E-Mail This Article to a Friend
	Revolutions? The Vienna Symphony, Les Misérables, and Lang Lang

In the 1950s, when I was growing up and growing acquainted with classical music, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra was my ticket to Beethoven, in particular Otto Klemperer’s recording of the Pastorale Symphony with the VSO. Later I discovered Jascha Horenstein’s recordings of Mahler’s First and Ninth Symphonies with the same orchestra. I had barely heard of the Vienna Philharmonic. The VSO has, however, always been Vienna’s number-two outfit, and so it was brave of the FleetBoston Celebrity Series — which had brought in the Philharmonic, with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, back in February — to give us the Symphony a week ago Wednesday, especially in a mainstream program of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and the Eroica.

At first it didn’t seem that courage would be rewarded. Symphony Hall was filled, if not packed, and though the VSO has hardly more women than the VPO (I counted seven), I was happy to see that Vladimir Fedoseyev had positioned the first and second violins antiphonally. The Violin Concerto, however, was a sleepy, self-serving affair. Even when I closed my eyes to Nikolaj Znaider’s posturings, his on-loan 1704 "ex-Liebig" Stradivarius sounded slightly acidic, and his phrasing verged on precious; it was all about him, not Beethoven. The orchestra’s attack was gentle, to say the least; apart from the hushed, reverent opening of the Larghetto, the winds were faint-hearted, and from where I sat, slightly left of center, the second violins made no impact.

Was Znaider responsible for this inert, gutless reading? You’d have to think so from the lean-and-mean way the same orchestra tore into the opening Allegro con brio of the Eroica. Fedoseyev was compact and energetic on the podium; the sound he got was engagingly unblended, and you could hear a theme being passed around in the development. The old-fashioned small-bore Vienna horns came into their rustic own in the Trio of the Scherzo, and the Finale was a playful, teasing romp, with the first and second violins in audible dialogue, the winds cheeky, and the brass and percussion rampant. All the same, this was the traditional macho bar-by-bar Beethoven that pounds you into submission, with neither the long line nor the tripping lilt that David Zinman achieves on his Nuova Era recording with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich.

They saved the best for the encore, Johann Strauss’s An der schönen blauen Donau ("Blue Danube") Waltz, which flounced and flirted and was a different creature in each section, Fedoseyev repeatedly taking the orchestra to the precipice of schmaltz without ever falling in. It was a performance Harnoncourt and the Vienna Phil could have been proud of. Too bad the same levity didn’t illumine the VSO’s Beethoven.

THE 18-YEAR-OLD MUSICAL that Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg created out of Victor Hugo’s Les misérables is all levity and very little illumination. Hugo’s monumental (some 1400 pages) 1862 novel addresses itself to the criminal-justice system in France and the events surrounding the 1832 uprising in Paris, but his bigger theme is that even the misérables of this world are redeemable. The fast-food reduction from Boublil and Schönberg wouldn’t keep Jean Valjean’s niece alive. The fabled turntable does whirl us from Toulon (Jean released from prison after serving 19 years for stealing that loaf of bread) to Digne (a good bishop helps him out) to Montreuil-sur-Mer (Jean has become mayor but seduced-and-abandoned Fantine has to sell her body to provide for daughter Cosette) to Montfermeil (Jean rescues Cosette from the infamous Thénardier family) to revolutionary Paris, with bloodhound Inspector Javert in eternal pursuit. But it’s fiber-free Hugo, all melodrama and no musing. Schönberg’s recitative-like score sounds at almost every moment as if it would be rememberable, but on my second attempt, all I came out with were snatches of "I Dreamed a Dream" and "Do You Hear the People Sing?" And the flag-waving English text by Herbert Kretzmer makes the screenplay for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame sound like original Hugo.

But audiences love it, and the production that’s moved into the Colonial Theatre (where it’ll be through December 7) is no worse than the one I saw in 1995. Randal Keith is a bear of a Jean Valjean, a wounded animal with soul. James Clow’s Javert is self-righteous where obsessed would be more to the point. Tonya Dixon’s victimized Fantine brings some feeling to "I Dreamed a Dream"; Amanda Huddleston has a nice nasal earnestness as Cosette and Ma-Anne Dionisio actually captures some of the range of Hugo’s Eponine. Josh Young’s Marius is callow to a fault; I kept wondering why they didn’t cast the commanding Enjolras, John-Andrew Clark, in the role. As the Thénardiers, Michael Kostroff and Cindy Benson trivialize Hugo’s pessimistic vision, but that’s written into the part. The same is true of their eldest son, Gavroche, a Dickens-like urchin in the novel, a sub-Disney know-it-all in the musical whom even Hugo might have thought beyond redemption.

There’s no skimping on the special effects, or at the souvenir stand, where you can buy three different CD versions, songsheets, sweatshirts, mousepads, pins, illustrated program books . . . Everything but the novel.

ANY PIANIST WHO SELLS OUT JORDAN HALL is a hot item. Over the past two years, the 21-year-old Lang Lang, from Shenyang in China, has had a sold-out recital at Carnegie Hall, performed with many of the world’s great orchestras (including the BSO at Tanglewood last summer), been profiled by CNN, and snagged a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. His one DG album so far, the Tchaikovsky B-flat and Mendelssohn G-minor piano concertos with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony, is a puzzle, full-bodied in tone, imaginative in detail, and phenomenal in technique but with no overall structure.

His appearance last Saturday night didn’t shed any further light. The program was unusual but, in its second half, not satisfying: Schumann’s Opus 1 Abegg Variations, Haydn’s Hob.XVI/50 Sonata, Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, then Tan Dun’s Eight Memories in Watercolor, Chopin’s D-flat Nocturne, and Liszt’s Reminiscences of "Don Juan," a paraphrase of themes from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Live, like Nikolaj Znaider, Lang Lang plays up his own sensitivity. His passagework was fabulous even in the densest writing, but in slow sections, like the Abegg theme and the Wanderer Adagio, he sounded self-conscious. His huge tone, all gold and grit, never banged or clattered, and he brought an admirable forthrightness to the opening statement of the Wanderer, but there was no modulation, no maturity. And though his phrasing wasn’t insensitive, it didn’t connect to the structure of the pieces or their harmonic movement. (The Chopin nocturne should wind down; he simply spun it out.) Like Vladimir Horowitz, he sometimes has more technique than he knows what to do with.

Horowitz too didn’t always play the most substantial programs. Tan Dun’s Eight Memories in Watercolor is third-rate Debussy, with generic part titles; Lang Lang performed it as if the medium were hyper-saturated oil paint, all sunlight, no shadow. Liszt’s Don Juan showpiece is 20 minutes of pyrotechnics that becomes deadening after five; you’re astonished that anyone can play it and amazed that anyone would want to. The relief of the first encore, "Träumerei" from Schumann’s Kinderszenen, was short-lived: Lang Lang swooned over the opening phrase, inserted a dramatic pause before the big high A, inserted an even bigger pause before the final F-major chord, then held that chord interminably, inflating not the piece but his own performance. He and his father, Guo-ren Lang, then teamed up for "The Competition of Horses," a duet for piano the two-stringed Chinese instrument called the erhu; here he let his dad do the showing off, and they were fun to watch together. The capper was Alfred Grünfeld’s transcription of themes from Johann Strauss Sr.’s Die Fledermaus. It wasn’t fast food the way Les Mis is, but by the time I got home I was hungry to hear Maurizio Pollini or Ivan Moravec.