On the evenings of February 29 and March 2, the Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä took the helm of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with a program featuring works by Henry Dorn, Sergei Prokofiev, and Jean Sibelius. The opening work, Dorn’s Transitions (2019), is a tone poem inspired by the last days of the composer’s mother’s battle with cancer. Vänskä debuted this work with the Minnesota Orchestra in 2022, and his confidence in the piece was palpable in the Atlanta Symphony’s playing. Though only eleven minutes long, its textures capture the ups and downs experienced by the family and friends of the terminally ill: dizzying, whirring passages are met by moments of quietude and delicacy, just as anxiety and relief are intertwined when sitting with a dying loved one. Percussion is employed to mimic the noises of the cancer ward. Allusion to the medieval Dies irae motif finally appears, a recognition of the inevitable outcome.
My frequent complaint about contemporary American composers is that they write with a bias towards the orchestra backbenches—woodwind, brass, and percussion. Perhaps our preoccupation with sport and war has made the nation’s ear more naturally inclined toward the marching band than the orchestra. Dorn, however, presses beyond this paradigm in several places, including a lyrical passage for solo viola and a percussive role for the piano that is tastefully subtle. Such an intimate piece should not be shocking, and Dorn’s composition reflects that understanding, successfully communicating on both the private and public levels.
Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto—completed in 1913 but largely reorchestrated in 1923 after the loss of the manuscript copy during the Russian Revolution—sets the piano’s voice ahead of the orchestra’s; indeed, at moments, the orchestral part sounds antagonistic toward the piano. For decades, its reception was troubled: the audience hissed and walked out at the premiere, and reviews were often mixed. Though its tonal shock value has worn off over the past century, the concerto still speaks a language that requires reflection. The soloist for the evening, the Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov, played the piano with the aura of an oracle deciphering this difficult work. The Woodruff Arts Center’s Symphony Hall is an acoustically challenging space, especially for a solo piano performing a concerto of this sort, but Melnikov was focused and decisive in his pianism, rarely looking up from the keys as he played notes that even the composer once confessed to finding difficult to perform and keep committed to memory.
Vänskä, in spite of his commanding presence at the podium, worked carefully as the intermediary between the soloist and the orchestra. Rarely have I seen a conductor so clearly communicate his desired outcomes, resulting in some of the best orchestral playing I have heard in a long time—and, again, in a hall that acoustically fights against its players. From the softness of the opening Andantino to the rapturous finale, it was hard not to feel taken by the work of Melnikov and the orchestra. The ovations at the end were certainly deserved, and the encore, “Poetico” from Prokofiev’s enigmatic piano suite Visions Fugitives, was an appropriate bonbon to follow this cornucopian concerto.
It is always exciting to consider the reading of a work in concert against an earlier recording of that work by the same conductor. I had heard Vänskä’s 1996 recording of Sibelius’s Third Symphony with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra several times over the years without being notably moved; yet, nearly thirty years after that recording, I found myself wondering if this was at all the same symphony, let alone the same conductor. For anyone skeptical of the romance and regionalism of Sibelius’s other symphonies, this one is worth hearing for every measure and note. Sibelius blends the symphonic voices like paints on his palette, and his creative adaptation of the Classical idiom is a masterclass on integrating tradition into a contemporary vernacular. This performance made the orchestra seemingly melt into a chamber ensemble. Vänskä is famously a communicative conductor—gesticulative, though not gratuitously so—and his action from the stand demonstrated his command of this work. Given the symbiosis of band and baton throughout the evening, it was difficult to believe that Atlanta is not Vänskä’s regular orchestra.