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Insinuations
Neeme Järvi at the BSO, Emmanuel’s Schubert, the Borromeo’s Mozart and Bartók
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

The most delectable piece of music Richard Strauss never quite wrote was the suite of hit tunes and waltzes from his most popular opera, Der Rosenkavalier. Since its 1911 premiere, numerous conductors have put together concert pieces of excerpts, but the one that’s taken hold is the one that was played (and probably composed) by Artur Rodzinski for the New York Philharmonic in 1944. One of its best performances was given in 1956 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Pierre Monteux — it’s a highpoint of the 12-CD boxed set of live radio broadcasts from the BSO archives. It’s so sly and buoyant, insinuating and touching — so Viennese — that it’s practically worth the price of the whole set.

This past week, the Estonian conductor Neeme Järvi, music director of the Detroit Symphony and one of the most recorded conductors in the history of recordings (the BSO program book mentions his 350 discs of the standard and non-standard — sub-standard? — repertoire), ended his program with that Strauss suite. And though it certainly got a rise out of the audience, I found it coarse, heavy-handed, and fundamentally uncomprehending of Strauss’s elegant style — his turn-of-the-20th-century version of Mozart. The opening music is from the beginning of the opera; it "depicts with drastic explicitness," as Michael Steinberg’s program note informs the uninitiated concertgoer, "the bedtime fun" of the two main characters. Järvi made it explicit, all right, but it was so loud and vulgar, it didn’t sound much like fun. The orchestra lurched from tune to tune without any sense of musical progression. When Järvi seemed to know what the music was suggesting, it was more like an elbow jabbing you in the ribs than a teasing innuendo.

So if Järvi directed this familiar piece of music so badly, then it’s hard to evaluate the quality of the least familiar piece he led, George Whitefield Chadwick’s Third Symphony. The composer led the BSO premiere in 1894; the BSO’s only other performances were under the great Karl Muck in 1914. Chadwick was an important Boston figure, director of the New England Conservatory and widely admired as a composer. Is he really more than a historical footnote?

The Third Symphony sounds like Brahms and Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák enlivened by some Irish tunes. Here and there you can hear a strain of the American music that inspired the far more adventurous Charles Ives. Järvi has (of course) recorded it, along with several other Chadwick pieces, and it seemed like a solid enough performance. But given the level of the Strauss, and with nothing to compare the performance to, it may well be a more engaging, less predictable work than it seemed at Symphony Hall.

Järvi has, in fact, recorded everything on his program, and at least he didn’t undermine the other item, Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder ("Four Last Songs"), with soprano Barbara Hendricks, who at her 1978 BSO debut ravished and charmed listeners in the title role (Alice in Wonderland) of David del Tredici’s Final Alice and whose other Symphony Hall appearance with the BSO, a year later, was in one of the now legendary BSO events, the memorable Mahler Second Symphony under Claudio Abbado. Hendricks also has a recording of the Vier letzte Lieder (not with Järvi), but with all due respect to her musical intelligence and taste, she probably shouldn’t be singing this piece in public any more. Strauss’s last major work — tenderly and lushly nostalgic — requires an element of vocal plushness and glamor that Hendricks’s tremulous high notes and toneless low notes no longer possess. Her loveliest, freest singing came in the unannounced encore (for which the orchestra was obviously well prepared), Strauss’s gorgeous "Morgen" ("Tomorrow"), though it was odd to have another song come after something called Vier letzte Lieder.

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, Craig Smith, who is a master of bringing to light and to life neglected masterpieces, has wanted to conduct Schubert’s most ambitious but almost forgotten opera, Alfonso und Estrella. And now, finally, in the final year of Emmanuel Music’s seven-year cycle of Schubert’s chamber and vocal music, he got his wish. The crowd that filled Emmanuel Church has another "new" work — and another grand Emmanuel performance — to cherish.

The opera comes from a period of high inspiration for Schubert, and despite its formulaic plot, it overflows with irresistible Schubertian touches: appealing melodies, piquant harmonies, scintillating orchestrations (including a glowing obbligato for the entire cello section), lilting and bellicose choruses, a surprising rhythmic variety and variety of ensemble (arias, duets, trios, soloists interacting with the chorus). Its story line goes back to The Tempest — Shakespeare’s non-Realistic mixture of the pastoral and the political (the offspring of a deposed king and his deposer fall in love and bring about a reconciliation). Its musical sources are German singspiel and melodrama (Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Weber’s Der Freischütz, and especially Beethoven’s Fidelio) — though Schubert makes musical advances by not using any spoken dialogue, and all of the recitatives have full orchestral accompaniment.

You can also hear familiar things that came after Schubert — touches of Verdi (those conspiratorial harmonies), Gilbert & Sullivan (I heard foreshadowings of The Pirates of Penzance and, in the pastoral section of the splendid Overture, Iolanthe), and even silent-movie heroine-tied-to-the-railroad-tracks music. Some of the numbers sound more like German lieder than opera arias. One ballad — about a hunter who falls in love with a seductive but unreal creature — has a tune that Schubert used again later in the song "Täuschung" ("Deception") from his greatest song cycle, Winterreise, and with the same heartstopping modulations.

Smith has said that one of the difficulties of performing Alfonso und Estrella was finding a cast that could handle the opposing styles of lieder singing (intimate, poetic, nuanced) and opera singing (extroverted, large-scaled). He succeeded spectacularly, especially in his three baritones, Sanford Sylvan and James Maddalena (who created the respective roles of Chou En-lai and Richard Nixon in John Adams’s Nixon in China) and William Sharp, accomplished artists in both areas. Sharp was the kind king Froila, who creates a new peaceable kingdom after Mauregato (Maddalena) has usurped his throne; Sylvan was Adolfo, Mauregato’s general, who turns against his leader when Mauregato waffles on his promise to offer his daughter Estrella’s hand in marriage. Maddalena actually once sang Sharp’s role at a Monadnock Music concert a decade ago — the only other performance I’m aware of in this area.

You knew Sylvan was the villain from his viciously articulated consonants, yet the warmth of his singing kept you from losing sympathy with him. Maddalena was in resplendent voice, and at the end his sense of guilt was both convincing and moving. And Sharp’s familiar understatement and tonal sheen were especially effective in this benign role. On the one recording (EMI), under the direction of Otmar Suitner, these parts are sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Hermann Prey, and Theo Adam. Emmanuel’s three guys could hold up to any comparison.

In the title roles, soprano Sarah Pelletier and tenor Frederick Urrey sang with elegant authority, though with less of the melting sweetness Edith Mathis and Peter Schreier display with such ease on the recording. Karen Coffman, Pamela Murray, and Chad Freeburg more than filled smaller, nameless roles. John Ehrlich’s Spectrum Singers were exemplary citizens and warriors.

How many times have I written about an Emmanuel event that Smith and the orchestra were its true soul. Now I say it again. Smith has said he admires the EMI recording, though even with his recommendation its excellence eluded me. Listening to his performance, I heard something fresher, livelier, more colorful, and much more expansive than I remembered from the recording. His phrasing really captured Schubert’s melodic curves and harmonic curveballs. But listening to the recording after attending Smith’s performance, I can now hear more of what Smith has liked about it. So not only has he delivered on his own passion, he’s also taught me what to listen for.

THE BORROMEO STRING QUARTET just concluded its extraordinary six-part Gardner Museum series of the six quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn paired with Bartók’s six quartets — an illuminating embodiment of the radical changes as well as the deep continuities in quartet writing over a century and a half. The Mozart was K.458 in B-flat, The Hunt, with its tally-ho opening, its serious minuet, and its sublime, prayerful Adagio, with the first violin seeming to materialize out of the air, and then the cello doing the same thing (Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein is convinced the source of this "heavenly" movement is the Agnus Dei of Mozart’s early Litaniae Lauretanae, in which a soprano sings the theme that later became the violin’s). The Bartók was No. 6 (1939), his last work before he left Hungary, with its astonishingly diverse first three movements (a grim and rather un-vivacious Vivace, an intense march, and a grotesque "burlesque" with its guffawing strings reaching a state of near-hysteria), each preceded by an introspective slow introduction marked Mesto ("Sad"), and its entire last movement marked only Mesto.

These were remarkable performances — beautiful without descending to prettiness and expressive without being hammy. In the Mozart, the Borromeos balanced graciousness with a darker profundity. In the truly vivacious Allegro vivace assai, the subtle little accents on the rising note of a repeating phrase made me jump in my seat each time I heard it. The Adagio, with Nicholas Kitchen’s violin and Yeesun Kim’s cello never more songful or soulful, was a revelation of the inextricability of tenderness and sorrow. Mai Motobuchi’s heartbroken viola solo in the Bartók’s opening Mesto established the underlying tone of lonely lamentation. In the march, Kim’s ferocity made her cello sound like an air-raid alarm. Second-violinist William Fedkenheuer made less obvious but equally essential contributions. The desolate quietude that ended the Bartók seemed a peculiar way to end this marvelous series, yet its grave, uncompromising beauty was just one more cause for celebration.

Issue Date: February 6 - 13, 2003
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