David Hoose led the Boston University Symphony Orchestra in yet a third birthday celebration, this one honoring the incipient centennial (January 1) of the distinguished violinist and legendary pedagogue Roman Totenberg, who's been teaching at BU since 1961. The concert featured the Muir Quartet's Peter Zazofsky in Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2, the piece he played for the 1977 Wieniawski Competition, which Totenberg was judging; Zazofsky won third prize, and they've been friends ever since. He played like a kind of Hungarian Sheherazade, his violin intensely and sweetly narrating some mysterious folktale. Under Hoose, the student players hung on — and responded — to the violin's every "word." Susan Dangel produced a lovely film featuring the genial, ever-engaging Totenberg and his three daughters (one of them is NPR's Nina), and Totenberg, on stage, was clearly delighted by the "Happy Birthday" variations played by two of his most successful (and glamorous) students, celebrity soloist Mira Wang and the New York Philharmonic's Na Sun. The musical program itself, though, seemed somewhat miscalculated, the already long evening ending with Elgar's restrained 50-minute Symphony No. 1, surely not the ideal conclusion for either this occasion (did the piece have any connection to Totenberg?) or this audience. Many bailed out before the start of the long last movement, having already sat through two and a half hours.
BSO II: Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos offered up Falla’s Catalan oratorio La Atlàntida. |
Hoose is also the director of Collage New Music, which this season is featuring the work of Fred Lerdahl (a recent Pulitzer finalist), who is not heard around here often enough. Imbrications, with its witty, barely audible, rhythmically altered references to "Happy Birthday" and "Auld Lang Syne," was a brief tribute to the late Andrew Imbrie when he turned 80. The other Lerdahl piece Collage offered in its mid-November concert was the exhilarating, surprising Duo, with violinist Catherine French and pianist Christopher Oldfather pulling out all the stops in the angry first movement, then almost keening and calmly contemplative in the second. Also led by Hoose in expert performances: Andy Vores's Often (2003), which was compromised by the inadequate projection of the abstract images of the bombing of Baghdad that's supposed to accompany the music; David Wheelock's 1982 Music for Seven Players (did we really need a program note explaining how he came up with this title?), more arresting in its parts than as a whole; and Stephen Hartke's Meanwhile (2007), an engagingly lively suite of gamelan-like "incidental music to imaginary puppet plays."
When Murray Perahia canceled his Symphony Hall concert, the Celebrity Series of Boston quickly invited another renowned pianist, Garrick Ohlsson, who celebrated Chopin's bicentennial. Ohlsson has given some great performances — a Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto with Robert Spano and the BSO in 2004 was the most dramatic and moving live performance of that showpiece I've ever heard. He's never bad, but there's a gap between his very best and his less than inspired. Both aspects were present in this program. (I should say that from my seat in the first balcony, the sound seemed to dissipate; when I moved downstairs, it had far more presence.) The highlights for me were the phenomenal Variations brilliantes (from which he squeezed every drop of musical insight along with the dazzle), the breathtaking gallop of the last movement of the Piano Sonata No. 3, and his three encores: an intimate and personal E-minor Mazurka (Opus 17 No. 2), with some of his most nuanced dynamics; a passionate "Revolutionary" Étude (Opus 10 No. 12); and the triumphant (and famous) E-flat Polonaise (Opus 53), whose pounding chords had me bouncing in my seat.
