By JAMES H. LEWIS

No music director conducts every performance of a full-season symphony orchestra. While the maestro directs every major concert during the season, the rest of the season gives audiences a chance to hear the ensemble under the baton of a different leader. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra sometimes turns to veteran leaders, such as Sir Mark Elder, late of the Hallè Symphony Orchestra; it more often turns to younger talents who, though established, may be unfamiliar to Pittsburgh audiences. In such moments, we often recognize someone from whom we will hear for many years. (I recall attending a performance of Bernstein’s “Candide” by the Eugene Symphony Orchestra three decades ago and deciding that the young conductor, Marin Alsop, was someone to be reckoned with.)

That was the case Friday evening, when American Karina Canellakis led the PSO through three selections from the classical, romantic, and modern eras. Ms. Canellakis is an American violinist turned conductor who, in her brief career, has built a formidable reputation. She serves as the principal conductor of the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the first woman to hold either position.

For this performance, she rearranged the stage, placing cellos and bass violins on stage left with the keyboards placed before the percussion section. The move was critical to the first selection, “The Kingdom of Silence” by Victoria Borisova-Ollas, a Russian-born composer who now makes her home in Sweden. The fifteen-minute piece begins with a celeste playing a series of notes that can barely be heard, joined by a glockenspiel, and slowly building to a deafening crescendo of strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion, only to fade back to the celeste and a single note held in suspense until it disappears. The audience, which is not always appreciative of modern music, roared its approval.

Following a long reconfiguration of the stage, which reduced the orchestra to strings and two horns, Maestra Canellakis returned with Israeli-American pianist Inon Barnatan to perform Ludwig Van Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 2” in B-flat. Though labeled his second piano concerto, this was the first he composed and was completed in a whirlwind of activity hours before its first performance. Though Beethoven was under the tutelage of Franz Joseph Haydn at the time, the concerto is more reminiscent of Mozart. It lies firmly in the classical era, and only in the third movement, the Rondo, do we hear hints of the romanticism for which Beethoven later became known.

Mr. Barnatan delivered the three movements with a practiced delicacy that is missing from many recordings of the piece. In the quiet passages, one almost struggled to listen, so light were his fingers on the keyboard. Ms. Canellakis conducted without a baton, the flowing motion of her hands leading the orchestra as it accompanied the pianist through the lyrical passages. The audience recognized what it had heard and brought the pair back to the stage in ovations that were more than obligatory.

The best was yet to come from Mr. Barnatan, however, whose encore was the piano transcription of “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben,” from Cantata BWV 147 by J.S. Bach, known familiarly as “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” He played with such grace and delicacy that the audience sat enraptured. Typically, one can hear a stray cough and the groan of a chair under shifting weight at the conclusion of a piece, but as the pianist finished and held his hands above the keyboard, the concert hall was completely still.

After an intermission, conductor Canellakis took up the baton again to conduct Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances.” He composed the three-part piece for the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1942, and it is the last major work he completed in America. It contains only hints of the romanticism in his symphonies and “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” seeming to adopt influences from predecessors from Paganini to Sibelius. He did borrow the “Dies Irae” of the rhapsody, and from his choral work, “All-Night Vigil.” Through the changing moods of the three movements, Ms. Canellakis brought the orchestra along, using not just her hands and arms, but her entire body to coax the sound she demanded.

She was accorded a boisterous ovation that far exceeded the obligatory applause that concludes all PSO performances. The audience seemed to sense that they had been treated to a very special talent, one they will hear from many times in the future.

Barnatan Plays Beethoven, part of the Pittsburgh Symphony’s BNY Classic series, repeats on Sunday, October 25th, at 2:30. Tickets are still available at : https://pittsburghsymphony.org/production/104553/barnatan-plays-beethoven

James H. Lewis is a former public media professional and consultant who now writes fiction. Many of his eleven novels are set in Pittsburgh, his adopted home.

Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews

Tags: Inon Barnatan, Karina Canellakis, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra