E-Mail This Article to a Friend Concerted efforts Garrick Ohlsson and Robert Spano, Robert Levin and Ya-Fei Chuang, Jacques Zoon and Boston Baroque, and Andrew Rangell BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony and the Brooklyn Philharmonic and former assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, put together a clever program for his return to the BSO last weekend. He took a piece that has only two events, Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round (1996) for string orchestra (originally for double string quartet with bass), a repetitive two-movement/two-mood tribute to Golijov’s Argentinian compatriot, tango master Astor Piazzolla, and followed it with a piece that has more events going on than you can shake a stick at (if, as Groucho Marx once said, you like that sort of thing), Oliver Knussen’s Symphony No. 3 (1979).

Spano waved his stick and brought both pieces to life. The Golijov, in which the strings loosely imitate Piazzolla’s bandoneon (a keyboardless accordion), deflated from manic intensity to intense calm. In Knussen’s one-movement Third Symphony, nothing stays the same for long (dynamics, tempos, textures). Spano emphasized the luminous combinations of sound-as-color: muted trumpets underscored by woodblocks; shivering trombones; two pairs of timpani; a returning "carillon" of celesta, harp, and guitar. The piece starts and ends in atmospheric quiet; what comes in between in waves mixes utter unpredictability with ineluctable musical logic. (Knussen completed the symphony five years after its due date; this time, neither the originally announced Symphony No. 4 nor its replacement, Cleveland Pictures, was ready in time.)

After these contemporary works, Spano rewarded us with old-fashioned rapture: Garrick Ohlsson in the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto, in a performance extraordinary for its freshness, its rhythmic alertness, and its stupendous but unforced mastery of every technical demand. Yet Ohlsson and the orchestra didn’t merely mow this mother down, they made it consistently alive and crackling. Ohlsson filled the meditative piano opening with insinuation, as if he were thinking (quietly) aloud. He could be playful, too. He’s a big man with astonishing power — heaping fortissimo upon fortissimo without any unnecessary dramaturgy (even in the grandest passages, his hands rarely rose more than a few inches above the keyboard). That huge orchestra couldn’t drown him out. Big tunes emerged as touching, not sappy. Even in the most gigantic climaxes, Ohlsson’s playing never lacked clarity or nuance.

Neither did the orchestra. Flutist Elizabeth Ostling shone in her quiet duets with Ohlsson. Oboist John Ferillo played with eloquent intimacy. Richard Svoboda’s bassoon solo sounded like a Russian folk song. Spano ran a tight ship; the players were with Ohlsson at every moment. And however rhapsodic the music, it never wallowed. The concert actually ended five minutes ahead of schedule.

The audience, on its collective feet, roared and roared. So America’s greatest living Chopin player obliged with an encore. "Chopin," he modestly announced — and paused for the crowd’s giggle of delight. His breathless, deliciously seductive, teasing performance of the familiar Opus 18 E-flat Waltz sounded as if he were making it up on the spot.

Ohlsson and Spano — both at the keyboard — were back on Sunday with the BSO Chamber Players. Ohlsson led off with Mozart’s dark, searching G-minor Piano Quartet, but only he did any searching; the three BSO principal string players just played the strings. Schumann’s Andante and Variations, for two pianos, two cellos, and horn, is better known in its later, two-piano form; with cellos and horn, it seems more effort than payoff. The great success was Mozart’s Sonata in D for Two Pianos. Spano is not a virtuoso on Ohlsson’s level, but both players got an obvious kick out of playing together, and Ohlsson caught both the humor (injecting a single note to complete a phrase in the second piano) and the passing, heart-stopping shadows. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the closing Clarinet Quintet.

A FREE AND PACKED Fromm Music Foundation concert at Harvard exploring "The Evolution of the Concerto and the Soloist" offered an ambitious program of soloists playing with orchestras, with tape, and with themselves. Patrice Bocquillon performed Salvatore Sciarrino’s Hermes (1984), an amplified flute solo. Or was it a duet? Sciarrino asks for two kinds of fluting — an evanescent floating sound punctuated (and punctured) by harsh, shrill, breathy shrieks. Each "voice" effects subtle changes in the other. In Mario Davidovsky’s 1971 Pulitzer-winning Synchronisms No. 6, the remarkable pianist Aleck Karis accompanied — or was accompanied by — a prismatic pre-recorded tape. Karis’s hair-trigger timing (a tape brooks no delays) was only part of the pleasure of this elegant rocket launch into musical pointillism. Giacinto Scelsi called his Anahit (1965) "a lyric poem dedicated to Venus." This violin concerto in quarter tones seemed like a 15-minute wail of sexual urgency. The sustained hum of Curtis Macomber’s violin made the queasy changes in tone vividly palpable.

But the big event of the evening was a rare performance of Elliott Carter’s enigmatic and scintillating Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961), which was first commissioned by the Fromm Foundation. Pianist Robert Levin was at the harpsichord, with his wife and former student, Ya-Fei Chuang, at the piano. Jeffrey Milarsky led both chamber orchestras until the coda, when he and Joshua Feinberg divided the conducting responsibilities, Feinberg taking charge of the piano and its orchestra.

Carter has written that he associates this piece with Lucretius’s description of cosmic creation at the beginning of De rerum natura and Alexander Pope’s parody of it in his description of Chaos at the end of The Dunciad, when "universal Darkness buries all." Seven uninterrupted movements form a kind of musical arch. An introduction in which tentative sounds gradually become pitches, a harpsichord cadenza, and a quicksilver Allegro scherzando precede the central Adagio (with its fortissimo drum beats), which is in turn followed by an even shorter and faster movement (Presto), then piano cadenzas, and a Coda in which sounds disintegrate and dissolve. I know the piece mainly through the superb Nonesuch recording with Paul Jacobs and Gilbert Kalish under Arthur Weisberg.

Carter has said that his intention was "to stimulate performers into giving vital, personal performances." Levin’s harpsichord was all glitter and sparkle — chilling, really, but dazzling, breathtaking, a dashing mechanical monster running rampant. He must have at least 12 fingers. Chuang’s piano was softer, more tender, caressing, but also louder, more heroic, full of vibrant flourishes. Carter’s startling juxtapositions, counterpointing the colors and textures of these two opposite kinds of keyboard instruments and their accompanying orchestras, and the syncopated way new movements seem to take root before the old ones end, were never more compelling. Or ravishing. Mary Ruth Ray’s expansive and moving viola solo made me hear for the first time how when single orchestral instruments leap out of the ensemble, they’re performing their own elegies. Milarsky and Feinberg walked Carter’s tightrope between hilarity and doom. It was a staggering achievement, and the sophisticated crowd of musicians, students, and lovers of contemporary music went wild.