ISO Classical Season opens with the spotlight on two of its principals

Sometimes an enduring statement in musical history stands out from its surroundings for a variety of reasons. These questions may arise in retrospect: Does it fill some kind of unmet need that perhaps wasn't immediately evident when the ink was hardly dry on the score? Or does it indicate without delay that it may be making a bid for immortality, not by "going for the gold" with a grandiose claim, but simply because it is uniquely appealing?

The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra opened its Classical Series Friday night with four works that make distinctive claims on audience attention. The Hilbert Circle Theatre concert (repeated Saturday afternoon) featured one new work that was omitted in the weekend preview Thursday morning. Its special standing had a lot to do with the music that inspired it. Beethoven's 7th symphony has a famous slow movement that was so impressive from the start that the audience practically demanded to hear it again at its premiere.

Making powerful use of the rhythmic and harmonic features of that movement, Carlos Simon's "Fate Now Conquers" is a five-minute celebration of Beethoven's genius that

Pete Oundjian has been the ISO's "fireman."

premiered just over two years ago in Philadelphia, a city that for Americans will always stand for a unique debut in the non-musical sphere.

Guest conductor Peter Oundjian said in the preconcert "Words on Music" conversation that the eminent American composer John Adams recommended the piece to him. Oundjian himself has recent historical significance with the ISO.  He's something of a fireman (in baseball terms, an effective relief pitcher who neutralizes threats from the opposition and leads the team to triumph). In this case the opposition was the  pandemic, and in May 2021 Oundjian helped demonstrate that our side won as he returned to the podium and led the orchestra after a 429-day hiatus. 

In this weekend's appearance, he got to introduce the orchestra and its patrons to a young composer whose rethinking of a repertoire staple in fresh terms amounted to an example of new music that has some unmistakable resonance with the past. Yet its profile throbbed with new life. "Fate Now Conquers" was both compact and compellingly major in implication. It draws from the mysteriousness of the Beethoven original, yet strides ahead with its hard-won confidence as well. 

The rattling figures that help animate a slow movement that is defiantly not slow at all were reconfigured as 21st-century punctuation for the phrase of the title. Simon borrowed the words from something Beethoven said,  indicating that the need to bow to fate could nonetheless preserve something essential about personal triumph over obstacles. 

Triumph is something that Mikhail Glinka's Overture to "Ruslan and Lyudmila" has accomplished over anything else the Russian composer wrote, including the opera it was first attached to. Credited with putting Russia on the world musical stage, Glinka is familiar today solely through this strikingly peppy overture, with its catchy contrasting second theme. It's about as long as Simon's piece, and it made a riveting appetizer before the program's most substantial work, Brahms' Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra.

The Brahms "Double" became a landmark because of its rarity — the two solo instruments seldom are showcased together — and the way it has surmounted its initially tepid reception. Its stunning mastery was fully addressed Friday by two first-chair ISO players: concertmaster Kevin Lin and principal cellist Austin Huntington. This was the second time I've heard Huntington as one of the work's partners. The last time was with Lin's predecessor, Zachary DePue. Friday's performance was even more assured, thanks especially to the corresponding energy imparted to the accompaniment under Oundjian's baton.

The sterling rapport achieved by Lin and Huntington was especially fetching in a couple of dialogues in triplets in the first movement. And the soloists' tone in the finale complemented some excellent playing in the winds, the palette of colors almost making the two string instruments honorary winds in the best sense.  

The second movement featured a nice shaping of dynamics, and where the melodic line is unified the effect seemed to symbolize the high degree of rapport. That these two young principals  bring that rapport to bear in more than this piece was confirmed by their virtuoso encore, the Handel/Halvorsen "Passacaglia," which was greeted with shouts of approval by an audience thankfully well supplied with young people.

That ovation was almost greater than the applause generator that ended the concert: Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition."  These two composers are forever linked in the public's mind, because the French composer's skill in orchestration has helped ensure the immortality of the Russian composer and his suite of descriptive pieces for solo piano. 

Except for a second Promenade that had sort of a shuffling feeling about it, this "Pictures" was dapper and assured. The sharp satire in the picture of a rich man and a beggar ("Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle") could hardly have been more keenly etched: lofty self-importance contrasted with persistent wheedling. 

Mark Ortwein's account of the saxophone solo that sustains the atmosphere of "The Old Castle" was again well worth hearing. The last iteration of the "Promenade" music, following the "Catacombs" episode, was redolent with the musical fright factor so appropriate for this Halloween season.  

Finally, after the witch Baba-Yaga's heart-stopping ride, there came "The Great Gate of Kiev," a structure which never existed even before the deplorable Russian invasion of the Ukrainian capital, which we have learned to call "Kyiv." This must have aroused a little extra excitement on Monument Circle, where, for the first time, the concert was broadcast live. That innovation, announced by CEO James Johnson to Friday's audience, will be a feature of the Classical Series for the whole season, and may lure a few more paying customers inside the hall.