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Ida Haendel at the BSO
BREATHTAKING BRUCH


If only the BSO offered more concerts like the one last weekend. Ilan Volkov, who last year, at the age of 25, retired as one of the BSO’s assistant conductors, was back on the podium as a full-fledged guest conductor. The program he put together was the smartest of the season: two 19th-century classics (Schumann and Bruch) balanced, after intermission, by ancestor and descendant: 18th-century classical music at its most inventive (Haydn) and an American premiere by a contemporary master of invention (Ligeti).

Even the more familiar composers were represented by pieces of welcome rarity. This was only the fourth time since 1918 the BSO has scheduled Schumann’s moody, beseeching, and finally heroic overture to his failed opera, Genoveva ("Genevieve"). And Haydn’s delightfully unbalanced and harmonically adventurous Symphony No. 42, in D, made its very first BSO appearance. Volkov offered dramatic contrasts and pellucid textures in the Schumann, and he kept the Haydn buoyant and bracing, though the slow movement — Andantino e cantabile — could have benefitted from more "cantabile" ("singing").

Ligeti’s Hamburgisches Konzert, for horn and orchestra, had its world premiere in Hamburg (where else?) a year ago. Its six movements take barely 15 minutes, and any mood or color rarely lasts more than a minute. Four of the movements are subdivided into radically contrasting sections: the longest, the fourth, begins with "Solo," a substantial horn cadenza (beautifully negotiated by BSO principal horn James Sommerville) full of mournful inner echoes (parallel to the series of echoes two movements earlier between solo horn and, in turn, each member of a quartet of natural — that is, valveless — horns). This movement ends with the brilliant "Kanon," a breathless, kaleidoscopic fugue, precisely annotated, with shrilling strings, xylophone, and flutes — a frenzied birdhouse of chirping, twittering, cooing, and cuckooing.

The penultimate movement, "Spectra," is the longest but most unified, a penumbra of shadows created by all five horns, with the help of eerily bowed cymbals (I thought of Morris Louis’s Veil paintings, huge canvases saturated with almost transparent layers of overlapping color). A sudden outburst of chimes, drum rolls, and a growling trombone erupts before "Spectra" finally subsides again into its own mist.

The most familiar piece, Max Bruch’s rhapsodic Violin Concerto No. 1, in G minor (minor keys were another unifying factor all evening), was last played by the BSO just three years ago. But not like this. The soloist was the magnificent Ida Haendel, once a child prodigy but now, in her 70s, even more prodigious. Her vivid sense of phrasing — in breaths not bar lines — and seductive, shimmering, silvery tone made Bruch’s conventional gestures of energy and repose immediately, ardently personal. The opening violin statement, rising out of a hushed drum roll from depths to summit, staked out a vast territory, announcing its mastery over all it surveyed.

Haendel’s Adagio was a love song of throbbing concentration, softer and slower than usual, the violin a silken thread — indrawn, intimate, one long-held breath. The Finale (Allegro energico) danced with a rhythmic snap and an unflagging drive, a throaty low melody sounding more like a cello than a violin. Haendel never wastes her gestures on self-display, though she can outplay just about anyone else in the business. Her latest visit was another touchstone for the BSO, and for concerto playing anywhere.

BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Issue Date: February 7 - 14, 2002
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