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Carter from Levine and Hoose, Emmanuel’s Harbison, Sherman’s Kirchner, Diaz’s Ligeti, Pro Arte, NESE, and the BLO’s Rigoletto
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
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I usually don’t go to New York for chamber concerts, but I couldn’t resist the ambitious one James Levine put together with his Met Chamber Ensemble at Carnegie Hall’s elegant little Weill Recital Hall. When he takes over the Boston Symphony Orchestra next year, I hope he’ll plan similar events here. At the center of the long program were two contrasting song cycles incorporating the poems of Elizabeth Bishop: Elliott Carter’s A Mirror on Which To Dwell (1975) and John Harbison’s North and South (2000-2001). They’d never been played together before. Bishop was still alive when Carter’s cycle premiered, and she was somewhat baffled by it. It’s a complex work in which the vocal line is only one strand in a densely orchestrated texture that reflects the words on many simultaneous levels. In "Sandpiper," for instance, the soprano describes a sandpiper running along the water’s edge, "looking for something, something, something," while the oboe embodies the bird itself, "a student of Blake" in its frantic search among the dazzling, multicolored grains of sand. In Carter’s Ivesian setting of Bishop’s satirical Cold War poem "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress," we can actually hear both the "snatches" of a distant march and the "interference" that prevents the sound from coming through. The shimmering, glassy "Insomnia" (the source of the cycle’s title) is one of Carter’s most exquisite creations, the musical lines moving in opposite directions as if in a mirror. The six poems — contrasting public life and isolation, love and politics, nature and art, daylight and darkness — are filled with references to sounds or music, from the cacophony of birds, church bells, and factory whistles in "Anaphora" to a difficulty in breathing in "O Breath." Bishop is rightly admired for her combination of lucidity and elusiveness. The best performances of Carter’s cycle are the ones in which the singer can convey not only the words but the slippery emotion behind them. Susan Davenny Wyner sang the premiere; other notable sopranos have been Diana Hoagland, in the Boston premiere with Musica Viva, and Lisa Saffer in a Collage New Music concert last February. Levine led a tight yet rhythmically nuanced performance by the articulate if narrow-voiced young Met coloratura Jennifer Welch-Babidge and a group of spectacular players from the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. Harbison’s North and South also uses six poems, these dealing with love and music: two of Bishop’s "Songs for a Colored Singer" (which she had hoped someone would set for Billie Holiday — too bad Holiday didn’t live to hear Harbison’s bluesy insinuations); two short mood pieces, "Late Air" and the early "Song" (Summer is over upon the sea"); and two love poems Bishop didn’t publish in her lifetime, the heartbreaking "Breakfast Song" ("Today I love you so/how can I bear to go/(as soon I must, I know)/to bed with ugly death") and the untitled "Dear, my compass/Still points north"). Here the vocal line is primary (though the chamber version is also full of instrumental wizardry), the harmonies are more comprehensible, the emotions are more direct. Two particularly expressive singers introduced North and South, mezzo-soprano Janice Felty (the piano version) and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (the chamber version), so it was a little disappointing to hear the big-voiced young Metropolitan Opera Wagnerian soprano Marjorie Eleanor Dix, who sang with intelligence but without deep understanding. It’s obvious that Levine loves the piece, and it’s good to see him continuing his commitment to Harbison’s music. The concert began with Schubert’s single movement in C minor for string quartet ("Quartett-Satz"), ended with Verdi’s seldom played but wonderful string quartet (composed around the time of Don Carlo and sharing its dark beauty), and also included Levine himself accompanying the two major Schubert songs with obbligato winds, "Auf dem Strom" ("On the River"), with Met tenor Gregory Turay and horn player Michelle Baker, and "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" ("The Shepherd on the Rock"), with Welch-Babidge and clarinettist Ricardo Morales, both singers slightly out of their stylistic depth, but the musicians, and especially Levine, playing with glittering finesse. THE SECOND INSTALLMENT of Emmanuel’s Harbison series was actually a concert by (and tribute to) the amazing Emmanuel Music Chorus led by Craig Smith and Michael Beattie. Harbison told the audience that his very first Emmanuel commission, in 1971, had been a choral setting of Blake’s Songs of Experience. The four Harbison motets on the program were all Bible settings. The unsettling Beloved, Let Us Love One Another, the second of Harbison’s Two Emmanuel Motets, was composed at a time when divisions within Emmanuel Church were threatening its entire music program. Harbison said he still feels "guilt and remorse" for treating the chorus as if it were a string quartet in which "singers could do anything." This chorus certainly could. It was a revelation to hear these intricate and compelling contemporary works in the context of the great 17th- and 18th-century German choral tradition of Schein, Schütz, and Bach. Schein’s moving depiction of the death of Jacob (from Israelbrünnlein) and Bach’s radiant Jesu, meine Freude were exactly what one expects from Emmanuel — musicmaking on the highest order of integrity and accomplishment. BACK TO ELLIOTT CARTER for a moment. It was after David Hoose’s superlative performance of A Mirror on Which To Dwell that he decided to return to a Carter piece Collage had played before: the fiendishly tricky Triple Duo, in which pairs of winds, strings, and percussion (including piano) are like a pinball machine in which the musicians keep three (or is it six?) balls going at once. Some of the music is hilarious (think of Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine). The opening maneuver is a slapstick triple play: piano to clarinet to flute to snare drum — bang! Later it becomes inscrutably indrawing, then even threatening, before its abrupt shutdown. All of this is captured on a recording by the Fires of London, the group (founded by Peter Maxwell Davies) to whom the piece is dedicated. "There are a lot of notes," Hoose told the audience, and the Collage players didn’t miss a single one. But the performance lacked a sense of event, of different things happening, of big changes in dynamics or pacing. It was work to hear and seemed like work to play (unlike Hoose’s powerful, propulsive Mozart Requiem last week with the Cantata Singers, in which the forward momentum never overrode Mozart’s radical mood shifts). The piece Hoose seemed to have the most feeling for was the late Donald Sur’s beautifully spare and melancholy Catenas I-III — the third (1976) longer, denser, consolidating the evocations of the first two (1953). Special applause for William Buonocore on mandolin. The three Boston premieres were Steven Mackey’s 1999 Microconcerto, in which percussionist Craig MacNutt had a field day, and two prize winners, Ryan Gallagher’s Burning in Water, Drowning in Fire, composed a year ago, when he was still in high school, and 33-year-old doctoral candidate Gregg Wramage’s in shadows, in silence. (Is Carter’s 1981 setting of Robert Lowell, In Sleep, in Thunder, the grandfather of these parallel prepositional- or participial-phrase titles?) It’s hard to imagine more devoted performances. TWO REMARKABLE new-music performances were given in rather opposite venues. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the great Russell Sherman, now 74, followed two heavenly Brahms Intermezzi and Debussy’s fantasy travelogue, Estampes (a Sherman signature piece), with the world premiere of 84-year-old Leon Kirchner’s extraordinary Piano Sonata No. 2, which emerged out of Debussy’s impressionistic drizzle into a complex, even ominous, twilight world of deep nostalgia and urgent yearning — by the end, a heavenly yearning — ever on the verge of bursting into song (or tears). Sherman seemed almost hypnotized as he led the audience through Kirchner’s mysterious corridors of feeling. Opening the festivities for the centennial of New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, a group of young players and faculty conductors put on a good show capped by an astounding rendition of György Ligeti’s 1993 Violin Concerto by violinist Gabriela Diaz (the youngest in a family of stellar string players — she just won the Boston Modern Orchestra Project concerto competition and will be playing John Zorn’s Contes de Fées with BMOP in January). Guest conductor Eric Hewitt expertly led John Heiss’s New England Conservatory Ensemble (Heiss was in the audience, celebrating his own birthday — his 65th). All the composers on the program, pianist/conductor Stephen Drury told us, including Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen, had worked with NEC students in Jordan Hall. I also liked Lee Hyla’s lively and gorgeously long-lined Pre-Pulse Suspended (1984), which was led by Drury and featured extended violin solos elegantly played by Gabriel Boyers. THE PRO ARTE CHAMBER ENSEMBLE celebrated its 25th anniversary by repeating its very first program, at which the late Larry Hill, a Harvard chaplain, conducted three of the most enchanting pieces in the repertory: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>ák’s D-minor Serenade, and Schubert’s Fifth Symphony. Isaiah Jackson is the current music director of this co-operative orchestra, and some of the original personnel are still playing (several were in the audience). The Schubert was particularly engaging. It was Hill’s vision to give concerts that people can attend who don’t or can’t get to concerts, or can’t afford to. The Pro Arte continues to fulfill that mission. It was one of three orchestras (the Chicago and Pittsburgh Symphonies were the others) to win the 2003 MetLife Award for Excellence in Community Engagement. One is touched by parts of the Pro Arte audiences — young, elderly, disabled — even before the musicians begin to play. In a program called "Dreams and Transfigurations," Susan Davenny Wyner repeated the major item of her very first concert as director of the New England String Ensemble, in 1999: Shostakovich’s hair-raising 14th Symphony — a song symphony, like Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde or Britten’s Spring Symphony, 11 poems about death by García Lorca, Apollinaire, and Rilke, and a Russian poem against persecution by Wilhelm Karlovich Küchelbecker, who died exiled in Siberia for his part in the 1825 Decembrist uprising. The same soprano, Dominique Labelle, also returned, in refulgent voice. Her new partner was bass Morris DeRohn Robinson, from the Met’s Young Artist Development Program, a former Citadel football star who sings as if that were what he was born to do. He doesn’t yet have Labelle’s profound penetration of the texts, but he demonstrates a concern for language and has one of the most magnificent bass voices on the scene. Wyner put together a fascinating program — seldom performed pieces by C.P.E. Bach, Tchaikovsky (a canny combination of two unrelated movements), and Shostakovich, all death-haunted — the Shostakovich Scherzo a veritable danse macabre. The orchestra is impressive. The acoustics at the charming Stoneham Theatre, where I heard the first of NESE’s two performances, were clear, dry, and rather favoring the voices. Wyner had the poems sung in Russian (which is how Shostakovich set them). Transliterations and translations were provided, but the house lights were turned off, so you couldn’t read them. This evidently didn’t happen the next afternoon at Jordan Hall, where the house manager surely knows better. A DECADE AGO, Labelle rescued a dismal and inept Boston Lyric Opera production of Verdi’s Rigoletto in the role of Gilda, the deformed court jester Rigoletto’s virginal daughter, who’s seduced by the depraved Duke of Mantua. Labelle’s luminous poignancy caught the very soul of this opera, its true humanity. The BLO’s scaled-back "Italian Season" (read: "We’re doing fewer operas and more warhorses") opened with a much fancier, more ambitious production (at the Shubert through November 18) staged by Lorenzo Mariani and illuminated by Paul Palazzo’s candle-lit Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro. It has interesting ideas, and singers who can also act. But it never touched me. Allen Moyer’s unit set is the courtyard and two-tiered loggia of a 16th-century palazzo. The curtain goes up during the dramatic overture, and you see Rigoletto on a wooden platform with a dead body in his arms. Is this the beginning of the opera or the end, when the jester finds his daughter dying in the body bag intended for the dissolute Duke? But no — it’s a "performance" the jester is putting on for the courtiers. The lights come up and he takes a bow. That platform becomes the central playing area — and most of the action becomes a kind of play-within-a-play. All the world’s a stage — get it? The Duke rapes Gilda not off stage, as Verdi indicated, but on this stage-within-a-stage, hidden from view by the surrounding courtiers (kinky!). His entrance in the great fourth-act quartet Mickey-Mouses the rhythm of the music to comic effect. These tricks distance us from the melodrama by exposing its artificiality, its theatricality. But it doesn’t work — on several levels. First of all, it’s vulgar and gimmicky. It’s also inconsistent. Some moments, like the invented scene during the Overture, are "played to the house." When the Duke, with his shoulder-length Titian blond wig and tight black leather pants and doublet, sings his famous "La donna è mobile" ("Woman is fickle"), he actually winks at the audience. Some of the action is conventionally realistic. But the very impulse to underline the artificiality undermines Verdi’s musical sincerity, which makes us want to forget that this melodrama is mere theater. Although thoroughly professional, few of the singers completely fill the vocal demands of their roles. As the Duke, the young Met tenor Gregory Turay, who first appeared with the BLO in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore in 1997 (and who just sang Schubert with James Levine), pushes an attractive voice into relentless overdrive instead of seeming to toss off the notes effortlessly. It may be that he’s moving too fast from bel canto to Verdi’s heavier demands and that that’s already taking a toll. Baritone Mark Rucker is a heroic last-minute replacement for the ailing William Stone as Rigoletto, a part he’s played numerous times. But his reedy voice hardly varies in tone. His most affecting moment isn’t in anything he sings but in his final (unwritten) shriek of pain. The prettiest voice is Dina Kuznetsova’s. She gilds Gilda’s famous "Caro nome" ("Dear name") with exquisite pianissimo trills; when she gets loud, though, her voice turns harsh. Running around the stage hugging columns during this difficult aria probably doesn’t help her breath support. She conveys Gilda’s youthfulness, innocence, and irrational devotion. But to me she seems a little too calculated to be truly pathetic. Daniel Borowski (the assassin, Sparafucile), Beth Clayton as his less-slutty-than-usual sister, Maddalena, and David M. Cushing as Monterone, whose curse Rigoletto can’t get over, work hard in smaller roles. In 1994, Robert Spano was the BLO Rigoletto conductor, and the orchestra’s urgency and pathos matched Labelle’s. This time, BLO’s music director Stephen Lord does a skillful job, but the musical contours and dramatic transitions remain less intense than with Spano. This respectable production is far from BLO at its worst. But I think I’d prefer a poorer one that broke my heart to a fancier one that didn’t.
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