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Truths and consequences
Mark Morris’s musicians; BSO premieres; Slavery Documents 1 and 2
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

One of the best chamber-music concerts of the season took place in the orchestra pit of the Shubert Theatre last weekend, in the performance of the music the Mark Morris Dance Group used. Morris is famous for his insistence on live music; for him, music is never mere accompaniment. As he says repeatedly, he choreographs only to music he loves — the music comes first. Music is what the dancers both embody and respond to. And he often hears things in music that might not have occurred to the rest of us.

For The Argument — whose three couples are in various stages of love/hate — he uses Schumann’s Fünf Stücke in Volkston ("Five Pieces in Folk Style"), for cello and piano, a piece in which I always heard less anger (I hear it now) than national pride, in which the cello seems to answer itself — a piece known largely through an exciting 1952 Pablo Casals recording. When The Argument premiered, in 1999, Yo-Yo Ma played on the Wang Theatre stage, a part of the action. At the Shubert, the players were confined to the pit (and got too much amplification), but cellist Matt Haimovitz (facing the dancers) and pianist Ilan Rechtman played with fire and nuance, their flickering moods and biting syncopations reflecting Julie Worden’s sudden bursts into flame in the first movement ("Vanitas vanitatum" — mit humor). Haimovitz’s lyrical outpouring in the slow second movement was so palpably physical it practically lifted Marjorie Folkman (who created the first movement with Baryshnikov at the Wang) and wafted her across the stage. The cello ranged from dark molasses to brazen buzz, cajoling and squabbling and — in the repeat of the opening movement Morris added — throwing in some hapless and ironically teasing sighs.

In The Office, Morris’s choreography for the folktunes of Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák’s sunlit Five Bagatelles (originally done for a folk troupe in Columbus, Ohio) is all line dances, round dances, and square dances. Haimovitz — with Rechtman on harmonium, making it sound like an instrument of musical suavity — and violinists Lisa Lee and Andrea Schultz played the especially enchanting first and third Bagatelles (the third an energetic variation of the first) with multi-hued delicacy and buoyant gracefulness.

Between the richness of the Schumann and Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák, Morris cleansed the palette with Peccadillos, a solo for himself (originally intended for Baryshnikov and longstanding company member Guillermo Resto) set to three Satie piano cycles for children, "easy pieces," with Ilan Rechtman on stage, squatting at the tiny keyboard, inducing magical chiming from an amplified toy piano (a "baby baby baby grand," Morris called it during the Q&A that followed one of the performances — "$500, and the bench came with it"). Morris’s dance reflected both the mechanical nature of the music and the freedom of Rechtman’s inspired rhythmic playfulness; both dance and music seemed to be about the childlike joy of invention and the artist’s burden, the need to give some shape, direction, life to the impulse to create.

The major musical event on the program was Schumann’s magnificent Piano Quintet in E-flat, for Morris’s new V (the Roman numeral five, for quintet, not to mention the repeating V-formations on stage). Violist Jessica Troy joined the superb ensemble, which was as exhilarating and expressive as the dancing. The first movement has one of the great cello melodies; Haimovitz played it with yearning eloquence. In the second-movement funeral march, to capture Schumann’s poignant hesitations, Morris had the dancers crossing the stage on all fours, bearing the weight of the world on their backs. By the end of the breathless Scherzo, some of the dancers were lifted off the stage by the shoulders and spun around. And the musicians gave them the momentum to make this plausible.

At the Q&A, Morris talked about the nature of musical repetition, how a returning phrase might have the same notes but is still different because we’ve heard it before. Schumann’s many leitmotifs are reflected in V’s formal intricacy, especially the breathtaking fugue of the Finale, in which the main themes (and gestures) of the opening movement keep getting remixed. And the musicians responded to the dancers in a performance that was airtight yet breathed easily, structurally clear and yet spontaneous, full of delicious sleight of hand in the pattern of repetitions — always and never the same.

THE LATEST BSO CONCERTS featured world premieres of commissioned works. Would there were more. But neither Michael Colgrass’s concerto for flute and piano, Crossworlds, nor André Previn’s Violin Concerto is a work of significant density or substance.

Crossworlds (Hans Graf conducting) pitted the seductively tonal flute (Marina Piccinini), with its capacity for bent, between-the-notes, Eastern melisma (at times a Cobra Woman hootchy-kootchy, with harp arpeggios), against a brassily Western, atonal, percussive, urban piano (Piccinini’s husband, Andreas Haefliger). They alternate, interweave, even change places, with the flute getting belligerent while the piano, as Colgrass writes, keeps "looking back to its Baroque, Romantic and Impressionistic past" (Haefliger’s quietly rippling Debussy-ism). An attractive jaunty passage is squashed by an overripe rhapsodic climax. My favorite moment was the opening muted trombone. Colgrass’s idea seemed musically thin for a half-hour travelogue.

Previn’s concerto was more traditional in form, but it exceeded its expected half-hour length by going leisurely on, as conducted by the composer, for 42 minutes. Filled out by Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Rachmaninov’s 50-minute Second Symphony, the concert lasted almost as long as James Levine’s, which had five pieces.

Anne-Sophie Mutter, sheathed in clinging, low-cut silver lamé, delivered a silver lamé performance, though Richard Dyer in his Globe review found her playing warmer and more inward than usual. Is it hitting below the belt to say that this piece sounded more like a concerto in a Hollywood movie in which a concert is taking place in the background? I’m not sure Previn’s music has escaped his soundtrack past. The tunes are ingratiating and sentimental, the orchestrations professional and predictable. The first movement is right out of Korngold, an even better Hollywood composer; the second is out of Shostakovich. The last movement, marked parenthetically "from a train in Germany," consists of variations on a German children’s song Previn remembered from his childhood in Berlin. One lively section suggests a speeding train ride. But I wish the concerto were about something more complicated than nostalgia.

The audience applauded both composers warmly. In these new pieces, though, small coloristic effects, the sugary elements, outweigh structural inevitability. Where were these pieces going? When would they ever get there? Despite opportunities for virtuosity on the part of distinguished soloists, a kind of stop-and-go thematic development never fully allowed either piece to blossom, or sing. Colgrass turns 70 in April, Previn 72. Shouldn’t the BSO be thinking about getting its new pieces from fresher voices?

ONE OF THE MOST AMBITIOUS VENTURES by a Boston group is Slavery Documents, an hour-long oratorio by the late Korean-American composer Donald Sur that was commissioned by the David Hoose and the Cantata Singers and performed in 1990. This was a strange, powerful work — eclectic to the point of eccentricity, mixing Bach with Stephen Foster, gospel and minstrel with Beethoven, Wagner, and minimalism. The texts were also eclectic: Cotton Mather, the Bible, The Confessions of Nat Turner, a 19th-century sentimental poem about the joys of being a slave on the old plantation, and some of the most devastating pre–Civil War legal documents about the brutality slaves endured. Near the end came two astonishing moments. The splendid African-American baritone David Arnold burst chillingly into Foster’s "Old Folks at Home," with a deranged orchestral accompaniment; and a few minutes later came an extraordinary grand fugue for full chorus (multi-racial) and four vocal soloists on the text "Ranaway, the Negro boy Teams — he had on his neck an iron collar," a pastiche, a parody of a Bach Passion, that Sur made entirely his own. He was working on two long additional parts when he died of cancer in 1999, at 64. There’s been no other performance until now.

This revival at Symphony Hall had two of the original soloists, Arnold (still in magnificent voice) and tenor Rockland Osgood, with soprano Karel Ryczek, mezzo-soprano Cynthia Clarey, and baritone David C. Howse. The Cantata Singers chorus and stellar orchestra were overwhelming. Hoose shaped the disparate elements into a powerful uniformity of intention, underlining the relentless irony of the relentless juxtapositions.

The concert closed with another Cantata Singers commission, Sur’s friend T.J. Anderson’s Slavery Documents 2, a shorter sequel if not exactly a completion. The texts, some even more brutal than Sur’s, are mostly from historian Loren Schweninger’s collection of Southern slavery documents — petitions not only for freedom and education but for permission to return to slavery (out of loneliness for family and loved ones), depictions of "horrible acts" (bloody whippings, castration, and worse), more about runaways (in an exhilarating moto perpetuo), and a final sequence of reconciliation through Anderson’s re-created spirituals. "There’s no vengeance in spirituals," he told the audience at his pre-concert talk.

Anderson also acknowledges diverse musical influences (Baroque forms, African drumming), but inventive as Slavery Documents 2 is, it’s more unified in tone and far less eccentric than its predecessor. I’m not even sure they work together on the same program, other than intellectually. Still, this pairing attracted one of the most racially diverse audiences I’ve ever seen at Symphony Hall, and there’s no denying the cumulative power of the truths and the still terrible consequences of racism these two composers confront us with.

Issue Date: March 21 - 28, 2002
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