Oh Henry!

Plus, the Pops dances, and Gulliver

by Lloyd Schwartz

Is there any difference between a concert that just misses and one that's utterly hopeless? Well, yes and no. Both make you ache with disappointment, but at least you can leave a failed performance by an artist you admire with respect for the endeavor. Last year, the 73-year-old Chinese-born American pianist Robert Henry, who lives in Hamburg, played a rare local recital at the Harvard-Epworth Church about which I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. The restraint and the feeling he conveyed that there was something to restrain! The conviction! The subtle play of wit! The iridescent beauty of tone! Bach, Bartók, and Schumann, with a single Schubert encore, the achingly poignant last of the Moments Musicaux. I had a few reservations, but this was a great and memorable recital, and I yearned for Henry to come back.

A couple of weeks ago, Henry did come back, and this performance left me not exactly cold but out, as if it were taking place in the next room. It was beautiful and refined, serious, unshowy -- just like last year. Again he started with Bach: two preludes and fugues, one in D major that began with a Scarlatti-like exhilaration and proceeded to a big, contemplative fugue, then one in F-sharp. Every note was perfectly round and full. But nothing was quite getting to me.

All six Moments Musicaux came next, and they were lovely. But right now, two weeks away, I don't remember them very well. I remember the Chopin F-minor Fantaisie better. Here, Henry's fingers occasionally let him down. But what hurt the performance more was the lack of a crucial driving force, of sweep, of a central rhythmic pulse.

Several of Brahms's six Opus 118 Klavierstücke -- four Intermezzi, a Ballade, and a Romanze -- were more successful. The first Intermezzo (A minor), marked "molto appassionato," was hardly passionate at all, though the second (A major), marked "teneramente," was extremely loving. I was struck with how Henry brought out the way Brahms alluded to that tender theme in the later F-minor Intermezzo ("un poco agitato"). The final Intermezzo (E-flat minor) with its dark, moody bass and searching melody was best of all. Henry said he didn't want to play an encore because that was the piece he wanted us to take home with us.

But why didn't this concert work when last year's was so shattering? My only quibble last year was that some of the more leisurely passages lacked momentum -- they were either too leisurely or not leisurely enough. That problem was compounded this year. Almost everything Henry played was at a moderate tempo: Moderato, Allegro moderato, Andante, Andantino, Allegretto (perhaps he can't play very accurately at high speeds anymore). But he couldn't find the special, individual pulse that makes an Andantino different from an Allegretto. All these tempos sounded the same. Instead of being gripping, they became monotonous.

Robert Henry is the kind of artist for whom a hair's-breadth makes a difference -- that slight but profound difference between sharp focus and blur. It's the highest kind of art, and the kind that takes the greatest risks. This time it didn't work. Next time it might be magnificent.

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One of the things I didn't know about Keith Lockhart was what kind of dance conductor he is. On the podium (and on his bare-legged first-album cover) he's athletic, and even balletic. But a good dance conductor needs more than a good beat. Dancing to live music means that the orchestra can be immediately responsive to the particular performance and offer moment-to-moment support to the individual dancers.

At a special morning taping, with an invited audience, for two PBS Evening at Pops telecasts (June 23 and July 28), Lockhart led the Mark Morris Dance Company in one of Morris's cheekiest and most effervescent works, Lucky Charms, to Ibert's irrepressible Divertissement. Ibert, for example, interrupts his Gallic wit with a louche quotation from Mendelssohn's Wedding March; Morris responds by having one of his male dancers drag in "his woman" by the hair. The dancers play hide-and-seek, or become cheerleaders, or Rockettes, or Apache dancers. They waltz. They march. To some of Ibert's creepiest scoring, they roll each other across the stage. Like the sequins on the dancers' halters, the dancing sparkles seductively, yet there's something sinister in it all too.

Lockhart had scheduled the Divertissement at several previous Pops concerts (he and the dancers actually first met at the taping). The playing was both classy and brassy. And the dancers seemed lifted by Lockhart's beat. Here was first-class dance conducting.

Then Larissa Ponomarenko and Patrick Armand from Boston Ballet did George Balanchine's marvelous "The Man I Love" pas de deux (deliciously orchestrated by Hershey Kay). Armand had the right touch of Broadway to balance his classical elegance, but Ponomarenko didn't, lovely as she was. This is a part that needs considerable abandon (it was the role in which Balanchine finally made Patricia MacBride look womanly). Ponomarenko seemed to forget that the title of Balanchine's complete ballet is Who Cares?

But part of my disappointment with "The Man I Love" had to do with Lockhart's tempo, which was too slow and too torchy to dance to. He kept letting the dancers get ahead of the music, and he kept them from working inside it.

Everything got back on target with the Hoedown from Agnes de Mille's Rodeo. Pollyana Ribeiro (the Cowgirl) is a natural charmer, and Lockhart led Aaron Copland's lively music with spirit. He might just turn into a first-class dance conductor.

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John Eaton's Travelling with Gulliver, which Richard Pittman's Boston Musica Viva presented in its world premiere last weekend, is so pretentious and inane, so limp and disjointed, it's not anywhere near striking distance of being the compelling work it had the possibility of becoming. Why would such gifted artists as stage director Nicholas Deutsch and sculptor Dimitri Hadzi (the "scenic designer") give it their serious attention? This two-act "romp" (as the Musica Viva flyer calls it) has a libretto by poet Estela Eaton (Eaton's daughter) that's "freely based" on Swift's masterpiece. At a pre-performance panel, BU's famously witty English professor Christopher Ricks said that Travelling with Gulliver is to Gulliver's Travels what Clueless is to Jane Austen's Emma. Would that it were!

"The poet has de-emphasized the satirical elements of the book," Eaton writes in his program note, "instead bringing out its existential and surreal qualities." Uh-oh. For Swift's devastating and passionate satire, the Eatons substitute a tone that veers between stilted declamation and flat colloquialism. Poor baritone Donald Wilkinson (Gulliver) is made to exclaim, "Verily, I have died and gone to Hell! Bah!" (the "Bah!" is written out in the text) and "I was born of savage kisses" and "I've searched my heart for answers" and "I feel good about that party. I think they've finally accepted me as their equal." Travelling with Gulliver sputters briefly to life mainly when it's being satirical, lampooning (though not subtly) musical minimalism and poetic surrealism ("Floors dance with yellow fingers," recites one member of the Balnibarbian Academy, except the line can't be heard over the musical cacophony).

The characters Gulliver meets (in Laputa, Balnibarbi, and in the land of the Houyhnhnms -- Lilliput and Brobdingnag are alluded to only in the musical prelude and postlude) are both played and sung by the six accompanying chamber musicians (originally, the conductor was also supposed to sing Gulliver). Gold stars to violinist Bayla Keyes and flutist Renee Krimsier for their uninhibited good-sportsmanship. Krimsier actually has a passable singing voice, too. But it's a gimmicky idea at best, and next to Wilkinson's rich, resonant singing the musicians sound ludicrously amateurish. Why should these wonderful musicians be forced to do what no one ever expected them to do well?

Eaton, a MacArthur and Guggenheim recipient who teaches at the University of Chicago, is best known for his use of microtonalities. What's wrong with his score, however, is not that it's hard but that it's so obvious (a quotation of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries for Gulliver's siting of the Floating Island is far less shocking than Ibert's Mendelssohn allusion) and so innocuous (a sea chanty that sounds only slightly more inebriated in quarter tones). Even the occasional jazziness (Eaton is apparently a wonderful jazz pianist) seems tame. The scoring is familiarly contemporary, and it was played with panache by Keyes, Krimsier, clarinettist Ian Greitzer (who as a lady Yahoo has to wear a bra and wolf-whistle at Wilkinson), cellist William Rounds, pianist Geoffrey Burleson, and percussionist Dean Anderson. But nothing soars, or builds, or adds up, and the libretto is too thin to help the music along.

It's fun to see Hadzi's movable objects in a lighter vein (including a delightful swinging abstraction of a ship or wave), but there aren't enough of them to offer a larger vision. Only one hanging piece, like the bottom half of a bronze breastplate, has his familiar mythopoetic weight. (In a fascinating theater piece, Ahab's Wife, quietly presented by the ART earlier this season, installation artist Ellen Driscoll's stunning sea images created a large-scale visual counterpart to Tom Sleigh's knotty lines and brilliant, sexy puns.) Some of Gail Buckley's costume ideas are okay (giant brain wigs for the giant brains of the Academy and, maybe, Gulliver's rain hat and raincoat); others are horribly wrong (bone-through-skull headhunter wigs for the Yahoos). Deutsch's staging is infected with a similar haphazardness. He can be an inspired director, but here it looks as if there were nothing to inspire him. The dead spots for the minimal scene changes were lethal.

Travelling with Gulliver is probably too short -- an intrusive intermission stretched the evening to all of an hour and a quarter. Surely a work based on Gulliver's Travels would mean more if it contended head on with the most famous chapters in the book. On the other hand, given what's already in Travelling with Gulliver, brevity may be its greatest virtue.