Outgoing as well as musically astute, two guest artists herald pause in ISO Classical Series

A recent discovery new to this continent makes the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's pre-Yuletide Celebration program this weekend especially exciting.

Nadia Boulanger's Fantaisie variee for Piano and Orchestra had been performed in North America by only

 Dariescu strives to represent women in repertoire.

one orchestra, the Houston Symphony, before Friday night's Hilbert Circle Theatre concert. Its champion, Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu, is on hand as soloist, as she was in Houston. The final performance is this afternoon at 5:30.

The French composer (1887-1979) is best-known as an influential teacher, whose Paris studio attracted many young American musicians about a century ago, including Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, and Aaron Copland, and continued to provide a sort of finishing school for composers internationally for decades.

Fantaisie variee was composed in 1912, and over its 20-minute length shows an eclectic gift for blending aspects of French romanticism and impressionism alike. For someone with an academic reputation, Boulanger as a composer in this piece has something extraordinary and distinctive to say. The way she balances solo and accompaniment, while keeping both components active rather than making sure each side of the dialogue gets its turn, then recedes, is unusual in the piano-concerto literature.

Dariescu's sympathetic partner in this effort was Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya. The

Yankovskaya managed tension and release well.

ISO appeared to romp attentively in music unfamiliar to it. There was evident recognition that both solo and accompaniment had complementary opportunities to shine. It was a bracing presentation of what felt like new music, despite how historically grounded the score is.

Dariescu's obvious joy with the audience's reception of the Boulanger resulted in two encores: With concertmaster Kevin Lin, she played Clara Schumann's Romance for Violin and Piano, a lovely inspiration for this impromptu duo to bring off well. Then she capped her appearance with "Polichinelle," a familiar designation for the little clowns like those in the annually ubiquitous  "Nutcracker"  ballet. This Brazilian version was a suitably brief, pixieish character piece by Heitor Villa-Lobos. Dariescu projected the feeling that she could have gone on and on, and that the audience would have loved it.

The concert began with a piece well-known in Ukraine, the homeland of its composer, Mykola Lysenko.  The Overture to "Taras Bulba," with that name most familiar to music-lovers from Leos Janacek, in this case maximizes the Cossack energy and ferocity of Nikolai Gogol's source story. It struck me as a essentially noisy and unrelieved, but effective in laying out larger-than-life aspects of this operatic hero. 

The performance didn't allow extensive opportunity to evaluate and appreciate this guest conductor. That changed enormously when Yankovskaya conducted Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B minor, op. 74.  It's accurately known by its nickname "Pathetique," a word whose English equivalent has acquired an unfortunately dismissive connotation. The French word centers the music's feeling in suffering and the sympathy it evokes. 

Friday's performance was intense and scrupulous. Yankovskaya displayed a remarkable ability to draw every pertinent detail from the orchestra. Looked at askance, perhaps, Tchaikovsky often sounds to me like someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown, even at his most inspired. Handling a vibrant interpretation of his music involves a pinpoint sensitivity to shifts of mood as well as tempo, dynamics and texture. 

Yankovskaya seemed to have that at every moment. And not only were the gestures specific and easy to relate to what I heard, they also indicated that she can convey tension and draw it from an ensemble, but can do so while staying relaxed. She didn't seem too tightly wound up in her work, but flexible enough to allow the full spectrum of the "Pathetique" to be reflected in her movements and truly projected by the ISO, which played superbly throughout.