Rich harvest

Our local heroes deliver a musical feast

by Lloyd Schwartz

I've been through eight concerts in two weeks: two BSO programs, the first of this season's Emerging Artists concerts (nobly sponsored by the Bank of Boston Celebrity Series), four concerts by some of our leading vocal groups, and one by a new ensemble that specializes in 20th-century orchestral music. The success of these events was not unpredictable, yet there were also significant surprises. And once again, I'm left astonished by how much extraordinary musicmaking takes place in this city.

At the BSO, Sir Simon Rattle gave us two programs that challenged and evidently excited the players. Last week he led an unforgettable, profoundly thoughtful Brahms D-minor Piano Concerto (with Krystian Zimerman) and Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, which by actually following Bartók's shifty tempo changes revealed something far more compelling than the usual orchestral dazzle. This week he led a Haydn symphony (No. 90), that was so stylish and witty, it fooled the audience (me, too) into applauding in the wrong place -- just as Haydn intended. At the end of the four-bar pause in the Finale, Rattle turned around and grinned mischievously. Then he gave us a Bruckner Seventh of enormous span and depth, a magnificent edifice with lofty arches and corridors that took winding turns into unexpectedly airy arcades. With its four Wagner tubas in Bruckner's mournful elegy for Wagner, and its deep cello solo (wonderful Martha Babcock), the orchestra played its heart out. With Rattle, every concert is a major occasion.

In between, Sergey Schepkin, a 34-year-old pianist originally from St. Petersburg, played a long and demanding program as an official Emerging Artist. Best known for his recording of the Goldberg Variations, Schepkin bracketed the evening with colorfully pianistic, lacelike, heroic Bach: the dark Sixth Partita and, as an encore, the first variation of the Goldbergs. These surrounded two striking contemporary works: Sophia Gubaidulina's tight, pounding, ghostly, rhythmically tilted (with more boogie than woogie) Chaconne from 1962 and the premiere of Alan Fletcher's 1984-'96 (yes, more than a decade in the making) Sonata, which is dedicated to Schepkin and allows him room to do one of the things he does best: find edgy ambiguities in the cracks between the broader sentiments. There was also a lightweight, surprisingly pretty piece by Robert Helps, three Rachmaninov Preludes, Liszt's daunting Après une lecture du Dante, and a most humbly phrased Liszt Consolation, the first encore. Nearly two and a half hours was too much, yet it proclaimed a big new sun rising on the musical horizon.

Boston Cecilia, Boston Baroque, and the Cantata Singers offered us new installments of what we've always been grateful for, but with delightful differences. Cecilia's Donald Teeters has been a major player in Boston's Handel revival. We probably know L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato best through Mark Morris's extraordinary ballet. This is actually Cecilia's second go at it in two decades, and the company's 14th major Handel since 1981. I've occasionally regretted Teeters's reticence as a conductor of dramatic works. In this piece without plot, Handel resolves the contrasts in Milton's famous poems (which advocate, in turn, the outgoing and the meditative life) by offering a third alternative (Enlightenment moderation). Teeters located and revealed the philosophical drama with the immeasurable assistance of three glorious -- and gloriously different -- sopranos: exuberant Sharon Baker (Allegro) and intimate Karol Bennett and volatile, shimmering Nancy Armstrong (Penseroso). He got less from tenor Timothy Neill Johnson (articulate but too often toneless) and baritone Philip Lima (hard to hear and problematical pitchwise in a role that James Maddalena made electric for Cecilia in 1976). The period orchestra, however, was superb, and the chorus sounded more energized, more viscerally alert, than it has to me in years.

Both Baker and Lima were back for Boston Baroque's evening of Handel and 17th-century French music. Director Martin Pearlman assembled a charming symphonic suite from Lully operas; then three sopranos -- this time Baker with Mara Bonde and Roberta Anderson -- wove exquisite vocal wreaths around two indrawing Lully motets. Delalande's big Te Deum, composed for the court of Louis XIV ("At a time when the two people running for the most powerful office on earth are called Bill and Bob," Pearlman commented, "it might be hard for us to relate to the politics of a man who called himself the Sun King"), was full of surprises, turning inward when you'd most expect extroversion (as in the Sanctus), and vice versa. These were ravishing performances, though I wouldn't have minded even sharper articulation of Dryden's wonderful text in Handel's luscious and brilliant Ode for St. Cecilia's Day.

No surprise that David Hoose and the Cantata Singers delivered accomplished, moving (especially tenor Karl Dan Sorensen as the voice of Jesus crying out in Schütz's piercing Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich?), joyful performances of Schütz and Bach woven around the first two Boston performances of Emerson, a stupendous new work for double chorus by John Harbison, in many ways still the Cantata Singers' spirit-in-resident. Harbison takes two startling passages from Emerson essays -- Self-Reliance and Compensation -- that express, Zen-like, the mystery of existence ("If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation," phrases set with alternating male and female voices then repeated with the voices reversed). No other composer today sets such multisyllabic words as "apologetic," "microscope," and -- amazingly -- "animacule" with more rhythmic aplomb.

Harbison's gorgeously exotic orchestration for his 1982 Mirabai Songs, sung eloquently by mezzo-soprano Mary Westbrook-Geha (one of the key words is "actually"), was the centerpiece of an ambitiously varied program (Cowell, Arthur Berger, Alan Hovhaness, Ives) from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. The BMOP was led with expressive, controlled power by Gil Rose, whose only technical limitation was to allow the superb players to cover too many of Westbrook-Geha's words (Jordan Hall's painful "new" acoustic strikes again).

The inability for words to get through was also the major problem at another event, but an event I enjoyed so thoroughly I'm disinclined to complain. Joel Cohen's Boston Camerata is famous for its theatrical yet scholarly performances of early music, but Cohen has also become increasingly interested in lost or disappearing American music: anthems, spirituals, hymns, Shaker songs. He's now taken a surprising though perhaps inevitable new turn. With help from the Paul Green and Kurt Weill Foundations, he's restored a full working score of Weill's first American opus, Johnny Johnson -- songs, choruses, and extended "incidental music" composed in 1936 for a broadly satiric yet poignant anti-war play by the Pulitzer Prize playwright Paul Green (whose daughter, Betsy Green Moyer, served both as Cohen's adviser and as a chorus member). Only a chunk of the much-revised/much-deleted score is included on the 1957 recording with Lotte Lenya (Polydor CD), and that marvelous performance has never hit me full in the face the way Cohen's did.

The original Broadway production, directed by Lee Strasberg, ran barely nine weeks, despite a cast that included John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, and Elia Kazan, and a score that's an astonishing amalgamation of American naïveté and Weimar worldliness, the deliberately treacly and the acidic. No one had a better ear for piquant dissonances than Weill. His breathtaking orchestration -- smeary trombone (Robert Couture), trumpets, accordion (Katherine Matasy), lubricious saxophone (Diane Heffner), clarinets, guitar (for a cowboy song, with tambourine) and banjo, piano, strings, percussion, and the then recently invented Hammond organ -- makes his unforgettable tunes all the more corrosive. And Cohen -- perhaps not surprisingly -- turns out to be born to play this scintillating and moving music, which he obviously adores. He made the Otaré (spell it backward to get Erato, the label that's going to release the recording I can hardly wait for) Pit Band sound as if it had been conceived in a back room at the Berliner Ensemble.

Cohen strung the numbers together with a narrative he adapted from Green's play (modestly delivered by Christopher Lydon the night I attended) and assembled a cast that mirrored his own enthusiasm and stylistic rightness. As Johnny, the tombstone carver who's never so sure about fighting this big war he's enlisted in to please his girlfriend Minny Belle (pouty Ellen Santaniello), lanky baritone Donald Wilkinson sang warmly and acted with touching earnestness ("Great guns, I forgot all about the War!" -- I wish Preston Sturges had been around to write the book). There were star turns by René de la Garza as both a smarmy mayor and a "Texas cowpuncher," Lynn Torgove as Minny Belle's mother (who sings the jauntily obsessive "Sewing-Machine Song"), Mark McSweeney as a gung-ho West Pointer, rich-voiced D'Anna Fortunato as the Statue of Liberty, Paul Guttry as a cuckoo psychiatrist, Anne Azéma as a seductive (though intonationally disturbing) French army nurse (Lenya's role on the recording), Bruce Fithian, Paul Cummings, and especially Richard Lalli as the self-absorbed Captain Valentine, a Hollywood-obsessed former movie stand-in. But the real star was Kurt Weill, and Cohen's project is not only a brave new step for the Camerata but a gift for all of us.