ISO welcomes a superb young cellist in his instrument's best-known concerto

The only anxiety generated by Pablo Ferrandez's debut solo performance with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Friday night was the security of his cello's end pin.

Colombian-American conductor Gonzalez-Granados

Otherwise, the Spanish cellist delivered a transcendent account of Antonin Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B minor, in which pin slippage on the platform vanished among all other earthly concerns. Playing his Stradivarius "Archinto" instrument (1689) to maximum effect, Ferrandez wowed one of this season's largest Classical Series crowds at Hilbert Circle Theatre. 

The end pin, tightened several times, held firm. So did his interpretation, both swooning and commanding as the need arose, as well as his rapport with guest conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados and the orchestra. In his pre-concert Words on Music appearance, Ferrandez mentioned his satisfaction with the heroic quality of the solo part, entering in B major after the hefty orchestral introduction in the minor mode. 

Ferrandez sustained the heroism he believes characterizes the repertoire's most famous cello concerto. He did so with simple authority, without grandiloquence, and the labor required to put across this masterpiece did not offer any evidence of strain, even though he broke a sweat now and then.

 ISO contributions to the soloist's mastery showed up in such details as the steady, delicate string

Pablo Ferrandez is portentously shadowed.

tremolos succeeded by a cello-flute dialogue in the first movement, and, in the second, the way swelling phrases from the orchestra were reflected in the solo. Throughout the Adagio ma non troppo, there was consistent plasticity of cello and detailed accompaniment, scrupulously guided by the conductor. The finale displayed Ferrandez's aptness for the tricky passage work and mastery of the instrument's full range — everything in the technical department at the service of his artistry and collegial responsiveness.

For an encore, Ferrandez had the cello section gather around him for an arrangement of Dvorak's "Silent Woods," which afforded more welcome exposure to his radiant tone. At 32, Ferrandez presumably has several more decades of eminence as a concert artist ahead. Somewhere along the way, it wouldn't be surprising if he acquired an aura among the public similar to that of another Spanish cellist named Pablo long ago.

Gonzalez-Granados established her acute control and nimbleness as the concert got under way with two of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances. After intermission, there was a major exhibition of what she has to offer on the podium. The heroism long associated with Shostakovich is more flecked with irony than what Dvorak displays in his cello concerto. Symphony No. 5 in D minor, hailed as an acceptable response in the Soviet Union to severe criticism of the composer, has been a favorite all over since the 1930s, and among the few 20th-century symphonies with a stable position in the international repertoire.

The gloriously ambivalent first movement received an aptly nuanced performance Friday night. The energy it stirs up was under tight but never suffocating control. You could feel hints of the conditions Shostakovich was force to work under. The eerie ending of the first movement, with its tentativeness and attempted grace under pressure (the upward creep of the celesta), brought to mind the necessity Shostakovich and many other artists felt to keep a packed suitcase at home near the front door in case of an unannounced visit from police bearing one-way tickets to the gulag.

The division and reduction of the string sections in the Largo were smoothly handled, allowing its song of lament and tense worry to emerge in somber layers of expressiveness. It was also appropriate that the outbursts of humor in the second movement Allegretto sounded heavy-handed, as if any merriment under Stalinist oppression had to carry grim watchfulness with it. 

As for the finale, it's hard to be certain whether Shostakovich was yielding to a tendency he always had toward brashness and overstatement, or whether he was mocking the platitudes of socialist realism that governed artistic expression most of his life. In any case, the climaxes in Friday's performance were stunning, the brass choir in fine fettle for the most part, and Gonzalez-Granados had the whole ensemble painting in vivid colors. The program will be repeated at 5:30 p.m. today.