On the face of it, an amateur orchestra like the Longwood Symphony (which is composed primarily of health-care professionals) shouldn’t be trying to play a virtuoso work like Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. That goes double when the Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed the piece just a month earlier in one of departing artistic director Seiji Ozawa’s farewell concerts. And yet a sharp conductor — say, Boston Ballet music director Jonathan McPhee — can do wonders with Berlioz’s opium-dream vision of a young man deceived by his beloved, whose idée fixe swirls through the passion of first sight (think Romeo and Juliet), waltzing in a crowded ballroom, betrayal in the country, the march (after murder?) to the scaffold, and a witches’ raucous round dance in Hell. The piece transcends program music: Berlioz’s tart inner strings and creamy woodwinds and erotically glistening brass combined with off-the-beat phrasing that gives ambivalence and weight to our hero’s emotional insecurity — all this makes the program redundant.
At Jordan Hall a week ago Saturday, the vision was in place, and the playing was heroic if not impeccable. There was a nice yearning hesitation to the opening phrase, and if thereafter McPhee’s reading was fleeter and more classical than I’d have liked, it’s only fair to add that my recorded benchmark, Otto Klemperer, would doubtless have struck Berlioz as unacceptably romantic. Attacks were tentative (the strings had some difficulty getting into the rhythm of the first-movement coda); there was some choppy phrasing from the cor anglais at the beginning of the Scène aux champs (but a nice rustic tone, and the phrasing improved thereafter), a minor mishap in the Nuit du sabbat E-flat clarinet, and the odd false entrance. No miracles but a creditable performance given the orchestra’s limited rehearsal schedule. There were points — notably the climaxes in the Scène aux champs — where the erotic tension seemed to elude McPhee, but against that there was the observance of Berlioz’s religiosamente marking at the end of the first movement (i.e., better balance than in any of the 50-odd performances I’ve heard), the unusually limpid violins in the Bal movement, more great brass balancing plus some snazzy bassoon slaloming in the Marche au supplice, and a refreshing refusal to sprint through the climaxes of Bal and Sabbat that underlined Berlioz’s sensuous architecture. Overall a performance worth the price of a BSO ticket.
The first half of the program comprised McPhee’s own Fantasy for Two Pianos and Orchestra and Mozart’s Double Piano Concerto in E-flat, both with the husband-and-wife team of Randall Hodgkinson and Leslie Amper. A single hearing of the short (seven or eight minutes) Fantasy was not enough for this new-music-challenged critic, but it would be worth hearing again. The Mozart got some handsomely transparent playing from the orchestra but could have used a touch more poetry from the soloists — I’d like to hear Hodgkinson get in touch with his Florestan side.
