The BSO is celebrating another 200th birthday, Robert Schumann's (he was three months Chopin's junior), with three programs devoted to all four of his symphonies, and with another celebrity, Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire, playing Schumann's lone piano concerto. Eighty-three-year-old guest conductor Kurt Masur led energetic but monochromatic and monodynamic (everything mezzoforte) performances. Schumann's symphonies, with their thick-textured orchestrations, really benefit from having first and second violins on opposite sides of the stage — as they were arranged in Schumann's time, and as BSO maestro James Levine deploys them. Masur kept both sections together, and so Schumann's First (Spring) and Fourth Symphonies, and the crucial orchestral interaction in the concerto, all sounded thumpy and bottom heavy. Freire, usually such an eloquent player, with such exquisite tone, sounded oddly uncommunicative, more repressed than poetic.
In previous weeks, the BSO had featured some imaginative programming that didn't attract huge audiences. Those who missed Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducting his suite from Manuel de Falla's strange oratorio, LaAtlàntida ("Atlantis"), missed not only a fascinating if surprisingly austere score but some extraordinary singing (in Catalan) by soprano Alexandra Coku as Queen Isabella, with mezzo Nathalie Stutzman as Pyrene (the doomed princess of the Pyrenees), baritone Philip Cutlip narrating, and boy soprano Ryan Williams (one of the best singers in the Boston Lyric Opera Tosca) as the young Columbus, and the biggest job going to the spectacular Tanglewood Festival Chorus. The week before, David Robertson led John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony, an orchestration of passages from his controversial opera. The best music in the symphony turns the best music in the opera — Oppenheimer singing John Donne's Holy Sonnet "Batter my heart" — into a brilliant trumpet solo (the profoundly musical Thomas Rolfs). Both players and audience seemed to groove on even the more banal passages. (Robertson has a good new recording of the piece with the St. Louis Symphony, on Nonesuch.) Brahms didn't fare quite so well under either Frühbeck (Symphony No. 2) or Robertson (Tragic Overture). Robertson did better by Bartók's sinister Miraculous Mandarin suite (a BSO specialty) but had only mixed success with the cool but not icy enough Nicolas Hodges, a contemporary-music specialist, in Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2.
The week after Frühbeck, there were empty seats for pianist Christian Zacharias leading two Haydn symphonies, the great No. 95 in C minor and the slashing D-minor No. 80 (which the BSO has played only once before, in 1944) and, conducting from the keyboard, two relatively obscure Mozart concertos, Nos. 15 and 16, which hover on the fascinating verge of Mozart's series of concerto masterworks. These performances were articulate, droll, and, for a modern-instrument orchestra, relatively lean.
John Adams was the focus of Gil Rose's latest BMOP concert, the high point of which was the gorgeous slow movement of Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony (2007), a follow-up to his landmark Chamber Symphony (1992), which concluded the program. The luscious slow melody began in the flute (Sarah Brady), over pizzicato strings, with other winds gradually interweaving, before they were overtaken by intricate bells, cymbals, and tapped woodblocks. The entire program, called "Virtuosity's Velocity," was a mixture of the wet (Ross Lee Finney's nostalgic 1971 Landscapes Remembered) and the martini dry (Arthur Berger's 1956 Chamber Music for 13 Players), Scott Wheeler's stealthy, erotically noirish City of Shadows (2007) being a dirtier martini with a neat bourbon chaser.
