Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki, at 40 already music director of the great Ensemble Intercontemporain, became the sixth woman to lead the BSO. So within two weeks of assistant conductor Shi-Yeon Sung's debut, this season also became the BSO's first with two women conducting. Mälkki opened with Le tombeau de Couperin, Ravel's tribute to the great Baroque French composer and to the history of French music. Tender and zippy, her phrasing had the rhythmic snap of a mousetrap in a piece that usually sounds like melting ice cream. Principal oboist John Ferrillo played the opening spinning music as if he couldn't resist telling a fabulous tale. His imaginative, insinuating work here and in two Stravinsky pieces earned him a series of ovations. (Shouldn't he have been given solo billing?)
Then, before and after intermission, two of the repertoire's sweetest suites: Stravinsky's 1922 reduction of his irresistible 1920 Pulcinella ballet (the BSO gave the suite's premiere) and Debussy's Petite suite, an 1880s piano duet charmingly orchestrated, with Debussy's encouragement, by Henri Büsset in 1907 (flutist Elizabeth Rowe here a lilting gondolier). Yuri Temirkanov, for whom Mälkki was filling in, had planned Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony, but Mälkki substituted Stravinsky's mysterious Symphony in C. He began it in Paris in 1938, composed the exquisite slow movement while recuperating from TB in the sanatorium where his wife and daughter had recently died, wrote the rhythmically unpredictable Scherzo here in Cambridge, and then in Hollywood, in 1940, after the war had begun in Europe, completed the ambivalent finale (is that jubilation or loin-girding before the final prayer?). Mälkki's precise beat and ear for subtle thematic and timbral repetition were a revelation.
Sixty-six-year-old Russian cellist Natalia Gutman returned to Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic to play Prokofiev's late Symphony-Concerto in E minor, a piece she learned from her teacher, Mstislav Rostropovich, who'd helped Prokofiev recast it from his failed Cello Concerto. Gutman's authority and conviction were amazing. I have a page of notes about her profound musicality, her staggering technique, the gorgeous singing sound of her Guarneri, and her refusal to wallow in tonal glamour for its own sake. Like a great actor's, her "voice" is nuanced and mercurial. Just when you thought she'd reached her limit, she'd surpass herself. The applause was overwhelming, and after many curtain calls, she pulled out yet another stop: a dancing Bourrée from Bach's Third Cello Suite so effortlessly alive, she seemed to have become her cello.
Zander and the orchestra were with her at every turn. I didn't really want to hear anything after that, but Zander's Brahms Symphony No. 2 was so full of unforced momentum and unpressured sweetness (and some magical playing from flutist Kathy Boyd and oboist Peggy Pearson), who couldn't be grateful?
