James Levine doesn’t become the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s official music director designate until September, but in the public’s mind, that’s what he was when they cheered his return to Symphony Hall for the first time since his appointment as Seiji Ozawa’s successor was announced last October. For the past year, his scheduled program has been listed as TBA. Clearly this concert was meant to be an emblem of things to come. The result could be taken two ways: the announcement of a new widening of the repertoire or an all-over-the-place attempt to please everyone.
It certainly looked thought-out on paper: a lively overture (Dvôrák’s Carnival), two contemporary works for strings (American Charles Wuorinen’s 1971 Grand Bamboula and György Ligeti’s 1969 Ramifications), and two major symphonies from the central repertoire featuring passages of complex Bach-inspired counterpoint (Mozart’s Jupiter and Schumann’s Second). An insert in the program book indicated the order was being tweaked up to the last minute, with the Ligeti and the Wuorinen trading places.
The generous dimensions of the program also meant a fatiguing evening (two and a half hours) for both audience and performers. Some of the playing was still rough around the edges, even after one more rehearsal than usual. There was rather much of the self-consciously celebratory. The Dvôrák begins with fanfares; the Mozart and Schumann end with them. "Is everything from now on going to sound like an opera overture?" a neighboring subscriber asked. Both the 20th-century string pieces were short, and their joint appearance didn’t tell us much more than that Wuorinen’s brash car-chase music (my image, not his) and Ligeti’s gossamer elegance and mystery are different from each other.
Still, this was an Event. The Dvôrák began with a sunburst blaze and a warm arc of melody. The players actually sounded as if they enjoyed playing. "Tingling," I jotted down, "bristling," "driving," "sweeping." The strings then tore into the six-minute Grand Bamboula (a term, Robert Kirzinger’s program note tells us, taken from the music of 19th-century American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk — father of the cakewalk). It was an odd bit of tokenism for American music. Levine evidently likes this piece, but I wish he had come up with something more meaty, or appealing. The composer was present and got a warm hand.
The two weakest pieces on the program were certainly an odd introduction for the Jupiter, Mozart’s last and most technically complex symphony, with its stupendous five-part fugal Finale. The opening bars contrasted the Peremptory (an opening that can be played as more majestic and expansive) and the Sweetly Insinuating (a theme that can also be played as searching and inward). Levine gave the little repeated tune a rare piquancy. If the first movement alternated between Don Giovanni and Figaro, the songful, muted slow movement was Cosí fan tutte, each phrase a breath, a lover’s sigh. The Minuet was at a plausible dance — or dancing — tempo. The main theme drifted down, then bounced up again, like a cosmic pinball.
The four-part string theme in the last movement really seemed to be making the rounds, because Levine divided the first and second violins right and left, with the cellos and basses behind the first violins. This historical seating literally opens up space in the string sections. It’s makes the piece harder to play, though, and I suspect that some of roughness was the result of the players not being used to this set-up (yet the one real mishap came from, I think, a horn — that misplaced bleat was hard to identify). In his pre-concert talk (which Levine attended!), programs-publication director Marc Mandel suggested that Levine will maintain this seating plan. It couldn’t come soon enough for me. Levine also took all the repeats (entire sections of exposition, development, and recapitulation), to the benefit of Mozart’s glorious architecture. The performance was more exuberant than probing, but it was crowded with incident and color.
The second part of the concert was even better. Ligeti’s Ramifications, with its two string sections tuned a quarter-tone apart, was an exercise in mystery — too artificial to be natural, too much like Nature to be mere artifice. It must be fiendishly difficult to make all that humming and whirring and fluttering sound so beautiful. Levine took his time — 10 minutes is a minute and a half longer than the (also extraordinary) Boulez recording, two minutes longer than Ernest Bour’s. But it was all going somewhere. Each gradation of quietude seemed uncannily gauged. (Most of it was so quiet, the incessant coughing was particularly distracting. Why can’t the BSO have bins of Hall’s cough drops, the ones with the quiet wrappers, the way Carnegie Hall does?) With the divided strings, the sound, spiraling upward, seemed to lift off the stage and fill the hall — then float downward to darkness on folded wings. The sudden outbursts near the end were truly alarming. And so were the sudden silences.
If it was a last-minute decision to place the Ligeti before the Schumann, it was also a good one. Quiet and mystery were in short supply, and, in a way one couldn’t predict, Ligeti’s radical sound world was an inspired set-up for Schumann’s. Schumann is a Levine specialty (he’s recorded all four symphonies twice). Here the seating plan was a revelation, adding air to what is usually thick and dense. This was a warm and enlivening performance, played with complete conviction, and with an old friend of Levine’s, the BSO’s principal oboist, John Ferillo, in his first season here after leaving Levine’s Metropolitan Opera orchestra, giving voice to Schumann’s plangent solos.
Two nights later, I turned on the radio on my way home from Benjamin Zander’s impressive and, in the last movement, mesmerizing performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the Boston Philharmonic, and Levine’s Schumann was just beginning. It sounded tighter, more refined and more urgent, more playful, more songful, nobler — Schumann’s response to Bach and Mozart, and his amazing anticipation of Mahler. After months of decisions, last-minute changes, hard work, opening-night nerves, and standing ovations, this was a strong new start for the BSO. The harder part — and (we hope) the best part — is still to come.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE LEVINE’S APPEARANCE, Daniele Gatti — the Italian conductor whose health problems forced him to cancel his BSO debut three seasons ago — led a compelling if frustrating Brahms evening. The music director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Bologna’s Teatro Communale possesses a remarkable ear. Even more than Bernard Haitink, Gatti has a refined sense of sonic depth, of getting inner voices to emerge from the shadows. In the Variations on a Theme by Haydn, each variation had a distinct color and "feel." Unfortunately, the variations, instead of building to a marvelous climax, just sort of stopped. There was a quietly intense Schicksalslied ("Song of Destiny"), which the BSO has not performed at Symphony Hall since 1930. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang without scores and impressed with its wide dynamic range.
The great Fourth Symphony was odder — dramatic transitions went blurry, the rhythmic pulse occasionally limp. Passages felt stuck in a murky ditch. Deafening volume levels obliterated Gatti’s ability to maintain a rich transparency. This was a heavy performance of sporadic power and flowing energy by someone who seems to have interesting musical ideas, though a clear sense of direction — like Levine’s — might not be one of them.
My favorite BSO program of this season came a week later. Last year, I had planned to hear the BSO debut of the American conductor David Robertson, who’s best known for taking over the astounding Ensemble InterContemporain from Pierre Boulez. But the performance I had tickets for was the one a snowstorm forced the BSO to cancel.
I’m glad I didn’t miss this elegantly planned program. If Levine offered an overflowing cornucopia, Robertson gave us a Japanese tea setting. Each half of the program included a "modern" piece and a "classical," and the classical in both halves was Haydn, the most elusive of all the Great Figures to get right, in which to find the razor-edge balance between wit and depth of feeling, exuberance and coolness, structural clarity and spontaneity, gravity and buoyancy. In both the early Cello Concerto No. 1 in C, with Steven Isserlis (playing the great Emmanuel Feuerman’s burnished Stradivarius), and the late Symphony No. 93 in D, Robertson found those balances.
Isserlis presents an odd cross between self-consciousness (is he a throwback hippie, playing his long curly locks as much as his cello?) and the purity of his tone. He must have the most vividly quivering tremolo in the cello business, and the most delicate pianissimos. Robertson supported him with chamber-music lightness. Symphony No. 93 alternated between grandeur and intimacy. Each phrase was a springboard for the next, often with teasing pauses. The second movement, Largo cantabile, begins as an elegant string quartet before expanding into to a singing movement that anticipates Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony and even Schubert. Robertson isn’t afraid to show that classical elegance can also be full-hearted.
He certainly caught the rhythm of the lively, alternating blocks in Stravinsky’s first official work of neo-classical abstraction, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (composed partly as a memorial for Debussy), bouncing between busy Russian barnyard and solemn, piercing church chorale. And it was wonderful to hear again George Benjamin’s Palimpsest, which was composed for Pierre Boulez’s 75th-birthday tour with the London Symphony (Boulez conducted a glittering performance at Carnegie Hall in the spring of 2000), and led by Benjamin himself that summer with the student orchestra at Tanglewood. Palimpsest also uses a wind chorale, a gentle canon whose otherworldly calm is punctuated — then shattered — by startling explosions of brass. A barely audible wire-brushed timpani seems to be scraping away the surface of this palimpsest. This compellingly ambiguous piece, brilliantly played, had the audience on the edge of its collective seat.
