For his next-to-last week as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa repeated a work from last October, coupling it with one of his "signature" pieces in just a single concert Saturday night. It looked like an odd pairing, Bartók’s rarely heard Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion, and Orchestra and Berlioz’s very familiar Symphonie fantastique. What the two works share is rhythmic complexity. The 9/8 theme of the concerto’s first-movement sonata-form theme keeps getting resubdivided in ways that create Bartók’s characteristic cross-rhythms. In his first movement, Berlioz, in a more conventional 4/4 time signature, achieves the same effect by running his phrases through the bar lines and throwing in off-the-beat timpani shots.
The Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion, and Orchestra started out life as Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; Bartók and his wife, Ditta Pásztory, premiered it in 1938 in Basle. In 1940 the composer left Fascist-leaning Hungary for America, and his new publisher, London’s Boosey & Hawkes, suggested that the sonata might be programmable for orchestras if he turned it into a concerto. Bartók did so, but the result hardly ever turns up in concert programs (the BSO had performed it just once prior to this season, in 1966, under Erich Leinsdorf) or on recordings (the catalogue currently has just one); and to my ears, it’s an artistic failure as well, with the kinetic interplay of pianos and percussion getting buried by the orchestration. Although at Symphony Hall the pianos were deployed as per Bartók’s instructions with the keyboards facing the audience (back in October they were nested), they had little presence, even when the orchestra was silent. Were Benjamin Pasternack and Randall Hodgkinson overpedaling? Was my seat on the left side of the first balcony not ideal? Perhaps Symphony Hall is just too resonant for this piece. I’d have loved to hear it in its sonata form in Jordan Hall, with, say, Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire.
Berlioz has always been an Ozawa specialty, and I confess I’ve never understood why. Whereas Seiji’s flair is for the dramatic, Berlioz’s métier is the ambiguous — he keeps stranding you in harmonic no man’s land and writing melodies that are at odds with their meter. His pulse is almost always dancelike, which means a conductor has to give weight to every beat, not just the first one in the bar (it’s as if you were speaking Italian). What’s more, Berlioz’s characteristic bittersweet harmonies require close attention to the inner strings, and Seiji is more of a top-and-bottom conductor.
Much of what I’ve missed in Ozawa’s Symphonie fantastique (which was performed without the first- and fourth-movement repeats and without the optional cornet parts in the waltz movement) wasn’t there again Saturday. The Allegro of the first movement drove forward without rhythmic or harmonic hesitation, the climax pooped orgasmically, and the long concluding plagal cadence did not end "religiosamente," as Berlioz asked. The Scene in the Country was more of a brisk walk; Ozawa didn’t evince any lover’s anxiety approaching the big F-major explosion at bar 143 (Otto Klemperer is the benchmark here), and in the yearning three-note phrases that start at bar 164, you couldn’t hear the middle 32nd note. And after a ferocious, determined start, the March to the Scaffold began to speed up and lose its march-like character.
But there were also positive things I didn’t remember hearing from Seiji’s Fantastiques. The waltz movement had, well, waltz movement: it swayed and flowed and didn’t trip over its feet by trying to go too fast; the two harps were well balanced, and the whole had tenderness if not wit. The countryside cor anglais was wistful; the tubas (substituting for Berlioz’s ophicleides) in the last two movements would have done Fafner proud; and the Witches’ Sabbath E-flat clarinet was sleazy without being squeaky. Best of all, the sound had that bittersweet middle. In the final round of the Witches’ Sabbath, at bar 496, you could hear all the eighth notes in the winds and brass (few conductors get this right), and in the final outburst of demonic laughter, the descending lines were audible (ditto). This might not have been a fantastic performance, but it closed out Seiji’s BSO Berlioz account on a positive note.
