BSO plays forcefully in concert> Energy drives music at MCA performance

The Bangor Symphony Orchestra’s concert Sunday at the Maine Center for the Arts was strenuous and insistent. It demanded attention. It started big and just got bigger. It was moody, gutsy and oddly serendipitous. From the outset of Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic’s “Uneven Souls,” a ferocious percussion piece written in 1992, this concert was clearly going to have unusual rhythms — both musically and emotionally.

Zivkovic’s work is scrupulously written for solo marimba, played gracefully by Stuart Marrs of the University of Maine, as well as intrepid percussionists Nancy Rowe Laite, Cindy Brooks-Bastide and Dave Halvorson on a curiosity shop of percussion instruments. The sounds, which also included eerie chants from UM’s Maine Steiners, were simultaneously lulling and agitating, fascinating and upsetting.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor was the major work of the afternoon, and it, too, packs a disarming punch with its lucidity of vision and brilliant subversion. The orchestra kept magnificently focused on this dragon, and caught the sadness, humor and terror of the themes. Conductor Christopher Zimmerman took a wham-bam approach to the forward motion of this massive statement that the composer called “a Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to justified criticism.” It’s unlikely that many people heard the crashing final rumble without getting goose bumps.

Shostakovich was, after all, saving his life and his art with the 5th, first performed in 1937 at the height of the Stalin purge. To portray it as anything other than indestructible and universal is misleading and misinformed. In that way, there was nothing detached about Zimmerman’s choices musically. He drove this symphony, and drove it hard.

No one would ever claim that Franz Liszt’s music should be driven in the same over-the-top way, but his Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major needed more panache than guest artist William Black gave on piano. Some may have found Black’s performance tender and gentle. For others, however, it was simply too yielding. Nevertheless, the orchestra and especially clarinetist Beth Wiemann and the woodwinds were vivid and full.

The concert was dedicated to Richard Pasvogel, the BSO’s principal keyboardist, who, at 41, died unexpectedly earlier this month. As Zimmerman pointed out, the program aptly suited Pasvogel’s interests in percussion, piano, and Shostakovich. Following tradition, the orchestra expanded the program and poignance with the “Nimrod” section of Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations. It was a melancholy and mighty farewell, one of great beauty, appreciation and sorrow.