Really terrific concert last night at Davies, David Robertson conducting Dukas’s The Sorceror’s Apprentice and Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto and First Symphony, the Classical, along with the first public performance ever of a new piece, Uriah: The Man the King Wanted Dead, by a young Israeli composer named Avner Dorman. Tickets had been discounted so I went online the night before and bought the pair of seats in the very center of the very last row of the last balcony, Dave’s favorite place to sit. (In most concert halls, Davies included, the sound is best in the back of the last balcony.)

Dave and I had just heard MTT conduct The Sorceror’s Apprentice maybe six months ago, but it’s always a treat to hear it — there’s always a difference between hearing a piece on a recording and hearing it live, but with Sorceror it seems almost like hearing a different piece that happens to use the same melodies. And it was interesting to hear it played by the same orchestra but under a different conductor with a different take on the piece. Both were delightful in different ways; it was brighter and brisker and more of a showpiece under MTT, and there was more irony and earthy humor under Robertson. At times Robertson’s tempi seemed plodding compared to what I’m used to hearing, but the very choice of a plodding tempo in those places was itself a wonderful bit of scene painting and made me chuckle more than once.

I don’t really know the violin concerto, but Dave tells me it’s usually performed as a fiery, virtuoso showpiece (which I expect is exactly how Prokofiev intended it). Under Robertson, though, it sounded light as chamber music or a baroque concerto. Leonidas Kavakos was the soloist, and his playing was terrific, graceful and understated, never calling attention to his technique or the difficulty of the music. The whole thing was irresistible. Dave’s heard the piece many times and he told me during the intermission that he’d never heard it played that way, and that he liked Robertson because he always seemed to have a fresh take on even a familiar piece and could make you think about it in a new way. (Little did we realize there was one more such, and a jaw-dropper at that, to come.)

After the intermission came Uriah, a tone poem in five sections. I’m not musical enough to venture much of an opinion after a single listening, but I liked it and would like to hear it again sometime. The first movement is powerful and fierce, representing (according to the composer’s short talk before the piece, assuming I’m remembering it correctly) God’s anger at King David, who arranged for Uriah to be abandoned by his own men in battle so that David could marry Uriah’s beautiful wife; the second movement is slower and somewhat melancholy, representing Uriah’s thoughts and feelings on the morning of the coming battle; the third is a “presto barbaro” representing the battle and ending with Uriah’s death; the fourth is gentle and lyrical and represents the angels whom the composer hopes attended Uriah and guided him into heaven (2 Samuel is silent on this point, however); the final movement is a short epilogue repeating themes from the first movement.

Last was the Classical Symphony, which is usually played as a relentless snarkfest of mockery, and which I usually find pretty tiresome — a very clever music student’s prank, sure, and lots of fun the first two or three times I heard it, but since then I have felt like, OK, I get the point already and now I’d rather hear something else — like maybe one of the symphonies by Haydn or Mozart that Prokofiev was parodying, which stand up to repeated listening many times better than the Classical, but which nevertheless get programmed far, far less often. (I am a great lover of Prokofiev’s music, by the way, including all his other symphonies. It’s just his first one I don’t like all that much. But that’s the one that gets performed over and over and over again.)

Well, Robertson played the Classical as though it were one of those symphonies by Haydn or Mozart — the texture was light and transparent, the tempi were lively without being frenetic, the wit didn’t sound sneering, the lyrical sections were allowed to be sincerely and unsnarkily lyrical, and I heard all kinds of subtleties in the music I’d never heard before. Wow. It was wonderful and astonishing and ear-opening and probably the complete opposite of what Prokofiev meant it to sound like. I said to Dave afterward that I thought we’d just heard the first performance of the Classical Symphony ever to be informed by period performance style.

Last Thursday Dave and I went to hear the Berkeley Symphony’s season opener, a performance of not just one but two violin concertos, the Beethoven and the John Adams, both played by violinist and superhuman Jennifer Koh. In both works the violinist is kept very, very busy, and just to play the solo parts of both adequately in a single evening, without your bowing arm falling off, would be an amazing enough accomplishment. But Ms. Koh also played them both dazzlingly well, with all sorts of wit, insight, power, and precision. Dave and I have been hearing the Beethoven violin concerto rather a lot lately, including a really terrific performance with Hilary Hahn as soloist that was broadcast from the BBC proms; and still I heard details and nuances in Ms. Koh’s performance that I don’t remember noticing before. Really wonderful.

I had not heard the John Adams violin concerto before. I’m not sure how much I like it; it’ll probably take me a few hearings before I know. It’s certainly striking and atmospheric music, but it didn’t feel to me like it moved or developed much. However, I’m not always a good listener and sometimes it takes me a while to start hearing things in a piece of music that’s new to me, so I have to grant the possibility that I just haven’t gotten this one yet. In any case, Ms. Koh played it with great spirit and precision and, at times, physical vigor. I figure after a double bill like this one, she gets to skip the gym for a week.

This is Joana Carneiro’s second year as conductor and music director, and I thought the orchestra was sounding very polished, much more so than it has in the past; as exciting as the performances usually were when Kent Nagano was conducting, there was always a bit of scrappiness in the playing. Not so this time. Dave and I went to only one of their concerts last year, and that was early in the season, so this is the first time we’ve heard the orchestra in about a year; under Ms. Carneiro they’ve come a long way in a short time.

Well over a hundred violists stood elbow to elbow on the stage, in the aisles, and all around the hall at Freight & Salvage earlier tonight, playing the solo part of the Telemann viola concerto, while four violists seated in the center of the stage played a much reduced version of the orchestral parts, in a stab at the world record for number of violas playing together.

The result was flip-flopped from the usual concerto experience, and deliciously silly: The solo part was big and lush and loud, and the orchestral part was delicate and concertante-like. The right to play the cadenza in the third movement was one of the many prizes drawn in the raffle earlier in the program.

The all-viola program started with a prelude for solo viola by Bach (really wonderfully played, but there was no program given out and I don’t remember the name of the violist), followed by a duet, a trio, a quartet, a quintet, and an octet, all actually written for viola ensembles, and finally the Telemann concerto. A completely daffy idea for a concert but a lot of fun.

I’ve listened to all six Brandenburgs from the BBC Proms concert now. They’re terrific — as they’re live recordings, there are a few bloopers here and there, but they’re full of life, very joyous. In a couple of cases, the performance caused me to think about the music in a new way, and how often does a performance of such a familiar work manage to do that?

I’d blogged before that #1 had the most raucous horns I can remember hearing in the piece, and I found it very fresh and exciting. The other performance that I thought was particularly ear-opening was #3. Two reasons. First, #3 is the Brandenburg with the empty middle movement. Bach wrote only two slow chords, a cadence, for the movement. He gave no explanation, but the usual assumption is that he intended that one of the soloists would play a cadenza here, and that the two chords were what the orchestra would come in with to close off the movement and get you into the right key for the final movement. The violin cadenza here is terrific and more substantial that what I’ve generally heard done in this slot.

Then in the last movement, I’ve never heard the cross-rhythms emphasized so strongly. The whole movement is in 12/8, but there’s a certain figure that keeps recurring, that has a tendency to sound like it’s in 6/4. Then near the end of the movement Bach adds a tie to a couple of the notes in the figure, which eliminates one of the stronger beats in the middle and just about forces the figure to be heard in 6/4. In most performances I’ve heard, this is smoothed out; either the pulse is kept in 12/8 throughout or when the cross-rhythms occur they’re done somewhat subtly; in this performance, though, they let the cross-rhythms have a lot of weight, so that some instruments are very definitely playing in a strong 6/4 while others are playing in 12/8. And not just in the measure with the explicit syncopation but to a lesser degree in all the measures where the figure appears. It gives the movement a real kick that I can’t recall ever hearing it have before.

Dave let me copy his podcast of two concerts from the 2010 BBC Proms, the six Brandenburg Concertos conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner and played by the English Baroque Soloists. They’re not performed in numerical order, but in the order 1-6-4-3-5-2. I’ve listened to the first two so far (that is, to numbers 1 and 6).

The performance of number 6 is delightful, but the performance of number 1 is a standout, with very raucous horns. Easily the rowdiest horns I’ve ever heard in a recording or performance of this piece! They even make several flubs along the way (easy to do with period horns) and I don’t care much, I love them. No attempt at all to make the horns blend smoothly with the rest of the orchestra, which is exactly as I feel it should be for this piece. I couldn’t say why, but it just feels perfectly right to me this way. In an interview on the podcast, Gardiner calls them “party crashers” — yes! yes! yes!

Number 1 is my favorite of the six, and those horns are the main reason why. The very first recording I ever listened to of a performance of anything played on period instruments was a recording of the six Brandenburgs issued back in the 1980s by the Smithsonian Institution. I was in college and still finding my way around classical music. I’d heard the B’s by that time — they got played a lot on the radio (remember classical music radio stations?), and I think I must have owned a recording or two. I liked them okay. I thought of them as very smooth, suave, graceful, polite pieces.

I was buying vinyl from the Smithsonian already because they had a neat series of historical recordings of American musical. For some reason, I don’t remember why, the catalog blurb for the recording of the B’s intrigued me and I added it to an order of something else.

Well, I started with number 1, of course, and it just blew me away. There was the sheer novelty of the sound of the period instruments, first of all. But more than that, it was no longer a particularly polite piece of music. The first movement was taken at a faster tempo than I’d ever heard it, breathlessly zippy and incredibly full of joy and life. And those squonking horns cut through the texture in the most excitingly audacious way. I’d heard the piece before but I’d never heard anything the least bit like this.

I played that recording, and especially the first concerto, over and over again. That was the start of my love of period instrument performances, and a quarter of a century later I’m still at it.

I have a feeling I’m going to be listening to this performance of number 1 quite a few times, too.

I’ve been on a Richard Strauss listening binge the last few weeks, including spending some quality time listening to Tod und Verklärung, which I hardly know at all, and Don Quixote, which I don’t know well enough. Dave provided me with several recordings I hadn’t heard before, including a wonderful, wonderful recording of Don Quixote with Jacqueline du Pré on cello. (DQ is loosely in the form of a theme and twelve variations, and the main theme, representing DQ himself, is on a solo cello; some of the variations also use the solo cello to portray him. So, while the cellist is not exactly a featured soloist in the manner of a concerto, he or she gets a lot of opportunity to stand out.) Du Pré poured an astonishing amount of depth of emotion and thought into her solo passages. No other recording I’ve heard so far comes anywhere near it in that regard.

Okay, maybe that was a little too snarky. But I think Gordon Getty’s song cycle White Election would be a sharper and more effective piece if it were half the length. There didn’t seem to me to be enough going on in either the words or the music to justify a song cycle that’s long enough to include an intermission. I have to admit that I’m not much of a lover of Dickinson’s poetry, though. After a while it sounds to me like they all begin, “How sweet to never live your life!”

Lisa Delan sang very beautifully but with so-so diction and without finding a way to make the 32 songs into some kind of progression; they came across as a long string of pleasant but mostly rather similar songs. Mikhail Pletnev was at the piano, and it was fun to see him in action relatively close up.

I crept into a yellow church
And folded there my wings
And heard, as blossom hears the day,
A cycle spun from songs.

The poems were by Dickinson
And one by one they came
Till two and thirty stood in line,
Their meters all the same,

Until the sound of anapest
And dactyl seemed as far
As ancient lute or mandolin
Played on a distant shore.

Mere two and thirty daffodils
Could never be enough.
With verses, though, by Dickinson,
They might have stopped at five.