Odds, ends

Mark Morris, First Monday, the BSO, the Pops, and the Cantata Singers

by Lloyd Schwartz

"Live music is something I must have!", Mark Morris told the audience at a Q&A session after a performance last week at the Emerson Majestic. Where else would you hear on one program music by Brahms, Purcell, and octogenarian California composer Lou Harrison, who doesn't get played much on this coast? Rhymes with Silver, which premiered a month ago in Berkeley, is a major work, some 40 minutes of extremely colorful and appealing dance-floor music (cakewalk, foxtrot, tango) alternating with folk music and evocations of Eastern ritual (gamelan-like gongs and chimes and vibes in pentatonic scales, played wonderfully by Diana Herold).

At the center is a series of cello monodies (and threnodies), spun out with thrilling intensity and tonal luxuriousness by Israeli-born recent Harvard graduate Matt Heimovitz (Yo-Yo Ma gave the premiere). The most moving music is the sinuous Prelude, before the curtain rises; the most brilliant is the frenetic Chromatic Rhapsody, to which Mark Morris dances his own frenetic solo (the plucked note that ends each phrase mirrored in Morris's jerked-out foot): mimelike, he gropes imaginary walls, and races on and off stage in the presence of the motionless, Buddha-like Kraig Patterson (Morris calls this a pas de deux). In one enchanting section, Morris and the dancers reflect the ups and downs of the cello with the old game of "sewing up" one's fingers.

Heimovitz and Emmanuel Music's Michael Beattie on harpsichord made an eloquent contribution to four Purcell songs in Morris's sinister, unsettling 1985 vampire pas de deux, One Charming Night ("I'm 200 years old," Morris said, "Marianne Moore's eight!"). Soprano Eileen Clark Reisner had good diction but a wan, pinched tone. In the Brahms (Love Song Waltzes), Reisner was joined by three okay singers who've been touring with Morris. The singing improved two nights later when Boston tenor Mark Kagan replaced laryngeally stricken Gregory Davidson less than two hours before curtain time. Pianists Linda Dowdell and John Sauer accompanied with impassioned 3/4-time delicacy.

---

A free first Monday chamber concert at Jordan Hall brought together some of Boston's favorite musicians with some stunning results. Pianists Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun (his wife, who keeps a lower public profile but is probably responsible for an extraordinary number of prize-winning young virtuosos) started off with Schubert's late four-hand Rondo in A (with its touching references to "The Trout"). Sherman provided a richly textured base for Byun's glistening high notes -- does any pianist around have a more ravishing tone? There's a chilling section when the wonderful melody suddenly switches to the bass: Sherman played it with heartfelt warmth under the aurora borealis of Byun's shivering octaves. From where I was sitting, though, balances were off, accompaniments sounding too much as if they were the main event -- more disturbing than the occasional glitches in "togetherness."

Sherman returned in Mozart's great G-minor Piano Quartet, and especially in the first movement, the true heart of this piece, he played with a supple and urgent inwardness. I loved the way each statement seemed a direct response to the assertions or sudden sweetness of the strings (Ruggero Allifranchini, second violin of the Borromeo Quartet, here taking -- and running -- with the primo part; Scott Nickrenz, viola; Laurence Lesser, cello), and the way Sherman let melt away the last poignant notes of his repeated phrase.

After intermission, the entire Borromeo Quartet appeared (with Lesser and Nickrenz) in Schoenberg's original string-sextet version of Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night"), that eloquent expressionistic projection of Richard Dehmel's moving poem, in which forgiveness and devotion turn the bare, cold grove two lovers are walking in into a psychological landscape of luminous clarity. Some of this performance sagged. Nickrenz was hard to hear from my seat. But the great, ecstatic moments -- a hushed duet for violin (Nicholas Kitchen) and viola (Hsin-Yun Huang), the radiant cello (Yeesun Kim) that introduces the great change from D minor to D major, in fact the entire heavenly last section -- were sublime.

---

The BSO Season ended with three weeks led by principal guest conductor Bernard Haitink, the undisputed highlight of which was Sofia Gubaidulina's moving new Viola Concerto with violist Yuri Bashmet. Haitink led an exhilarating Beethoven Seventh that built up tremendous momentum, and a strongly played Le sacre du printemps (with a memorable, creamy opening bassoon wail by Richard Svoboda). This is a piece Seiji Ozawa is admired for, though not by me. Ozawa keeps the orchestra together in the very fast and loud parts but falls asleep during the equally important sections that are slow and mysterious. Haitink let the slow sections bloom, but the performance as a whole left me cold.

I kept asking myself why, since nothing seemed wrong, and I think the answer lies in my fundamental problem with Haitink. He's a square! I hear no rhythmic life within each phrase -- in almost anything he conducts. Perhaps the greatest orchestral performance I've ever heard was Le sacre with the London Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez at Carnegie Hall (I've run into people who say, like the handshake in a secret society, "Were you there that night?"). I was at the edge of my seat every second, and the final result was overwhelming. Boulez gave himself up to Stravinsky's still unbelievably complex rhythms. Fast or slow, each moment was fully alive. Sacre is about rhythm (it's certainly about something). With Haitink, I hardly ever feel the music is about anything except notes. Maybe the orchestra members like him so much because this rhythmic squareness makes works like Sacre easier for them to play, and so they always sound good. Yet that's not enough. I'd like to hear what his admirers respond to. But I don't.

---

The pops opened its 112th season, and Keith Lockhart his third, with music that veered between the pious and the lubricious. The orchestra sounded tip-top in John Williams's New England Hymn and Leonard Bernstein's brash "Times Square: 1944" from On the Town (both, Lockhart explained, on the next Pops album), Malcolm Arnold's lively Four Scottish Dances (from the album after that), and the notorious Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila, which had energy but needed to be more PG than GP. The sleaze factor continued with the North American premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies's Mavis in Las Vegas, which has some amusing parodies of American kitsch (a wedding chapel with horrible organ, the Liberace Museum conjured on the piano), and Davies's unfailing ear for tilted textures (high violins against brushed cymbals).

The first guest was diminutive 12-year-old violinist Stefan Jackiw, who played the last movement of the Wieniawski Second Violin Concerto unbelievably fast. As child prodigies go, he was only a little short of prodigious, with a few missed notes and a comically studied grand manner. I'd have been even more impressed if there'd been a hint of Gypsy soul along with the bravura display.

The star turn was delivered by British musical-comedy diva Elaine Paige -- in her own words "the last Norma Desmond but the first Evita." Her soaring chest voice has a Streisand-like tone that ascends to a pretty, real soprano of limited range. She sang Andrew Lloyd Webber and some Piaf numbers (having played Piaf in London) and joked -- lamely -- about being replaced in Sunset Boulevard by Dennis Rodman and more pointedly about the movie version of Evita ("I've gotta go see that film"). Her self-references got a little wearing, and her singing was too often calculated for effect. She finally hit an emotional nerve at the climax of "Memory" (from Cats), surely the best song written for her, then ended with an awful Jimmy Webb number called "Grow Young," which, she said disingenuously, "kind of sums up my philosophy of life" -- homespun sincerity not being one of Paige's more convincing qualities.

Ray Davies was in the audience, unacknowledged, and Richard Hayman, frequent Pops arranger ("The M.T.A."), was pointed out and cheered (then Lockhart led that exuberant version). It was also the centennial of the first performance (May 19, 1897) of Souza's Stars and Stripes Forever, which Lockhart and the players made sound -- of all things -- fresh! The flag unfurled and the balloons dropped. Pops is Pops, and Pops is back.

---

"At the end of my 15th year with this organization," David Hoose told the audience at the Cantata Singers' season-ending concert, "I've become connected with the spiritual side of music in ways I wouldn't have thought possible." He mentioned his special appreciation of the chorus and orchestra for their "deep knowledge and the profound innocence and wonder with which they approach the music." He was repeating what those of us who've heard these concerts have also been saying for 15 years.

Certainly no organization puts together more thoughtful and challenging programs. Hoose embarked with a beautifully modulated Mendelssohn Hebrides Overture, with the marvelous clarinet duet sumptuously played by Bruce Creditor and Ian Greitzer. The sea music continued with the Boston premiere of Marjorie Merryman's terse, brooding 1995 oratorio Jonah, which begins with Psalm 107 ("They that go down to the sea in ships") and ends (!) with Genesis 1, in a series of emotionally ambiguous fanfares. Veteran tenor Karl-Dan Sorensen, the soul of Hoose's powerful Bach St. John Passion last March, was the impassioned narrator, and baritone David Kravitz, whose natural, intelligent, and resonant singing I'm increasingly impressed with, was the tormented Jonah.

The brilliance and overflowing joy of Haydn's late, exuberant Creation Mass (not to be confused with his late oratorio The Creation) formed a high contrast with Jonah's darkness. Hoose is probably America's (the world's?) greatest living Haydn conductor: he gets the jokes and the exhilaration without ever trivializing them (his conducting of Haydn's farcical The World of the Moon was the best thing about the BU Opera Program's production last month). In the Creation Mass, he had magnificent support from orchestra, chorus, and the four vocal soloists: Sorensen, bass Mark-Andrew Cleveland, soprano Karyl Ryczek, and especially mezzo-soprano Lynn Torgove, whose commanding voice triggered the opening Kyrie, and who -- like Kravitz -- has been blossoming with each new role.