Winter wonders

New works highlight a great start to the new year in Boston

by Lloyd Schwartz

The beginning of a new calendar year is usually a kind of cusp for classical music, a quiet, transitional time -- Of Reminiscences and Reflections, as composer Gunther Schuller called it in the piece that opened the new year for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But just as the fall season leapt into full swing early, so 1997 began with a burst of significant, richly satisfying performances.

Only a few days before her 76th birthday, Josephine Murray -- esteemed pediatrician, fighter for worthy causes, and patron of the arts (most notably co-commissioner of the John Harbison Cello Concerto for Yo-Yo Ma) -- was honored by the New England Conservatory and the Longy School at a crowded 75th-birthday "Concert for Josie" at Longy's Pickman Hall. It was a quiet but intense program of some of Murray's favorite pieces presented by some of her favorite artists. Pianists Veronica Jochum and Craig Smith played four of Schumann's overlooked but marvel-filled, good-as-Schubert Four-Handed Piano Pieces for Small and Large Children: two inventive marches surrounding the lovely "Garden Melody" and the surprisingly cheerful and lovely "Trauer" ("Mourning"). Longy director Victor Rosenbaum gave us exquisitely rippling performances of Brahms's three Opus 119 Intermezzi (only the third, in C major, perhaps a bit too delicate for its own good). He also provided powerful, imaginative keyboard support for mezzo-soprano Jane Struss's three rapturous, heroic, generous Brahms songs, especially the impassioned "Von ewiger liebe" ("Of everlasting love"). Struss's communicative urgency ought to be a model for all musicians.

The final highlight was soprano Karol Bennett with Jochum, her frequent partner, in a set alternating songs by Clara and Robert Schumann, and one by Brahms -- the Schumanns about sinister seduction, lotusland and lorelei. The most fascinating selection was Clara Schumann's setting of Friedrich Rückert's "Liebst du um Schönheit" ("If you love because of beauty"), a poem more familiar as one of Mahler's five Rückert songs. Clara's is simpler and more direct, but the refrain -- "then do not love me" -- has harmonic twists that Mahler surely knew and assimilated. Bennett was in shining voice, and who could blame her and Jochum for adding an encore, Robert's fervent "Widmung" ("Dedication"), sung directly at Josie Murray.

That weekend, Craig Smith was back at the C. Walsh Theatre with the second concert in Emmanuel Music's planned seven-year exploration of all of Schubert's chamber, piano, and vocal music. The featured lieder singer was mezzo-soprano Mary Westbrook-Geha, first in a set of Schubert's settings of poems by Matthias Claudius (the most famous being the brief but shivery "Death and the Maiden"), then in six settings of poems by Johann Mayrhofer ranging from the grandly rhetorical "Fragment from Aeschylus" to the intimate light-and-shade of "Erlafsee" ("Lake Erlaf" -- "I am so happy, yet so sad").

Geha's rich voice has opened and deepened, from gleaming top to velvety (or shadowy) chest register. She differentiated the two voices of "Death and the Maiden" even more fully than on her recording with the Lydian String Quartet, and the chilling consolation and near-silence of Death's last words were less a matter of inaudibility than of inevitability. Word at intermission was that she had a cold; you couldn't tell. (The following weekend, at an elegant Collage concert led by David Hoose, she sang John Heiss's sinuously lyrical settings of early James Joyce poems and Schoenberg's fascinating, edgy chamber arrangement -- with harmonium! -- of Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer. No question, vocally she's on top of the world.)

In the Schubert, Craig Smith was her achingly sympathetic accompanist; he also played the poignant C-minor Allegretto, and an oddity, Schubert's Hungarian Melody, the composer's own two-hand transcription of one section of his big four-hand Divertissement à l'hongroise. Then the Lydian Quartet (Daniel Stepner, Judith Eissenberg, Mary Ruth Ray, and Rhonda Rider) played one of their signature pieces, the Death and the Maiden Quartet (it's on the same Schubert CD). The Lyds play so all out, with no compromising the whirling tempos, it's not surprising that in a live performance, especially on a damp, murky night, they'd come closer to slipping over the precipice than on a recording. It was breathtaking, but not always beautiful, though Rider's cello solo in the variations movement would alone have been worth the occasional glitches.

Both the Longy and Emmanuel concerts prove that, especially in the dying art of lieder singing, and in cozier settings than Symphony Hall, our "locals" are more truly world-class than most of the celebrities.

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The big events on the BSO's first two programs of 1997 were the two most recent pieces: Gunther Schuller's 1994 Pulitzer-winning Of Reminiscences and Reflections and György Ligeti's four-year-old Violin Concerto, in their first BSO performances.

Czechoslovakian-born Zdenek Macal, director of the New Jersey Symphony, was the short-notice replacement for the ailing Edo de Waart; he led a precise and heartfelt account of Schuller's memorial for his late wife of 44 years -- the first piece he was able to write after her death. It begins in catastrophe -- a full orchestral outcry that leads to a moving lament on the English horn. The reminiscences and reflections, though, in five continuous movements, are not all painful (or perhaps, finally, even more painful for being such lively and vivid depictions of the couple's enjoyment of music and of city and country life). Woven through, Schuller writes, are quotations of their favorite pieces, but they're so thoroughly hidden you'd hardly venture a guess (he calls this piece his own Enigma Variations). Jazzy high-energy and joky syncopations alternate with bucolic hush, all orchestrated in sparkling Technicolor, until the final outburst of grief. I'm not sure this was a better performance than the one by the Tanglewood student orchestra under Reinbert de Leeuw two summers ago, but it worked, and on the radio next day it seemed both more relaxed and even more devastating.

Macal also led a crisp, crystalline, but monochromatic Mozart 17th Piano Concerto with Garrick Ohlsson, and a Brahms Fourth Symphony that started with uncertain pulse and moved leisurely until in the noble finale it finally blossomed.

The following week, 36-year-old Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst and the phenomenal 30-year-old German violinist Christian Tetzlaff introduced the Ligeti Violin Concerto to a Boston audience (which turned the quiet slow movement into a concerto for violin and coughing fit but stayed to cheer at the end). What an exciting and beautiful work! Its five movements (three of them quite short) begin with a Praeludium (Vivacissimo luminoso) that starts out sounding like the orchestra (the world? the universe?) tuning up. Then how quickly the music takes hold. Barely a dozen strings with off-center winds (alto flute, recorder, slide whistles, and three ocarinas) and a rainbow of percussion keyboards (glockenspiel, marimba, vibraphone, xylophone) punctuate, embroider, and extend the central violin part. Things get turned inside out: the ocarinas become aggressive little chirpers (with what Robert Lowell called an "angry wrenlike vigilance") while tough-guy trumpet and trombone are muted pussycats. Moods shift mercurially between the elegiac and the raucous. The epicenters are the long second-movement "Aria," with its luscious, melancholy violin solo, and an intense fourth-movement Passacaglia, with the high-pitched violin playing against tilted rhythmic interruptions from the tambourine.

The big finish (Appassionato) is brashly agitated, even jeering, with one violin and one viola in the orchestra deliberately mistuned ("scordatura"). This cosmic hoedown is interrupted by another soaring violin solo and a stunning cadenza. Tetzlaff easily negotiated left-handed pizzicati, triple stops, spine-tingling trills, and glassy harmonics, but he can also play a simple, singing line that melts the heart (at the last performance he returned with a Bach partita for an encore). He does it all. And so, too, I think, does this riveting, mysterious, endlessly surprising, all-embracing concerto.

Bracketing the Ligeti were a sober, mechanical performance of Haydn's early, three-movement Lamentation Symphony (No. 26), with its medieval plainsong quotations (Good Friday music) and odd minuet finale, and a nervous, bottom-heavy, rhythmically erratic, yet often lively rendering of Schubert's early Tragic Symphony (No. 4). For two weeks, though, the conductors and the players (and most of the audience) seemed to derive their greatest pleasure from -- of all things -- the newest works.