BSO's best

Fleisher and Spano, Zimerman and Rattle

by Lloyd Schwartz

The BSO is on a roll. After a shaky start under Seiji Ozawa -- including a Mahler Fifth Symphony with a slow movement that may well have set a new world's record for endurance (twice the length Mahler himself suggested) and inertness -- the orchestra blossomed behind two extraordinary guest pianists and under two of its best guest conductors.

First there was the stirring return of Leon Fleisher, playing with both hands for the first time at Symphony Hall in more than 40 years. The solution -- if not the cure -- to Fleisher's longtime problems with his right hand is one of the few unadulteratedly good pieces of musical news. Last summer he played Mozart's A-major Concerto, K.414, at Tanglewood under Ozawa. Here, with former BSO assistant conductor Robert Spano (who now directs the Brooklyn Philharmonic), his playing was even more confident and secure, more radiantly beautiful and, as a result, even more deeply moving.

The mystery of Mozart -- which both Fleisher and Spano understand -- is that under the surface elegance beats a conflicted human heart as complex as Beethoven's or Mahler's -- or Tolstoy's. By the time Mozart wrote K.414, his music was more stupefyingly gorgeous than ever, but never just gorgeous (never just one of anything). Fleisher, with Spano, conveyed these hidden depths by riding the dazzling surface -- precise and articulate -- over a rhythmic undercurrent that was not merely (as with Ozawa) lively but had a coiled-spring tension, ever alert to the slightest shifts in the emotional direction (which are perhaps more subtle in Mozart than in any other great composer), that gave the music a vital, breathing energy.

The first movement scintillated: sparks flew, and sparkled. The slow movement revealed the solemnity beneath the glistening lyricism. The incomplete, broken-off phrases in Fleisher's cadenza, and all the repeated cascades of descending trills, have never conveyed such poignant resignation. And the Allegretto finale, with its buoyant chords and trills, never seemed so much like a decision to face and enjoy whatever the world has to offer in spite of what one might be suffering inside.

Spano surrounded the Mozart with the American premiere of a leisurely, colorful, and finally very touching suite from Benjamin Britten's last opera, Death in Venice (using almost all the orchestral music, arranged by Steuart Bedford, who conducted the opera's world premiere), and a shimmering, exuberant, yet elegant performance of an old BSO specialty, Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony.

Bernard Haitink may be the BSO's principal guest conductor, but the most consistently exciting and satisfying guest conductor has been Sir Simon Rattle. Last week, Rattle was back with pianist Krystian Zimerman, and their collaboration produced the most thrilling live performance of the Brahms D-minor Piano Concerto I've ever heard. For once, the concerto wasn't about how hard it is to play. Rattle's thoughtful -- thought-through -- conception seemed to be about the relation between two opposite ways of living through time. The opening theme of the first movement, concentrated and forceful, was a controlled dynamo; the second theme -- daringly slow and mysterious, freely flowing, undulating, more like romantic Wagner (Brahms's arch rival) than classical Brahms -- was about another kind of time: dreamlike, time-less, the piano suddenly intimate, veritably swooning. The drama of the concerto lay in the structural and emotional dynamics between these two kinds of time.

In the slow movement, Zimerman's descending chromatic scales floated earthward unpredictably, reluctantly, like late-autumn leaves -- you never knew where each note was going to fall -- yet all in a single breath, or sigh. Then the last movement erupted with an uplifting rhythmic zip. Zimerman mowed down the overwhelming technical hurdles, and the orchestra was with him every inch of the way. Things that get glossed over in most performances -- piquant pizzicati, or a rhythmically asymmetrical fugue in the finale that prefigures, of all people, Stravinsky -- became flesh.

Rattle completed his program with Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta -- one of Ozawa's big showpieces. But Rattle had the orchestra playing for mystery and meaning, too, so that by the omnium gatherum of the conclusion, it was far more than just the listener's ears that were caught up in the turbulent gossamer of Bartók's musical web.