Demons, Drama & Dance: The BSO with Marin Alsop, conductor & Jean-Yves Thibaudet, pianist

Three aspects of musical virtuosity were on display last night at Strathmore Music Center - compositional, instrumental, and orchestral - as Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet performed a very lively program entitled Demons, Drama, & Dance. Featuring composer Michael Daugherty's tour de force "Red Cape Tango" from the Metropolis Symphony along with the Mr. Thibaudet's pianistic wizardry in Liszt's Totentanz in the first half, the program worked its way backward in time in exploring the musical theme Dies Irae to the ground-breaking orchestral behemoth Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.

For those who were unable to attend the pre-show lecture or get a chance to read Janet Bedell's excellent program notes, Maestra Alsop provided all of the overview needed with prefatory comments from the podium while conducting snippets from the score. The Dies Irae (Days of Wrath) - a Gregorian chant punctuated by bells - was memorialized in Symphonie fantastique, but I was unaware of the extent to which it was mined in Liszt's work and the later Daugherty movement.

"The Red Cape Tango" - the Metropolis Symphony is Daugherty's take on the Superman Myth - depicts the superhero's death struggle with Doomsday. The piece has a postmodernist flavor, combining many disparate musical idioms. It started out with a call of horns and chiming of bells, rolling to a rhythmic flick of castanets and a flourish of violins, highlighted by an excellent solo from concertmaster Jonathan Carney; the score seemed to suggest a stylized squaring off of the adversaries which mounted in intensity and shifted in momentum, with the diverse layering in orchestration - right up to the electrifying BAM, ZAM, POW finale. Ms. Alsop pulled the best out the musicians, individually or in tutti passages, throwing herself into the performance - here and throughout the night - with telling effects; the orchestra matched her enthusiasm note by note, beat by beat.

Mr. Thibaudet next arrived to perform his own dance with death real-time with Listz's Totentanz. Wearing his trademarked designer tux, but employing a different Steinway & Sons piano in an effort, probably, to evoke a bigger sound, the soloist was all business as he sat down to confront the mighty score. While the melody and theme sounded like a transparent lifting from Berlioz, the piano part for Totentanz is clearly written for "the happy few" who can handle its intricacy, complexity, range, and tempo, not to mention the number of notes. Mr. Thibaudet alternately stroked and attacked the keyboard as he moved from the tender (beginning) to the intense (later) sections of the piece, employing glissandos repeatedly interspersed with rapid-fire arpeggios in a breathtaking demonstration of virtuosity - particularly in the cadenzas. The brass and percussions were effective in complementing the at times dissonant, at times frenetic pace, while the strings helped shape the intensifying mood, and the timpani emphasized it, when they weren't pausing to admire the pianist's technique in extended solo sections. In this mano-a-mano contest with the spirit of Liszt - perhaps the greatest pianist of all time in his own composition - Mr. Thibaudet secured, at the very least, a draw.

Like a first love - or any love - we can all fondly remember our initial encounter with Symphonie fantastique (mine was with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra), the progenitor of the Romantic repertoire and an Ur-tone poem. This programming standard, though a unique classic. is often maligned as "a warhorse," but with apologies to Samuel Johnson, when you've grown tired of The Symphony, you've grown tired with music, if not life. The work is ostensibly about the meeting and often rocky relationship of the composer and an Irish actress and while, yes, you can find a one-to-one correspondence of sorts between the movements and the narrative intent, once the performance begins and you are caught up in the music - all bets are off - the other side of your brain will start working and you will have forgotten everything you've been told or remembered.

What impressed me this time around was the way in which the work, despite its late movement flourishes from timpani and horns, is anchored in the string sections, and the BSO is very well endowed there. From the lilting strains of the violins, the deep tonal quality of the cellos, and strategic employment pizzicato with basses and violas, the strings set and maintained the musical table. Also noticeable was the evocative echoing of instruments - horns and woodwinds and sometimes strings - their responses, and the individual solos, certainly a prototype for a modern sound, say, of jazz. Ms. Alsop guided the orchestra clearly through the first three movements, but I thought the momentum started to lose a bit of focus in the fourth through the fifth passages - it is a big work lasting about an hour - where the cacophony and intensity sounded somewhat overemphasized. Still the eerie finale with the violins playing col legno and the E-flat clarinet along with the timpanic send-off was memorable and a fitting conclusion for a most enjoyable evening.

This concert will be repeated in Baltimore at Joseph Meyerhoff Hall on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 11/20-22. Check www.bsomusic.org for times.

Sound check: Very good, with only some uncomfortably high sound levels towards the end of Symphonie fantastique

Program notes: Excellent, the bimonthly publication Applause at Strathmore has feature articles, detailed notes, and bios from all performances and is an outstanding and free resource

Applause meter: Highly recommended, 4 hands

Runtime: About 1 hour and 55 minutes with an intermission