart and the orchestra made us feel its Romantic yearning.

When Repin came in, he took a contrarian tack: Serene and aloof, mulling over the themes as if they were mathematical abstractions, as if he were above the orchestral stress and strain. I found his approach surprising and fascinating, especially when he became increasingly dramatic and heated through the development. Repin developed a theatrical character, the quintessential young Romantic who tries to distance himself from life but finally must release his passions.

The finale of this concerto always strikes me as a buffa romp that doesn’t really follow the first two movements, and it sounded that way  to me this time, too. But I loved Repin’s ethereal, nearly static and utterly hypnotic slow movement; it was as if he were delivering a poetic soliloquy in a deserted cathedral.

Repin stepped out of character, as it were, to deliver a killer cadenza in the first movement. Sorry, I don’t know which cadenza he played, but it has the most amazing harmonized combination of the two main themes. [This just in, 10:22 a.m. Saturday: Cadenzas by Fritz Kreisler. Thanks to Robert Levine, MSO principal violist.] Repin endowed the passage with great forward drive and dead-on pitch. It didn’t fit into the scenario I sketched above, but no matter. This was violin-playing to make you say wow.

Wow.

This program, given at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall,  will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and further information, visit the MSO website or call the Marcus box office, 414-273-7206.

Click here for the MSO This Week preview piece for this concert.