Haitink, plus

What lures new audiences? The now ubiquitous gift shops? Amenities at the BSO range from $7 rush tickets before weekday performances to cocktail hours and buffet "Suppers at Symphony" that include either chamber music or talks. A handful of Celebrity Series events are also preceded by free lectures.

On a recent New York visit, I was pleasantly surprised to discover additional treats at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall: bins of free Hall's cough drops (with a polite note requesting that patrons limit their selection to two) and, even more, a sight for sore eyes: the choice of a readable large-print program, with notes by the dean of America's program annotators, former BSO program annotator and Globe reviewer Michael Steinberg. And how civilized of the New York Phil to offer concertmaster Glenn Dictorow the respect of his own entrance bow before the tuning-up.

That evening, the Philharmonic was presenting a Shostakovich program I was eager to hear. Last year, the BSO under 43-year-old Kirov Opera director Valery Gergiev convinced me that Shostakovich's blatant and endlessly repetitive Leningrad Symphony (the Seventh) might be a masterpiece of subtle dynamic gradations. His big piece with the New York Phil was the neglected Fourth Symphony, the work Shostakovich himself withdrew in 1936 after it had already gone into rehearsal -- probably because of the Stalinist attack on the decadence of his recently produced opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (the symphony finally reached the public in 1961). It's an hour and five minutes of cacophonous modernist unpredictability, undercutting melodrama with either a throbbing lyricism or a shrill irony that are themselves on the verge of further melodrama. Shostakovich admitted the piece suffered from "grandiosomania." The first movement is so long and goes off into so many directions (each like a variation but not really recognizable as such) it's hard to tell when it's finally over. Gergiev pulled out every stop, and the performance was riveting (perhaps in more ways than one); at the end, the lost-in-space fade-out seemed all the more haunting.

Earlier this year, Ben Zander and the Boston Philharmonic, with three young American and Russian vocal soloists, presented a touching performance of Shostakovich's vocal cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry (which, given the USSR's overt anti-Semitism, had to wait seven years for its premiere in 1955, two years after Stalin's death). I wrote that it was "oddly charming, sadly celebratory." With Gergiev and the New York Philharmonic and three mature artists from the Kirov Opera with powerful, colorful, extraordinarily varied, and profoundly expressive voices (soprano Marina Shaguch, contralto Larissa Diadkova, and tenor Constantin Pluzhnikov), these 11 tragic and comic lamentations over the conditions of the Jews under the czars and their (allegedly) happier conditions on the collective farms (some of Shostakovich's subtlest irony here, with death and loss, hope and despair undercurrents in even the most playful songs,) acquired a larger, archetypal human poignancy and grandeur.

Back in Boston, the BSO season ended with more Shostakovich, the Tenth Symphony, apparently a favorite of principal guest conductor Bernard Haitink, who led a memorable Symphony Hall performance with the London Philharmonic nearly 20 years ago. Some people consider the Tenth the greatest of Shostakovich's 15 symphonies. Completed in 1953, it's both somber and nasty, with an Allegro Scherzo the composer has apparently acknowledged to be a brutally satirical musical portrait of Stalin himself. Haitink, unlike Gergiev, holds the lid on, keeps the stops in, and that's a useful control for Shostakovich's excesses. Haitink refuses to indulge the work's flaws -- the way the best passages are so much better than the worst, the way the symphony doesn't really need all that repetition. So despite Haitink's success in conveying the eerie slitherings of those narrowly undulating, snake-in-the-grass themes and the increasing urgency of those monotonous repetitions, he doesn't -- like Gergiev -- make you feel every note has to be there. But the really good parts, especially the imaginative/ominous wind writing, couldn't have been more beautifully played, or played with more conviction or sympathy, given Elizabeth Ostling's tender flutings, William R. Hudgins's sexy clarinet oodlings, and bantering bassoon burbling by Richard Svoboda.

What struck me most about Haitink's Shostakovich, though, was how the repressed, deliberate, unsettling waltz of the slow movement echoed Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales, which closed the first half of that program. (Was Haitink suggesting Ravel as Shostakovich's source?) In fact, the entire program fit Haitink's particular talents like a brand-new Isotoner. The opening selection, Webern's early Richard Strauss-like, pre-opus-number Im Sommerwind, is a 13-minute "Idyl" for "large orchestra," full of restless, ever changing, intimate small-ensemble chamber effects (sounding nothing like, but anticipating in every way, Webern's later, more subtle and cryptic volatility). And Ravel's quintessentially French waltzes, alternatingly tender and edgy, lucent and ambiguous, found in Haitink a leader of taste, restraint, and exquisite elegance -- with Alfred Genovese's oboe the insinuating olive in that martini.

Haitink is recording Ravel with the BSO, so the week before we also had Alborada del gracioso and Tombeau de Couperin, with Genovese again their cool yet vibrant heart, though neither piece had as much French (or Spanish) inflection as the very best versions have. The concert ended with Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, delivered with welcome restraint, but without Genovese and without much transfiguration (the entrance into Heaven was the last place the brass section seemed to be announcing).

That week's highlight was, without question, the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with Pamela Frank (the gifted daughter of pianists Claude Frank and Lilian Kallir). This was a chiaroscuro dream of a performance, lit by Haitink's mastery of rhythmic trickery and the effortlessness with which Frank sailed over the technical challenges (11th chords triggering each movement!). She was both droll and acerbic in the teasing rubato and register changes of the lively outer movements, and passionate just short of swooning in the two intense "Arias." Timothy Morrison's Kurt Weil-ish trumpeting added another breath of early-'30s air. Haitink is best at music that doesn't depend on personal inflection. And he knows not only where the music is going but where it's coming from. Both he and Frank acknowledged Bach more than Tchaikovsky as the concerto's legitimate granddaddy.

A BSO piece I missed but heard later on tape was the East Coast premiere of Elliot Goldenthal's Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratoria, commissioned by former BSO assistant conductor Carl St. Clair and his Pacific Symphony Orchestra and first performed last year on the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Seiji Ozawa was apparently so moved by the score he insisted on substituting it in two BSO subscription concerts and taking it on tour. In the house, this must have been an extraordinarily moving event. God knows, nothing much has been done musically to acknowledge the victims -- on either side -- of the Vietnam tragedy. Goldenthal's large orchestra, soloists (soprano, baritone, cello), and both adult and children's choruses must have made quite an impact on a sympathetic audience.

The text is a collage of Vietnamese folk songs and Buddhist poems, a Roman Catholic Requiem Mass in Latin, Greek, and French, short passages about war and death from Virgil's Georgics, François de Fenelon, Amadis Jamyn, several other Roman writers (Tibulus, Cicero, Vegetius, Tacitus, Horace), the Bible, and quotes from The Pentagon Papers. At the center are two eloquent, extended excerpts from poems by 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Vietnam veteran Yusef Komunyakaa.

The music is also eclectic, but in a far less interesting, spongier sort of way. We get Orff, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, lots of Puccini, a little (maybe not enough) Verdi, and too many minimalists. There isn't a bar that isn't already a cliché of war music, elegy, and exotic scene-painting. Goldenthal's biggest successes have been as a composer for theater (ART's The King Stag) and film (ranging from Demolition Man and Batman Forever to Heat and the Oscar-nominated Interview with the Vampire). Here he was perhaps trying too hard to be sincere (or ironic) or, like Paul McCartney in his Liverpool Oratorio, letting himself become too intimidated by the genre. Unlike the Requiems of Verdi, Brahms, Fauré, and Britten, Fire Water Paper remains essentially soft-centered and melodramatic.

Suffice it to say that the piece got a magnificent, heartfelt performance from Ozawa and the orchestra, from John Oliver and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, from Johanna Hill Simpson and PALS (Performing Artists at Lincoln School) in the Vietnamese folk and children's songs (probably the best and certainly the least pretentious music in the piece), from cellist Jules Eskin (whose playing matches Yo-Yo Ma's vibrancy on the Sony recording under St. Clair), and especially from soprano Jayne West and baritone James Maddalena (an original cast member), whose full-out, impassioned, yet precise and emotionally focused delivery conveyed more conviction and complex feeling than I heard in any of the music they'd been given to sing.