BSO blues

Our leading orchestra's tangled season, on stage and off

by Lloyd Schwartz

The major news from the Boston Symphony Orchestra is not the music at Symphony Hall but what's going on behind the scenes in the reorganization of the Tanglewood Music Center, the BSO summer academy founded by Serge Koussevitzky. Last year Seiji Ozawa asked longtime administrator Richard Ortner to step aside (evidently offering him another position that he declined). Last month, the faculty chair, pianist Gil Kalish, resigned in anger at Ozawa for continuing to carry out his personal agenda without listening to the faculty. Some of the most distinguished teachers in the program (which means some of the most distinguished musicians in the world) are upset by what they consider a longstanding lack of communication from Ozawa. A new overall director, Ellen Highstein, was appointed without much faculty input. This week, Leon Fleisher, the TMC's artistic director, has also resigned, angrily (does that mean he's unlikely to perform with the BSO in the near future?), with a dire warning about encroaching commercialism.

Other distinguished musicians defend Ozawa. And the BSO management has taken umbrage at what it seems to regard as Fleisher's ingratitude. If it's true that the best students are no longer applying to Tanglewood, then maybe reorganization is necessary. But the root of the problem may be that since Ozawa has never earned the deepest respect or trust from a large part of the musical community, as either artist or administrator, questions about his motives are inevitable. The waters are now muddier than ever, and feelings are badly hurt. What's clear is that the situation has been painfully mishandled from the top.

Meanwhile, this has been an odd season musically for the BSO. Some good young talent. Welcome return engagements. Thoughtful programs. Worthy new work. Yet little was absolutely thrilling or indelible. Thinking back over the most recent concerts, I needed to consult my programs just to remind myself what was played.

Probably the most important piece was the BSO's other new commission (after Leon Kirchner's season-opening grand cantata, Of things exactly as they are): French composer Henri Dutilleux's The shadows of time. These "five episodes for orchestra" show the 81-year-old Dutilleux looking back over the century from the perspective of its completion (or demise). The opening soft tick-tocks of the woodblock ("Les heures") re-emerge at the end under moody big-band, Gershwin-like blue notes ("Dominante bleue?") as the sound of time running out. This consummate craftsman has a refined ear for surprising orchestral timbres: very high disembodied basses hovering over timpani taps; flutes fluttering over low-lying strings; wild orchestral winds sweeping across static heavy chords.

Maybe Dutilleux isn't better known because the feelings he seems to explore are quietly subtle, even repressed -- entropy rather than ecstasy, irony and resignation rather than despair. Notoriously slow-working, he began this commission in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the death of Anne Frank, to whom, along with "all the children in the world, the innocents," he dedicates the slow third movement ("Mémoire des ombres" -- "Memory of Shadows"). A beseeching child's voice asks "Pourquoi nous? Pourquoi l'étoile?" ("Why us? Why the star?" -- that is, the yellow star worn by the Jews). Ozawa overstated the pathos (the bathos?) by using three children. Dutilleux's irony, at least in this performance, had a marshmallow center.

The evening began with another French piece, arguably the work that made 20th-century music possible: Debussy's once shocking Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894; first BSO appearance in 1904). A better performance would have set the right mood for the Dutilleux. But it was square and episodic, with minimal dynamic changes. This was the first starring role for the BSO's new principal flute, Jacques Zoon. But Zoon's chaste, un-French wooden flute lacked Debussy's masturbatory charge. Later in the season, we'd get a clearer idea of how good Zoon is.

Krystian Zimerman's post-Dutilleux Rachmaninov First Piano Concerto was one of the two best concerto performances of the season. This was breathtaking playing that was also elegant and intimate. I'm not certain the new risers, which help us to hear the BSO brasses better (Heaven help us!), are nearly as helpful to the soloists. Zimerman was occasionally drowned out. I'm sure we'll hear every note on his forthcoming BSO recording. The long evening ended in Hell, with a lively version of Tchaikovsky's supersaturated and underrated Francesca da Rimini, in which Ozawa again let the brass choirs overwhelm the gorgeous tunes.

Other soloists this fall included violinist Gil Shaham, who spun out a Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with a real singing line, not just a vibrato-laden throb. He left all the heaviness to Ozawa. His pianissimo repeat of the main theme of the slow movement made you want to weep with joy. And there was a sweet performance of the Dvorák Violin Concerto with Pamela Frank, but she too was sometimes overwhelmed by the orchestra (those risers again?). The best piece on that program was former assistant conductor (now associate conductor) Richard Westerfield's lovely complete Firebird, Stravinsky's ambitious breakthrough ballet, with echoes of Rimsky-Korsakov and Russian folk music but with an entirely new voice as well. No revelations here, nothing particularly Russian, either, but honest, atmospheric, mainly unforced playing (Zoon the ethereal "voice" of the firebird) by what I sometimes forget can be a great orchestra.

Even more extraordinary Stravinsky was on the BSO's best program this season: classical Haydn -- religious and secular (the Te Deum in C and the Clock Symphony) -- countered by neo-classical Stravinsky (secular and religious) -- the acerbic, deceptively pretty Concerto in D for Strings and the tremendous Symphony of Psalms, one of the BSO's two greatest commissions (along with Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra). It was a perfect program for the technical command of Bernard Haitink, but Haitink had to cancel (from exhaustion) and Andrew Davis, not primarily a technician, filled in. In fact, Symphony of Psalms' "striking" opening chord, to which Stephen Ledbetter alluded in his program note, sounded more like two chords. But the committed singing of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, especially in the quiet awe of the third part, Psalm 50 (Laudate Dominum), beginning and ending with its hushed Alleluia, was infectious. The orchestra got it. Everyone got it. This was the most moving musicmaking of the entire season.

Davis was back in Haitink's place the next week with Murray Perahia, who returned to Symphony Hall after a seven-year absence, the result of a thumb injury, infection, and repetitive stress problems. He dedicated Mozart's tragic C-minor Concerto (K.491) to the memory of his friend the British philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who had died the night before. Perahia played sensitively, and with glistening, evanescent tone. Not so many pianists these days care so much about what they sound like. But Perahia pays a price for his insistence on beauty. Everything sounded like a lullaby. The C-minor has some of Mozart's greatest writing for winds -- too bad none of the principal wind players was on call. Marianne Gedigian was fine on flute, but the ensemble was weak and Keisuke Wakao's coarse oboe was hardly Mozartian.

Davis led a spirited but messy Magic Flute Overture (more splattered entrances), and a very convincing Prokofiev Sixth Symphony, not particularly idiomatic but attuned to its multiple postwar ironies and its circusy swing -- a more than acceptable substitute for the Shostakovich Fourth scheduled by Haitink. The BSO, a great Prokofiev orchestra under Koussevitzky, hadn't played it in a dozen years.

Westerfield programmed Prokofiev too -- two brief and irresistible orchestral excerpts from his opera The Love for Three Oranges (over in less time than it took you to read this sentence). And Garrick Ohlsson played the scintillating Third Piano Concerto under James Conlon. Ohlsson's large hands really tickled those slippery ivories. This was a fleet and twinkling performance, though not as mercurial or variegated as Stephen Drury's stunning version with Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic in 1989.

I like James Conlon in opera (he's now conductor of the Paris Opera), so I was especially looking forward to the excerpts from Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Dawn and Rhine Journey, Siegfried's Funeral March, and a sans-soprano Immolation Scene) after the Prokofiev concerto. But the brasses mostly blared on in their own sound world (the risers working their mischief again?), with more sloppy entrances, and Conlon lacked one of the most crucial qualities for Wagner -- a sense of momentum, waves of forward motion that convey profound yearning. This Wagner was monolithic, and deadly. Nothing moved, so there was nothing to look forward to. Conlon began the evening with a stilted Brahms Tragic Overture. The only playing with any direction that night was Ohlsson's.

Brahms and Prokofiev reappeared in the program led by James DePreist, the now 61-year-old nephew of Marian Anderson and since 1980 music director of the Oregon Symphony, who was making his BSO Symphony Hall debut (after his Tanglewood appearance in 1973). The "Prokofiev" was actually William Walton's 1956 Cello Concerto, which was played with warmth and radiant tone by Lynn Harrell. Alas, as Stephen Ledbetter wrote with deadpan understatement, "The overall plan is very similar to that of Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1." "Ripoff" might be the more appropriate term. The curve of the cello melodies, the texture of the accompaniment, are lifted right out of Prokofiev's 1913 masterpiece.

DePreist, however, knows the secret of how to make music move. He's got a strong and extremely visible beat, which perhaps gives the players more confidence about making that dangerous journey across the barline. He began with John Adams's Slonimsky's Earbox (1996), co-commissioned by DePreist's Oregon Symphony and the Hallè Concerts Society -- a lively but instantly forgettable 13-minute exercise in scales (the title is more interesting than the music). He ended with a leisurely but endlessly flowing Brahms Second Symphony. The first-movement lullaby had an appealing lilt, the final Allegro con spirito a broad spaciousness. The brasses were messy again, and you couldn't hear the bassoons, but the cellos were glorious, and Zoon's woodland piping once again redeemed that sexless Debussy.

Then Ozawa returned for the year's last -- and worst -- program. The hodge-podge began with Mahler's unwieldy string-orchestra arrangement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet (ironic, given Ozawa's general lack of interest in Schubert). Its main attraction is as a showpiece for a phenomenal string section, but Ozawa couldn't stop the violins from screeching. Then we got the East Coast premiere of John Corigliano's new The Red Violin fantasy, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, the BSO, violinist Joshua Bell, and Sony. It's a suite "inspired by the film The Red Violin," for which Corigliano is doing the soundtrack. Bell (who'll be the "body double" in the movie) was the glamorous soloist. By turns hyper and syrupy (one tune closely resembles Jule Styne's "You'll Never Get Away from Me," with a new Bernstein cadence), and finally bloated and melodramatic, it sounded as genuine as a faked orgasm. Audiences hungry for melody and color will love it.

The concert ended with an Ozawa specialty, Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales and La valse (played as one continuous piece, as in George Balanchine's ballet La Valse, but with less point when there's no plot). Ozawa likes Ravel, but when he conducted these a decade ago, they sounded coarse and stiff. This time, they were real waltzes, full of rhythmic give, delicate and lilting. And La valse, glitteringly played, beginning with Everett Firth's quietly rumbling timpani, swept one into Ravel's loving and savage depiction of the Hapsburg decadence -- embodied in the waltz itself -- that would end in the cataclysm of the Great War. Ozawa seems to have acquired a new understanding of the coexistence of charm and cataclysm.