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Compensation
The BSO with Christoph von Dohnányi, Radu Lupu, Ton Koopman, and Peter Wispelwey, plus the Borromeo Quartet, Sarasa, and the New England String Ensemble
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

There wasn’t a concert I was looking more forward to than pianist Leon Fleisher’s 75th-birthday recital in the FleetBoston Celebrity Series this past Saturday. And though there were numerous musical pleasures during the last couple of weeks, nothing could compensate for the disappointment of Fleisher’s postponement (for "personal reasons").

The BSO offered a different kind of keyboard celebrity, Romanian virtuoso Radu Lupu, playing the Schumann Piano Concerto under guest conductor Christoph von Dohn‡nyi, music director emeritus of the Cleveland Orchestra. Symphony Hall was filled to capacity, and the audience responded warmly. Lupu is an odd player. His Mozart with the BSO has had a tonal delicacy I’ve found too precious, too lacy — the kind of playing that makes people think Mozart is all surface. So I was happy to hear him alternating between his usual filigree and outbursts of real power. This was not quite the effervescent and dynamic concerto I love. The meditative, intimate piano passages seemed less searching than self-absorbed, rather disregarding the orchestra that was attempting to accompanying it. Maestro Dohn‡nyi had his hands full keeping the orchestra together with the soloist.

Dohn‡nyi seats the orchestra in a configuration similar to James Levine’s new/old plan: first and second violins on opposite sides of the stage, cellos and basses behind the first violins. He even has the front row of second violins surrounding the podium, facing the conductor, with their backs to the audience. This helps open up the dense textures of 19th-century Romantic music. Schumann and Brahms, for example. The evening ended with a beautiful, intense performance of Brahms’s last symphony, No. 4, in E minor — the rare symphony that ends in a relentlessly gloomy minor key. In the first movement, you could distinguish the Q&A taking place between the first and second violins — or was it a Q&Q ("What is the answer?" "How should I know?"). The most exquisite playing came in the slow movement: violins and basses mellifluously gliding above plucked violas and cellos.

I admire Dohn‡nyi’s honesty and intelligence, his musicality, and his high standards. He makes orchestras sound good. And yet, in the standard repertoire, I always want to give him an A-. His excellent version of the Brahms is not on the exalted level of Toscanini’s, or FurtwŠngler’s, or Klemperer’s, each of whom seems to stake his life.

To his credit, Dohn‡nyi always includes a contemporary piece, and the concert began with the first BSO performance of the 78-year-old Hungarian composer Gyšrgy Kurt‡g’s Stele, Opus 33, his first work for a full-size symphony orchestra (the Tanglewood student orchestra played the American premiere in 1995). Stele is the Greek word for stone monument, often a memorial. Kurt‡g’s piece is in remembrance of the Hungarian composer Andr‡s Mih‡ly. The big-bang grand "opening" quickly dissolves into wavering filaments of quarter tones. The music moves from tentative questioning to a beehive of anxiety to a collective sigh of despair and finally to a gentle but ominous quivering of the ground under us. The second movement is marked "Lamentoso — disperato" ("lamenting — desperate"); the third is an ominous slow movement. We hear traces of folk melodies, but the overall effect is of a deep sadness — the orchestra embodying the composer’s unresolved grief. The performance was masterful.

On Sunday afternoon (Super Bowl Sunday), Dohn‡nyi and the orchestra were back for a rare non-subscription pension-fund concert, with celebrity guest baritone Thomas Hampson in Mahler’s masterful song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfarer"), themes of which turn up in Mahler’s First Symphony. Dohn‡nyi opened with an excitingly fast yet substantial Nozze di Figaro Overture, and he got the orchestra to wrap itself around Hampson’s suave, many-colored voice. But what a peculiar performer Hampson is: elegant, intelligent, and yet with his coiffed "DA," he looks as if he’d stepped out of a glossy 1950s magazine ad. He sounds sincere, but he looks phony, his face stiffly repeating the expressions in an acting handbook.

There was a lot of music in town that Sunday, and of a much higher quality than what CBS/MTV offered at the Super Bowl. Before the BSO performance, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo String Quartet played the program that was snowed out last December: Ligeti and Brahms. Staying for the Brahms would have meant missing Hampson, and I’m not sure I wanted to hear another quartet after the Borromeo’s mesmerizing performance of Ligeti’s first quartet, Metamorphoses nocturnes. This stunning early work (1954), a spectral dreamscape encompassing wild midnight rides, eerie tonalities, and yearning melodies, at first looks back to Schoenberg and Bart—k but soon anticipates all the scintillating and terrifying musical adventures of later Ligeti.

I didn’t stay for the BSO Brahms, either, choosing to forgo a repeat of the Fourth Symphony in order to hear the second half of Susan Davenny Wyner’s New England String Ensemble at Jordan Hall. I caught the last two movements of the world premiere of David Rakowski’s Dream Symphony, an Allegro giocoso (which I tried to hear from the lobby) and a serious, moody Adagio assai. More than a century after Tchaikovsky’s PathŽtique, it’s still unusual for a symphony to end with a slow movement. It made me want to hear the whole piece. After intermission came a sensitive — and gorgeous — rendition of the Prelude to Richard Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio (1942), less an opera, really, than a musical conversation about the relative merits of music and words. The concert ended in unusual fashion with an early Mozart piano concerto — K.414, played with a graceful, natural beauty by Claude Frank.

The following week, guest conductor and early-music specialist Ton Koopman was back at the BSO — and the orchestra was almost but not quite back to seating as usual (all the violins audience left, but cellos in front of rather than behind the violas). Koopman conducts like a marionette — bouncy, loose-jointed, yet also square. His Bach First Orchestral Suite was thoroughly animated but always clipped. Phrases didn’t breathe. Everything was played at a similar brisk pace and at a similar high volume level. Bach’s suites consist of a series of dances, but I didn’t hear Koopman make much distinction between a minuet (daintier) and a gavotte (more stately), or between these courtly dances and the earthier forlane.

A concerto by Bach’s second son followed, C.P.E. Bach’s arrangement for cello of his own Harpsichord Concerto in A. The soloist was the wonderful Dutch cellist Peter Wispelwey, who was finally making his BSO debut after making records and performing around Boston for more than a decade. In a Boston Globe interview, he’d said he’d be playing an octave higher than the score indicates in order to make the cello project better, to make the brilliant passages sound more brilliant, so they wouldn’t "mumble." He may have underestimated Symphony Hall’s acoustics. I heard complaints afterward that the cello "sounded funny," that there was too much scratchiness. But no one could complain about the depth of feeling and the warmth of tone in the soulful, muted, dirge-like cello aria of the slow movement — a relief after all the Koopman’s earlier undifferentiated liveliness. This concerto is all chiaroscuro. Even the vigorous first movement is not without shadows, and the last is more nervous than jolly. The BSO has played it only once before, at Tanglewood. For this occasion, the Harvard University Music Department library lent some of its rare books and manuscripts, which were on display in the lobby.

The program closed with Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony. Mendelssohn was one of the musicians most responsible for the revival of interest in Bach in the mid 19th century, and this symphony quotes the same Martin Luther hymn that Bach used in his cantata Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"). Mendelssohn also opens with the beginning of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony (Mozart was probably quoting Palestrina), and he uses the Dresden Amen (as does Wagner in the music about the Holy Grail in Parsifal). He was 23 and was trying very hard to be epic in scale. But he also couldn’t resist being his charming self, so this symphony is something of a hodge-podge. Flutist Fenwick Smith launched the last movement with a stirring rendition of Luther’s hymn tune, and in the last movement, trombonist Douglas Yeo played the serpent, a snaky musical instrument with an unmistakable low buzz (it was already reaching obsolescence in Mendelssohn’s time). Koopman finally delivered the goods.

The week’s best Bach was offered by the chamber group Sarasa, in a benefit concert at the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge. Two of Sarasa’s most distinguished colleagues, soprano Dominique Labelle and baritone Sanford Sylvan, attracted a sold-out house to help pay for a new recording of Bach cantatas. Labelle sang a glistening Wedding Cantata and Sylvan repeated Ich habe genug ("I Have Enough"), the cantata about last things that he sang with Sarasa shortly after September 11. A bad cold kept him from joining Labelle in the cantata Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen ("Dearest Jesus, My Desire"), so Labelle sang only her own first aria and harpsichordist Maggie Cole filled in with a repeat performance of Bach’s F-minor Harpsichord Concerto. The performances were loving and radiant. Sylvan’s cold hardly altered his dark resonance. Oboist Richard Earles was a little too loud for Labelle in the celebratory Wedding Cantata, but he played more inwardly for Sylvan’s big aria. Cole’s slow movement was not as touching as I remember it from a couple of years ago, but the fast movements were technically and imaginatively exciting.

THOSE OF US who weren’t invited to the Vatican for the Pope’s Concert of Reconciliation, an attempt to bring the three great monotheistic religions ("children of Abraham") together through music, can hear it on line at www.papal-concert-of-reconciliation.com. Three of the five movements (not the satirical one) from Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, feelingly conducted by Gilbert Levine, are preceded by Abraham, a powerful "sacred motet" by Boston’s John Harbison based on Genesis (God telling Abraham he’ll be "a father of many nations") that was commissioned by the pope and played by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with multi-ethnic choruses from Pittsburgh, London, Krakow, and Ankara.


Issue Date: February 13 - 19, 2004
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