Simon-ized

James Conlon, as expert at Russian music as any non-Slavic conductor has any right to be, kicked off the New Year with the glistening Prelude (sometimes called "Dawn on the Moskva River") to Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina and a breathy, violent suite Conlon himself stitched together of extended (perhaps too extended) orchestral passages (some with the vocal line instrumentalized) from Shostakovich's shocker, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the opera most famous for Stalin's disapproval of its explicitly sexual orchestration (Time magazine dubbed the graphic trombone slides "pornophony"). In between came the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Joshua Bell in a skillful solo performance that was too well played, too polite, for its own good.

The following week introduced a new conductor, the Estonian Eri Klas, who offered Alfred Schnittke's colorful, endlessly orgasmic Epilogue from Peer Gynt -- the ballet that asks the musical question: is it possible to have too many climaxes in one evening? (Yes!) -- and a vibrant reading of Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (premiered -- and quite literally owned -- by Koussevitzky), though the repeated "Promenades" through the picture gallery suggested something more hurried than a stroll. In between, Russell Sherman played unexpected repertoire, the Chopin Second Piano Concerto. The slow movement was exquisite, as thoughtful and soulful a melodic outpouring as anyone could imagine on the keyboard. The outer movements seemed oddly smaller, with Klas and the orchestra surrounding Sherman with too much cold efficiency for anyone's good.

The major BSO event was Sir Simon Rattle's extraordinary two-and-a-half-hour program that asked almost too much from both the players and the audience, but that nevertheless flew by and was received with gratitude. Not only did it bring back the BSO's most consistently compelling guest conductor of the '90s, it also gave us an all too rare chance to hear the marvelous Polish-born septuagenarian violinist Ida Haendel, who was last here two years ago playing an astonishing, every-note-counts Sibelius Violin Concerto, also with Rattle. This time it was Beethoven, and though the main event was Rattle's signature piece, Mahler's infrequent, unfinished Tenth Symphony, the Beethoven Violin Concerto is hardly just a warm-up.

The diminutive Haendel plays out on the edge, with a tone like satin (warmer than silk, finer than velvet) -- none of that thick veil of vibrato behind which many a violinist hides a multitude of sins. The pace was leisurely, yet each phrase had a bracing lilt. At first, the intonation within Haendel's rapid-fire, full-toned runs could be a little dicy, but she soon settled into a dead-on accuracy, even on the highest wire. One of her glories is the phenomenal steadiness of her trill, which in her fingers is not merely a decoration, or just a local expressive device, but also an architectural one; that trill is always leading somewhere. By the end of the first movement, you could see just where. The climactic cadenza was a miracle of technical virtuosity presented as human drama. (Was that only one violinist or three, their separate voices arguing, competing, finally agreeing?) But the paydirt, the movement's real climax, came immediately after, in the heartbreaking simplicity and indrawn -- indrawing -- tenderness of the returning main theme, with its delicate pizzicato accompaniment. Haendel knows that virtuosity, however dazzling, is never an end in itself, especially for Beethoven.

The miracles weren't over. In the slow movement, the solo violin weaves itself around the theme more than it actually plays it. Haendel's uncanny timing of Beethoven's oddly disconnected phrases turned them into questions and answers, doubts and reassurances. Yet she never lost sight that this quiet interlude is a springboard to the last movement, which she reached in a quicksilver series of transitions -- from pure songfulness to intense double-stopping, and then suddenly to the dancing lightness and energy of the finale. And at every turn, Rattle and the reduced orchestra were attentive and complicit partners.

So by 9:18 p.m., when Rattle and the full orchestra returned for the symphony that Mahler wrote but never finished (in Deryck Cooke's eloquent "performing version" -- there are at least four others), all of us had already been through something big. But from the tremor in the searching opening passage for violas alone, you could tell that something even bigger was only just beginning, and Rattle didn't let us off the hook for the next hour and 20 minutes. The beautiful but complacent playing in Haitink's Mahler Ninth was gone. Many of these musicians had probably never played this work before (the only previous BSO performances were under Niklaus Wyss in 1979). So there was a sense of people being asked to stretch, to go beyond their normal capacities -- a quality one doesn't often hear anymore at the BSO. And even Rattle himself, who recorded a completed Tenth with the Bournemouth Symphony in 1980, asked for new degrees of heat -- and warmth.

Mahler began his Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp immediately after his Ninth (which was really his tenth symphony if you count Das Lied von der Erde, which Mahler didn't number because he was reluctant to break the superstition about daring to write more symphonies than Beethoven). He had essentially completed the great first-movement Adagio, but the rest remains in sketches, though some are quite fully outlined. Musical and ethical positions on the viability of performing this work abound, and arguments over details -- would Mahler really have used that instrument, that tempo, those dynamics? -- will go on forever. What matters is that in performance, the Tenth -- whoever it's by -- emerges as a gorgeous and devastating work that sounds like the place to which Mahler would have gone had he lived to go there (he died in 1911 of a blood infection that might have been treated had penicillin been discovered a decade or so earlier).

The symphony itself re-creates a life-and-death struggle. At times, everything grinds to a sudden halt: with a shrieking trumpet, a pounding drum, trombones turning sour, or an ear-shattering full-orchestral cacophony. Then always, once again, the music will flower -- like the broad melody in the Adagio after the uncertainty of the opening violas. In the unsettling Scherzo second movement, the meter changes in almost every measure. The middle and shortest of the five movements is a shivery ghost dance Mahler called Purgatorio (after deleting "or Inferno"). Out of all this complexity, Rattle's clear and spacious textures brought home one of the most basic devices in all Western harmony -- the tension between some instruments reaching upward while others are simultaneously sinking. It's one of Mahler's simplest gestures, but I can't remember it ever feeling so poignant. In the final love theme, all the music was at last fading out in the same direction. The gentle vanishing, an acceptance of life and death, dissolved into such rapt silence you couldn't tell when it was all over.

At the end of the waltzy fourth movement, the loud smack on the huge two-sided military drum jolted the mesmerized audience upright, even into nervous giggles. That's the kind of performance this was. Remarkable solos -- flutist Elizabeth Ostling's melancholy third-movement night song; Timothy Morrison's chilling, and beautiful, trumpet of death; solo oboe; tuba; viola -- were all cogs in one of those exceptional BSO ensemble performances where the players were pulling together, even when they were nearly pulling apart.

Apropos Joshua Bell, who has moved -- like many current prodigies -- from promising to pedestrian, let's congratulate two pianists, Max Levinson (who turned 24 on January 8 -- Elvis's birthday -- and whose most recent concert was part of the Celebrity Series Emerging Artists program) and HaeSun Paik (30 -- she was one of last season's Emerging Artists), on their commitment to serious musicianship and full-time musical exploration.

Lightning bolts flashed, lava flowed, and feathers flew from Levinson's Wanderer Fantasy, but there was some resulting loss of Schubert's melodic line. The Chopin Preludes were poems masquerading as bravura (though Levinson again showed a tendency to head for the fast lane). The 24 pieces, in every major and minor key, felt as if some large circle of discovery had been fulfilled. Even more remarkable, his identification with Leon Kirchner's urgent and meditative Five Pieces for Piano (1987) made the composer's voiceless transcriptions of five Emily Dickinson songs sound like a history of 20th-century music from Debussy to atonality, all spun out from within.

Kirchner himself turned up at the Gardner Museum to conduct Hindemith's jazzy and (in the second movement for languorously slow winds and a triangle) elegiac Kammermusik, Opus 24 No. 1, and, with Paik at the keyboard, Mozart's D-minor Concerto for Piano, Creaking Chairs, Rustling Programs, and Restless Child. You could barely see Kirchner's left hand darting out from behind the piano lid, but you could hear his hand in the fleshed-out left-hand part of the slow Romanza. Within the rich, glowering atmosphere he created, Paik sang out her wistful and piercing songs, never losing Mozart's dark center even in the high-power cadenzas. It's reassuring that some of our prodigies get only more and more prodigious.