Stern wisdom

Han-Na Chang, the BSO, and Emmanuel

by Lloyd Schwartz

"A city lives by the way it appreciates a civilized life," the wise, 76-year-old violinist, humanitarian, and apparently soon-to-be-newlywed Isaac Stern told the crowd of benefactors at the Four Seasons after the "Gala" opening the BSO's 116th season. For his first BSO concert in a dozen years, his talking was mainly more masterful than his playing. His tone, no longer aggressive, has moments of lovely singing cantilena; but it has dwindled to a scrawny filament that's often out of tune. Dvorák's Romance in F minor began well with a juicy melody, but the rest was dicy. In the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5, his playing came to life only in the teasing final bars.

After intermission, Stern reappeared, microphone in hand, and confided that "nothing makes me more radiantly happy than to see young colleagues begin to make a career." He mentioned how in 1957 prodigies Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman "dared me not to like them." Back in 1953 or '54, he calculated, he heard a young virtuoso playing a cello bigger than he was -- Yo-Yo Ma (uncannily prescient, given Ma's 1955 birth date). Three years ago, visiting a string-repair shop, he heard a young Korean cellist named Han-Na Chang. Now, he said, she's a "grown woman -- she'll be 14 in December." No one, he admitted, can predict a career, but "between her will to make music and your will to enjoy it," he thought she had a real shot. Chang then appeared, making her BSO debut in the single-movement Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1.

Tiny and feisty, she has technique to burn. Her sound is big and creamy, with delicate pianissimos. Even at breathless speeds, she doesn't miss a note. The audience loved her. But I suspect she might have been better served by a more "serious" piece. The Saint-Saëns needs a certain worldliness and sophistication that Chang shouldn't be expected to have yet (the orchestra had it in the airy midsection minuet). Her skill impressed me, and her charm, but I wasn't moved. She'll have to develop a richer emotional range before she can become a real force, but she might be so protected by her family and management, who knows what her opportunities for a fuller engagement with life will be.

Following the concerto, she returned in a duet with Stern: Dvorák's insinuating Slavonic Dance in E minor. Chang had the big tune, but she remained an ivory statue into whom Stern's Pygmalion tried to breathe some life. Rhythms were square, tempos dragged, and the two separate styles never coalesced.

The evening began with a gorgeously played Overture to Verdi's La forza del destino and ended (ironically) with another overture, Dvorák's exuberant Carnival Overture. In the Verdi, the moaning undercurrent of the low strings -- that ominous shiver of dread (the opera's "force of destiny") -- was something I'm not sure Seiji Ozawa could have made so audible a few years ago. Yet the piece is a minefield. It's so sectionalized, it depends less on any particular nuance of phrasing than on the rhythmic swing from section to section; each episode has to be a comment on the last. Here Ozawa was at sea. Despite the luscious sound of the BSO, the overture remained inert. And though the Carnival Overture can -- and did -- succeed as a brilliant orchestral showcase, like all the other Dvorák on the program it lacked any sense of ethnic flavor or flair. If Ozawa is growing as a musician, he still doesn't hear the essential differences between Mozart and Saint-Saëns, Verdi and Dvorák.

Two nights later, the first BSO subscription concert was even more disappointing. The first half was taken up with 37-year-old Scottish composer James MacMillan's 1992 concerto for percussion, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, composed for the marvelous Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who was making her BSO debut (she was in Boston last spring with the NEC Wind Ensemble). Profoundly deaf, Glennie performs in bare feet so she can feel the vibrations. She's a vision of grace, a Celtic wood nymph with red hair down to her waist who darts about like a ballerina. And she's a brilliant instrumentalist.

But MacMillan's music for her big marimba and vibraphone solos seemed merely conventional. And everything is millions of decibels too loud. As the title suggests, this is an Advent piece, with a surprise Easter ending, during which the lights dimmed while Glennie took a grave stroll around the stage to a scaffold-like platform for a set of chimes in the rear, while the entire orchestra shook small handheld dinner bells. Glennie, lit only by a spotlight, ascended this altar and knocked away at the chimes. Then an endless silence. MacMillan's piece may need such corny theatrics because the music itself has so little real content.

Then Ozawa led Schubert's Ninth Symphony in a loud and driven performance distinguished only by some superb wind playing (Elizabeth Ostling, flute; Alfred Genovese, oboe; Charles Kavalovsky, horn; Timothy Morrison, trumpet). As with the Forza Overture, Ozawa started out by concentrating on inner voices -- but in the ensuing din, he seemed to lose interest. I've seen Schubert conductors make broad circling gestures in the last movement that evoke the wheeling of constellations; Ozawa moved his wrist around during the brief oboe solo. No large picture here. The symphony sounded repetitious, not revolutionary, nothing like 80-year-old Kurt Sanderling's lovable -- and loving -- version with the BSO in 1992: so warm, so Viennese, so gemütlich. Ozawa plays so little Schubert, maybe he doesn't like him. Maybe that's why he plays him like bad Beethoven.

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Emmanuel Music is back too, welcoming us to Emmanuel Church with "Music of Mozart" -- two performances of a program conducted by Craig Smith that included soprano Jayne West singing the concert aria "Bella mia fiamma, addio," pianist Russell Sherman in the Piano Concerto No. 17 (K.453), and the Requiem, with West, mezzo-soprano Pamela Dellal, tenor Frank Kelley, and baritone Paul Guttry. I was at the second concert, Sunday afternoon, at which the order of the program had to be reversed so the members of the chorus who had temple jobs could leave in time to sing their Yom Kippur services. I think I'd have preferred to hear the Requiem last -- especially given the power and broadness of vision it had. But I loved the classic Emmanuel ecumenicism responsible for the change.

The flute-like purity of West's voice seems to be growing and growing, and the climaxes of the concert aria had an expansive, hall-filling new surge. Dellal's voice, too, has really coalesced, and her eloquence and fervor made one sit up and listen to a role that too often allows itself to be overlooked. Kelley was at his very best, projecting his vibrant voice with authority and a new variety of shading and color. Guttry, whom I haven't heard as much, keeps impressing me with his intelligence and strength. And what a pleasure to hear Sherman in a piece that affords him the opportunity to display polish as well as energy, scintillating wit (a quality of both rhythm and dynamics), and ambiguity (a quality of color), light and shade.

Among all these star performers the Emmanuel Orchestra and Chorus hold their own. Chorus master (and, at this performance, organist) Michael Beattie prepared a group that had exceptional clarity and passion. And every season I'm reminded that there's probably no Mozart orchestra in the world that plays with more sweetness or with more unity of breath and purpose, for which I assume we have not only the players themselves to thank but also Craig Smith. Even the trombones in the Requiem (Nicholas Martin, solo, with Mark Cantrell and Denis Lambert) were elegant in their proclamations of doom. David Satz's basset horn was plaintive without sounding watery. And the strings were more luminous than ever.

Singing alto in the chorus was Emmanuel's splendid oboist Peggy Pearson, who in a more familiar venue shone in her oboe's intimate dialogues with Julia Scolnik's flute. Pearson has actually started her own chamber-music series at the Follen Church in Lexington, and the opening concert in that octagonal acoustical gem was a thorough delight, featuring Pearson herself (the most moving and eloquent Bach oboist alive), with violist Mary Ruth Ray, cellist/cousin Beth Pearson (both members of the Emmanuel Orchestra), and (here) harpsichordist Michael Beattie in a searching Bach sonata transcribed from a hard-to-play organ chorale-prelude; her own arrangement of Haydn's B-minor Quartet, Opus 64 No. 2 (giving herself the first violin part -- "There's nothing authentic about this," she announced); and the Boston premiere of a delectable four-minute four-movement (all marked -- but not with the strictest accuracy -- "Fast") Trio Sonata for oboe, viola, and cello that John Harbison wrote for any combination of treble, alto, and bass instruments.

After intermission, Pearson asked the audience to join the musicians in singing a Bach chorale (a family tradition, she explained, for all important occasions). Then -- for an eloquent and exhilarating Schumann Piano Quartet -- she relinquished the stage to Ray and cousin Pearson (whose solos in the magical third-movement waltz were sublime), violinist Sarah Roth, and that magnificent, galvanizing pianist Judith Gordon. This spirit of familial cooperation is the essence of chamber music, and all these musicians seem to have it in their blood.