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The persistence of memory
James Levine from Prague to Sacre
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

James Levine’s first subscription program as music director of the BSO last weekend was, if anything, even more remarkable and ambitious than the opening gala. Instead of one enormously challenging work (Mahler’s Eighth Symphony), he conducted four: a piece by a living composer, György Ligeti’s Lontano (1967); a great classical symphony, Mozart’s Prague (1786); and two seminal 20th-century masterpieces, Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) and Stravinsky’s momentous Le sacre du printemps (1913). But instead of being all over the place, this complex program cohered and reverberated.

Ligeti provided the clue through this musical maze. "Lontano" is Italian for distant, and for 12 minutes, the audience seemed to be looking back into its own psyche. Most of this piece is extremely quiet, an extended shimmer, and like the Ligeti piece Levine led in 2002, Ramifications (1969), it turned into a concerto for orchestra and chest congestion: unmuffled coughing and hacking from every corner of the hall. Still, the orchestra not only kept going but gave Ligeti’s mysterious stasis a sense of direction. Arcs of sound and texture, long chords or chords made up of innumerable staccato murmurs, became a kind of motionless motion. Phrases got louder (a little) or softer, and farther and farther away, into the distance, into the past, into memory, where the past exists as an eternal presence.

"Why Mozart?" the maestro asked in his program note. His answer was simple: he "can never get enough Mozart." But some more complicated instinct was also working. The Prague Symphony seemed to underline the difference between Ligeti’s psychic time and historical time, a trip back into the classical past. Ligeti’s structure is slippery, an elusive continuum; Mozart’s is architectural, with clear, well-defined outlines and contrasts, especially given Levine’s decision to play all the indicated repeats. Ligeti’s barely perceptible but hypnotic melody is embedded in the inner voices; Mozart’s melodies are out in the open — sunlit and radiant, yet with moments of stealth, dappled, shadowy harmonies, sudden hushes that suggest more enigmatic and conflicting emotions. This was expansive, full-bodied, full-hearted Mozart — not prissy, yet not inflated, either.

I heard this program twice. Thursday, the Adagio introduction went by a little too fast, as if Mozart — or Levine — didn’t have the full courage of his convictions. Saturday, the tempo slightly adjusted, that passage was more focused. It combined solemn grandeur and melting tenderness, then shifted into the threatening, otherworldly trumpets-and-drums D minor of Don Giovanni (composed the same year). The Prague is one of Mozart’s most operatic symphonies, with echoes of the high comedy of Le nozze di Figaro and anticipations of the enchanting Papageno-Papagena duet of Die Zauberflöte. The entire opening concert clocked in at two hours and 21 minutes — did we really need all those repeats? The Saturday concert took an extra couple of minutes, yet everything was so beautifully paced, it didn’t feel as long.

The pairing of Schoenberg and Stravinsky was just as illuminating. The Five Pieces, with cryptic movements called "Premonitions," "Things Past," and "Summer Morning by a Lake," took us back into the world of personal memory and psychodrama. (In his program note, Michael Steinberg pointed out that Schoenberg told friends that a little phrase in the harp actually represented "fish breaking the surface" of the lake.) In "Things Past," an eerily repeated eight-note phrase on the celesta seemed to be ticking out the passing of mental time, the persistence of memory. These short, dramatic, dense yet mercurial movements foreshadow the fluidity of Ligeti (especially the deep quietude of the "Lake," with its repressed harmonic undercurrents). But as in the Mozart, Levine let us hear clear dynamic oppositions — sudden outbursts, sudden stillness. The orchestra was dazzling; the audience seemed enthralled. Over the next year, Levine promises 10 Beethoven-Schoenberg programs. He’s determined to make Bostonians love spinach.

At 9:45, Levine launched into Stravinsky’s extraordinary exploration of cultural memory — the primitive Russia of ritual sacrifice. I can’t remember a more visceral performance, with grunting, gouging strings, moaning trombones, and eight upraised horns wailing. Timpanist Timothy Genis, subtle and buoyant in the Mozart, here erupted into the voice of overpowering primordial, orgiastic turbulence. Yet Levine also articulated Sacre’s mystery and awe. This Stravinsky was the descendant of Rimsky-Korsakov, a snake-charmer Sheherazade telling spine-tingling tales, with syncopated snap, crushing discords, and insinuating Oriental inflections — in elegant structural blocks that suddenly seemed not altogether unlike Mozart.


Issue Date: November 5 - 11, 2004
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