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Music Review

Something Borrowed and Something New

Spring for Music The Toledo Symphony performing “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” at Carnegie Hall on Saturday evening.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Spring for Music, the new festival of North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, started on a relatively subdued note on Friday night with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, but caught fire on Saturday evening with the Toledo Symphony.

Not to take anything away from Orpheus and its excellent outing. Its presentation of “The New Brandenburgs” — commissioned works, each about 20 minutes long and somehow reflecting on a Bach “Brandenburg” Concerto, by six composers — was altogether admirable.

Audiences that have come to take Orpheus’s polished performances for granted should perhaps be reminded what a difficult achievement it is for a sizable group to prepare and deliver sophisticated interpretations without the service of a conductor: in this case more than two hours’ worth of new, often tricky music. (The finale of Paul Moravec’s “Brandenburg Gate” opens with a pointillistic bandying of notes in meters alternating quickly between 2/4 and 3/8, with rhythmic triplets thrown in.)

Being taken for granted was undoubtedly part of the problem. It was too easy for New York concertgoers to assume that this was just another night of Orpheus in Carnegie Hall, where it appears regularly. But this was different. The purpose of the festival is to encourage and reward inventive programming, and to encourage audiences to turn out for it, with inexpensive seating. (Most tickets are $25; a few, $15.)

The seven orchestras participating in the festival were chosen on the strength of the programs they proposed. (Orpheus having replaced the Atlanta Symphony, which had to withdraw for financial reasons.) And in the end some 1,200 people turned out for Orpheus, a respectable showing for a concert of entirely new music.

It is probably inevitable, when imagination and risk are the main criteria, that some programs that look good on paper will work less well in actuality. This, alas, was one of them.

In introductory remarks from the stage David Hyde Pierce described the works here (by Aaron Jay Kernis, Melinda Wagner, Peter Maxwell Davies, Christopher Theofanidis, Stephen Hartke and Mr. Moravec) as dialogues: between past and present, between Bach and living composers. And each would probably have benefited from being juxtaposed with its Bach counterpart, as the works were when they were new.

But every composer takes off from Bach in a different direction, perhaps adopting the same instrumentation, the same overall contour or the same spirit; perhaps none of the above. And what resulted when they were all put together here for the first time was less a dialogue than a colloquy with everyone speaking a different language. It made for a fascinating experiment but not a completely satisfying concert.

The Toledo Symphony, on the other hand, stormed Carnegie, with 1,400 Ohio citizens in tow (in an audience of more than 2,000), and its program, dwelling on the plight of the individual in an oppressive society, proved a masterstroke. It opened with Shostakovich’s slightly eccentric Symphony No. 6, written in 1939, after a serious strain in the composer’s relations with the Soviet regime.

Stefan Sanderling — the orchestra’s principal conductor, who described a personal relationship with the work in the program notes — conducted a brilliant performance. The orchestra may not always have shown the overall sheen of its more famous neighbors in Ohio, and the performance was not flawless, with an occasional false entrance or loose attack. But the playing pondered deeply or surged with energy, as appropriate to the moment, and on this occasion the orchestra fully measured up to high Carnegie standards.

“Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” — the Tom Stoppard playlet with music by André Previn, directed by Cornel Gabara — filled out the program in high style. Mr. Stoppard toys with levels of reality, delusion and deception. The three main characters are either father, antagonist and son, or simply different manifestations of a single person, and the conceit includes an orchestra, real and imagined.

Mr. Stoppard does not bring Shostakovich directly into the picture, but Mr. Previn does, with uncanny takeoffs on the master’s music woven into more generic writing. The orchestra had less to do here than in the symphony, but it did it equally well, right down to silent miming when the music existed only in a character’s head.

In all, the evening was a genuine coup for the orchestra and its gifted conductor.

A correction was made on 
May 20, 2011

A music review on May 9 about the Spring for Music festival at Carnegie Hall, using information from the program, misstated the year in which Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6, which was played by the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, was written. It was 1939, not 1936.

How we handle corrections

Spring for Music runs through Saturday at Carnegie Hall, and all concerts are broadcast live on WQXR; (212) 247-7800; springformusic.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Something Borrowed and Something New. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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