Escaich might be embodying spiritual forces both good and evil. With a glinting, coppery tone, Capuçon gave the opening phrase — a Baroque homage that nods to Bach’s Invention No. 13 — a cunning flicker of darkness and light. The violins played long notes on high, not unlike the angelic overture to Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” as the horns droned down below. Flutes dipped like swallows, and brasses popped out like goblins. Tubular bells tolled ritualistically. Within this frame, both beatific and ominous, Capuçon’s cello maneuvered: warm, bodily, determined.
In that sense, the cello, in both design and execution, was very much the piece’s animating force, passing through light and shadow, and knowing something of both. Escaich wrote cadenzas to link the three movements into a continuous form, and Capuçon emphasized their atmospheric expressivity as opposed to their show-pony virtuosity. The orchestra navigated the shifting meters and watery textures of the second movement with conviction, and Nelsons masterfully plotted the way in which the final movement’s heavenly motif for celesta and harp melted away into a dangerous dance. Jazzy dalliances and an abrupt ending didn’t ultimately detract from the concerto’s absorbing sound world.
Adès’s “Air,” by contrast, devotes itself to a single idea — one of fragile beauty — for its 15-minute duration. The way Adès pitches the violin writing high up, almost daring the soloist to sustain it, recalls the extreme tessitura for the soprano role of Ariel in his opera “The Tempest.” This time, though, the effect is serene instead of unnervingly otherworldly.
Mutter, who gave the world premiere of “Air” at the Lucerne Festival last year, played at Carnegie with a platinum tone, densely concentrated. The orchestra drew mesmeric circles around her, conjuring a world of glass, as Mutter’s sound irradiated a childlike innocence full of whispered awe.
With the sensitivity of an opera conductor who loves his singers, Nelsons consistently scaled the orchestra’s sound to his soloists’ resources. If his rendition of Sibelius’s “Luonnotar” — a tone poem about the mythic creation of the earth and firmament — lacked a cosmic spatial sense, then at least its quiet intensity was of a piece with the soprano Golda Schultz’s rosy tone and haloed high notes; these performers were very much describing, rather than dramatizing, the piece’s world-shattering dimensions. Nelsons cushioned Mutter’s elegantly assured playing with spirited, swift touches in Mozart’s First Violin Concerto, and he matched Capuçon’s dazzling, consuming focus and mercurial coloring. Each collaboration felt natural, intuitive.
At times during the Boston Symphony’s performances, the parts were greater than the whole. A textbook reading can be exemplary but also plain. But when this orchestra had a new story to tell, it was full of surprises.
