Benjamin Zander was scheduled to lead two concerts at the New England Conservatory with the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, but that was before he was invited by the Israel Philharmonic to replace Herbert Blomstedt (whose wife was seriously ill). So Zander, airlifted from a Mediterranean cruise ship by a helicopter delivering Elton John, led two big programs in Tel Aviv and Haifa, including Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Beethoven’s Eroica, while YPO assistant conductor Jonathan Cohler took over the first YPO concert. Zander was back in Boston for the second, which also included the Mahler Fifth, plus the first movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto (an odd pedagogical choice but with a rhythmically supple and eloquently understated student performer, 19-year-old Desmond Park, a student of the admirable William Wrzesian), and the rarely performed Andante that Mahler cut from his First Symphony nine years after its premiere in 1889, the second of its then five movements, called Blumine ("flower pieces") after a collection of essays by Jean Paul, one of Mahler’s favorite authors (Mahler at one point titled this symphony Titan, after a Jean Paul novel).
The YPO Blumine had an unhurried buoyancy and lilt — echt Viennese, proto-Richard Strauss — from the pianissimo orchestral quiver accompanying the lovely song for solo trumpet through the darker, more mysterious minor-key night song (prefiguring the "night music" movements of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony?) and on to the reprise of the opening tune, high winds in counterpoint with low strings, and then the final return of the soulful trumpet. Seiji Ozawa included this movement back in the 1970s, in his two Mahler Firsts with the BSO, and I remember it sounding goopy and syrupy. Yoel Levi leads a commendable version in his lively Mahler First with the Atlanta Symphony (on Telarc). But Zander and his young players made this irresistible.
Zander led the Mozart movement, misleadingly listed in the program as the complete Clarinet Concerto, with a reduced orchestra, but with a similar lilting eloquence that also allowed Park the freedom to phrase. This is one of Mozart’s loveliest movements but one that rarely works. David Shifrin’s recent performance with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra had a rather hard edge, though Shifrin played the instrument Mozart actually composed for — the basset clarinet. Park had the courage to pull back from the apex of the musical phrase, giving the phrase a kind of improvisational freedom, an almost jazz-like spontaneity, but also an inward turn. He made me want to hear him in the entire concerto.
Five years ago, Zander and the YPO took the Mahler Fifth to Brazil. I traveled with them and must have heard them play this symphony almost a dozen times. It was a phenomenal achievement, though on various nights some parts worked better than others. That any performance of this 75-minute symphony works at all is remarkable, but that a student orchestra could realize Mahler’s most complex and even contradictory intentions was astonishing.
So no one ought to expect a student performance on that lofty level to be repeated, and the current YPO wasn’t on that level. This time the beauties — a loving Adagietto (perhaps the mature fulfillment of the earlier Blumine movement), a rousing, all-stops-out final coda — were compromised by occasional technical roughnesses, a lack of rhythmic articulation in crucial passages (like the opening trumpet solo), and a less than strict precision of ensemble. More seriously, even under Zander’s knowing guidance, there was a lack of emotional conviction (though not a lack of energy or good intentions). Louder volume and higher speed weren’t enough to express the mystery of Mahler’s sense of doom and salvation.
This was the second demanding program these young musicians had played within a single week. Perhaps if Zander had been here to lead both programs, the players might have more thoroughly caught his drift. Still, they deserved the standing O. Sometimes an A for effort is truly earned.
"IT’S GOING TO BE GOOD," a passer-by remarked as I was looking at the poster outside Jordan Hall for the Chorus pro Musica’s concert performance of Verdi’s Nabucco ("Nebuchadnezzar"), under music director Jeffrey Rink (" ‘Boston’s pre-eminent Verdi conductor,’ L. Schwartz, Boston Phoenix," the CpM flyer quotes me — accurately — as having written). Performances of Nabucco, Verdi’s third opera (and first major success), are rare, but last season we got a lively production from Teatro Lirico d’Europa and a live Met broadcast on WHRB. Now Rink, who has already led two of Verdi’s three Shakespeare operas, Otello and Macbeth, has tried his hand.
The libretto for Nabucco is hardly Shakespearean. It’s an over-the-top political melodrama whose famous and moving chorus of exiled Jews, "Va pensiero," Verdi’s plea for the unification of Italy, became the themesong of the Risorgimento. The King of Babylon is stricken mad by a thunderbolt. His stepdaughter, Abigaille, born a slave, is one of opera’s most conniving and ferocious villainesses.
So subtlety is not a major concern. The principals poured it on and the audience ate it up. Soprano Joanna Porackova (Abigaille), baritone Roy Stevens (Nabucco), and tenor Noel Espiritu Velasco (as Ismaele, and one of Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston regulars some decades back) went into overdrive — as they should, but not to the point of vocal strain and wavering tonality. Their voices couldn’t sustain their effort. You couldn’t say any of them sang beautifully. I was impressed with the quietly efficient way, without stage action or costumes, Stevens suggested the difference between Nabucco’s madness and his final return to control: when he went cuckoo, he turned his feet in, pigeon-toed; as the commander, his heels were close together and feet splayed for stability. He’s apparently about to give up the baritone repertory for tenorhood, but the top of his voice was not its securest part. All the soloists sang from memory, which certainly added to the power of the event. Russian bass Mikhail Svetlov warmed up to the part of Zaccaria, the Hebrew high priest, so that by the second act, after a very rocky start, his resonant bottom-of-the-well low notes were really on target.
The most beautiful, consistently full-bodied singing came from the young Armenian mezzo Victoria Avetisyan (who impressed me last year in a small role in the Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Tod Machover’s Resurrection), as Fenena, the beleaguered ingenue, Cordelia to Abigaille’s Goneril. And excellent in smaller roles were baritone Philip Candilis (a researcher with the National Cancer Institute, who sang the High Priest of Baal), soprano Julianna Dempsey (who will take on Donna Anna this summer in Opera Aperta’s Don Giovanni), and German tenor Vince Wolfsteiner (as a Babylonian officer).
What made Nabucco most impressive, though, was the precise articulation and consistent tension and sweep of Jeffrey Rink’s conducting, and the vivid response from his superlative orchestra, which included gorgeous playing from cellist Ronald Lowry (fronting an ensemble of six cellists as Zaccaria receives the tablets of the law), flutist Julia Scolnik, oboist Barbara LaFitte, clarinettist William Wrzesian, and a vibrant quartet of horn players. Anyone who thinks early Verdi has to be coarse hasn’t heard this combination of elegant and vigorous playing. Rink built each section to a powerful climax (as in Verdi’s extraordinarily complex finale to the second act), just as he built the entire piece. And the Chorus itself was in spectacularly good form for one of the most richly choral of all Verdi’s operas (this is a work about the effect political leaders have on a suffering community). Of course, "Va pensiero," with its flowing and breathing lyric line, had to be repeated.
Next year, Rink and CpM are doing much subtler Verdi — La traviata. I can’t wait.
By the way, the enthusiastic passer-by in front of the poster turned out to be the Jordan Hall stage manager, whom I saw setting up the music stands for the YPO concert. He’s probably someone not easily given over to superlatives.
MEAE CULPAE. In my last two Phoenix reviews, I made two embarrassing misattributions, for which I sincerely apologize. In writing about Marcus Thompson’s magnificent performance in Penderecki’s Viola Concerto at MIT (in the May 24 Arts section), I said that Penderecki had been largely ignored in Boston since Sarah Caldwell presented his unpleasant opera Die Soldaten 20 years ago. That unpleasant opera was actually composed by the late Bernd Alois Zimmermann. In fact, Boston has ignored Penderecki for even longer, probably since Seiji Ozawa led the only BSO performance of his work, the lugubrious Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, 27 years ago.
And in my review of the touring Kiss Me, Kate ("After Deadline" in the May 31 News & Features section), I criticized the conducting of Paul Gemignani, whom I admire for his work with Stephen Sondheim, as being too fast and mechanical. The program, in very large print, credits Gemignani with Musical Direction. But it was not Gemignani who was conducting. I think I’d have realized this if latecomers at the Wang hadn’t blocked my view of the pit when the conductor was taking his opening bow. What I didn’t notice is that the tour conductor was listed — in much smaller print — as James Moore, who, I suppose, was attempting to replicate Gemignani’s conception, but without the flexibility and grace you can hear from the master himself on the "New Broadway Cast Recording" on DRG.
On a happier note: congratulations to WHRB for its series of musical "orgies," which provided some of the season’s best listening. I particularly enjoyed the #1 Orgy — the sequence of Billboard top-of-the-chart singles from "Rock Around the Clock" to the present (the ’60s were an especially rich decade); the illuminating Complete Haydn Orgy; the marvelous two-day Richard Rodgers Orgy (especially day one, which was devoted to Rodgers and Hart); the two orgies given over to two of the 20th century’s most compelling pianists, Glenn Gould and William Kapell; and the War Years: America 1939-1945 Orgy, a chronological collage of music, news, speeches, radio broadcasts, and film soundtracks. Bravo to producer David Elliott and everyone who put such effort into making these possible. Music on the radio is alive and well — at least in Cambridge!
