Conductorless SPCO makes the most of its freedom and talent

There is little in classical music more bracing than a crisply played Rossini overture, and the magic worked again on Friday evening at the opening concert of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra's 2019-20 season.

"La Scala di Seta" may have a silly plot — a man climbs a ladder made of silk to visit his beloved every evening — but its overture is brilliantly entertaining, and showed the SPCO's chattering violins to be in sparkling fettle after the summer recess.

It also gave an early opportunity for the orchestra's new principal oboist, Cassie Pilgrim, to show her paces. Pilgrim spun an appealing line in her first lyrical solo, and nailed the dizzy-making string of faster notes Rossini gave her later.

Rossini's influence also fizzled in the outer movements of Schubert's Second Symphony. Again the string writing bubbled hyperactively, but a conductorless SPCO cannily stopped short of pushing the music into overdrive.

Judicious balancing of the different instrumental parts characterized the performance, especially in a nigh-perfect realization of the second movement Andante.

Its sunny variations smiled and lilted at a carefree pace, with elegant Mozartian stylings in the upper strings and a satisfying scrunch from the double basses in the minor-key variation.

Not for the first time since the SPCO moved to working mainly without a conductor, the freedom that the players enjoy to make their own decisions on interpreting the music was strikingly apparent.

Between the Schubert and Rossini pieces, SPCO artistic partner Jeremy Denk played the solo part and led the orchestra in Schumann's Piano Concerto.

Denk is a thinking man's pianist who writes for the New Yorker and has an acclaimed blog on his website titled "Think Denk."

He talks a good game, too, and prefaced his performance of Schumann's concerto with a witty disquisition on the role the dominant seventh chord plays in it.

Denk's approach to the opening movement was notably flexible, at times feeling almost like improvisation. In Schumann that works well — moods flicker and flare unpredictably, and the orchestra adroitly shadowed Denk's embrace of the mercurial.

The concerto's middle movement can seem trite and inconsequential, but Denk found touching vulnerability in it, and the SPCO cellos contributed a poetic commentary.

A more deep-rooted type of emotion came in Denk's encore, a piece from Clara Schumann's Op. 21 Romances. Written in 1853 when her husband, Robert, was suffering from mental illness, it has a doleful, haunting quality that Denk distilled powerfully.

The 200th anniversary of Clara's birth fell on Friday, and Denk's encore marked it movingly. Her music is slim in quantity, but of tantalizingly fine quality. We still don't hear enough of it.