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Good hands

Lockhart at the Pops, the Cantata Singers, and Yo-Yo Ma

by Lloyd Schwartz

["Yo-Yo To be perfectly honest, Pops concerts aren't a particular priority of mine. I've never found the mixture of light classics (which require but rarely get even more stylish treatment than serious "classical" music) and show tunes, pop standards, and (shudder!) rock hits in elevator-and-supermarket arrangements especially satisfying. I've also been put off by the media frenzy over heartthrob Keith Lockhart, John Williams's replacement as conductor of the Boston Pops. I've remained more impressed by his quick mind and good looks than by what little of his musicianship I've actually heard. The Boston Pops is big musical business, however, and I've run out of excuses to postpone my consideration.

I decided not to go on opening night but to a more "ordinary" event, to see what most audiences would be getting. And to my surprise, I found myself enjoying the evening a lot, feeling less like a critic than like one more happy member of the crowd. The formula, mysteriously, was working.

["Keith The evening began with Dudley Buck's Festival Overture on the Star-Spangled Banner, which was composed (as Steven Ledbetter's program note informed us) a half-century before that song became our national anthem, in 1931. During the piece, Lockhart spun around, signaled us to stand, and turned it into a star-spangled sing-along. "Surprise!" he exclaimed after it was over. "You didn't know you were going to have to work, did you?"

Then he led a touchingly understated version of the slow movement from Dvorák's New World Symphony (the music to which, in 1922, Boston writer William Arms Fisher added the words "Goin' Home"). These were, after all, Boston Symphony players, and the wind section sparkled (especially the flutes), though Richard Sheena's elegant rendition of the famous English-horn solo stayed curiously impersonal. The pizzicato basses had a strong pulse, and Lockhart's pauses lasted long enough to keep you in suspense without seeming exaggerated, though his graceful fingers, highly visible in their molding of each phrase (or was he making shadow puppets?), were almost too artfully Stokowski-like. Still, he was getting musical results.

Before the exuberant "Buckaroo Holiday" movement from Aaron Copland's Rodeo, Lockhart told an amusing anecdote about Copland's nervy young assistant, Leonard Bernstein, who criticized Copland in front of Rodeo's choreographer, Agnes de Mille. Suddenly, the familiar intro to Rodeo reminded me of a riff from Wonderful Town, a show Bernstein wrote a decade later. It was one of his gifts to make you feel that the music he stole seemed to be stolen from him. BSO trombonist Norman Bolter, that eloquent trumpeter Timothy Morrison, and the lively percussion section took considerable advantage of their opportunities to fool around with Copland's snappy cowboy syncopations.

After a short intermission came an indeed stylishly played Saint-Saëns's French Military March. BSO cellist Jonathan Miller was the appealing soloist in the Saint-Saëns Second Cello Concerto, an oddly constructed piece in three continuous movements with many codas and numerous echoes of what had already passed. Miller, with his dark-chocolate low notes, gave Saint-Saëns's restless rhetoric considerable verve and the central Allegretto con moto, which is unusually airy and up-tempo for a slow movement, a Gallic courtliness. It was -- like the theme from Cheers later -- a delightful change from predictable Pops repertoire.

This year's stage decorations have been roundly and justly criticized. Hanging over the orchestra is a big round circle surrounded by lightbulbs and painted flowers -- like a cross between a circus hoop and the rim of a giant electric condom. Adding projections makes it look like a petri dish full of stagnant Charles River microbes. The lighting is dim and depressing (spotlights on both sides of the balcony are aimed right into the eyes of audience). On opening night, the dailies reported, the flag that was supposed to unfurl from the Symphony Hall ceiling during the inevitable "Stars and Stripes Forever" encore failed to unfurl fully, and my night too, it descended in a pathetic semi-furl.

Nevertheless, the Glenn Miller tribute that took up the final third of the program was good enough to redeem any minor malfunction. This is ideal Pops material (and what Lockhart announced would be on his first Pops album). The orchestra got to bust loose, with enormous assistance from the rhythm section -- Fred Buda, drums, and Bob Winter, piano -- and (in Lockhart's words) the "dueling saxes," Mike Monaghan and Tom Ferrante.

Lockhart himself, with his wide stance and heels tapping (he's still young enough to dip and tilt in more than one direction at a time), obviously knows and loves the big-band style. He put the audience at ease with breezy talk and joky gestures like turning to them and waiting while the orchestra held onto an extended chord in "In the Mood" or sitting on the podium railing and tapping his fingers to the piccolo trio in "Stars and Stripes." When the flag got stuck again, he rested his elbow in one hand and put his other hand to his cheek à la Jack Benny.

More important, he found a terrific combination of familiar and unfamiliar numbers: the Grieg-ish "Sunrise Serenade" along with "Moonlight Serenade"; not only an elegant "String of Pearls" and "Little Brown Jug" (an encore) but also "St. Louis Blues March" and Miller's uninhibited "Song of the Volga Boatmen," whose muted trumpets and growling trombones sounded less like barge-towing Russians than outpatients from "St. James Infirmary." At one point, all the string players clapped syncopated hands. At the end, the rest of us clapped too. A lot.


Given the Cantata Singers, founded in 1964 to present some of Bach's most neglected repertoire, and the 25 years of weekly Bach cantatas at Emmanuel Church, Boston is a great place for Bach. Last month at Emmanuel's Lindsay Chapel, Rose Mary Harbison (a founding member of Emmanuel Music and an early concertmaster for Cantata Singers) played with unflagging rhythmic incisiveness and dead-on intonation Bach's two most ferociously difficult pieces for solo violin, the C-major Sonata (which has the longest fugue he ever wrote) and the D-minor Partita (with its famous Chaconne). Harbison's Chaconne was not merely a bravura addendum but an apotheosis, the direct flowering of the four preceding dance movements. These were her first public performances of these masterworks, and though the fugue went awry at one point it was still phenomenal (she repeated it at the end of the exhausting concert to willing ears).

David Hoose and the Cantata Singers closed their season with stunning performances of three of Bach's greatest cantatas, which surrounded three sublime Schütz motets of the century before (the five-part "Madrigale spirituale" -- new to me -- called Ach Herr, du Schöpfer aller Ding sounding as ancient, and fresh, as Heaven itself). The Bach moved from the rush of high-pressured optimism of Cantata 72 (Alles nur nach Gottes Willen) through the spiritual briarpatch of 78 (Jesu, der du meine Seele) to a dancing acceptance of death and eagerness for Heaven in Cantata 8 (Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben) -- Bach here anticipating the innocent child's-eye-view of Heaven at the end of Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Hoose led this with heartfelt piety -- confidently, spaciously, the core of calm after the complicated preceding storms.

A dozen soloists stepped out of the splendid chorus, among them sweet-toned soprano Karyl Ryczek, alto Lynn Torgove (firm yet increasingly voluptuous in her new lower register), warm and openhearted bass David Kravitz, and veteran tenor Karl Dan Sorensen: tormented, raw, vulnerable, and heartbreaking as ever. Approaching 70, he can still pour out the voice. Christopher Krueger's flute, radiant in Cantata 8, is in that same league, but to single out anyone else would be unfair to the astonishing ensemble.


Perhaps the biggest problem classical music has right now is finding a new generation of audiences. In 1994, the first National Medal of Arts to be awarded to an arts organization went to one created specifically to address that issue -- Young Audiences, Inc. Yo-Yo Ma, an artistic adviser for the Massachusetts chapter, accepted the award from President Clinton. Millions of schoolchildren who might have had no exposure to the arts have now benefitted from their first contact with professional performers.

The annual YAM benefit concerts have been some of our choicest musical events, partly because they've given Ma the chance to perform with musicians closer to his own level of artistry than the ones he usually gets to play with -- like pianist Peter Serkin and violinists Lynn Chang, another YAM artistic adviser, and Pamela Frank.

This year's benefit at Regis College, "String Fever," teamed Ma with Chang and Frank, violist Marcus Thompson, and the Amaryllis String Quartet, four gifted young women who got together five years ago at the New England Conservatory. The program, however, was a little lighter-weight than usual: "Dueling Fiddles" (Andy Stein's four-violin arrangement of Arthur Smith's "Duelin' Banjos"), a brief Josquin motet, the profound Adagio from Schubert's C-major Quintet (a bit lost out of context), and the Spring Concerto from Vivaldi's Four Seasons (with Chang the principal soloist). These were all lovingly played, but they didn't add up. Was classical radio's policy of playing only snippets now invading the concert hall? Even Pops programs (see above) can be better organized than this.

Post-intermission, Chang, quoting Victor Borge on playing encores first (so everyone would hear them), introduced Dvorák's Songs My Mother Taught Me in Ivan Tcherepnin's ardent arrangement for eight strings, in honor of Mother's Day and Young Audiences' unofficial mother figure, violinist Mary Lou Speaker Churchill. Delicious, but just more dessert.

Then Ma announced a correction: the program book had listed only the brief Scherzo from Mendelssohn's Octet, but all four movements would be played. It's a piece that grows deeper the more delightful it gets, and these eight marvelous players -- smiling at, listening to, encouraging one another -- were obviously having a ball. This was their most serious musicmaking, and it was a joy -- just what it was supposed to be.


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