Spellbound

Ozawa does Ravel; Zander does it all

by Lloyd Schwartz

Twenty-one years ago, Seiji Ozawa conducted Ravel's almost allegorical one-act "lyric fantasy" with a libretto by Colette, L'enfant et les sortilèges ("The Little Boy and the Magic Spells"). It was one of the two best concerts I've ever heard from Ozawa. Rehearing a taped broadcast reconfirmed that first impression. The superb cast of mostly American singers included some of Boston's best-liked performers (Mary Davenport, D'Anna Fortunato, Mark Pearson), plus the late Jan de Gaetani as the naughty child whose mistreated playthings and garden creatures seek revenge and finally -- ecstatically -- turn him into a wise and caring person.

My other favorite Ozawa performance was Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder that same summer at Tanglewood (with Phyllis Curtin, George London, and James McCracken); when Ozawa repeated it four years later at Symphony Hall -- for a recording project -- it flopped. But last week, Ravel remained in good hands. Ozawa seems to be able to put himself into the mind of a child yet maintain his technical sophistication. In this music, for once, he actually hears meanings: each trombone blurp or contrabassoon burp, each plangent piece of fluting, plink of pizzicato, or misty spray of harp responded to some specific moment in Colette's literally marvelous text. The music -- waltzes, tangos, and foxtrots -- slips from parodic ragtime to solemn pastoral processional. Ozawa, the players, and each member of John Oliver's Tanglewood Festival Chorus (excelling as a group and in many small solos) were with it every magical step.

At the literal center of the simple but pointed staging, in front of and around the podium, American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, with her creamy voice and expressive grin, was so irresistibly devilish as the little boy, you knew he couldn't be all bad, so you cheered his moral reclamation. Contralto Nathalie Stutzmann was his strict yet tender mother and an exotic Chinese cup ("Mah-jong . . . harakiri, Sessue Hayakawa"). Well-known Welsh tenor Robert Tear was a pugnacious teapot ("How's your mug? . . . I punch your nose"), a fiendish math professor, and a helplessly trapped frog. An international cast, mostly making BSO debuts, included coloratura Sumi Jo as the leaping fire, the child's beloved fairy-tale princess (a bit too chilly), and a nightingale. Italian mezzo Monica Bacelli and American baritone Chris Pedro Trakas made a hilarious pair of cats, meowing with all-too-French innuendo. Dewy-voiced Norwegian soprano Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz was a particularly touching bat. And veteran Belgian bass-baritone José van Dam, making his first BSO appearance in a decade, was more than luxury casting as a dancing armchair and a wounded tree.

Earlier that evening, van Dam performed Rückert-Lieder, Mahler's five extraordinary settings of poems of dedication to love and art by the 19th-century German poet Friedrich Rückert. Austere and heartfelt, van Dam sang from deep inside these songs of spiritual crisis. No display. No projection of self. He was almost too self-effacing (he even sang from a score), yet profound in his dignity and gravity. Robert Sheena's cor anglais solo in "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I've gotten lost to the world") was his loveliest work with the BSO to date. And preceding the Rückert Songs Ozawa led a gorgeously played Overture to Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel. (For an entire program of music about children, shouldn't the Mahler cycle have been Kindertotenlieder?)

A week before, Yo-Yo Ma joined Ozawa in both Haydn cello concertos and Leon Kirchner's 1992 Music for Cello and Orchestra, which was composed for him but which he hadn't played here before. The eagerly awaited world premiere of Kirchner's BSO commission, Of things exactly as they are, was supposed to be the big item on this program, but the composer's recent hospitalization and recuperation forced a postponement. In its place, Ozawa led the American premiere of his late countryman Toru Takemitsu's cantata My Way of Life (composed in 1990 as a memorial for the London Sinfonietta's founder, Michael Vyner). It's a piece Ozawa evidently believes in, but I'd have to nominate it as one of the worst things I've ever heard at Symphony Hall. Treacly and derivative (the Globe's Richard Dyer found traces of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, and a Pops arrangement of "White Christmas"), it's a gushy setting of a sappy (in English, at any rate) Japanese poem about a tree ("A tree is/Love itself"; "No two trees are the same"; "Tree,/I love you deeply"). Where's Joyce Kilmer when you really need him? "What's the Japanese word for `schmaltz'?" someone remarked at intermission.

Ozawa's square Haydn was a letdown after Simon Rattle's rakish Haydn symphony the week before, and Ma's playing in the Second Concerto (which began the program) combined the lambent with the effortful (it sounded better next day on the radio). Kirchner's piece, I wrote in 1994, is an odd combination of the monolithic and the kaleidoscopic. It's very personal, with quotations from Bach and Mahler. When Kirchner himself conducted it here with his own orchestra nearly three years ago (with Andrés Díaz), it was an event-filled progress from fist-shaking to mellow acceptance. Ozawa rather blurred and generalized the details, and he romanticized the music into a single rhapsodic effusion. Ma sounded heroic, but his new recording with David Zinman (who led the premiere) comes closer to capturing Kirchner's clarity and quirkiness. Ending the concert with the Haydn First Concerto, Ozawa had more spring, and Ma was at his stupendous best -- heartbreaking in the Adagio, hair-raisingly fleet and buoyant in the fast movements.

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The hight point of the Boston Philharmonic's excellent concert under Benjamin Zander last weekend was a rare performance of the Bartók Second Piano Concerto (1931), with another stupefyingly gifted young player, 22-year-old prize-winning Russell Sherman student Jong Wha Park. This is music that, as David St. George pointed out in his superb and comprehensive program essay, is usually played more for pounding percussiveness than for poetry. In places, Park sounded as if he had six hands, but he's also a player (witness the quietude of the Adagio) of refinement and deep poetic instincts. At Sanders Theatre, he played both with and through the orchestra. Zander kept the strings in the Adagio down to a breathless hush, barely a whisper, and skillfully directed traffic through Bartók's complex hairpin rhythmic curves. He surrounded the Bartók with a lively Overture to Glinka's Russlan and Ludmilla, with a real swing to it, and a passionately noble Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony.

It was a busy day for Zander. That evening at Suffolk's C. Walsh Theatre he turned up at a Collage new-music concert -- this time being conducted by David Hoose, who used to play first horn under Zander in the old Civic Symphony. The Zander-thon ended with a delicious performance of William Walton's setting of the 21 poems of Edith Sitwell's darkly comic more-than-nonsense masterpiece, Façade (from the early 1920s -- the same period as Ravel's L'enfant). In her own famous recording, Sitwell's droll dry drone ("For Hell is just as properly proper/As Greenwich, or as Bath, or Joppa!") suggests the height of clipped sophistication. Zander and partner Susan Larson took the reverse approach by fleshing out the recitation with a dazzling display of accents (British, Scots, Deutsch), languorous whispers, and snooty attitudinizing. With a heavier hand, this could have been awful. But their tongue-twisting dexterity, their obvious affection for the text, and above all their musicianship (mere actors rarely succeed in this piece) were marvels of lightness and comic timing.

A word about Larson. She first got under my skin as an operetta singer: Offenbach, Gilbert & Sullivan, Rodgers & Hart. She's the best American operetta singer I've ever heard, with the perfect voice for it -- "light, and bright, and sparkling," the qualities Jane Austen feared Pride and Prejudice might have too much of. Larson is our own Elizabeth Bennet, poised on the razor edge of parody and sincerity. There's never been much opportunity in this country for operetta, and now that Larson has essentially given up singing (she's teaching voice and writing for the Globe), I'd given up on hearing her in more. Façade, though, is like spoken operetta, and Larson wasn't merely good, she was thrilling. And it's the greatest compliment to Hoose and his brilliant ensemble -- Christopher Krueger (flute), Ian Greitzer (clarinet), Kenneth Radnofsky (alto saxophone), Tom Smith (trumpet), and everyone else -- to say they were the instrumental equivalents of Larson.

There was also a magnificently played performance (Christopher Krueger and pianist Judith Gordon) of Stefan Wolpe's Piece in Two Parts 1960, which I just couldn't connect with despite Hoose's introductory comments about how witty this was going to be. And finally, the premiere of a terrific new Collage commission: Andy Vores's Weegee, inspired by 10 of the famous news photographers gritty black-and-white pictures of New York murder victims and murderers, a jazz club and Easter Sunday in Harlem, a fire and a car crash. Vores's score is moody, colorful (mostly blue), and highly original in the way it knowingly yet unselfconsciously incorporates traditional elements of jazz and blues. I wonder how much it depends on the projections of the photographs. I'm eager to find out with further hearings.