Fireworks

Lighting up Brazil and the Pops

by Lloyd Schwartz

When I told my friends I'd be traveling to Brazil to cover the New England Conservatory's Youth Philharmonic Orchestra (YPO -- the conservatory's pre-college orchestra) four-city concert tour of Brazil, the near-universal response -- next to the oohs and aahs about Brazil -- was a concerned "How many times will you have to listen to the Mahler Fifth Symphony?"

Given that the YPO's music director is Mahler-specialist Benjamin Zander, the Fifth was certainly the centerpiece of this tour, and a major challenge for any orchestra, let alone an ensemble of students mainly between the ages of 13 and 18 -- though 10 parts, many of them principal (horn, trumpet, bassoon), were taken by unpaid "ringers," college students (some of whom had played before in the YPO) plus a couple of professionals.

Including the sendoff concert at Jordan Hall, I heard seven complete performances of the Mahler, along with major sections of it in numerous rehearsals and a recording session on the last day of the tour. I heard even more performances of the Brazilian and American national anthems, Leonard Bernstein's Candide Overture, and the Prelude to Villa-Lobos's Bachiana brasileira No. 4, which began most of the Mahler programs and also joined Oscar Lorenzo Fernández's pounding, African-inspired Batuque (Danza di negri), Astor Piazzolla's languorous "Oblivion" (with Edward Kim's sensual clarinet solo), Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture, "Stars and Stripes Forever," "When the Saints Go Marching In," and the Star Wars main title on a Pops program that was presented mainly in such outdoor venues as Rio's Copacabana Beach (in an acoustically awful shell specially built for this occasion, for some $30,000 -- where the stage lights went out in the middle of the Tchaikovsky but the orchestra kept playing from memory in the dark!) and São Paulo's urban and urbane Ibirapuera Park (which has a 50-speaker sound system the Hatch Shell could envy).

But I never got tired of hearing these performances, especially the Mahler, because the players were so galvanized (even on days when they'd been pushed by the brutal schedule -- as one player put it -- "not merely to the limit but beyond it"), and because Zander led them with such unflagging intensity.

Already at Jordan Hall, when the ensemble was still rather rough, Zander's view of the Fifth Symphony -- its overall dramatic shape and the nuances of its endless emotional transitions -- emerged with power. This seemed one of his sharpest and freest conceptions. And he was teaching the students to play meaningful phrases that crossed the bar lines, not just to get from one bar to the next.

I loved the solitary opening trumpet fanfare (the phenomenal head-shaved Tom Cupples), like a solitary soldier who's survived a holocaust in outrage and sorrow, and the way it's answered by weeping strings (Helena Baillie the superb concertmistress of a remarkable string section) -- Zander pulling back the tempo to underline the difficulty of finding "words." And I was struck with the subtlety of Benjamin Fox's whispered timpani strokes.

In the stormy second movement, the cellos (Kate Bennett and Alexei Gonzales co-principals) came into their own -- a world-class combination of velvety depth and buoyancy. I've always thought of the big cello theme as a kind of tango macabre, a seductive, sinister dance of love and death, Mahler altering the rhythm of the opening march (his parody of the opening of another Fifth Symphony -- Beethoven's) just enough to change everything. Zander once used the image of astonished prisoners coming into the daylight after long captivity. Remarkably, thereafter I could hear both images simultaneously -- Zander at his best helping Mahler at his best to achieve this extreme degree of ambiguity.

The long third-movement Scherzo, with its parody waltzes and ambivalent view of Vienna (was this satire or nostalgia?), had trouble hanging together till one rehearsal at which Zander demonstrated how much more swing it had conducted "in one" rather than "in three." By the end of the tour, it had tightened up by nearly two minutes. Yet even when the movement was most disjointed, the enchanting pizzicato interlude (like a ghostly guitar serenade), Jill Jaques's hushed horn lullaby, Leah Seiffert's flawless oboe solo, and all the loving, evocative winds never failed to get under my skin.

The famous Adagietto, with its important harp accompaniment (Nicholas Harlow) and great basses, eventually lost more than two of its initial 11 minutes. I liked it in Boston, where it unfolded slowly, a passionate lyric outpouring (not the usual dirge), an enveloping, consoling love song. Mahler's Tristan. During the tour, it also lost a good deal of its tenderness and flexibility. It picked up speed but sounded monolithic -- and slower. It finally refocused and regained that loving feeling, with a new dappled airiness that also took less time to convey.

The expansive, celebratory finale, which takes the love theme of the Adagietto and doubles the tempo, also had its ups and downs. Convincing in Boston, it had the messiest ensemble. On the tour it got better -- and worse -- before it achieved near perfection, even from the horns, which had been the most troubled section during the tour.

The Candide Overture also got one of the best performances I've heard, full of incident and event and sly turnabouts. Zander got the jokes. The biggest audience favorite was Batuque, mainly because the orchestra was joined by Funk'N'Lata, a group of 10 brilliant young black percussionists from Rio's third-oldest samba school, the Mangueira. It was a hoot to see their leader, blond Ivo Meirelles, wearing white pants and black tails, sharing the small podium with Zander. Gerald Slavet, the tour's director and overall make-things-happen guy, was so thrilled with them, he wants to bring them here.

I became extremely engrossed in hearing the changes in each performance -- the dispiriting failures, the ecstatic successes, and the way the Mahler changed in the various acoustics, from the lush radiance of Rio's Teatro Municipal to the warmth and honesty of São Paulo's Theatro (as it's spelled on the façade) Municipal, to the dryer acoustics of the newer halls in Campinas, Porto Alegre, and Curitiba, to the disastrous deadness of a São Paulo gym where you could hear weights clanking during the concert.

Ironically, the YPO got no reviews, though there was extensive media coverage and audiences were enraptured (at the Pops program in the outdoor stadium in Campinas, the players were cheered like rock stars and had to be guarded from a crowd that wanted to touch them). Maybe because critics don't take youth orchestras seriously. Maybe because the concerts were sponsored by the Bank of Boston, which is celebrating its 50th year in Brazil, and most of the paid tickets were distributed to clients and employees of the bank. The New York Philharmonic was also in Brazil, and it was described by one critic as "mediocre." He chose the wrong orchestra to review.

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It was fascinating to hear "Stars and Stripes Forever" and Star Wars at the Hatch Shell just after I got back from Brazil. This is the centennial year of Sousa's great march, which was of course the grand finale of the Pops Esplanade Orchestra's July 4 bash, though the YPO kids brought it more vividly to life ('tis newer to them), especially in their captivating, amazingly unified piccolo quartet. Maybe "Stars and Stripes Forever" ought to be our national anthem, though Sousa's lyrics are even less singable than Francis Scott Key's ("Other nations may deem their flag best/And cheer them with fervid elation"). Our real anthem was sung by Tara Holland, the current Miss America, who interpolated a not exactly tasteful or particularly attractive high D at the end of "the land of the free" (on the second syllable of "free").

Ben Zander would probably agree that John Williams's Star Wars music is more Keith Lockhart's territory than his own, and it was a pleasure to hear Lockhart's affectionate shaping of the big tune. There was also a lively Elvis medley, the high point of which was Lockhart saying "Thank you vurry much" with a real Elvis growl. The US Army Field Band and Soldiers' Chorus (Sergeant Major Lance Swiegert, baritone soloist) did a repellent number called "God Bless the U.S.A.," which makes "The Ballad of the Green Berets" sound pro-Commie, but they redeemed themselves in the foreshortened 1812 Overture and the Sousa.

Other guests included Show Boat star Tom Bosley in a brief appearance and Andre Solomon-Glover (Show Boat's Joe) in "Ol' Man River," which he sang powerfully and for which he was better miked than at the Wang Center. And the ageless Roberta Flack sang four numbers, including what's still her best song, "Killing Me Softly," which she asked the intimate audience of 300,000 to join her in.

But the true stars of the show were the ones in Ken Clark's phenomenal post-concert fireworks display, for the first time on the banks of the Charles completely synchronized to music. Pyrotechnology, Inc.'s artistic director is a musical visualizer. Through rhythm, color, design, and altitude, he sees the music as we couldn't have imagined it ourselves. It's better than a video.

Copland's Rodeo had some witty but low-lying and hard-to-see Roman candles dancing off the barge (and the initial synching seemed a little off), but when halo'd, multicolored stars started exploding and expanding to the beat of "Rock Around the Clock," it was heaven. "Unchained Melody" was all in white diamonds until the climax in gold. The soaring, floating, syncopated extravaganza to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was one of the most extraordinary displays I've ever seen. This was an event waiting to happen, and I can't wait for it to happen again (next year to live music?).

Cleverly parking at Alewife Station ("Why not take the T?"), I returned from the sidereal splendor to an hour-long logjam ("Forget the T!"). After 20 motionless motor-running minutes, I got out of my car to investigate. "Mr. Schwartz!" cried out a voice from the car in front of mine. It was one of the sweet YPO players from the Brazil tour. "What are you doing here?"