UTAH SYMPHONY, Abravanel Hall, Jan. 11; second performance 8 p.m., Jan. 12, tickets at 801-355-2787, 888-451-2787 or www.utahsymphony.org  

Friday night at the Utah Symphony was a night for strings. The headline piece was Jean Sibelius’ violin concerto, but the evening began with an insightful performance of Edvard Grieg’s “Two Elegiac Melodies” for string orchestra.

It’s sometimes too easy to dismiss Grieg as all “Morning Mood” or “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” but we needn’t punish a man for popularity. There’s a real elegance to Grieg’s craft, and it shines brightest when he’s writing for strings.

Grieg is so sensitive to the varied palette of the strings, and he puts that variety to great effect in these elegiac pieces. So much of his music is created with gesture – a sudden forte in the violins followed by silence; a subtle swelling in the cellos; a shudder in the violas – that it’s much more than just notes on a page.

Gilbert Varga (Photo Credit: Felix Broede)

Credit must be given to the Utah Symphony strings as well as guest conductor Gilbert Varga for delivering such a nuanced and musical performance. Varga was a natural fit for the pieces Friday night, and the orchestra nimbly followed his leadership. He was so natural, in fact, that it took me a while to realize that he wasn’t conducting from a score. He’d left the music stand behind and was guiding the orchestra from memory. As a result, his intimacy with the music rang loud and clear.

Then came the Sibelius concerto with Tobias Feldmann on violin. The first thing I noticed about his playing was his liberal bowing. He never used half of the bow when he could go all the way. It gave his playing a wonderfully rich tone in all registers. His lower notes were throaty and warm, while his high notes – even the false harmonics – were full and never shrill.

His technicality and musicality followed suit. Only at the very beginning were his double stops just a little off. And in the final movement, he managed to play a sequence of intensely demanding false harmonics with a natural flare.

Tobias Feldmann

In concerti like this there are inevitably many virtuosic, cadenza-like passages, and soloists run the risk of making those passages sound like hurdles or hoops through which they must jump. But Feldmann threaded those sections organically together so that they became cohesive extensions of the musical and emotional thoughts that preceded them. At just 21, Feldmann has a long career ahead, and I hope to hear more from him – and soon.

After the intermission, the symphony performed two rhapsodic pieces: “Dances of Galánta” by Zoltán Kodály and “Romanian Rhapsody” in A major by Georges Enescu. The two works proved faithful companions to each other. They both offered a wide range of expression for every section of the orchestra (a clarinet solo was especially memorable), and they both packed high-octane levels.  Enescu’s piece in particular played like an 11-minute climax.

These Hungarian and Romanian pieces with their steady um-cha um-cha um-cha provided a nice contrast to the nuance in Grieg’s Norwegian works. When Kodály and Enescu looked for variety, they had the strings go into tremolo or pizzicato, whereas Grieg employed those techniques lightly or not at all. Of course, they were writing rhapsodies while Grieg was writing elegies, but the juxtaposition still helped accentuate Grieg’s subtle and compelling craft.