Audacious BSO performance winds up Russian weekend

There’s no getting around the audacity of Sunday’s classical concert by the Bangor Symphony Orchestra at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono. The final event in a weekend of activities celebrating Russian culture, the concert had an exhausting quality. But don’t let that fool you. It was a most impressive exhaustion.

Especially since it included guest cellist Borislav Strulev, whose performance of Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, Opus 33, was so glowing and giving that he made the romantic work seem as if it were one of the greatest pieces of music ever written for cello. Strulev has one of those showman personalities that catches you a bit by surprise, particularly considering he was born in 1976. No one his age has any right being so charismatic.

Yet Strulev’s youthful charisma had an intrinsic appropriateness to it. He was flamboyant, passionate, witty and jazzy with nearly teen-age vigor. He moved in large gestures and so did his music. Then he found petite notes and tickled away at them. The real wallop, though, was that he was so caught in the moment that he never lowered his heels to the floor. Indeed, the floor seemed quite delighted to disappear deferentially below him. And the cat-and-mouse game he had going with the orchestra gave this darling piece a novel richness.

That playfulness ended promptly with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 in G Minor, Op. 103, a tragic memoir to 1905, the year in which the first attempt at revolution was brutally suppressed. There is a certain wrenching in this piece, which has both the carnivalesque twisting of a bad dream and the shocking chaos of a battlefield. Always, there is a sense of some viral force spreading throughout the body, especially during the vast slow expanses of sound.

Music director Christopher Zimmerman made a huge commitment when he took on this work, which lasted more than an hour, and the result was a taut, compelling performance with the subtlety of a bomb. Every instrument came out for this show of force, and more than 80 musicians were onstage. From the tiniest toot on the piccolo to the brazen crashes of the cymbal and the underlying hum of the harps, the orchestra was unflappably disturbing and chilling.

The champions for this long half of the program were the strings, with a particular sharpness on the part of the viola section. They never flagged in their focus and intensity. Performances by the percussion section were also stellar, and the brass players were up against some hard tasks which they largely handled with finesse. A favorite in this presentation was Michelle Vigneau, who played elegantly in a solo piece for the English horn.

The concert opened with a rollicking version of Mikhail Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla: Overture — and there’s really no other way to play this piece. It has been said that, at the opening of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, Tchaikovsky ran inside and played this small, yet hardy, orchestral piece by heart on the piano to ensure it was the first music to be heard in the new building. It’s safe to say the BSO gave the work its requisite sparkle. Again, those racy string players captured the limelight.