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Glittering bubbles
Elliott Carter’s Symphonia, Russell Sherman’s Mozart — and the BSO
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

For his 70th birthday, Monadnock Music’s James Bolle wanted a concert. He’s conducted concerts at New Hampshire’s summer music festival for 35 years — so this one had to be special. He’s been a champion of new music, and especially the music of Elliott Carter, so a major work by Carter would be appropriate. And he’s presented many talented young performers, like 24-year-old Russian pianist Konstantin Lifschitz, and something with Lifschitz would also fit the bill.

So in conjunction with the Harvard Music Department, Bolle came down from the mountains with his Monadnock Festival Orchestra to Harvard’s Sanders Theatre and performed the impossible: the American premiere of Carter’s vast, almost hour-long Symphonia, whose three movements were commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Cleveland Orchestra. There have been performances of the individual movements in the US, including a magical one of the final "Allegro scorrevole" by the Tanglewood student orchestra in 1998. But after the world premiere of the complete work by Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony (there’s a splendid Deutsche Grammophon recording), no American orchestra has attempted the work in its entirety.

The full title is Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei. The subtitle ("I am the prize of fleeting hope") comes from a poem written in Latin by the 17th-century metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw, "Bulla" ("The Bubble"), in which a floating, darting, plummeting soap bubble becomes an image for the fragility of art and hope ("Why does my silly bubble offer its roundness to you?/What does my worthless toy do for your seriousness?"). In the first movement, Partita (Italian for "sporting match," among other things), the bubble ("the flower of air,/the star of the sea . . ./the brief dream of nature,/the pride of trifles and the grief,/sweet and learned aimlessness, . . ./the mother of the quick smile") bobs restlessly over a varied and unpredictable landscape ("the roses set the snow on fire,/and the snows put out the fires of the roses"). Carter came to the poem after he had begun the piece, back in 1993, when he was a mere boy of 84, but it seemed an uncanny fit for the view of the world his music embodies: "the many changes and oppositions that make up our experience of life."

Marked "Allegro fantastico," Partita begins with an explosion and an alarm going off. Shadowy steps in the lowest register — plucked basses, tuba, piano, and timpani strokes — conjure the Pink Panther on stealthy tiptoe. Long melodic lines are punctuated by blips and beeps, burps and hiccups. And sudden stops — bump! Ticking pizzicatos mark the passing of time. The game gets wild, more dangerous, before time is abruptly called.

The second movement, "Adagio tenebroso," is the darkest, most muted of Carter’s profound slow movements. It begins "tranquillo," but it’s tranquillity at its most ominous. If Partita takes place in daylight, here we’re feeling our way along a starless path ("I am the mirror of the blind goddess"). This movement runs more than 17 minutes on the Knussen recording. Bolle took eight minutes longer! At the climax comes sudden but momentary chaos; the conclusion is one of Carter’s saddest.

But it’s not over. The scherzo comes last. This "Allegro scorrevole" ("scurrying") is the shortest, most buoyant, most crystalline movement ("more shining than glass,/more brittle than glass, more/glassy than glass"). It takes off and whirls away ("I am the brief nature of the wind,/ . . . the flower of the air"), in the spirit of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music, or Berlioz’s Queen Mab. Shakespeare references are not inappropriate. Carter’s encompassing, unsentimental vision, embracing both tragedy and comedy, is Shakespearean in its dimension. Does the bubble finally burst? Or does it just disappear into the empyrean as a final high piccolo, diminuendo?

This is an overwhelming work, and Bolle and the orchestra made a monumental and magnificent effort. The playing was on an extraordinarily high level (and there were surely not unlimited rehearsals), with only minor mishaps. Special praise must go to concertmaster Ole Bohn, the Norwegian violinist for whom Carter wrote his Violin Concerto. His heavenly solo in the last movement was the most outstanding of much distinguished playing and remarkable teamwork (including such Boston regulars as John Grimes on timpani and Leslie Amper on piano). The 93-year-old composer came to the stage obviously exhilarated by the performance and pleased by the standing ovation.

It’s a shame that after all this work there couldn’t be a follow-up performance (WGBH recorded this one for future broadcast), and there are no plans by any other American orchestra to present this masterpiece. Now that Bolle has command of the technical logistics, wouldn’t it be wonderful if he had the chance to work on the subtleties, to bring out more of the humor of Partita, to define the shape of that extended slow movement, maybe cut down on the time without diminishing the basic pulse? But given the contemporary state of classical music, this dream seems as evanescent as Crashaw’s bubble.

Bolle ended with another massive work, Brahms’s D-minor Piano Concerto, in a large-scale and powerful performance by Konstantin Lifschitz in his Boston-area debut. I’ve heard Lifschitz twice at New Hampshire events, and this was the most satisfying of my experiences with this prodigiously gifted young artist. His ripe, round, gilded sound is ideal for this concerto. And he didn’t waste his energy on self-display. Octaves, runs, trills, and tremolos had both glitter and point. His gossamer solo passages in the Adagio eerily anticipated Schoenberg. Bolle took the "espressivo" lyric second theme at a distractingly slow tempo, the only concession to sentimentality. Best of all was the dancing lilt both conductor and soloist brought to the Rondo Finale. The coda began with a here-come-the-troops horn call that triggered a riveting overdrive. It wasn’t exactly "exploratory," but it was always going somewhere.

THE BRAHMS CAME AS AN ANTIDOTE to a twinkly (but not tingling) performance of Mozart’s witty, exuberant G-major Concerto, K.453, by Richard Goode and Bernard Haitink at the BSO the night before. Haitink, the BSO’s principal guest conductor, is an oddly controversial figure in these parts. Some people, including musicians and critics, regard him as a genius who inspires the orchestra to virtuosic heights and interpretive depths. Others, also including musicians and critics, regard him as pedestrian, an uninspired workhorse whose performances lack narrative urgency or real rhythmic life within or between phrases. To my ear, he’s a higher-minded mechanic than Seiji Ozawa, one who lets you hear what the orchestra can sound like when it wants to sound good.

These days, during the sabbatical of principal trumpet Charles Schlueter, the brasses have been sounding less egregious and blary. This is good for the brass-heavy Bruckner Seventh Symphony. One thing Haitink knows how to do is build slowly to a grand climax (Ozawa usually rushes). But there’s always some watering down, some flattening out. The Adagio was not, as marked, "Sehr langsam" (very slow), and neither was the contrasting Scherzo "Sehr schnell" (very fast). Both sounded more like variations of Moderato. So if some members of the audience decided to depart before the piece was over, using the Scherzo as exit music, I suspect the problem was more with Haitink than with Bruckner.

AT JORDAN HALL, pianist Russell Sherman joined Craig Smith and the Emmanuel Music Orchestra for a moving Mozart birthday celebration (in a FleetBoston Celebrity Series/Boston Marquee concert). Mozart’s two minor-key concertos, No. 20, in D minor, and No. 24, in C minor, his two most overtly dramatic, were each preceded by a same-key solo Fantasy. The grand and grimly stirring Overture to Idomeneo led off, with no pause between it and the D-minor Fantasy, as if to underline the underlying sense of fatality running through all the pieces on the program. Sherman played the D-minor Fantasy with piercing emotional directness. The C-minor seemed almost improvisatory — as if the notes were brain cells, the embodiment of the convolutions of complex thought processes.

For the stormy D-minor Concerto, K.466, Sherman played solo cadenzas by Brahms (previously unknown to me — suddenly there were lots more notes played at the same time) and Beethoven, two intense commentaries on Mozart’s richest concerto to date. With the small but choice orchestra, Smith emphasized the piece’s nervous element rather than its more familiar thunder and lightning, leaving the scintillation to Sherman. You could see the sparks.

The piece that overwhelmed me was the C-minor Concerto, K.491. The sense of tragedy without melodrama, the pull of fate, caught me immediately. Sherman’s playing was a distillation of poignance. There’s a little rocking phrase that leaps quietly to a sudden high note. It’s always lovely. But Sherman’s phrasing made it heartbreaking. Elegant strings (Danielle Maddon, concertmaster) and a wind quartet to die for (Fernando Brandao, flute; Peggy Pearson, oboe; Bruce Creditor, clarinet; Ron Haroutunian, bassoon) made crucial contributions to a piece in which suffering is endurable (even, perversely, desirable) because both the suffering and the consolation for suffering are so exquisite. The Brahms cadenza here was virtually heart-on-sleeve compared to Mozart’s restrained sorrow.

The singing Larghetto, taken at a faster-than-usual tempo, seemed a momentary escape from suffering, a Heavenly vision — which was in turn shattered by the uncoiling march to doom in the last movement (Sherman calls the quirky cadenza by pianist Edwin Fischer, which both mocks and accepts the military ferocity of the march, "more Buster Keaton than Charlie Chaplin"). If Goode and Haitink played their Mozart as if Mozart had written only bunches of notes, Sherman and Smith played theirs as if they couldn’t make sense of their lives without it. How could any of us make sense of our lives without it? The C-minor is that kind of piece, and it got that kind of performance.

Issue Date: January 17 - 24, 2002
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