All's well . . .

. . . when the season ends this well

by Lloyd Schwartz

Just when you'd think the musical season would be winding down comes a burst of outstanding events. Like the "Celebration of Luigi Dallapiccola" presented at (and by) Emmanuel Music and Smith College. This Italian composer, who died in 1975, at the age of 71, was a musician's musician's musician; hence he's not much performed or recorded. The panel of disciples and friends moderated by John Harbison before the Boston concert depicted a complex, even eccentric character of unshakable standards and courtly elegance. He admired the unlikely pair of Puccini and Schoenberg -- just as his music combines exquisite Italianate melody with spartan 12-tone technique, a sensuous, gossamer surface with ascetic spirituality -- and he hated Stravinsky, whose piquant instrumentation and rhythmic elan his music resembles perhaps more than anyone else's (this antipathy was mutual and baffling on both sides).

Soprano Jane Bryden, one of Emmanuel Music's founding members, had been turned on to Dallapiccola a quarter of a century ago by Harbison, who'd been working in Rome. She was approached by Smith College, where she teaches, to apply for a grant. So she and her husband, the wonderful flute player Christopher Krueger, consulted Harbison and Emmanuel music director Craig Smith. The program lists six sources of grant money. Grant money has rarely been better spent.

Harbison conducted Bryden, baritone Donald Wilkinson, and the Emmanuel Orchestra -- which included such star players as Krueger, of course, and Julia Skolnik on flute, Bruce Creditor and Kathy Metasy on a variety of clarinets, oboist Peggy Pearson and her sister, cellist Beth Pearson, violinist Danielle Maddon, saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky, pianist Leslie Amper, and Martha Moor on harp. Can you begin to imagine the surprising timbres? (Smith, recuperating from toe surgery, couldn't participate.) And Randall Hodgkinson played, with exploratory eloquence, the austere contrapuntal pastels for solo piano of the Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera.

The pieces crossed three decades, from Tre Laudi (1936-'37), in Latin, with its gorgeous vocal lines, delicate high winds and strings, brilliant trumpet and horn fanfares (with harp!) and, later, its more ominous, discordant plea for penance (with saxophone!) to the angular coloratura and colorful percussion effects of the Christmas Concerto for the Year 1956.

Bryden's sweet, high-lying soprano was especially fine in her touching articulation of the haiku-like Four Lyrics by Antonio Machado (1948/1964), one of her signature pieces ("I dreamt I saw God last night . . . Then I dreamt I was dreaming"). Wilkinson sang the Five Songs for Baritone and Several Instruments with conviction and a new power. The Piccola Musica Notturna -- a ghostly, atmospheric 1961 chamber version of a large orchestral piece from a decade earlier that responds to a ghostly, atmospheric Machado poem (which is printed in the program but remains unsung) -- was another high point. There were only high points. A distinguished pianist in the audience exclaimed, "This music -- it's like the comet!"

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Sofia Gubaidulina, the Tatar-born composer (now living in Hamburg), shares Dallapiccola's spiritual undercurrents and unusual timbres. She came to wider American attention in Sarah Caldwell's 1988 "Making Music Together" Soviet-American festival (an event that takes on increasing importance in retrospect, given the number of significant Soviet artists and composers introduced), especially through her magnificent violin concerto, Offertorium, with Gidon Kremer and the BSO under Charles Dutoit (recorded by Deutsche Grammophon). Last week the BSO's principal guest conductor, Bernard Haitink, led her new viola concerto, with its brilliant dedicatee, Yuri Bashmet, who premiered the piece in Chicago the week before.

It's a stunning, haunting work, a dark night of the soul, with the central theme two alternating notes only a half-step apart (D and E-flat). The D is announced by the solo viola in unpredictable registers. The orchestra, including a creepy, tenebrous string quartet (with double bass) tuned a quarter tone lower, responds gloomily. Finger cymbals, hushed gongs, and other exotic percussion create yet another halo of sound around the strings. "Weeping" harmonics and keening tremolos rise out of the melancholy, literally soul-searching surroundings. Bashmet's viola not only sang but slid, scraped, trembled, whirred, and screeched. At one point stratospheric viola harmonics dissolve into a piccolo solo -- you couldn't tell which instrument was playing. This isn't pretty music, though some of it is sublimely beautiful, and Bashmet made it all riveting, repressed, then exploding into vertiginous climaxes (some of it reminds me of Bernard Herrmann's brooding, murmuring score for Vertigo) before subsiding into a final quiet wail. It's extremely emotional, even hysterical at times, all the more astonishing given the compressed range of the material -- and the absence of any expressive markings in the score.

Another impressive string soloist, British cellist Alexander Baillie, had an invitation from the Boston Philharmonic (where four years ago he performed the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto) to play anything he wanted. He chose the same composer's Second Cello Concerto.

Baillie is an open, honest, natural player, with a warm rich buzz that's also extremely flexible. Which is what this ambiguous piece (ambiguous even as to phrase lengths) needs. Shostakovich is even slipperier here than usual about where satire and lyricism intersect. Heroic or mock-heroic? A death march or a jig? Baillie's teasing glissandos sounded as if his bow were about to be spring-released into the conductor's backside. A broad cello melody conjured up an old Jewish folk song. Then the concerto just stops. Like that. Shostakovich must have influenced Gubaidulina, but how worldly he seems next to her essential otherworldliness. Benjamin Zander and the Philharmonic were at their best, with special nods to concertmistress Irina Muresanu, harpist Martha Moor, and Kevin Owen leading the crucial horn section.

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Yet another great instrumentalist turned up at Worcester's wonderful Mechanics Hall. James Christie's International Artists series presented the only local appearance this season by Slovenian pianist Dubravka Tomsic. The program was similar to her last Boston recital: Mozart's G-minor Fantasia (a piece she played at her debut, when she was five), three rhythmically scintillating, subtly colored selections from Ravel's Miroirs and the dazzling Toccata from Le tombeau de Couperin (which sparked a standing ovation before intermission), and all four Chopin Ballades at the end. The "new" pieces were Brahms's two Opus 79 Rhapsodies (a preview of her forthcoming Tanglewood and Boston recitals): capacious, obsessive, unstoppable -- with the gentle mid section of the first the only calm.

This was one of Tomsic's most glorious concerts. No one alive has more perfect technical command, yet technique is never an end in itself or an excuse for self-congratulation. Her phrasing of the famous waltz theme of the G-minor Ballade had a fresh, inward lilt; the impossible bravura coda of the F-major swept everything before it, including one's breath. And the limpid stillness of the Bach-Siloti chorale-prelude (her last encore) was equally breathtaking. Impassioned, full of feeling, her playing is also utterly unsentimental, and always at the service of the music. Mechanics Hall opened itself up to it. However thick the texture of Brahms's harmonies, each note, each line, could be heard distinctly, had its own body to be caressed by the breathing acoustics of the hall and carried on the air out into the house.

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There may be no major opera harder to pull off than Don Giovanni, even in concert. Boston Baroque presented America's first period-instrument version in 1986, and as I recall, it didn't work. But last week's revival -- despite some serious shortcomings -- most certainly did. Martin Pearlman's conducting still lacks innuendo (doesn't he realize that the postlude to "Vedrai carino" suggests a hand slipping into a lover's dress or pants?), but he now leads with more dash and, in the apocalyptic finale, a sense of tragic grandeur. And at least four of his new singers could make even the phone book come to life.

Once again, Pearlman chose Mozart's original version as first performed in Prague, before Mozart substituted Don Ottavio's simpler aria "Dalla sua pace," for the more treacherous "Il mio tesoro" and added Donna Elvira's powerful "Mi tradí." Mozart was a practical musician -- he made his alterations to fit the singers he had. If I were Mozart, I'd have wanted to give Christine Goerke, Pearlman's marvelous Elvira, some grand climactic moment (we'll have to wait till next season to hear her sing "Mi tradí," at the Met), and I'd have wanted to spare my Ottavio, the wan tired-sounding British tenor Lynton Atkinson, the embarrassment of flubbing the high note of "Il mio tesoro."

Granted, I heard the second of two consecutive performances, which is hard on any singer, though the demands didn't faze either Goerke, whose full-bodied voice never faltered and who never stepped out of character (she was endearingly ruffled even when she was just sitting and listening), or Nathan Berg, the hilariously uninhibited Leporello, whose plush, resonant bass-baritone made me think of Ezio Pinza. Abetted by drama consultant Laurence Senelick, he showed Elvira the "catalogue" of Don Giovanni's conquests by holding up his score (later, Senelick had him and Giovanni exchange scores rather than costumes), and since there were no peasant girls in sight, he hit on the nearest on-stage woman violinist.

As Giovanni, young baritone Nathan Gunn already cuts a suave, handsome figure, and he has an edgy sense of irony. His voice is suave too, but he can afford to let more of it pour out. The imposingly tall Edward Russell easily filled Jordan Hall with his imposing voice-from-the-tomb as the statue who comes to dinner.

More problematic was soprano Sally Wolf, who kept her eyes glued to the score (and made a wrong entrance the one time she didn't). Forget character. Her voice is lovely but too mushy for Donna Anna's revenge aria, and Mozart cruelly exposes questionable pitch. Her later aria ("Non mi dir") had sharper focus, and most of the coloratura was impressive. Amy Burton's Zerlina was more debutante than peasant girl -- a chirpy chippy whose shrillness diminished the magical possibilities of this enchanting role. Baritone Brett Polegato made a clean-cut consort for her. The miracle is that this ill-matched collection worked wonders as an ensemble. And with Boston Baroque's superb orchestra and chorus, that was enough for an entertaining and moving -- a real -- Don Giovanni.