Review: Berlin Philharmonic Soars in American Tour

It is not surprising that the Berlin Philharmonic is chosen as the avatar of all orchestras in the current hit film "Tar." In it, Cate Blanchett plays the title character – a musical genius who at an astonishing young age, has led the leading U.S. orchestras, including Boston, but has settled in Berlin. Given its reputation, its high place in the hierarchy of world orchestras is rarely questioned, and the opportunity to hear it outside its home city is one not to be missed.

Such it was this past Sunday night when the orchestra, under its youthful director Kirill Petrenko, visited Boston's Symphony Hall – about as ideal a venue to hear them. The concert was sponsored by the Celebrity Series of Boston. Follow the link to see the group's upcoming events.

It was an occasion if only to watch Petrenko guide his esteemed ensemble with his warm and confident hand. Like great conductors before him, Petrenko shaped the evening's three pieces with sharp precision, pinpointing orchestra members with a laser-like intensity while happily immersed in their virtuosity as expressed by his often joyful expression.

The current tour brings the orchestra to just a handful cities with two programs, only one of which was heard in Boston, It's too bad that the second program, consisting of one work, Gustav Mahler's rarely heard Symphony No. 7, wasn't also offered as it was in the orchestra's recent Carnegie Hall performances. The three works heard, nonetheless, covered three centuries of music and displayed the orchestra's breadth of the repertory. The program opened with Andrew Norman's "Unstuck," a title that refers to the moment when the composer came out of a writer's block that left him stymied when writing the work. In 2008, he explained in the program, he was stuck with some musical fragments that weren't congealing into something meaningful; then he came upon a passage in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" that released him. "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time," was the sentence that spoke to him, and he was able to complete the work, which exploded with vibrant mood swings that went from quietude to blasting orchestral passages in which the dynamic orchestration were played with amazing clarity.

Petrenko was joined with the orchestra's concertmaster, the tall, handsome Noah Bendix-Balgley, for Mozart's "First Violin Concerto," a gentle work that allowed the soloist full sway to command. Petrenko supplied the warm, quiet accompaniment to Bendix-Balgley's virtuoso performance that was a marvel to watch. The Pittsburgh-born Bendix-Balgley is also an expert in klezmer music, which he played in his two brief encores, the first a poignant tune that sang with sadness, while the second literally danced, enhanced by his vocal cues. Given the orchestra's long and conflicted history, the moment of embracing Jewish culture was especially meaningful.

Post-intermission, Petrenko led a work, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Symphony in F sharp, that he's been championing since becoming the orchestra's musical director in 2019 . It was thrilling to hear such a full-bodied work – a forceful hiccup of mid-century symphonic styles – played with such force and color, especially in the two middle movements in which the sheen of Korngold's orchestration was beautifully executed. Korngold career has suffered from cultural snobbery: a child prodigy while growing up in Vienna (he impressed Mahler when he met him as a boy), he ended up in Hollywood in the mid-1930s to escape the Nazis. It was a serendipitous move – working within the studio systems, he is an instrumental figure in the development of the symphonic film score. Korngold wasn't the only composer shaping the sound of movies at the time, but he had the most influence, given his prestigious roots and abundant musical imagination – which is on well display in the Symphony. It was written late in his career (1952, first heard in 1954) and wasn't well received. Since then it has languished, though there have been a number of recordings in the past few years.

The nearly hour-long work composed for a Mahler-sized orchestra is redolent of orchestral works of Dimitri Shostakovich and Aaron Copland, and also Korngold himself as he incorporated a theme from his film "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex," as well as the popular World War I song "Over There." That it was dedicated to Franklin Roosevelt points to the composer's great love for his adopted nation. Hearing the work, it is apparent the debt owed Korngold by contemporary film composers, specifically John Williams, who throughout his career showed the influence of Korngold in his use of music for dramatic effects and his orchestrations. The long ovation that greeted the beaming Petrenko and his orchestra was well-deserved.