Business as usual no more, this Philadelphia Orchestra concert brings echoes from Ukraine

Putin’s war on Ukraine is stirring the conscience of Philadelphia’s artists. The orchestra of the Philadelphia Ballet recently prefaced its Swan Lake with a performance of the Ukrainian state anthem. Singing City, the choir whose social justice mission goes back decades, has dropped its original May program in favor of a slate of works meditating on peace.

Thursday night, the Philadelphia Orchestra added a piece at the top of the program — Melody, by Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk, from the film The High Pass. And Ukrainian musicians from our area will perform in the lobby before the orchestra’s Verizon Hall concerts this weekend.

“Time and again we find ourselves bearing witness to the physical, emotional, and psychological trauma of war,” narrator Charlotte Blake Alston told Thursday’s audience before the music began. But she also spoke of resilience, the human spirit, and dedicated the program in “honor of and in solidarity with the resilient spirit of the Ukrainian people.”

It was followed by a long slice of silence.

Skoryk’s bittersweet score for strings, with its hopeful ascending figures, fit the moment, especially so with violinist David Kim’s fine solo turn. The rest of the program, though, was chosen long before the invasion of Ukraine. Is it just our times that makes the rest of the program come across as particularly fitting for the moment?

In this concert, past didn’t feel like past. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 might have been appreciated superficially for its sheer power and beauty in another time. But thinking today that he wrote it during Stalin’s brutal purges and had been denounced in the pages of Pravda before the symphony’s premiere puts a different gloss on it.

The message behind Gabriela Lena Frank’s Selections from Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout cut with an even sharper scalpel. With its weave of Andean and European influences, the piece aims to show that two cultures can exist side by side without one conquering the other. Was such a message ever more relevant?

Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 didn’t have the resonance of the other works on the program, but it did offer a soloist of considerable artistic individualism. Sergio Tiempo had such a big sound you might have thought his piano was amplified. But he also had dimensions. His suddenly explosive outburst in the second movement wasn’t a gratuitous one, but, rather, an expressively beautiful one. He could be brawny or flowery, and the orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin expertly hewed to his contours and flashes.

The conductor — who took over these concerts after Gustavo Dudamel canceled — could have found ways to nudge Shostakovich’s much-loved Symphony No. 5 several degrees more triumphant or bellicose. But there were no distortions. He took the second movement not too fast (a true allegretto) and shaded it slightly sardonic. There was no Leonard Bernstein moment, no echo of that famous New York Philharmonic recording where the conductor took the very end twice as fast as marked.

What Nézet-Séguin did was to grant several impressively polished players the space to express themselves in a piece they’ve known all their lives — from contrabassoonist Holly Blake to piccolo player Erica Peel, and throughout a five-person percussion section that was extraordinary in its power and precision.

Additional performances: Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Sts. Nézet-Séguin has canceled his appearances for the remaining concerts because of an unspecified illness, an orchestra spokesperson said. Kensho Watanabe was engaged to conduct Friday’s matinee as well as the last two concerts. The program remains the same, except without Gabriela Lena Frank’s work. Tickets are $10-$165. philorch.org, 215-893-1999.