It looked like a patchwork program Ben Zander and the Boston Philharmonic put together for their season finale last weekend: Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, three of Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs and Joseph Schwanter’s New Morning for the World (Daybreak of Freedom), both with bass-baritone William Warfield, and Gustav Holst’s The Planets. In his pre-performance talk, Zander proposed the umbrella title "Searching for a Better World." In fact it was a BPO pops concert — and why not? Wouldn’t you like to see this kind of programming from the Boston Pops?
Of course, some Pops patrons might suspect they’d had too much Pops Punch upon seeing no orchestra on stage for The Unanswered Question. Charles Ives’s way-ahead-of-its-time 1906 (revised in the late ’30s) piece — which gave its name to Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Charles Eliot Norton lectures — is a call-and-response for solo trumpet (asking the question) and flute choir (looking for answers) over ethereal strings. I had never heard it live; at Sanders Theatre last Thursday, with the trumpet and flutes in the left and right balconies and the strings in the atrium of Memorial Hall, it sounded louder than I expected but was welcome all the same.
For William Warfield the welcome mat is always out. At 82, this veteran of Show Boat and Porgy and Bess might not have all the notes he did back in 1950, when he made his recital debut in Town Hall, but his endearing character is intact. The highlight of the Copland songs was "(We Will Gather) At the River," the hymn that makes such a memorable appearance in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine; even the little bridge between verses got a gloria of a performance from the orchestra. As for Schwanter’s piece, which premiered in 1983 with Pittsburgh Pirate great Willie Stargell reading the texts drawn from the words of Martin Luther King Jr., let’s just say that the words outshine the music. Warfield read from the heart; Zander and the BPO didn’t get in his way. Warfield’s rousing encore was "Old Man River"; like the Mississippi, he just keeps rolling along.
Finally, The Planets, Holst’s 1914 orchestral showpiece. My favorite recording, the only one I ever listen to, is Bernard Herrmann’s late-’60s performance with the London Philharmonic: as neurotic and nightmarish as his film scores, it was so badly panned by the critics that it’s never been issued on CD. One can hardly criticize Zander for following the composer’s own example and driving "Mars" (without which there would be no Star Wars score) at a scathing pace, but the peculiarity of the 5/4 meter didn’t register, and I missed the juggernaut implacability of Herrmann’s obsessive slow tempo. Zander’s mercurial "Mercury" sacrificed some of Holst’s sly wit (but the big outburst was effective); the steady, stiff-upper-lip approach to the big hymn-tune-to-be in "Jupiter" sounded mechanical next to the tragic weight of Herrmann’s agogic distortions. "Uranus" was full-bodied but got faster as it went along; "Neptune" closed the concert circle by seeming too loud. The problem, in part, is that the BPO is not a showpiece orchestra. Still, The Planets is a work to be heard live (when did the BSO last play it?), and the BPO performance was alive and kicking. I was happy to hear it.
