Music talk

Then vis-à-vis Haitink's BSO Mahler Ninth the week before, Manning also admitted to being a longtime admirer of Haitink's "restraint" in Mahler, his "gentle rein on the hyper-Romanticism" that brings Mahler "back from the brink of excess to profound clarity." Many people share this position. I found that Mahler Ninth (and have always found Haitink's Mahler) generally inexpressive and timidly generic, smoothing over Mahler's risky emotional and dramatic twists and shifts.

But the larger issue is that this opinion expresses a false sense of alternatives. The one major conductor who specialized in tipping Mahler over "the brink of excess" was Leonard Bernstein. But think of the diversity of Mahler's own disciples: intense Oskar Fried, spacious Otto Klemperer, witty Willem Mengelberg, wise Bruno Walter, not to mention such later Mahlerites as different as the contemplative John Barbirolli, the warmhearted Klaus Tennstedt, the intellectual but lucid Claudio Abbado, and the prismatic yet dramatic and ineluctably forward-moving Pierre Boulez (the soul of expressive clarity). Their memorable performances have more to do with emotional focus, dramatic contrasts, and openness to Mahler's wide range of experience than with thick globs of hyper-Romantic emotional excess. What if people thought there were only two ways to play Hamlet: hamming it up or reading the lines blankly, as if they were the phone book? Do Haitink's noncommittal readings -- however beautifully played -- ever emobody Mahler's fundamental and Shakespearean sense of drama?

Then there are the acoustics of the newly renovated Jordan Hall, which have certainly disturbed me. The sound now seems as dry and airless as CDs used to sound (and some still do), as opposed to the warmth, the momentary bloom surrounding each note, that I remember from as far back as the first time I attended Jordan Hall more than 30 years ago to hear the Budapest Quartet. The string tone now sounds thin, with an irritating tinny reverberation at higher frequencies and a peculiar "bulge" in the brasses around the same register. Some musicians I respect actually prefer the new brightness and clarity, but there's no question that everyone finds the sound different -- and that wasn't supposed to happen.

A letter from NEC president Laurence Lesser "to the NEC Community" reports that the acousticians are blaming the removal from the ceiling of "years of grime -- in some places almost a quarter of an inch thick." People who know more than I do are suspicious of any new paint designed for permanence and impenetrability. "You might as well put up tile," a friend remarked. Can this really be an example of what Lesser calls "the way Jordan Hall sounded 90 years ago"? The house itself now seems too live. Applause is deafening. Sitting under the balcony for Boston Baroque's superb Monteverdi Vespers, I could hear every candy wrapper, bracelet rattle, and turning page around the entire rear circle. Wisely, Lesser rejects any further renovation until all the information is fully analyzed.

Conductor Benjamin Zander (also NEC faculty) wrote a letter to the Globe praising the new acoustic. He was happy with the Boston Philharmonic's first rehearsals there, but at the performance he apparently found the orchestra harder to hear well from the podium, and in Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony he felt the tone was hard-edged. At Sanders Theatre, the Tchaikovsky sounded rich, warm, unforced, and it moved me. So did the hauntingly muted Sibelius Valse Triste that opened the concert. Septuagenarian Hungarian violinist (and friend of Bartók) Denes Zsigmondy, in what were announced to be his last public concerts, evidently had a rough time at the earlier performance, even to the point of losing his place in Bartók's demanding Second Violin Concerto (I don't know whether the hall itself had anything to do with this problem). Yet at Sanders, though his tone had little dynamic variety, it was confident and radiant. His encore (the lyrical slow movement from Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin) was still more heartbreaking.

Lesser himself shocked some of us by announcing that he was going to resign after 12 years at the helm of NEC, an era of dramatic expansion. He'd undergone five successful "eye-related surgeries" in the past year but was evidently rethinking his life toward a greater concentration on his own cello playing. He said he'd stay on during the search for a new president, through December 1996. He started teaching cello at NEC in 1974, and he plans to continue on the faculty.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, practically everyone left in Boston who wasn't at The Nutcracker turned up at Emmanuel Church for a concert Emmanuel Music was offering in conjunction with a new recording (for Koch) of John Harbison works. This was Emmanuel's third performance of Harbison's Violin Concerto, which it premiered in 1981, and the world premiere of Harbison's new Recordare, an expanded version of a section of the Dies Irae from a complete "Requiem of Reconciliation" commissioned from 14 composers by the Stuttgart Bachakademie for last year's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Harbison had to cut 38 bars from the beginning of that piece for the Stuttgart event; at Emmanuel, all the original music was played for the first time.

And it was gorgeous. Four soloists in turn -- Roberta Alexander's angelic soprano followed by Frank Kelley's commanding tenor, Donald Wilkinson's chanting baritone, and Mary Westbrook-Geha's all-embracing mezzo-soprano -- and then all four voices praying together to "sweet Jesus" (as Harbison himself translates "Jesu pie") for pardon, for shelter, like a lamb among the sheep. The orchestra begins with a trumpet call and chimes repeating like a memory. Each succeeding verse shifts in tone, from a low-pressure center in bassoons and strings to wreathing winds trying to rise above the baritone's exhausted incantation, to a more heavenly ensemble of piano, celesta, and harp. Trombone slides make a scary warning then vanish before the peaceful, hopeful ending.

Despite its not insignificant difficulties, the Violin Concerto has now settled in like an old friend, an old masterpiece. Violinist Rose Mary Harbison, for whom it was written, was at the top of her form, filling the church with rhetorical grandeur, the intimacy of intense song, a "fiery" cadenza, and a climactic hoedown. Craig Smith led the superb orchestra with balance and thrilling energy.

Support for this concert was provided by several foundations and the family and friends of Jonathan Belden Daniels, a young man who was killed in Poland five years ago in a freak avalanche. In between the Harbison pieces, Smith led an exquisite Unfinished Symphony (his first), filling familiar Schubert with fresh insights and high contrasts: stabbing cries of pain alternating with lyrical wind playing of the most yearning sweetness.

More contemporary music -- and some of this year's best -- was offered by, of all people, the BSO. On a compelling program chosen by the British conductor Jeffrey Tate, the world's most famous living horn player, Australian-born Barry Tuckwell (at 64 well past the expected performing capacity for horn players), played the galloping Mozart Third Horn Concerto and the first Boston performance of Oliver Knussen's 1994 Horn Concerto (composed for Tuckwell) -- scintillating Mahler-inspired "night-music" beginning with a twinkle and ending with a shimmering crescendo and a dying fall.

Tuckwell is impressive not only for virtuoso bravura but for a virtually cinematic range of dynamics and tone qualities ("far away," "echo," "dissolve," "attack"). No wonder Knussen wanted to write something for him; no wonder he calls the horn his favorite instrument.

Tate began with a splendid version of Haydn's Symphony No. 104 (his last -- the London), notable (like the Mozart Horn Concerto) for its wit, its drive, its weight without heaviness -- qualities the BSO rarely demonstrates in classical music (see above). This concert, mostly (all but the Mozart) in tribute to musicmaking in England, ended with a loving, long, and leisurely yet rapt Elgar Enigma Variations.

And last week, Robert Spano became the first former BSO assistant conductor to lead his own program, one that began with Jacob Druckman's literally magical 1994 Nor Spell Nor Charm, a chamber-orchestra expansion of a song from A Midsummer Night's Dream that he'd written for Jan DeGaetani shortly before her death, music of almost wayward but appealing indirection. Spano also led a crisply pulsating and transparent if not particularly folkloric Sibelius Sixth (his "Pastorale"?) but couldn't rise above the generic mediocrity of the Beaux Arts Trio in Beethoven's Triple Concerto, which depends so heavily on the personalities of its three soloists.

I guess I have a blind spot about them. Even in their latest configuration, they still strike me as like the musicians you'd catch in the corner of your eye in a Hitchcockian concert-hall murder scene. They're playing, but your interest is elsewhere.