United States Tanglewood 2025 [3] – Brahms, R. Schumann, Tchaikovsky: Augustin Hadelich (violin), Boston Symphony Orchestra / Anna Handler (conductor). Koussevitzky Music Shed, Lenox, 16.8.2025. (ES-S)
Brahms – Tragic Overture, Op.81
R. Schumann – Symphony No.4 in D minor, Op.120
Tchaikovsky – Violin Concerto in D, Op.35
German-Colombian conductor Anna Handler, who was appointed assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2024, made a memorable debut leading the orchestra on Saturday at Tanglewood. A Juilliard graduate and former Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she impressed in a program of Romantic works familiar enough to audiences that a conductor feels challenged to offer fresh perspectives. This was barely an issue for Handler. She proved her mettle from the start, employing a reduced-size orchestra throughout the evening – just four double basses and five to six cellos. This choice lent the performances a chamber-like clarity and intimacy, and it allowed woodwinds and brass to emerge with unusual vividness.
The concert opened with Brahms’s Tragic Overture, its slashing introductory chords delivered with real bite and immediately setting a tone of urgency. Handler approached the score not as a ceremonial curtain-raiser but as a tightly argued symphonic statement, drawing attention to its motivic economy and restless energy. Rather than exaggerating its weight, she let shifting colors and dynamics trace a darkly dramatic narrative. Textures remained unusually transparent. The Boston Symphony responded with full-bodied sonorities and sharp contrasts: the brass added flashes of steel without overpowering, and the strings, driven by nervous energy, never turned heavy.
Brahms often looked to Robert Schumann as well as to Beethoven as models in his own symphonic writing. There is a kinship between the Tragic Overture and Schumann’s Fourth Symphony – in the way coherence is woven out of economy, binding drama to motivic logic – that Handler brought forward in the juxtaposition of the two scores.
The 1841 version of the symphony was criticized as episodic and, a decade later, Schumann reworked it into the 1851 version heard at Tanglewood – a score where themes return in transformed guises and all four movements follow without pause. Brahms admired this approach, though he favored the leaner 1841 version and ensured its publication late in life, despite Clara Schumann’s objections.
Handler shaped the symphony as a single, unbroken span, pacing transitions so that each movement seemed to grow naturally out of the previous one, and bringing out Schumann’s idiosyncratic, unconventional sense of form – his tendency to make the familiar appear strange. She handled the mood shifts – less abrupt than in Schumann’s piano music – such as a sudden brass outburst in the first movement, with both sensitivity and precision. The Romanze, taken at a slightly slower pace than Schumann’s ziemlich langsam (fairly slow) indication would suggest, unfolded with warmth, framed by a plaintive oboe–cello dialogue and centered on Alexander Velinzon’s delicately shaped violin solo. The Scherzo snapped with rhythmic edge, its Trio offering contrast in the winds’ lighter timbres before plunging back into the urgent main section. In the finale, burnished brass chorales and agile string figuration heightened the cumulative force of the movement’s music, propelling the work toward a blazing conclusion. The ensemble balanced weight with clarity, and with the leaner forces that Handler employed, Schumann’s scoring – once dismissed as overly dense – revealed a luminous architecture.
After the intermission came the main draw for many in the audience: Augustin Hadelich in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. From his first notes, it was clear that this would not be a performance of bravura for its own sake. The opening movement unfolded with a lyrical ease, Hadelich’s silvery tone and precise articulation turning even the most pyrotechnics-infused passages into graceful dialogues with the winds. His cadenza was unhurried yet full of inner drive, each double-stop and arpeggio carrying the music forward rather than pausing for effect. Handler provided a supportive, well-calibrated orchestral backdrop – never intrusive and usually responsive to the soloist’s rubato and dynamic shading.
The Canzonetta emerged with hushed intimacy, Hadelich’s phrasing gently supported by the muted strings’ dusky warmth. The exchanges with Mark McEwen on clarinet and Elizabeth Klein on flute suggested a restrained dialogue rather than operatic drama. In contrast, the Finale bristled with rhythmic vitality, its main theme snapping with dance-like energy, but Hadelich resisted the temptation to push the tempo into breathless territory. Even in his fleetest passages, the passagework gleamed with clarity, and the Molto meno mosso offered a brief oasis of lyricism before the rousing close.
For an encore, Hadelich played his own arrangement of Howdy Forrester’s ‘Wild Fiddler’s Rag’, tossed off with sparkle and technical ingenuity. Touched with an unmistakable American accent, it provided a disarming contrast to Tchaikovsky and sent the audience out smiling.
Overall, Anna Handler’s debut made a strong impression: a conductor with an ear for balance and architecture, particularly adept at shaping the difficult transitional passages in both Schumann and Tchaikovsky. Appointed Kapellmeister of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and continuing her tenure with the Boston Symphony, she is in the early stages of a career well worth following.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: Anna Handler conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood © Hilary Scott