National pride?

Charles Dutoit's flawed French; André Previn's easy Americana

by Lloyd Schwartz

On two succeeding nights last week, there were concerts that looked as if they might provide a fascinating contrast. The BankBoston Celebrity Series brought in the Orchestre National de France (founded as the French National Radio Orchestra in 1934) under its music director, Charles Dutoit (born in Geneva and generally acknowledged to be French music's best hope), in a very French program consisting of Ravel, Poulenc, and Rimsky-Korsakov (perhaps the most French of all the Russian composers). Next night, André Previn (born in Berlin but a true child of Hollywood) led the BSO in a program of American classics, three-quarters of which had never been performed by the BSO at Symphony Hall. Previn's concert was better than Dutoit's, but both left something to be desired.

We're spoiled in Boston. When concerts are bad, it's usually because of some failure of taste or judgment. These were issues for Dutoit, too, but what really shocked were the technical deficiencies: queasy intonation and ensemble so sloppy you'd have to rename the pizzicatos "schpritzicatos."

Dutoit has so many gestural mannerisms, he's at least always fun to describe. He leans way back like Bob Hope, but more ready to pounce; he keeps his elbows close to his waist like Jack Benny ("Well!"), with his arms circling the air like Bette Davis with a cigarette in each hand (a friend thought all these added up to Hans Conried). He does knee bends, flaps his wrists, shrugs his padded shoulders, makes air drawings, or goes into Rodin poses. But he's such a master of diverse styles, he usually transcends his peculiarities. This time, though, in the kind of music for which he's most admired, the performances themselves were laughable. And unforgivable.

Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales was thick and languid to the point of vapidity, with a limited dynamic range, though a flash of lightness or lilt suddenly made you feel as if you were at a real dance. Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos was livelier, in its way, which wasn't exactly Poulenc's way. Pianists Valentina Lisitska and Alexei Kuznetsoff, the award-winning duo who met at the Kiev Conservatory, were certainly riveting, but in rather too literal a sense of the word.

They certainly make a glamorous couple, she with her waist-length glowing flaxen hair, pale face and black-rimmed lips, dying-swan wrists and endless fingers; he with his curly dark hair and spaniel eyes. You wouldn't be surprised if they floated up from their benches and skated off into the wings doing multiple axels and lutzes, having just outscored Tai and Randy. Their simultaneity is astonishing. From where I was sitting, I couldn't see Kuznetsoff's hands, but it all sounded as if only two hands (with 20 fingers) were playing. Yet most of the time, the tone was hard and brittle, without a hint of Poulenc's Gallic charm and sly wit. The shimmering Larghetto sounded dreamier but sentimentalized, more a Tchaikovsky slow movement than Poulenc's insinuating and insouciant love song.

The Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, was a disaster. Dutoit conducted Rimsky's bewitching series of tales from the Arabian Nights as if they were Tristan, making them weighty and lugubrious, rather than supplying a more appropriate sweep and dazzle. Here Dutoit looked like Dracula. It was like that hilarious scene in The Band Wagon where Jack Buchanan, as the "genius" British director, turns Fred Astaire's lighthearted song-and-dance revue into a pretentious retelling of Faust.

The big bassoon solo weaving the story of the Kalendar Prince was appropriately sweet and mournful, the horn brightly alert, the solo cello suave and svelte. And concertmaster Luc Héry's impersonation of the seductive storyteller herself in his violin solos was ravishing as long as he kept his pitch from sagging.

I looked up my review of the last concert I heard by the Orchestre National, in 1981, under an even more flamboyant conductor, Leonard Bernstein. I'd evidently been impressed by the leanness and buoyancy of the playing. That's no longer the case. And even sadder, Dutoit, who's always been such a model of stylishness, seems to have deflated. The little detonations of rhythmic life that make music in any style compelling seem to have vanished. Even the requisite encore (the Minuet from Bizet's second L'Arlésienne Suite, primarily a duet for flute and harp) sounded tired. This concert had no pulse, and you don't have to be a doctor to know what that means.

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Previn's American program included the late Morton Gould's concert suite from Agnes DeMille's 1948 Lizzie Borden ballet, Fall River Legend; Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto, composed the same year for Benny Goodman, with BSO principal clarinettist William R. Hudgins; William Schuman's Third Symphony (1941); and George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924), a perennial Pops and Tanglewood favorite that had -- astonishingly -- never been performed before at a regular BSO subscription concert. It's the all-American angle that's so radical, but the dates tell you how deeply conservative and careful this program was. All these pieces were worth hearing, and Previn is an excellent advocate, though he is not the most exciting or personally involved conductor around. What were the politics for not including something by a living American?

"Skillful" is the word I want to use for the Gould and the Schuman -- orchestrally lively works that keep you interested if not exactly glued to your seat. No theme or phrase remains etched in your mind. Gould's suite takes mostly the folksy sections of the ballet and eliminates a lot of the darker material (what remains of that side has a melodramatic ring), yet folksy or dark, there's something a little anonymous about it all. The Schuman is brilliant and heroic, and very tightly constructed -- the Passacaglia and Fugue first part and the Chorale and Toccata second part all evolving from the same basic theme. The parts proliferate, but even when the texture is thickest, nothing gets lost. Yet in some deep way, it's still easy listening, pre-war style.

Copland's Clarinet Concerto is also lively and brief, tighter than Gould's ballet music, looser than Schuman's symphony. It's quite rhapsodic, actually, and romantic (the rocking rhythm of the first movement is established by a harp), with a whisper of jazz so modest, it's almost amusing. Hudgins did a good job -- his tone is clean, and he warmed it up as he warmed up in the cadenza and "Rather fast" second movement.

The big disappointment was Rhapsody in Blue. First of all, because he was conducting from the piano, Previn needed to have the lid removed, and as a result the piano lost its edge. The sound got diluted and diffused somewhere over the stage. It sounded dampered when it needed to sound brash. And then Previn took the famous big theme at such a slow tempo (so that his fast playing didn't have to be too fast?), it oozed when it should have soared. The most exciting playing came from clarinettist Thomas Martin in the fabulous opening, the slowly rising two-octave glissando wail that, according to program annotator Steven Ledbetter, Gershwin -- a fan of Paul Whiteman clarinettist Ross Gorman (who could do it) -- probably decided to use before he actually wrote down a note.

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Thumbs up for one of the BSO's other recent guest soloists, violinist Josef Suk (Dvorák's great-grandson), who played a big-toned, warmhearted, straightforward Mozart Third Violin Concerto under BSO assistant conductor Richard Westerfield. The program began with a slightly too-understated Overture to Rossini's sidesplitting L'Italiana in Algeri and ended with a strong, beautifully played Shostakovich Symphony No. 15 (the composer's last), which ranges from the satiric hilarity of another Rossini overture, William Tell (obsessively quoted), to the outer-spaciest music this side of 2001. Westerfield said in an interview that he had at first planned to do the William Tell but then decided it would overemphasize those quotations. I think that he was wrong, that the change of plans was timid. To be a great musician, you need to go for broke on every decision.

A couple of weeks later, Jeffrey Tate was the BSO's welcome guest conductor, but thumbs way down for his soloist, the Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja, who plunged with terrier-like enthusiasm into each phrase and shook her head on the tremolos. Her eyes had the broad expressivity of Cecilia Bartoli, but what came out of the piano was an inarticulate, muffled, muddy rendering of Mozart's Ninth Piano Concerto -- this season's low point. After intermission, Tate returned with a lovely, leisurely account of Bruckner's Second Symphony, which the BSO has played only twice before. It was oddly unfocused programming, and the downer of the Mozart made it hard to want to pay attention. But when I did, I heard the orchestra playing lovely country dances, noble chorales, and brilliant fanfares -- many of which anticipate the later and much greater Bruckner, after he learned to give emotional shape to those vast expanses of time and space.