TAMPA — There's magic in imperfection.
Take John Adams' Lollapalooza, a piece so clanky, so obsessively repetitive and just so slightly off, it has you bracing yourself in the best way. The low brass instruments groan, building to an unwieldy knockout punch that finally comes on the timpani and bass drum.
Friday, someone in the crowd went, "Woo!"
With that, the Florida Orchestra soared into a new season at the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa, presenting a soul-stirring and uneasy program. You could call it triumphant, but that would defeat the more challenging point. This stuff makes you think.
Guest conductor Joshua Weilerstein, who recently wrapped three seasons as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, built the orchestra's premiere of Lollapalooza into a program of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. Weilerstein is young, brimming with floppy-haired energy on the podium, and it's fun to watch.
Famed pianist Peter Serkin was scheduled to perform the Beethoven solo but canceled at the last minute due to illness. New York City pianist Shai Wosner stepped in with a spirited and at times almost ghostlike touch on the keys. The concerto, composed when Beethoven was young, not yet deaf, and not so tormented, may be his most comical work. In that sense, it felt a little out of place on the provocative program.
But like its counterparts, the concerto is built on repetition inside a huge structure. It served as a welcome slide into the finale, buoyed by warm, enveloping work from the orchestra's violinists. When Wosner finished a cadenza at the end of the first movement, the crowd laughed in exactly the right places.
They needed the grins before Symphonic Dances. It's the last piece Rachmaninoff composed before he died, written at the beginning of World War II when his daughter was trapped in France. The piece is haunting, eerie, a "waltz for ghosts," as Weilerstein said. In parts, it had the feeling of a laborious march stuck in the ground. Gorgeous harmonies all had one thing wrong with them, very much on purpose. An incongruous alto saxophone helped carry the themes, plus woodwinds noodling along the top like wrens flitting over fields of death.
The third movement felt like a battle. Some people believe Rachmaninoff was attempting to conquer death, but Weilerstein approached it with far less clarity. At the end, he had a choice to let principal percussionist John Shaw bang the tamtam and bring it to silence with the rest of the orchestra, or let it ring out until it stopped wherever it may.
Shaw slammed it and it wobbled to a stunning natural end, proving the most satisfying conclusions are not always the clean ones.
Contact Stephanie Hayes at shayes@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8716. Follow @stephhayes.