Orchestra's unusual, engaging end to a festival

In a somewhat unconventional program, Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Philadelphia Orchestra through the lighter side of Shostakovich - assuming there actually is one. Even when the composer seems to be kidding around, his music hints at something subversive, that the music means much more than it says, and what it says is always dangling out of reach. That's why you want to hear it again.

The objects of curiosity Wednesday at the Kimmel Center were Shostakovich's seldom-heard Piano Concerto No. 2 and music for the film The Gadfly - paired with Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 - creating a provocative conclusion to the St. Petersburg Festival that could have been less convincing had performances not been so purposeful.

The Gadfly arrived in a four-movement arrangement (some suites have as many as 12), kicking up my longtime bias against film music performed without the film: One doesn't know what plot and visual images Shostakovich was responding to in a medium that (unlike ballet) is mainly about storytelling. Still, it's outgoing, engaging music, though the deadline pressures of the film industry were apparent in the way each section has a single message - from this master of mixed messages.

The exception is the final movement: It starts to quote a melody from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, but changes its mind halfway through. Was Shostakovich trying to "gaslight" his audiences with a now-you-hear-it-now-you-don't effect?

The terse Piano Concerto No. 2 says that all is right with the world on the surface, while the subtext hints at much the opposite. The piece would seem to be a curiously insubstantial assignment for pianist Kirill Gerstein, though without demand for the usual concerto heroics, he played every note with great power in reserve, and as if each finger had an individual brain (a description often used for great Mozart playing). So you enjoyed the music's surface, but wondered, more than ever, what it's really saying. No performance I've heard gave the slow movement such emotional dimension.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 might have shown Shostakovich's kinship with the elder composer (both created musical edifices from small, sturdy building blocks). Instead, differences were most apparent. Beethoven didn't have an evasive bone in his body; with Shostakovich, evasion was a life-preserving activity under communism.

But such curatorial matters are secondary in the face of such a fresh, vital Beethoven Fifth. Like Christoph Eschenbach, Nézet-Séguin appends the first two phrases and keeps them in tempo with the rest of the movement, and with the inner clarity of a historically informed performance. Richard Woodhams' oboe solo miraculously went from proclamation to lamentation within seconds.

The second-movement variations had good momentum, partly because the final note of each episode was held a shade longer than usual. The final movement had a different hallmark of historically informed performance: Each orchestral section had a sharply defined sound accentuating the music's sense of impetuous collision. Loved it.