Nashville Symphony w/ Wendy Warner

8 p.m. Mar. 10-11

Jackson Hall, TPAC

For information, call 255-ARTS

In recent years, the Nashville Symphony has played like this season’s UT basketball team: Sometimes they show they can play with anybody; sometimes they just show up. The greatest disappointments have occurred with visiting soloists. Well-known people come to town, and their performances with the ensemble sound like an early rehearsal. Sometimes—as with Jessye Norman—the soloist has such charisma that the house is exalted anyway. More often—as with Isaac Stern—the soloist just does his thing and lets the orchestra go its own way.

Such has been the case this season, and as usual, the flaws have been most evident with visiting soloists. In pianist Navah Perlman’s recent appearance, soloist, orchestra, and house all just hung on until it was over. The lovely lady did not live up to her advance publicity; she was audibly out of her depth, on this evening anyway, trying to play a not very demanding piece. It was hard to tell who was out of sync with whom, but a typically generous Music City audience gave her a couple curtain calls and let her get out of town.

Paradoxically, that same evening, the orchestra sans soloist played some very demanding music with exciting mastery. These selections, by the maverick Yankee composer Charles Ives, contained a lot of rowdy, dissonant tone-clusters—note combinations that demand keener ears than the familiar thirds and sixths do. The orchestra, playing this music with evident gusto, nailed it. The performance was greeted with eager applause and a smiling, head-shaking buzz of conversation that would have tickled old Charlie himself.

It was not the first time this season the orchestra had dared to play music that few in the house had ever heard before, and played it very well. Two memorable occasions were Naxos recording sessions that may well have been given more rehearsal time than usual. But another recent concert, a tribute to Aaron Copland at the Ryman, was also quite musically done. As ears are my witness, this season the orchestra is consistently playing better than before.

This weekend’s TPAC concert will offer some more evidence. The announced program includes two familiar orchestral pieces, together with a lesser- known composition by a scarcely known composer. The familiar pieces are Tchaikovsky’s late Symphony No. 5 (the ”Waltz Symphony,“ from 1888) and an early Richard Strauss tone poem, Death and Transfiguration, also from 1888. The Symphony No. 5 elaborately utters major yearning in a minor key; it drew strong early praise from Brahms and has pleased audiences ever since. The tone poem aims to present, in rich orchestral costume, the story of an idealistic artist dying in pain because he failed to realize his dreams. He nevertheless becomes a transfigured soul after his death—Goethe and Nietzsche smile from the wings. Listeners who know the ”Also sprach Zarathustra“ music (used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey) have drunk from this cup. Listeners who heard Nashville Opera’s production last year of the Strauss opera Der Rosenkavalier know how delightfully heady that cup can be.

Both these pieces are compelling stuff when rightly realized. But the evening’s most exciting challenge requires the orchestra to play some not-well-known music with a rising young cello soloist. The music is Schelomo (Hebrew for ”Solomon“) by Ernest Bloch (d. 1959); the soloist is 26-year-old Wendy Warner, widely praised for her musicianship as well as her virtuosity. Neither composer nor soloist is a household name, but the composer should be, and the soloist almost certainly will be.

Wendy Warner has already given highly praised performances with many of the world’s finest orchestras and conductors. In this country, the orchestras have included those in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, and Philadelphia. Abroad, they have included those in London, Berlin, and Moscow. In these performances, the soloist has played a wide range of demanding repertory with conductors including Mstislav Rostropovich (himself a legendary cellist), Christoph Eschenbach, André Previn, Charles Dutoit, and Michael Tilson Thomas.

The composition she is to play with the Nashville Symphony is Bloch’s best-known work, composed in 1916. Born in Switzerland in 1880, Bloch came to the U.S. in 1916 and became an American citizen in 1924. An internationally esteemed musical educator, he held many prestigious posts. He was director of the Cleveland Institute of Music and of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. For a decade before he retired in 1952, he held a professorship in music at the University of California-Berkeley.

Patiently and steadily, he composed a solid corpus of good music. Compared with Stravinsky and Ives, Bloch is a musical conservative, though his sonorities are fresh and vital. Much of his work is nourished by the Old Testament—by what he called ”the complex, ardent, agitated soul that vibrates for me in the Bible.“ Schelomo is a powerful and passionate representation of what he meant. This composition, a meditation on the career of ancient Israel’s wisest king, builder of the great Temple, offers the Symphony a noteworthy chance to show what it can do in collaboration with an accomplished soloist.

Though called a rhapsody, Schelomo is by no means as free-form as that word typically suggests. Within a carefully crafted structural frame, changing time signatures and sudden shifts of mood give the music a fluid feel more like free verse than rhyme. And though scored for a large orchestra, the music’s transparency lets the cello’s vibrant bronze timbres show clearly through. Repeated notes, together with recurring patterns of perfect and augmented fourths, recall for some ears the ceremonial shofar sounded in synagogues on high holy days. And the cello, though given some bravura occasions, also often suggests recitation or declamation rather than blazing fire. The music builds patiently and carefully to two dramatic climaxes before ending with the cello in quiet meditation. Once heard, this contemporary imagining of the ancient king’s charismatic sensibility persists in memory.

Played well, Schelomo is strong and moving stuff. So too, in their own ways, are the Tchaikovsky and the Strauss. But because of the interplay of orchestral texture and solo cello, this rhapsody makes special demands on all the performers and offers them a chance to shine. If they don’t play well, that doesn’t mean they can’t play well. But if they do play well, as indeed they may, such playing will augur well for the orchestra—and for the orchestra’s fans.