Critic's diary

The season shifts into high gear

by Lloyd Schwartz

SUNDAY

Coro Allegro, the gay, lesbian, and gay-and-lesbian-friendly choral group that's interested in serious performances of an impressive range of music. Its latest concert, "Glories of Vienna," included Schubert's only setting of a Hebrew text ("Tov Lehodós" -- Psalm 92), an elaborate four-movement Brahms Biblical motet, three Kodály a cappella folk pieces (one, particularly lilting, interweaves images of Norwegian girls and the Norwegian landscape), and Haydn's brilliant Mass in Time of War, beautifully led by David Hodgkins, with more real dynamic contrasts than anything I've heard all year at Symphony Hall.

WEDNESDAY

A free Jordan Hall concert by the remarkable Borromeo String Quartet in a remarkable program: Schoenberg's glorious and demanding single-movement 49-minute-long First Quartet (1905) and Beethoven's Opus 74, The Harp. The Schoenberg left one gasping at the enthralling give and take, at the grand sense of design (just when you thought you couldn't absorb another note there'd be a dramatic change of gears and you were riveted again), at the unearthly beauty of the playing. The breathtaking tango (with underlying rhythm section), the pizzicato pixie serenade (in Schoenberg!), ethereal slow passages, the violin soaring for a moment over the consoling viola, those ominous otherworldly shivers, the joyous ending -- grammar fails me. I'll never forget it.

I'd quibble only with the lack of "swing" in the opening theme of the otherwise loving (and swinging) Beethoven, with its throwback to 18th-century aristocratic formulas, its enchanting harplike pluckings, its sobbing "Jewish" Adagio, and its whirlwind tarantella.

THURSDAY

The Mark Morris Dance Company returning with a rewarding program that included the Boston premiere of I Don't Want To Love, choreographed to a series of Monteverdi madrigals about rejected love; One Charming Night, Morris's hilarious and sinister "vampire" pas de deux, set to four Purcell songs; Lucky Charms, a dazzling and mysterious company piece to Ibert's seriously irresistibly and parodic Divertissement; and Gloria, one of Morris's first undisputed masterpieces, to Vivaldi's exuberant Gloria -- the music all performed live.

At a post-concert Q&A, Morris told the audience that what inspired him was his love for music. And the music was, mostly, wonderful, especially the Ibert and the Vivaldi, which were performed mainly by Emmanuel Music personnel under, respectively, Linda Dowdell and Craig Smith. The chorus was magnificent. Mezzo-soprano Mary Westbrook-Geha flooded the house with her creamy full-bodied voice. Peggy Pearson's oboe in the Vivaldi was like sacramental wine. Don Davis's hilariously louche trombone and Michael Beattie's raggy piano (to name two) captured the raucous yet elegant spirit of the Ibert. The company last danced Lucky Charms here at Symphony Hall, for a Live at the Pops telecast conducted by Keith Lockhart -- at the Shubert it was less glamorous but more intimate, more ominous, and appropriately inebriated.

Morris needs to find more musicians like the Emmanuel folks. New York's 458 Strings (five capable early-music instrumentalists including director/harpsichordist Gwendolyn Toth) and the Artek ensemble (three men with unappealing voices who at least sing with some feeling for the text) were joined by Eileen Clark Reisner, whose thin, wavery soprano, vague diction, and approximate tonality were like flat ginger ale next to the vintage burgundy of Pearson's accompanying oboe or Westbrook-Geha's full-throated ease. I wished I could just tune her out. Live music is crucial to Morris. Boston overflows with wonderful musicians and singers -- aren't there better ones in New York?

FRIDAY

Baritone Sanford Sylvan singing Schubert's Winterreise with his longtime collaborating pianist David Breitman -- a powerful if hardly cheerful event. Sylvan emphasized the bitterness and despair of the lonely winter wanderer in this bleakest of song cycles (Schubert's setting of Wilhelm Müller's achingly poignant, almost surrealistic poems). He stood nearly paralyzed, numb with grief, hands hanging at his sides, head a-tilt, like Nijinsky's Petrushka or Watteau's tragic clown Gilles, both "parody" images of Christ with the Crown of Thorns. And he was in spectacular voice -- spinning out legato phrases, then slipping suddenly into a pained falsetto or a rougher growl. Sylvan lives these songs, and within the confines of his interpretation, he's capable of infinite nuance and flexibility.

Much as I've loved almost everything else Sylvan does, I've always had some reservation about his Schubert, which to me misses the element of the naive, the suffering that comes before the attempt to understand it. He seems too knowing, too self-conscious. But this works in Winterreise because the narrator here has already faced his fate. My main reservation about this Winterreise has to do with pacing. Sylvan and Breitman began with unexpected urgency -- this traveler had no intention of dawdling in the town where the woman he loved had married someone else. As the narrator grew increasingly tired, the pace slowed and slowed. But there was a price to pay for this literalness. Toward the end the songs began to seem lugubrious -- too heavy, perhaps even belaboring the hero's existential isolation. Some performers convey an almost Beckett-like sense of resignation, if not Beckett-like humor, which avoids self-pity. Will the lonely old organ grinder in the last song add this wanderer's songs to his repertoire? How much more poignant this is when there's some tenderness toward the organ grinder. Maybe even at the bottom of this well of loneliness grief can be turned into art. Sylvan seemed to see not a glimmer of hope.

Breitman was, as always, the complete collaborator, underlining, perhaps at times with too heavy a hand (or foot), Sylvan's hallucinatory despair. Despite my questions of interpretation, I was devastated. I'm in constant fear that great lieder recitals are disappearing. This one gives me heart.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

I was right to be apprehensive about Benjamin Zander leading the Boston Philharmonic in Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto. The old-fashioned, bottom-heavy string playing lacked the refinement that made the best Bach performances of half a century ago shine, though there was plenty of high-energy forward motion and a strong sense of the melodic lines that period-instrument versions often miss. No reservations about Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, though. Explosive and inspired, Zander caught Hindemith's ecstatic, cataclysmic vision of the artist in spiritual conflict.

The rambling, symphonic Brahms First Piano Concerto is always dicy to pull off. Pianist Stephen Drury has been so thoroughly identified with 20th-century music (his Ravel and Prokofiev concertos with Zander are among the most scintillating I've ever heard), I was eager to hear him in Romantic repertoire. And there he was, in his familiar black leather pants and black silk shirt -- doing Brahms! Was it his idea to play the opening themes so meditatively? But the slowing down made it hard for the orchestra to stay afloat. Phrasing and intonation sagged, though there was something beautiful, too, in those endless long breaths.

In The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck warns Henry Fonda that her cardsharp father, who has just deliberately "lost" to Fonda, is "more uneven sometimes than others." "That's what makes him uneven, of course," Fonda dimly replies. Drury is rarely "uneven" -- I've heard him toss off Ligeti études. But he was uneven in the Brahms. He kept flubbing notes in the faster parts of the first movement. Maybe Brahms is really harder than Ligeti. The exhilarating Hungarian dance finale was more successful, and the slow movement had some lovely, delicate playing. Yet in view of how much Drury and Zander usually have to say, there was oddly little point of view. I finally couldn't tell what either of them really felt.

SUNDAY EVENING

David Hoose led a Collage new-music concert that included the Boston premiere of Donald Crockett's The Cinnamon Peeler, an aimlessly coloristic setting of an obscure erotic fantasia by Michael Ondaatje; the world premiere of Dreams, an easygoing, loose-limbed four-movement chamber piece by Edward Cohen that included several forays into contemporary jazz; and Light Fragments, by young Dorothy Chang, a student of John Harbison's at the Aspen Festival, who combined three gestures -- a two-note motto, a series of running 16ths, and a long-breathed cantilena -- into a tightly constructed and explosive brief invention.

And on another plane, John Harbison's marvelous chamber orchestration of Books Three and Four of his four-part 1980 song cycle, Mottetti di Montale, originally written for voice and piano. The exquisite instrumentation reveals fresh delicacies in this perfect meeting of poet and composer -- one of Harbison's most secure masterpieces.

Mezzo-soprano Janice Felty, who sang the premiere, was back, and most welcome. Two years ago, Harbison conducted Lorraine Hunt at a Dinosaur Annex concert, and Hunt has now recorded it (though the disc won't be released for another year). No one alive has Hunt's vocal radiance, verbal sensitivity, or emotional nakedness. For Felty, the highest-lying parts remain a strain, but she brings an impassioned (if a bit generic) approach to the text, and her voice has, if anything, grown warmer and rounder.

Hoose led a seductively detailed performance by guests Peggy Pearson (oboe), Peggy Friedland (flute), Jay Wadenpfuhl (horn), and Collage's distinguished regulars: pianist Christopher Oldfather (on celesta), Scott Woolweaver (viola), Ronan Lefkowitz (violin), Joel Moerschal (cello), James Orleans (bass), and Robert Annis (clarinets), all of whom seemed to revel in Harbison's gorgeous musical prisms.

MONDAY

At BU, Hoose was also conducting a student production of Regina, Marc Blitzstein's operatic version of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. Pure ham. But the score is one of the most inventively American in all American opera. And damned if Hoose and company didn't give us a more complete -- and convincing -- version than the one offered in 1991 by our reigning professional opera company.