Con brio: Focus on Italy in ISO's Classical Series features principal violist

German composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher

 The welcome return of Matthias Pintscher as guest conductor to the Hilbert Circle Theatre podium set up expectations of insightful and fully characterized performances. Those expectations were met Friday night in a concert also bringing to the fore the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's principal violist, Yu Jin.

Pintscher seems to have an immense interpretive range, suggested by two previous appearances with the ISO. Though there has been an unsurprising emphasis on the Austro-German tradition, his 2017 debut with the orchestra climaxed in  a vivid performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances."

This weekend Pintscher guides the ISO on a transalpine journey titled "Greetings from Italy," which will be repeated this afternoon at 5:30.  In Friday night's performances of Rossini, Mendelssohn, and Berlioz, he got detailed but unfussy results in a manner that was neither choreographic nor excessively sculpted. His rhythmic control was unfailing, yet he displayed a keen fondness for lyricism and tender effects. A prolific composer himself, he projected a rapport with each of three distinct composer personalities.

The blitheness of Rossini's creativity, well described in Marianne Williams Tobias' program notes, means that the well-known episodic layout of the Overture to "The Barber of Seville" is bound to set pulses racing in an atmosphere of spontaneity. Though the music alludes to none of the opera's tunes, a secondary theme in the violins had a full measure of vocal suggestion in this performance. In some of the fast music, the orchestra was still feeling its way somewhat, but kept rising to the occasion.

In Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony (No. 4 in A major, op. 90), the opportunity for songful expression was taken advantage of.  Well-managed crescendos always seemed to swell from within, rather than being externally applied. The wind choir was dependably solid.  The second-movement painting of a pilgrim procession was not so solemn and poker-faced as in some versions; Mendelssohn may have been a North German, but he was a cosmopolitan receptive to shining other lights upon religious observances when the milieu offered them. 

The third movement was exquisitely balanced, and the finale made the most of the cheek-by-jowl partnership of the saltarello and tarantella dance forms. The playing at great speed attained full confidence under the flawless authority of Pintscher's conducting. If Mendelssohn gloried in both the bucolic and urban sides of Italian life, he was always somewhat unsatisfied with a work that found immediate success with audiences.

The personality brought into lengthy focus by Lord Byron in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" was of a much different order. Hector Berlioz, a composer whose nerves always seemed a-tingle to Romanticism, found a unique way of responding to the Englishman's poetry. His focus on the viola as a solo instrument in this work doesn't dress it in conventional concerto garb. The soloist is an observer impersonating Byron's fictional Harold, sometimes taking in scenes and people in near-silence.

 Yu Jin has been ISO principal violist since 2017.

Byron created no Byronic hero in this poem, in contrast with his Manfred, fully fledged in narrative and given appropriate musical stature in Tchaikovsky's "Manfred" Symphony, which was splendidly recorded by Raymond Leppard and the ISO in 1994. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" broods a lot more than "Harold in Italy," which ends with so much elaborate revelry among colorful brigands that the viola has little to do.

Byron's poem is substantially vexed by the decline of Rome and disdainful of its gladiatorial heyday. It ends in relief with an ode to the ocean and its power over human vanity and pride. (This was before we spoiled even that huge part of the natural world with plastics.) Childe Harold seems glad to be done with taking in the human scene through restless travel; Berlioz, on the other hand, was happy to use the reflective figure of Harold and his wanderings in Italy to paint a postcard series all his own.

Soloist Yu Jin, with instinctive mastery of her role, immediately struck gold in the first movement. Her tone was molten and tender as needed and her performance quickly established an individuality and brilliance such that one never regretted the unconcerto-like layout of the work, with its absence of a bravura cadenza and a flashy solo finish. Bravura matters are left to the orchestra, especially in the finale, and the ISO's deep-delving brass were up to the challenge.