United States Tanglewood 2025 [4] – Still, Liszt, Sibelius: Jean-Yves Thibaudet (piano), Boston Symphony Orchestra / Dima Slobodeniouk (conductor). Koussevitzky Music Shed, Lenox, 17.8.2025. (ES-S)
Still – ‘Threnody (In Memory of Jan Sibelius)’
Liszt – Piano Concerto No.2 in A major
Encore: Liszt – ‘Consolation’ No.3 in D-flat major S.172, Lento placido
Sibelius – Valse triste, Op.44/1; Symphony No.3 in C major, Op.52
Among the guest conductors who have taken over the Koussevitzky Shed’s podium this summer after music director Andris Nelsons departed for European engagements, Dima Slobodeniouk occupies a special place. He has conducted the Boston Symphony with great success every year since 2018, except for the pandemic-disrupted 2020 season, in appearances both at Tanglewood and at Symphony Hall. He continued the trend here, leading a Caroline Shaw–Tchaikovsky–Beethoven program on Friday and returning on Sunday afternoon with a concert centered around the music of Sibelius.
There was, nevertheless, an important exception: Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.2, featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet. The French pianist, known for his sometimes-flamboyant style, offered instead a reading of subtlety and poise. A longtime BSO collaborator, he approached the work less as a platform showcasing sheer virtuosity than as a study in color and transformation. From his first entry, he highlighted Liszt’s principle of thematic metamorphosis, allowing a single musical idea to resurface in guises that were by turns lyrical, heroic and playful. Thibaudet’s crisp touch and supple phrasing brought a sense of conversational give-and-take to his dialogues with winds and Blaise Déjardin’s solo cello, yet he unleashed surges of power when the score demanded it. The concerto’s shifts between bravura and introspection may sometimes sound episodic, but here they cohered in a persuasive narrative. Slobodeniouk kept the orchestra taut and alert, ensuring climaxes had weight without sacrificing transparency of texture.
A single encore, Liszt’s ‘Consolation’ No.3 from the S.172 cycle, presented a different aspect of the composer’s output – one perhaps better illustrating why he is considered a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century music. Interpreted with beautiful restraint, it provided a reflective complement to the concerto and resonated with the austere, spiritually searching style of Sibelius heard elsewhere in the program.
The concert’s introductory piece was William Grant Still’s ‘Threnody (In Memory of Jan Sibelius)’, composed in 1965 for the centenary of the Finnish composer’s birth. In just a few minutes, Still blended the stately breadth of Sibelius’s orchestral writing with sonorities reminiscent of his work on American film scores and harmonic inflections drawn from the blues. Slobodeniouk guided the BSO in a performance at once dignified and tender, allowing shimmering textures and subtle colors to emerge without exaggeration. The central funeral march moved with a firm pace, its tolling chimes and warm lower strings suggesting dignity rather than desolation. Remarkably for such a brief work, Slobodeniouk found a through-line, binding the contrasting episodes into an arc that honored both composers’ lyrical impulses.
The second half started with Sibelius’s Valse triste, written in 1903 as incidental music for his brother-in-law Arvid Järnefelt’s play Kuolema (Death). Heard apart from its theatrical setting, the work can sometimes seem like a sentimental vignette, but under Slobodeniouk’s direction it took on sharper contours. In his brief remarks, the conductor recalled its stage origins – a dying mother rising to dance with the figure of Death – and linked it to the Symbolist movement. The opening waltz theme, whispered by muted strings, had an eerie fragility, as if suspended between memory and dream. When the music swelled to its fevered climax, the Boston Symphony answered with biting intensity before the sonorities receded once again into shadows. The effect was haunting, closer to a Munch drawing than a parlor waltz, and Slobodeniouk treated it not as a decorative interlude but as a miniature drama.
Echoes of Valse triste could be heard in the second movement, Andantino con moto, of Sibelius’s Symphony No.3, whose lilting rhythms and shadowy swells suggested a ghostly waltz in kinship with the earlier work. Slobodeniouk shaped the soundscape with supple pacing, the Boston Symphony’s strings giving the main theme a hushed delicacy while winds supplied fleeting, elusive colors.
The opening Allegro moderato, by contrast, displayed the symphony’s new direction: tauter lines, leaner writing and a classical clarity that seemed to cast off the late-Romantic expansiveness of the Symphony No.2 with deliberate purpose. Slobodeniouk himself had emphasized this contrast in his remarks, and his interpretation underlined it: he kept the flow buoyant, the dance-like energy coursing through the strings while the brass and woodwinds added cleanly etched accents.
In the finale, marked Moderato – Allegro (ma non tanto), the conductor highlighted its cumulative architecture, letting the fragments of thematic material gradually coalesce into a hymn-like apotheosis. The ensemble played with burnished sonority yet never lost the transparency that had marked the performance throughout. It was a reading of lean strength and lucid balance, affirming Slobodeniouk’s deep affinity for Sibelius, the towering musical figure of his adopted country.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: Jean-Yves Thibaudet with Dima Slobodeniouk leading the BSO © Hilary Scott