By Lawrence Toppman
When people talk about classical music showpieces, they usually mean show-off pieces, the kind of bravura works where dash and flash yank audiences to their feet in roaring approval. Every once in a while, though, a soloist prefers to show everything that’s in a piece, not in his dazzling fingers.
Gil Shaham did that Thursday night at the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra’s fall gala. I must have heard Tchaikovsky’s only violin concerto played live and on recordings by 15 soloists, and never have I encountered a reading with more gentle poetry. Being in Belk Theater was suddenly like sitting in a large 19th-century salon with friends gathered to hear a new work.
Shaham has plenty of heart, just not the kind worn on one’s sleeve. His pure, small tone doesn’t lend itself to fireworks, and music director Kwamé Ryan had to hold the musicians in check during quiet passages, giving them full rein during orchestral climaxes. But if you listened carefully, especially in the central andante, he pulled you into a reverie we rarely associate with this extroverted composer.
Woodwind interjections, include a few bits whose interplay with the violin sounded like klezmer music, might have been obscured by a more assertive soloist but emerged here. Pizzicatos from the cellos fell like raindrops. And where the robust final allegro would normally blow peaceful dreams away, Shaham continued to muse gently on underlying meanings in the piece.
I don’t know whether Tchaikovsky would have responded positively to this approach, but I did. So did the audience, which gave him five curtain calls. He responded with an encore of the gavotte in the form of a rondeau from J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 3, played with the same delicacy but just enough bounce to remind us it’s based on a dance form. (Speaking of that, Shaham bounced gently up and down while listening to orchestral passages, beaming at Ryan. We don’t often see a soloist get that much pleasure from what he hears onstage.)
Ryan laid the groundwork for us to appreciate Shaham’s interpretation in the first half of the concert, conducting Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony. The composer named it “Winter Daydreams” and titled the first two movements “Dreams of a Winter Journey” and “Land of Desolation, Land of Mists.” But here Ryan’s insistence on intimacy yielded more uneven results.
The first movement flowed beautifully, as if we were on a train moving through a chilly countryside. Some conductors put on us a fast-moving express, but Ryan gave us time to enjoy the musical scenery. Then Tchaikovsky asked for an adagio cantabile ma non tanto tempo – singing and slow, but not too much – in the second movement, and Ryan slowed things down so drastically that the energy drained out in places.
He picked things up neatly in the buoyant third movement and slowed them down daringly but tastefully in the andante that begins the finale. Then, like a man waking suddenly from a daydream, he gave the orchestra its head up to the exciting climax.
This approach to the symphony did pay one unusual dividend. Richard Strauss famously told musicians they should play his hyperdramatic opera “Salome” as if it had been orchestrated by Felix Mendelssohn. Ryan treated “Winter Daydreams” the same way, and its delicacy and clarity let us relish details that a blunter, zestier version might not have revealed.