Graced by a Lotus

The Berkeley Symphony's Zellerbach Hall season opened last Thursday with Kent Nagano, departing music director, at the helm for his only performance with the full orchestra this year. Nagano's commitment this season is limited to this performance and work with the new Berkeley Akademie chamber/training ensemble, and much of this season’s interest will be in seeing what a series of auditioning guest conductors can do with the orchestra. Although Nagano is transitioning out at a rapid pace, he joined his players for his familiar but effective approach to programming and did it well, mixing a contemporary work, a lesser-known piece by a major composer, and some standard repertory to round things out. The program's centerpiece was Toshio Hosokawa’s Lotus under the moonlight, a 2006 piano concerto performed with the work’s dedicatee, Momo Kodama, as soloist. This was its U.S. premiere. Written as an homage to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488, the work opens on the same solitary F sharp as the chillingly beautiful middle movement of the Mozart, and grows into an absorbing, moving work in its own right. From the stillness of its repeated initial pitch, the pianist’s meditative opening expanded organically, in tandem with the orchestra, into a sound world filled with dense and rich harmonies recalling Messiaen, at times. Kodoma’s performance, both commanding and emotionally affecting, led her through an expanding series of flourishes and a heavy use of the piano’s lowest register amid trills and harmonics in the ensemble's string section, played with a quiet focus. Building busily to a climax with the full orchestra, holding a long, still chord, then repeating the process, the work ended with a fugitive and evocative quote from the Mozart before gently dying out.

In Tune With the Composer

Kodoma’s performance was one of architectural rightness and total commitment, and both soloist and orchestra were deeply in tune with Hosokawa’s work, in which a fine attention to the importance of every note and gesture made both sound and silence beautiful. The orchestra turned to Schubert’s “Great” C Major Symphony to fill the program’s second half. One of Nagano’s greatest strengths has always been his sure sense of pacing, and a strong performance of the work was animated by his ability to let the music breathe and grow at just the rate it needed. A firm but patient approach to tempo and shape helped to create a rock-solid sense of the symphony’s unfolding structure throughout, and in this framework the music’s many melodic and harmonic surprises came across with freshness and vibrancy. There was fine playing across all sections, with some standouts being oboist Deborah Shidler’s solo passages to open the Andante con moto second movement, and the cello section’s noble playing later in the same movement. The program began with Mozart’s Symphony No. 26, in E-flat Major, K. 184. At first it seemed like this brief early work would be an inauspicious prelude to the Hosokawa, with an opening movement oddly lacking in shape and rhythmic precision, feeling too much like a warm-up. The orchestra’s recovery was swift, though, with a beautifully shaped second movement that suggested the dark dramatic power of many later Mozart works, and a vibrant concluding Allegro.