Counter point

Jeffrey Gall sings Handel; plus Dubravka Tomsic and Benjamin Zander

by Lloyd Schwartz

Countertenor Jeffrey Gall is probably best known to Boston audiences for his forceful and brilliant performances -- as actor and singer -- in three roles he played in Peter Sellars/Craig Smith Handel productions: the hunky, plaid-shirted, country-boy David in Saul and the eponymous heroes of Orlando and Giulio Cesare. As Caesar especially -- powerful strategist lusting after both world domination and that canny sexpot Cleopatra (in the person of his frequent co-star, soprano Susan Larson) -- he probably did more than any singer this century to restore the original notion of matinee-idol virility to the singing range that has usually been regarded as epicene and androgynous, the male falsetto. In New York, he made more history as the first countertenor to sing at the Met (in another role in Giulio Cesare, Cleopatra's kid brother and rival, Ptolemy).

Gall now lives in Vienna, so he doesn't sing here as often as we were once used to, or as often as we'd like. I'd never, for example, heard him in solo recital. But I got my wish Columbus Day weekend at Brandeis, where he offered a fascinating though somewhat academic program of five little-known Handel cantatas, chosen from the 16 small pieces, in Italian, for alto and accompaniment, known as the "London cantatas" (because they were collected by an English contemporary of Handel's named Elizabeth Legh). Gall and Chicago harpsichordist David Schrader, who accompanied, were "fortunate to have been permitted access" to the exhaustive Handel research by MIT professor Ellen Harris.

The five cantatas, evidently from both his earlier Italian phase and his later work in England, all deal with love, either abstractly (as in Dolc'è pur d'amor l'affanno -- "Sweet is love's affliction") or more personally (Irene, idolo mio -- "Irene, my idol"). Figli del mesto cor ("Children of the sorrowful heart" -- the title refers allegorically to sighs and tears) has recitatives preceding two arias of unsettling melodic tilt and unpredictability (intervals going up when you expect them to go down and vice versa) and ends with a startlingly brief third-person report that the lovesick hero of the cantata has fainted with grief.

In Lungi da me ("Away from me, tyrannous thought"), the hero refuses to believe the slander that his beloved Thyrsis has betrayed him. Introducing his encore, Gall said that this cantata's final trilling saraband was his favorite aria among these five cantatas, and it's one of the passages that equals the best of Handel's operatic arias. Nel dolce tempo ("In that sweet time"), with its ravishing sensuality (the singer is ravished when he sees a young shepherdess who refuses to let him ravish her), seduced the listener if not the shepherdess.

Gall was in magnificent voice -- the odd register break between tenor and falsetto that used to be a common feature of his singing is evidently long gone. He sings with character (though there were no real characters in these cantatas), impeccable diction, rhythmic vigor and incisiveness, dazzling ease in coloratura (trills, roulades), with radiant, full, unmistakably individual tone that even those hearing a countertenor for the first time would be unlikely to mistake for a female voice. I wish he'd done at least one aria from an opera or oratorio, for old times' sake.

Schrader, who also played a Handel suite and two Scarlatti sonatas, was more problematical, even taking for granted the limited dynamic resources of the harpsichord. I recently had the pleasure -- covering the "Stupid Pet Tricks" auditions for the Boston appearance of David Letterman -- of donating my arm and head for a demonstration with a Capuchin monkey, who carefully plucked his way through my hair looking, in kindness, for nits to remove. Schrader played with similar tiny, mechanical, nit-picking confidence, but with little trace of Ungawa's affection.

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Dubravka Tomsic also had some accompaniment problems in her appearance with the New Hampshire Symphony. She obviously knew the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto better than the orchestra did, though the orchestra had some wonderful wind players. Rehearsal time up in Manchester couldn't have been lavish, and James Bolle's strings had less trouble cohering in Tchaikovsky than in a painfully raw Schumann Fourth Symphony that preceded the intermission. There were also two new pieces on the program, George Tsantakis's attractively Ivesian/Copland-esque 1994 Civil War tone poem, Let the River Be Unbroken, and the premiere of James Sellars's deconstruction of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Afterwards -- Identity and Difference, which might have been sharper if it had taken less and not more time than the Beethoven.

But what made the trip up to Manchester not only de rigueur but without question valoir la peine was Tomsic, who will be appearing at Mechanics Hall in Worcester this spring but has no currently announced Boston date. This was a phenomenal performance -- and not because she threw herself into it with more eye-flashing and hair-flailing than you'd ever seen before but with more control. She made the familiar Tchaikovsky unfamiliar and surprising because she played it so musically -- as music. The Maestoso first movement was truly majestic, not merely gushing with emotion. Those huge opening chords had a classical, Apollonian austerity and grandeur, the dance section danced with witty accents, arpeggios glistened. Transitions one rarely notices were a revelation of their role in the structure. Passagework had color -- and point. Contrasting phrases had -- guess what? -- contrast! Which meant that tension and drama emerged all the more powerfully because they'd emerged so musically.

Christopher Krueger's eloquent flute solo introduced the plaintive second-movement tune in the piano, never more songful -- song-like -- than with Tomsic's touchingly understated touch. The folk-dance Finale was all the more exciting because she made every quicksilver note in the movement's complex embroidery startlingly -- beautifully -- audible.

Bolle offered more architectural than technical support, but if the strings weren't always -- or often -- together, at least they all had the right idea. No question that Dubravka Tomsic did.

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Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic opened their 18th season in familiar home territory, two supreme masterpieces of the central Austro-German symphonic tradition, and both unfinished: the Schubert Eighth and the Bruckner Ninth. As Zander pointed out at his engaging pre-concert talk, the risk of doing these was that four of the five movements of these symphonies are slow. Not to worry -- contrasts within and between the symphonies and among their movements abounded. Zander has taken the advice of Schubert scholars and restored accent marks that for a century were read as diminuendos, so there was a refreshing, buoyant energy instead of the more usual wilting languor.

At the restored Sanders Theatre, the orchestral sound was brighter than I'd remembered, but pellucid and perfectly balanced. I could hear pizzicatos even while brasses were blaring, and pianissimos just lifted off and floated away. Jonathan Cohler made something shapely and moving of the famous clarinet solo; Kyoko Hida is a refined young oboist; and the intimate interplay among all the winds was a particular treat. Zander's fleetness here strikes me as being at the expense of the deeper and darker mysteries of the Unfinished, but such streamlined youthful lyricism is not without its rewards.

It's been 16 years since the Philharmonic last performed Bruckner's great truncated final symphony, and if memory (and a copy of my old review) serves me, the intensity of that performance had to overcome some questionable ensemble work. The once problematical strings are no longer a problem. And intensity has never been a problem for Zander. What impressed me most about this Bruckner Ninth was the architectural care, the way Bruckner's long sections with similar tempos but opposing textures and attitudes were juxtaposed and built upon. This was especially successful in the Scherzo, in which you can never be sure whether the playfulness of the orchestration is going to lead to an episode of Viennese elegance and charm or a sort of nightmare out of Hieronymus Bosch. That Zander allowed the movement to go in both directions, at times simultaneously, was a triumph of understanding the fundamental Brucknerian dichotomies, in which the grotesque and the sublime, the elephantine and the ephemeral, the strong opposite pulls of earth and heaven, all co-exist within each living soul.

Bruckner was working on the orchestration of the last of his projected four movements the day he died (October 11, 1896), just 100 years before Zander's performance. Horns and Wagner tubas expressed the solemnity of the occasion. The sweeping melody of the low strings consoled and reassured us that though heaven might be hard won (the entire movement is building toward one terrifying chord that includes every note of the minor scale), there is something beyond the battle: the respite of peace and grace. Zander and the Philharmonic understand these large issues, too, and that was another particular pleasure of their performance.