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  tkin with the BSO, Stanislav Ioudenitch, and Franz Welser-Möst"> E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Brighter and dimmer bulbs
Leonard Slatkin with the BSO, Stanislav Ioudenitch, and Franz Welser-Möst
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Leonard Slatkin has always been popular with Boston Symphony Orchestra audiences. He’s a lively presence in the Bernstein tradition — bouncy and dramatic (a " Method " conductor?), athletic and balletic on the podium. He brings music to us without making us think too hard about it or feel more than one thing at a time. There’s some heat but no fire. And not a lot sticks to the ribs. Such was also the case in his return to the BSO since his last concert here four years ago.

He opened with a brash and energetic performance of Berlioz’s Overture to his opera Benvenuto Cellini and closed with a brash and energetic performance of William Walton’s Symphony No. 1 (completed in 1935 and last played by the BSO in 1992). Slatkin didn’t make much stylistic distinction between these pieces composed a century apart and on opposite sides of the English Channel — though oboist John Ferillo did in his eloquent solo passages. Both pieces are full of bravura — though the best part of the Walton is the least edgy, an " Andante con malincolia " (Walton’s Anglicizing of " malinconia, " the Italian word for melancholy), which fades out on a sighing solo flute (nicely rendered by Elizabeth Ostling).

In between came the BSO premiere of Edgar Meyer’s 1999 Violin Concerto and the BSO debut of 22-year-old Hilary Hahn, for whom Meyer wrote it. Meyer may be better known as a bass player, and especially for his recordings of " crossover " bluegrass with Yo-Yo Ma and fiddler Mark O’Connor. The Violin Concerto begins with a rising violin theme, a song in quatrains that seems full of a kind of Irish yearning — it reappears often, sometimes faster, sometimes more slowly, and Meyer contrasts it with minimalist orchestral chug-chugging. There’s more repetition than development. I didn’t hear any resistance to the prettiness of the tune, so it turned into cotton candy. And without some tension, there was little to keep one’s interest. The second movement alternates another slow tune with a kind of extended hoedown.

Hahn has impeccable technique and a silky-sweet tone that doesn’t vary much. The audience ate her up, and she played an encore, another country dance — the Gigue from Bach’s Third Partita — with exactly the same liveliness as the Meyer. How would someone who didn’t know Bach know that he was the greater composer?

ANOTHER GIFTED MUSICIAN under 30 made his Boston debut in a FleetBoston Celebrity Series recital at Jordan Hall. In 2001, Uzbekistani pianist Stanislav Ioudenitch walked off with the gold medal at the Van Cliburn Competition. His Boston program was one that both showed off his remarkable range yet stuck to music of the highest quality. How marvelous to hear a young pianist play Mozart with so much thoughtfulness. The poignant D-minor Fantasy had an extraordinary sensitivity of touch — very quiet, yet with sudden retreats into even deeper quietness. It felt so spontaneous, so open about its process of thinking out the music, it seemed like improvisation. Ioudenitch followed this with one of Mozart’s most moving sonatas, the A-minor, K. 310. He gave the Allegro maestoso the high-stepping elegance and quickness of Scarlatti. The minor-key Presto finale was all nervous energy. But the middle movement, Andante cantabile con espressione — the one with the famous series of eight repeated notes — maybe had more " expression " than songfulness; beautiful as it was, it seemed a little fussy and disjointed. Yet full of ideas.

Ioudenitch evidently has a serious back problem. He sits at the edge of a low piano bench, about as far from the keyboard as he can reach. He holds his hands out, horizontally level with the keys, more than a foot above his knees. He right foot is almost always on the pedal; he holds his left toe either " en pointe, " tucked under the bench, or way out to the left side. He has some nervous mannerisms. He was forever adjusting his tie or his rimless glasses, yet without losing rhythmic continuity even in the speediest passages. Later in the program, the way he attacked the keyboard — head on (rather than from above) — became more of a problem. Piece after piece, there was something too unvaried in his tonal palette; and for all his rhythmic flexibility and ferocity, he lacked a certain buoyancy. The sound became wearing.

But not in the next piece: Stravinsky’s greatest work for piano, Three Movements from Petroushka — a 1921 recycling (for Artur Rubinstein, no less) of two exhilarating scenes and one touching vignette from his 1911 ballet choreographed by Nijinsky and set at a Russian Shrovetide fair, with a puppet (danced by Nijinsky) as the tragicomic hero. It’s amazing with how much of his complex orchestration Stravinsky saturated a single piano. In the crowd scenes, half a dozen events might be going on simultaneously. There were times Ioudenitch was able to make only four or five of them heard; other times, there were so many layers it seemed there were one or two too many. He was so loose-limbed, he seemed to become the puppet. At the last note, he leapt off the bench as if it were electrified. This was a fearless performance, a high-wire act without a net — not note perfect, but thrilling.

After intermission, he played all six of Schubert’s Moments Musicaux. Most pianists don’t play all of them at one sitting, though this is how I’m used to listening to them at home — on Artur Schnabel’s transcendent 1937 recording. But Schnabel’s touch is quicksilver, his coloration prismatic, his dancing rhythms lighter than air. He’s both more playful and more searching — than anyone. Ioudenitch’s close-up examination of phrases isolated them from the continuous line. His slow tempos made the first two parts seem interminable. Though the faster " Moments " went better, one’s ears had already tired.

But the final piece, one Schnabel would never have condescended to perform (and probably couldn’t play even if he wanted to), wowed the crowd: Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody — a 15-minute workout in Iberian tunes and flamenco cross-rhythms, with rumbling bass and twinkling treble (olé!). Ioudenitch played with a perfect balance between bravura and musicality. His hands moved faster than the eye could see, and still you could hear every note. Those hands (or maybe his back) must have been exhausted, because despite the standing ovation, he didn’t play an encore. The Liszt was its own encore.

THE MAGNIFICENT CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA was back with the Celebrity Series, and for the first time in Boston under its young new music director, 42-year-old Franz Welser-Möst (who led one program with the BSO six years ago that included an unforgettable Ligeti Violin Concerto, with the superb Christian Tetzlaff, and eminently forgettable performances of Haydn and Schubert symphonies). His Cleveland program began with his specialty — new music: the Boston premiere of Orion, by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, recently commissioned for Cleveland.

Saariaho is a hot composer right now. An opera of hers, L’amour de loin, was staged by Peter Sellars at Santa Fe. Another piece, Château de l’âme, was performed by the BSO two seasons ago and repeated last summer at Tanglewood. Her music is like color-field painting — broad washes of delicate texture created from lots of small strokes with not a lot of architecture. Orion (Poseidon’s hunter-giant son, who is killed by an arrow and then turned into a constellation) begins intergalactically — you hear music like this on sci-fi soundtracks. The first movement, " Memento mori, " rises to a roaring crescendo for full orchestra and organ. Sudden stops are followed by diaphanous aftershocks, like comet tails; then it’s stop-and-go till the end of the movement. " Winter Sky " begins in another haze with an icy piccolo solo. " Hunter, " the last movement, has more action, with downward xylophone arpeggios and whooping eruptions from some unidentifiable part of the orchestra before the final fade-out back into cold, blue-black space.

Welser-Möst is an efficient and un-self-aggrandizing conductor. The playing was full of atmosphere, and everything sounded. It was certainly painless.

If Saariaho gives us a lot of the same notes without much to think about, Mahler gives us a lot of different notes with tons to think about: Life, Death, Love, the Past, Fate, Eternal Return. His Seventh Symphony may be his least popular, but its Shakespearean " mingled yarn " makes it one of my favorites, especially the two " Night Music " movements (the first, a march with bird calls, supposedly inspired by the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt’s Night Watch; the second, an eerie, dream-like serenade with guitar and mandolin), and an intervening Scherzo marked " shadowy. " The Orchestra played these exquisitely — the horn call and muted horn echo, for example, at the beginning of Night Music I.

But the true test of a good Mahler Seventh is whether the long and rousing Rondo-Finale arises naturally out of the sinister stuff that comes before (as in Otto Klemperer’s overwhelming recording, or in Simon Rattle’s stunning BSO performance back in 1991). And Welser-Möst failed this test. His Mahler was a collection of beautifully played but directionless and not vividly characterized fragments. The last movement came out of nowhere — a totally unconvincing conclusion to Mahler’s dark comedy. Maybe Welser-Möst is still too young to know how to fit all these pieces together; or maybe he’s just not an imaginative enough musician.

" I can’t help it — I’m Austrian, " he announced afterwards, introducing the encore in a resonant voice. The piece was Frauenherz ( " a woman’s heart " ), a fairly obscure polka-mazurka by Johann Strauss’s younger brother Josef. Welser-Möst used a familiar ploy of Viennese light-music conductors — he let the orchestra play much of the music without him conducting them at all, just standing there beaming at their skill. But Viennese pastries are less in the Cleveland Orchestra’s alimentary system than in the Vienna Philharmonic’s. The encore was charming, but, like the rest of the concert, not quite incandescent.

Issue Date: February 13 - 20, 2003
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  tkin with the BSO, Stanislav Ioudenitch, and Franz Welser-Möst"> E-Mail This Article to a Friend

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