Surprise! Surprise!

Cecilia Bartoli, L'elisir d'amore, Rostropovich, and the BSO

by Lloyd Schwartz

In the world of live performance, surprises are always in store. Two days before her sold-out Celebrity Series concert at Symphony Hall, superstar Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli canceled, because she'd caught a cold rehearsing in an unheated hall in Akron. Notices went out to subscribers and critics. Two thousand people suddenly had a free evening. Next day, guess what? Ms. Bartoli announces that she's recovered and will go on as originally scheduled.

The concert turned out to be delightful if not entirely satisfying. The first half consisted of a Latin motet, cantata, and opera aria by Vivaldi, complete with Baroque string quartet (I Delfici) and keyboard (György Fischer) -- not your usual concert fare. The second half had songs in six different languages (including Greek, Hebrew, and Yiddish, plus one without words at all) by Ravel, two composed by the great 19th-century diva Pauline Viardot, and Léo Delibes's delicious "Les filles de Cadix," all from Bartoli's recent French album, and an obscure but brilliant (though not wildly interesting) Rossini aria (from Zelmira).

No one else would have come up with such a program. Why didn't it add up to much more than just a showcase for Bartoli? The singing that revealed -- and reveled in -- the most beautiful parts of her voice (the darker velvets and bronzes -- more clarinet than flute) was in the selections that emphasized long, spun-out lyric lines. "Ah, ch'infelice sempre," the first aria from the Vivaldi cantata, was exquisite, with its ravishing, sighing melody and delicate pizzicato accompaniment (the most respectable playing by the exuberant but technically hard-pressed I Delfici).

Bartoli's coloratura was formidable for speed, agility, and accuracy, but not for variety of color or expressive range. In the final Vivaldi aria, with its breathless runs and trills, the fast notes sounded like little chihuahua barks -- not in the same league as Callas, who made these passages the climax of an inner drama, or Marilyn Horne, who made the impossible roulades an exciting contrast to her low chest notes, or Joan Sutherland, whose huge tone gave the technical difficulties a kind of grandeur, or such natural coloraturas as Beverly Sills and Lily Pons, whose trills and runs were so sheerly pretty. Bartoli's a capable actress, but she'd rather show off her dexterity than her understanding; it was odd to hear her convey such delight in an aria about an emotional shipwreck.

The Ravel, Delibes, and Viardot songs are charmers -- seductive (in the vocalise), touching, mysterious. In the "Chanson hébraïque," she used two distinct and convincing voices in the dialogue between father and son. And in Fischer (who, at 62, is exactly twice her age), she had an eloquent accompanist -- refined, infinitely nuanced, and consistently lilting.

The program was quite short. With an intermission and three encores, the entire evening clocked in under two hours, but it didn't exactly build. Yet from song to song, it's hard not to love Bartoli's animation, even her excessive facial mobility. Better that than the usual prima donna's proud formality. So if she takes too much pleasure in her own instrument, it's understandable, and not hard to forgive.

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Talking about surprises, who'd have guessed that Donizetti's slender pastoral comedy, L'elisir d'amore ("The Love Potion"), would be the plum of the Boston Lyric Opera's 19th season (final performances April 11 and 13)? Not that this says a lot after the disappointment of Tosca and the disaster of Mozart's Il re pastore. On opening night, L'elisir had its own share of problems: a thin-sounding orchestra that wasn't always together, stage business that hadn't yet acquired the impeccable comic timing it required (surely the result of insufficient rehearsal), and a young tenor who undermined his considerable gifts by not singing consistently on pitch.

But this production, borrowed from the Scottish Opera and Opera Zuid (Maastricht, Holland), has spirit and inventiveness, and a cast with an infectious sense of fun. Production designer Russell Craig puts the 19th-century genre scene (baskets of harvested tomatoes, a clothesline of laundered sheets stretched across the stage) inside a literal picture frame, then breaks the two-dimensional plane by having precariously raked platforms protrude through it and a red ladder leaning against the proscenium. Dr. Dulcamara's quack elixirs (nothing more than cheap wine) are housed in a big magicians' cabinet that kept unfolding and unfolding.

Stage director Leon Major, filling in for the ailing Colin Graham, fleshes out the production with an almost nonstop stream of shticks. The preening Sergeant Belcore, played with hilariously bumbling self-importance by baritone Earle Patriarco (one of the two most elegant singers in the cast), courts the charming owner of the country estate, Adina (soprano Lisa Saffer, the other elegant singer), by handing her a bouquet of flowers -- upside down. He holds up a hand mirror to demonstrate his handsomeness to her, then becomes more interested in picking something out of his teeth. He's followed around by three devoted stooges (Larry, Darrell, and Darrell?) who mimic his every step (and misstep). Even more impressive is the way Major has each of the peasant girls respond to the news that the Nemorino -- the poor peasant who's in love with Adina -- has come into a fortune: each one of them pacing in a different direction to the music of their collective minds at work.

Major also allows the intimate scenes their own moments of tenderness. What Donizetti's opera has most going for it are two romantic leading characters who have poignant human complications. The heroine, Adina, is charming and, for a coloratura, unusually smart. She reads books! In her first aria, she declaims to the peasants on her estate the story of Tristan she's just been reading (this is where Nemorino gets the idea for the love potion). Saffer (Cunegonde in the Lyric's production of Candide) is cast against type (she's more Radcliffe than radicchio), but she projects Adina's innate intelligence and enchanting sense of humor, and she moves with the grace of a dancer. A couple of high notes nearly got away from her, but I've never heard her silvery voice sound lovelier, more expressive, or more endearing. Her moment of revelation that she really loves the boobish Nemorino had startling emotional conviction without breaking the comic style.

The most famous aria in L'elisir is "Una furtiva lagrima," which Nemorino sings when he realizes that Adina loves him (it's her "furtive tear" that gives her away). The opera has a history of great tenors (like Pavarotti) who have only to stand there and sing it to make audiences happy. But in Gregory Turay, Saffer's young, multi-prize-winning tenor, it was wonderful to see a Nemorino who actually does a cartwheel (though he too is more corn on the cob than pasta e fagioli and more 1990s than 1830s; he actually looks a lot like Lorraine Hunt as the teenage son of Pompey in Peter Sellars's production of Handel's Julius Caesar). He plays Nemorino with uninhibited and touching adolescent innocence. Like Saffer and Patriarco, bass Dale Travis (Dulcamara) and soprano Christina Harrop (Giannetta, a peasant girl), he's very comfortable and unselfconscious on stage, even while director Major is taking advantage of his good bod and form-fitting trousers by having him stand or squat or stretch out on the stage as often as possible with his back to the audience.

Turay also has an attractive, sweet voice -- the bright sound of wheat in the wind. He can sing quietly, then pull out a big climactic high note. But he was almost always a little off (mostly above) the pitch.

Conductor Stephen Lord and the orchestra sounded as if they needed more rehearsal. Ensemble was often dicy, and even in the tiny Emerson Majestic, the group was hard to hear (except for the very loud harp accompanying "Una furtiva lagrima"). Yet despite its problems, this production works because (for the first time I can remember at a Boston Lyric event), everyone on and off stage seems to be having a really good time.

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The problem with some of the BSO's recent concerts was that the folks involved didn't seem to be having much fun, and when they did, it seemed more manufactured than genuine. I was most looking forward to the return of Hans Graf, whose 1995 Mozart program I liked a lot. His program was an imaginative pairing of the classical and the neoclassical, dark Mozart and bright Stravinsky: Mozart's stormy D-minor Piano Concerto, with the young Norwegian virtuoso Leif Ove Andsnes, and the late C-minor Adagio and Fugue alternating with Stravinsky's Baroquey Dumbarton Oaks chamber concerto and his big Symphony in C. But it was disappointing, one of those concerts in which either the conductor or the players (or both) are slightly inert rhythmically -- everything felt a little leaden, except Andsnes, whose playing was a gram too lightweight for the lightning flashes of this work.

The following week things got worse. This was virtually a Pops concert, with the BSO subscription debut of John Williams, who conducted the BSO premiere of his two-year-old bassoon concerto, The Five Sacred Trees, a piece inspired by Celtic folklore, with the BSO's superb principal bassoonist, Richard Svoboda. It turned out to be the most serious work on the program, something with musical density and color, and written gratefully for the instrument of choice.

The concert opened with superstar flutist James Galway playing and leading a small chamber group in one of the nearly 300 flute concertos by Johann Joachim Quantz (born 1697), the teacher of Frederick the Great. Before he began, Galway felt compelled to tell the audience that Quantz was "the highest paid musician of all time," making $2000 a year at a time when a cow cost a dollar. "I hope you're all going to wear your `This Is Quantz Year' buttons." Galway was apparently discouraged from repeating these crass remarks at the three ensuing concerts.

Galway later returned under Williams's baton, wearing a gold and red commencement gown over his red and gold vest, for John Corigliano's Pied Piper Fantasy (composed for Galway in 1981). Robert Browning's famous poem is a dazzling virtuoso extravaganza that's not only hilarious but also terrifying and poignant. Corigliano's seven movements of gimmicky schlock are stretched out to a length vastly disproportionate to their musical interest. Galway enters on a dark stage and eventually winds up exchanging his flute for a tin whistle and leading a dozen or so young flute students up the aisle and out of the auditorium, endlessly repeating a tune so simple and grating it might get some children running in the opposite direction.

There's something fake about all this cuteness -- Corigliano's and Galway's. They play to -- and down to -- the audience. Nothing comes from within, except the need to be loved. Galway is a skillful instrumentalist, just as Corigliano is a skillful orchestrator, but the Pied Piper Fantasy isn't as good -- or as honest -- as Tubby the Tuba. And Galway didn't seem to be putting much effort into producing that famous "golden tone." Williams kept it all going, but it's a work that provides more traffic than music to conduct.

A couple of weeks earlier Max Hobart and the Civic Symphony Orchestra presented the Boston premiere of John Harbison's 1994 Flute Concerto, with BSO second flute (and Boston treasure) Fenwick Smith. Here was a piece with color and substance and rhythmic bite. Harbison's note provides an engaging narrative: "The flute is a traveler, perhaps half bird, half human, who acts as leader and guide. The journey does not seek goals as much as events, sights, curiosities." Harbison plays on all the familiar kinds of fluty warblings and chirpings, but there isn't a cliché in the carload. Every turn has a surprise: syncopated dance rhythms, constant tempo shifts in what the composer calls "three fast movements," delicate passages of percussion, and a contemporary cool balanced against a fearless romanticism (the flute hovering over the rich orchestration at the climax of the second movement). Smith was a mesmerizing birdman, the real Pied Piper -- you'd follow him anywhere.

Hobart prepared the orchestra thoroughly for this work -- Smith's "companion" flutes were particularly effective. Unfortunately, the rest of the Civic concert, including an interminable Berlioz Symphonie fantastique (which should be a virtuoso showcase), barely met the music's technical (forget interpretive) demands. I remember some years ago being impressed by the Civic's playing. What happened?

Back at Symphony Hall, the BSO paid tribute to one of its favorite stars, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, on his 70th birthday. "Slava" always seems to be having a good time. The BSO's gift to him were two world premieres: 33-year-old Augusta Read Thomas's Chanson (in four short continuous movements) and a large-scale First Cello Concerto from her spouse, the 63-year-old British/Welsh composer Bernard Rands. I found the concerto of more moment-to-moment interest than Thomas's incantatory but gray lyricism -- at least, the last-movement variations on a Welsh folksong made me want to hear it again. Rostropovich threw himself into these, though I wouldn't say he played (or that the cello parts were written?) with compelling variety.

I'm not sure it was ideal to have a big variations movement precede one of the great variations pieces in the repertory, Richard Strauss's Don Quixote. Seiji Ozawa led a warm, loving performance, with superb wind playing (Alfred Genovese's sinuous oboe), and the BSO's new principal violist, Stephen Ansell, offering a magnificent characterization of Sancho Panza. Rostropovich was in rare form at the Friday matinee I attended -- full of energy, character, and passion. My only reservation was that the cello's final downward glissando, Don Quixote exhaling his last breath, was too smoothly beautiful.

The most moving moment of the afternoon came at the end, with tearful farewells, hugs and kisses (from Slava), and standing ovations going to four retiring BSO stalwarts: violinists Leo Panasevich (who joined the BSO in 1951), Harvey Seigel, and Raymond Sird, and principal horn player Charles Kavalovsky, who's been one of the BSO's major identifying voices since 1972.

After the concert, Rostropovich returned to the Higginson Room for a master class in string playing with four students and graduates of Project STEP (String Training and Educational Program for Students of Color). He apologized for his English but was eloquent on the issues of interpretation that arose with the two more advanced players: violinists Vali Phillips (who's just been appointed principal second violin of the Minnesota Orchestra) and Mariana Green (who's just been admitted to Juilliard) -- mainly ideas about how much more various their playing could be, and how important it was to hear the solo parts in relation to the rest of the orchestra (ably represented by pianist Joy Michele Cline).

With two younger players, tenth-grade bass player Lemarr Lovett and, the only cellist, eighth-grader Ndidi Menkiti, he dealt with issues of basic technique: bowing ("For sound, the right hand for string players is more important than the left") and the position of the hands and fingers. His suggestions made for instant and audible improvements. He ended by quoting his friend Dimitri Shostakovich: "We are all soldiers of music, and there are no generals."