The torch in the harbor: 'Coming to America' is piquant theme of this weekend's ISO concerts

Rebecca Tong leads an inspired ISO program.

The European wars of the 20th century, with the rise of Nazism between them, fed immigration to the United States, sometimes of distinguished artists glad to escape and re-establish their careers. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra this weekend concentrates on three of them, adding a young countrywoman of the guest conductor, Rebecca Tong of Indonesia. 

All four can claim substantial parts of their lives in America: Eunike Tanzil is a 27-year-old resident of Los Angeles, the metropolis that earlier attracted Erich Korngold and Igor Stravinsky.

The latter shares a Russian origin with Sergei Rachmaninoff, and both were already well-known before they settled here. Korngold, a native of Austria, was a wunderkind in his homeland until forced into exile by the Nazi ascent. Here he hit his stride in Hollywood as a major film composer.

His Overture to "The Sea Hawk" opened Friday's concert. "The Sea Hawk" is an Errol Flynn swashbuckler from 1940. As ISO librarian Cynthia Stacy points out in her excellent program notes, Korngold believed in providing scores that were faithful to each film's action.  Given the fluid variety of action in Golden Age cinema, that means abrupt changes of direction and emphasis from scene to scene. After the overture's derring-do opening with gleaming brass, the first lyrical theme suggests the movement of a calm sea. The overture's climax has an aptly cinematic breadth.

As Friday's concert went on, it became clear to me that all four pieces presented themselves as collages, composed of diverse episodes. Disparate musical elements are linked together, though the juxtapositions are often unanticipated and the transitions brief, without much signaling of their comings and goings. In fine art, collage was anticipated in the cubism of Picasso and Braque, as games with perspective and objects in skewed three-dimensional space birthed a genre in which superficially unrelated objects and images could be fixed to a surface and somehow achieve unity of effect. The vogue of surrealism took readily to collage techniques of novel assemblage, as in the work of Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst.

Music being a time-dependent art, any collage resemblance is only an analogy: you can't take in a musical collage all at once, but the succession of dissimilar events can make sense, set cheek by jowl, without much adherence to conventional musical forms. And there are avant-garde possibilities when the resemblance is strenuously pursued, as well as comic potential, as in the P.D.Q. Bach Quodlibet, which skips from Mozart to Gounod to Shostakovich's setting of "Tea for Two" in the first half-minute.

The works on the ISO program are neither avant-garde nor primarily comic. I do find touches of humor in Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, the main work on the second half.  I'm also grateful for Stacy's note emphasizing that the Russian composer was responding to the stresses of war and failure to land screen contracts. Premiered just after World War II, the Symphony in Three Movements is one of the high points in Stravinsky's long drift through  neoclassicism. Influential for a time, this style of using 18th-century forms, instrumentation and tempo steadiness brought forth too much shruggable music from Stravinsky.

But Symphony in Three Movements is a masterpiece. Tong led a performance that sometimes had the ISO precise and sparkling in ensemble but challenged to the brink by shifting textures and rhythms. The music's gracefulness was deemphasized, but this performance didn't dull its appeal. It was a pleasure to hear in concert, especially the charming second movement, with a repeated winking figure in the accompaniment. Its decorative, teasing turn reminds me of how Dame Quickly salutes Falstaff (in Verdi's opera) with "Reverenza" even while she is fooling him about a romantic tryst he desires.

And if Stravinsky is mocking German goose-stepping in the third-movement march, as Stacy suggests, it can be heard as mockery that anticipates John Cleese as an English hotelier goose-stepping out of the dining room at Fawlty Towers to show his disdain for some polite German visitors to his ill-run hotel decades after the war.

Indonesian composer Eunike Tanzil

Tanzil's "Origin," barely a year old after its world premiere in Indonesia, has a collage effect in its selective, positive memories of that vast country, especially its sea-girt landscapes and its absorption of various cultural influences, from wistful flute melodies to pulse-pounding dances. About seven minutes long, the work is loaded with pictorial suggestions. 

The lengthiest piece this weekend follows the form of its genre in general, but is rich in twists and turns that perhaps makes it the least popular of Rachmaninoff's five pieces for piano and orchestra. Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor brought to the stage Vadym Kholodenko, whose career is distinguished mainly by his gold-medal victory in the 2013 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. 

Ukrainiian-born Vadym Kholodenko won the Cliburn.

The work presents a big piano melody and a chattering accompaniment to start with, and the climax of the movement has a sweeping cinematic touch that helped the piece sit well next to the Korngold overture .The reflective second movement at one point gives way to a passage especially stormy and (for this composer) rather dissonant. 

Rachmaninoff fussed over the score and revised it late in life. The music looks in both directions over the composer's career as an international piano star and composer. Its Russianness is unmistakable, but the musical influences of the New World — the program notes cite Art Tatum and George Gershwin in particular — are stamped upon the score in attractive disguises.

Kholodenko exhibited a great dynamic range, crystalline when called for, as in the bell-like sonorities high in the treble as the finale gets under way. His vigorous playing always displayed purity in its power. His captivating variety of tone reached a peak in the encore he played Friday, from Rachmaninoff's Etudes-Tableaux, op. 33, no. 3.

Less stately as well as less heart-tugging than Rachmaninoff's other concertos, the G minor suits my impression that this "Coming to America" program can substantiate parallels to visual art's  collages in music of colorful substance and geographical range.