Washington Classical Review

David Kaplan was piano soloist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Thursday night at Strathmore, conducted by Anthony Parnther. Photo: C. Downey/WCR

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra continues a streak of distinctive programming in the third season under music director Jonathon Heyward. To christen the new year, guest conductor Anthony Parnther led a concert of American music Thursday night in the Music Center at Strathmore. All four composers on the bill offered different solutions to the challenge of weaving jazz into a classical tapestry.

At the top was a rare performance of Aaron Copland’s Piano Concerto, a two-movement work commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky and premiered in 1927, relatively early in Copland’s career. The score veers between Prokofiev-style dissonance and the blues-inflected language of jazz, often showing the kinship of the two styles. Parnther, music director of the San Bernardino Symphony since 2019, conducted it with elegant clarity.

Pianist David Kaplan, son of violinist Mark Kaplan, took the solo part, originally played by the composer himself. Kaplan gave the piece some delightful coloration and quirkiness, with some stiffness in scales and big chordal sections. His handling of the first piano entrance of the first movement provided a moment of nostalgic reflection after a heraldic brass introduction.

After this compact opening movement, Kaplan toyed with the flexible tempo of the second movement, now slow and biting, in other places more like an upbeat dance. Several solos in the orchestra stood out for flavorful character, including the perky soprano saxophone and the agitated E-flat clarinet. The BSO’s big sonic climaxes tended to engulf Kaplan’s loudest forte sound, but that only added to the thrill of the ending especially.

For an encore, Kaplan added a fifth American composer to the evening, George Gershwin. His rendition of the Prelude No. 2, while smoky in texture, felt a little plain and perfunctory, especially in the evenness of rhythm and phrasing.

Leonard Bernstein championed this Copland concerto, although it did not receive many plaudits at its premiere. One could hear some of the influence of the older composer in the concert opener, the Overture to West Side Story. Parnther, who was born in Norfolk, Virginia, opted for rapid pacing and brash balances, heavy on the low brass. He even turned toward the hall, cuing the audience with a wink to join the orchestra the second time that they called out “Mambo!”

To open the second half, Parnther offered just the first movement (“Born in Hope”) from Wynton Marsalis’s Blue Symphony, a seven-movement work from 2009. The piece, a sort of primer on jazz history, begins improbably in America’s Revolutionary War era. Piccolo and snare drum evoked a fife and drum corps, with rhythms that grew more and more complex. Marsalis eventually laid this music over a 12-bar blues pattern, initiated by the bass line in the violas. The tune made allusions to “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” quite suitable for the nation’s upcoming celebration of its semiquincentennial.

The program closed with Florence Price’s Third Symphony, from 1938, a work Parnther has a long history of championing. The conductor has completed a critical edition of the score, addressing some confusing notation, incomplete parts and dynamics, as well as slightly reducing the instrumentation to make the work more palatable to orchestras. With this performance the BSO offered the world premiere of this new edition.

When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered Price’s First Symphony in 1933, she became the first American black woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. Five years later, she showed a masterful hand at orchestration, especially the slow brass introduction to the first movement, rife with Wagnerian influences. The BSO brass played with smoldering power, adding a more forlorn character on the first movement’s pentatonic second theme, played first by solo trombone.

The second movement, to my ear the symphony’s best, featured the BSO’s plush string sectional sound, set shimmering with tinges of harp and celesta. Here and elsewhere, Price incorporated sounds derived from blues and Gospel, without ever directly citing any specific tune. In her letters, Price described this symphony as influenced by “the life and music” of urban black people in the years leading up to World War II.

The BSO musicians gave the third movement, a Juba dance similar to the third movement of Price’s First Symphony, an upbeat feel. Elements of Latin music percolated within it as well, including a prominent xylophone solo. Parnther moved the concluding Scherzo at a fairly fast pace, skillfully building the orchestral climaxes of this relatively short movement. Other orchestras would do well to give the new edition of this neglected symphony a shot.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. bsomusic.org