Romance rocks BSO concert at Maine Center for the Arts

Any way you listen to Ernest Chausson’s “Poeme” for Violin and Orchestra, it’s heartbreaking. Musically, the piece is beautifully, crushingly melancholy. But also, the French composer wrote it a few years before he tragically died in a bicycle accident in 1899 at age 44, leaving the world to wonder what symphonic glories he might have created had he lived.

Bangor Symphony Orchestra violinist and concertmaster Trond Saeverud paid tribute to both histories with a warmly romantic reading of “Poeme” during the orchestra’s Sunday concert at Maine Center for the Arts. He did not embellish the performance with tortured melodrama – which one could easily do, particularly under the direction of Maestro Xiao-Lu Li, whose comfort level with the romantic idiom is high. Nor did Saeverud dive deeply into torment. His bowing was sadly expressive without being sentimental.

Saeverud was featured again in a meticulous yet charming duet with cellist Noreen Silver during a concert version of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” And here Li really let loose with the orchestra’s adrenaline. It’s unlikely that any imagination was left untouched by visions of gliding swans, twirling ballet dancers or next month’s “Nutcracker” with the Robinson Ballet Company, an annual collaboration with the BSO.

Li was right to point out the family ties between the two ballets; “Swan Lake” is the older cousin to “Nutcracker,” one of the composer’s last works. Li was right also to let the musicians power up for this performance. The effect was exciting in a nearly patriotic fashion.

The BSO honored longtime French horn player Susan Curtis, who retired this year after more than two decades with the orchestra, by dedicating Andrew Pelletier’s solo performance of Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major to her.

Pelletier is an award-winning musician and professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He is from Lewiston and, earlier in his career, sat among the BSO brass section. His homecoming marked Curtis’ farewell, although she did perform with the symphony Sunday.

Pelletier played creamily in some places, boldly in others. One could conceive a first movement with more speed than Li allowed here, but the payoff was a slower pace that allowed time to relish those notes Pelletier played richly.

Many concert-goers (including this one) missed the opening measures of Gioacchino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” because of a bumper-to-bumper tie-up en route to a UMaine hockey game that dropped the puck at the same time the BSO began. If only traffic could have moved with the same giddy-up gallop that the orchestra gave the famous Allegro movement.