The Spanish maestro Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos is back on the Boston Symphony Orchestra podium with a second week of, it must be said, lackluster programming. There is nothing wrong with a de facto mini-festival of Strauss tone poems but this should ideally be done with real intentionality, and the music presented in suggestive pairings designed to offer some larger interpretive gesture. Better still if the conductor at hand is bursting with fresh things to say with this music. Neither one appears to be the case.
Strauss this week is being paired with Rachmaninoff. It was the latter man who once wrote that "a composer's music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, the pictures he loves." Strauss would have clearly added "the mountains he has climbed." This week's tone poem is the "Alpine" Symphony, a kind of massively scaled hiking trip for orchestra that was inspired in part by one of Strauss's own alpine adventures. Its pictorialism is extremely specific and we hear the sunrise, the tripping brook, the waterfall, the flowery meadows, and so on. Danger looms on the way to the summit but it is conquered and our hikers make it back down into the enveloping night, but not before being caught in a dramatic thunderstorm.
The work's ultra-bombastic Romanticism is a tough sell these days and the music flirts perilously with vulgarity. Frühbeck's reading was strong on the music's elemental forces but weak on its details. The orchestra and especially its brass had blindingly brilliant moments but there were also sections still quite rough around the edges. The offstage hunting party came across to fine effect, and the thunderstorm was frighteningly realistic.
Before Strauss took to the mountains, the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes scaled the heights of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. This soft-spoken Norwegian pianist may not seem like a natural for this kind of big-boned warhorse piano repertory, but he has an almost peerless technique and last night he gave a beautifully musical account, full of playing that was fleet, clear, and unmannered. Frühbeck made the most of Rachmaninoff's undulating orchestral lines, drawing warm and shapely phrases from the strings, but the soloist was covered too often. Elsewhere the orchestra was a full-throated and lyrical partner.
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