On the podium, Nelsons, a galvanic young Latvian, lunges about uninhibitedly. Illustration by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo; reference: Paul Marotta / Getty

“There is a point in the perfection of artistic skills beyond which further progress is without artistic value,” the composer and critic Virgil Thomson wrote of the Boston Symphony, in 1944. “The surface becomes so shiny that nothing else can be perceived.” These sentences appear in a new Library of America edition of Thomson’s writings, edited by Tim Page. As a critic, Thomson was high-handed, waspish, not infrequently compromised by conflicts of interest. At his best, though, he was surgically acute, and never cut sharper than when he addressed the American cult of orchestral precision. The Boston Symphony is “overtrained,” he says, its punctiliousness leading to “executional hypertrophy.” Phrases are so polished that they become inert; narrative dissolves into immaculate moments. “The music it plays never seems to be about anything, except how beautifully the Boston Symphony Orchestra can play.” Also, Thomson complained, the orchestra was too loud, simulating a “Niagara Falls of sound.”

If Thomson were to hear today’s orchestras—he died in 1989, at the age of ninety-two—he might well feel vindicated. Boston Symphony recordings from the nineteen-thirties and forties sound positively loosey-goosey in comparison with the technical standard that now prevails at top-tier ensembles. In the first minute of a 1938 rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth, under Serge Koussevitzky, the strings and the timpani struggle to fall in synch; these days, such a lusty but messy performance would occasion much head-shaking. And orchestras keep getting louder, to the point where earplugs are routinely distributed backstage. The conjoining of power and precision is awesome to witness, and it occasions justifiable professional pride. Yet, as Thomson suggested, it can become an end in itself, an unreally perfect distortion of the music it is meant to convey.

These glorious machines need leaders who can impart a sense of mission and drive. Arguably, Boston has lacked such a figure since 1949, when Koussevitzky, an imperious new-music advocate, departed. Ten years ago, James Levine came to town with a host of ideas; sadly, he never committed himself fully to the orchestra, and medical problems cut short his tenure. In September, a successor to Levine arrived, in the form of the thirty-six-year-old Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons. I saw three of Nelsons’s concerts this fall, including a début gala. He is a galvanic presence, and has the orchestra playing in wide-awake fashion. But he has not disclosed a grander vision, beyond fiery renditions of late-Romantic and early-modern repertory, and rumors that the Berlin Philharmonic is considering him as a possible music director have Bostonians feeling nervous. Thomson might see a problem not yet solved—although, as problems go, it is a gorgeous one.

Tall, gawky, bright-eyed, Nelsons ascends the podium looking like an overgrown boy who has been given an orchestra for his birthday. He assumed the directorship of the Latvian National Opera while still in his mid-twenties, and took the helm of the City of Birmingham Symphony in 2008, at the age of twenty-nine. A former martial-arts student, Nelsons lunges about uninhibitedly, violating textbook rules about the wisdom of minimizing one’s gestures. I imagine that Boston players have already mastered imitations of his signature moves: the Backward Lean, the Extreme Crouch, the Trapeze Grab, the Across-the-Table Ice-Cream Scoop.

As with the calisthenics of Leonard Bernstein, Nelsons’s gestures have a practical purpose: they impinge upon the peripheral vision of players whose eyes are fixed on their parts. This beat will not be overlooked. And Nelsons’s sweat-drenched physicality, not to mention his reportedly avid, affable way of running a rehearsal, invites an extra measure of involvement from the musicians. Every time I’ve seen him conduct—in Boston, Tanglewood, New York, and Bayreuth—he has set off brushfires of intensity. This fall, the Nelsons effect was most evident toward the end of two familiar scores: in the accelerating crescendo into the finale of Sibelius’s Second Symphony, which had the kind of unchecked passion one usually hears only on early-twentieth-century recordings; and in the “Danse Sacrale” of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” which hurtled forward even as individual figures jumped spastically in place.

[audio url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/178029920"]

Significantly, these climaxes were achieved not simply by way of loudness. I recall Levine making a bigger noise when he led the “Rite” in Boston a decade ago. Nelsons produces full-body impact: instead of shattering about your ears, the sound engulfs you. He is a master at controlling dynamics to create a kinetic, fluctuating mass. In the section marked “Poco largamente,” in the first movement of the Sibelius, there is a mighty surge, topped by a high, aching line in the violins, cellos, flutes, and bassoons. Yet Sibelius specifies a “poco f” dynamic, meaning that it should be slightly softer than the peak of the preceding crescendo. In the Koussevitzky recording I grew up on, the effect passes unnoticed amid the general excitement. Osmo Vänskä, in his icily potent readings, tends to reel back suddenly at the Poco largamente, as if to conserve power. Nelsons, applying a ritardando as well as a diminuendo, generates a sense of redoubled passion, even as the sound recedes—a drawn-out, sobbing cry. His co-conspirator is Boston’s Symphony Hall, with its wraparound resonance; acousticians have yet to devise a finer place to hear an orchestra. (In December, the orchestra’s BSO Classics label will release a recording drawn from the Sibelius performances.)

Nelsons’s vigorous shaping of phrases has its drawbacks. It can result in performances that seem fitful and overinflected, as when a stage actor invests each line with so much deep meaning that he begins to wear us out. The second movement of the Sibelius had too many wrenching contrasts, and a couple of oddly prolonged pauses sapped the momentum. At the opening-night gala, Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” Overture resembled a magnificent, overweight bird that was failing to get off the ground. The “Rite of Spring” unfolded in largely straight-ahead fashion, but in places Nelsons was too heavy-handed, dragging out, for example, the trombone glissandos in “Spring Rounds,” so that each felt like the last in a series. I suspect that the give-and-take between orchestra and conductor will settle over time, particularly if Nelsons chooses to be a little more sparing in his exhortations.

Although Nelsons is most at home in the 1850-to-1950 period, his first Boston season shows him open to newer music: five of his programs include works by living composers. Earlier this month, he led Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Offertorium,” a 1980 masterpiece for violin and orchestra, and “Dramatis personae,” an almost new trumpet concerto by Brett Dean. The Gubaidulina has a history in Boston, having been performed there in 1988, as part of a twilight festival of Soviet music. (I attended some events in that series, and remember the sight of Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke blinking uncertainly in the glare of the Western media.) The young Latvian violinist Baiba Skride, her bow arm violently strong, gave an arresting, at times overstrenuous account of the solo part; Nelsons delivered a rendition more episodic than continuous. The Dean, too, meandered, though in that case the fault seemed mainly the composer’s.

What Boston requires most from this hugely gifted, still maturing conductor is his full attention. Many European organizations, including the Lucerne Festival, want a piece of him, yet Boston operates on a year-round schedule, with its summertime residency at Tanglewood, in the Berkshires, central to its creative identity. Nelsons will lead six Tanglewood concerts next year, but in 2016 he is slated to conduct “Parsifal” in Bayreuth—a demanding, summer-long commitment. Too often, frequent-flier maestros come across as frazzled business travellers, their minds perpetually racing ahead to the next date. It’s time for conductors to make the revolutionary gesture of staying home, with the orchestras that work to realize their vision. ♦