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What’s it all about?
Brendel and Levine at the BSO; the Fromm Players at Harvard; the Hilliard Ensemble
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
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Alfred Brendel's official Web site

Although the quality of the programming and the playing has risen dramatically since James Levine has taken the helm of the BSO, attendance has been a little spotty. But not an empty seat could be seen last week, when Levine led a program of Classical classics: Haydn’s Oxford Symphony, Schubert’s Tragic, and, in between, Mozart’s D-minor Piano Concerto, with 74-year-old Alfred Brendel at the keyboard.

Brendel’s popularity, little short of adoration, has always been a mystery to me. "Studied neutrality," a friend calls his playing. His tone is neither glamorous nor colorful, his phrasing is always detached, lacking interiority, the sense that this music has some palpable meaning. People call Brendel "intellectual," yet the most intelligent musicians — pianists like the legendary Artur Schnabel and Boston’s Russell Sherman, conductors like Otto Klemperer and Pierre Boulez — seem to respond to music not abstractly but in the most nuanced, emotionally complex way.

I grew up on Brendel’s Mozart recordings on Nonesuch. I thought that’s how Mozart was supposed to sound: lively, technically secure, generic. But once I started listening to other pianists — Schnabel, Ivan Moravec, even Glenn Gould’s insane silent-movie Mozart — Brendel began to seem deeply inadequate. At the BSO, he was in good technical form, and the audience went bananas, standing and cheering. ("It was so bad," I once heard someone say about a Boston musical event, "it didn’t even get a standing ovation.") He even played an encore, a brilliant rondo movement from a little-known Haydn sonata that left most of the audience — including myself — guessing. Yet it was just more of the same. What was touching was his slightly gawky, lovably-old-grandpa sweetness, and how touched he seemed by the response. But the piano playing itself, even in the more buoyant encore (which also had a substantial number of missing notes), left me unmoved. (Brendel refused to allow his performance to be broadcast; on Saturday night, WCRB listeners were treated to Anne-Sophie Mutter in husband André Previn’s Grammy-winning Violin Concerto instead.)

The orchestra was another story. Mozart’s concertos are very operatic, and this one begins with mysterious D-minor rumbles that conjure the terrifying appearance of the dead Commendatore in Don Giovanni — an opera, need one add, Levine knows extremely well. The playing in the central "Romanza" had the moonlit atmosphere of a great love scene, and the winds were especially full of detail.

But the two symphonies were the evening’s real glories, Levine imbuing the Haydn with wit and delicacy — giving the slow introduction a moving, perfectly gauged solemnity — and maintaining a buoyant intensity in the early Schubert, who’s already on his way to becoming a master.

THE HARVARD MUSIC DEPARTMENT’S Elliott Gyger was guest curator for two imaginative and memorable contemporary-music concerts by the Fromm Players: "Multiple Voices," which focused on a wide spectrum of work by distinguished composers — vocal music rarely heard because each one involves more than one vocalist. One concert consisted largely of works for two voices, though not the usual duets or dialogues; the second was for larger groups. Almost everything was in the skillful hands of New York conductor Jeffrey Milarsky and a group of stellar musicians, with Hans Tutschku in charge of the electronics.

Two pieces played in a darkened Paine Hall were pre-recorded quadraphonic tapes: Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), with its disembodied interstellar choirboy voices, still sounding fresh, and Steve Reich’s intolerable 1965 It’s Gonna Rain, 17 minutes of phonemic repetitions from a recording of a San Francisco street preacher sermonizing at the top of his lungs about the Flood — it was like having your head shoved through a meat grinder. Two pieces were sonic dreamscapes: Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s 1989 Grammaire des rêves ("Grammar of Dreams"), with soprano Tony Arnold and the equally marvelous mezzo Julia Bentley singing poems or fragments by Paul Éluard, and Jacob Druckman’s 1979 Bo, with two sopranos and an alto, their backs to the audience, intoning Mu Hua verses about waves to the restrained accompaniment of harp, marimba, gong, and bass clarinet.

The big hit was Berio’s delirious 1975 A-ronne ("from A to Z"), in the version for eight amplified voices and live electronics he made for the Swingle Singers. Berio was the one composer in the series who dared to be amusing (even plugging in the singers’ mikes became a comic bit). The text is Edoardo Sanguineti’s poem made up entirely of quotations or non-verbal ejaculations of joy or awe or grief. Its three sections are about beginnings ("in principio"), middles ("nel mezzo del cammino"), and ends (the anus, death, "my music"). T.S. Eliot’s "In my beginning is my end" keeps turning up. Berio calls for shrieking, crying, coughing, shushing, tittering, and snoring; some of the music imitates heavenly mediæval modes.

Peter Maxwell Davies’s 1961 Leopardi Fragments, beautiful and sinister, intricately despairing, was a real discovery, with Arnold and Bentley excelling again in their parallel arias and duets. Harrison Birtwistle is a spiritual descendant of Maxwell Davies’s theatrical musical iconoclasm. His 1971 Meridian is a startling and ambitious setting of love poems by the contemporary Christopher Logue and the great Elizabethan poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Mezzo Mary Nessinger intoned the words, but Neil DeLand (horn) and David Russell (cello) were more expressive.

The most difficult undertaking was Elliott Carter’s knotty Syringa (1978) — a setting of a John Ashbery poem about Orpheus, with Ashbery’s colloquial language ("But it isn’t enough to just go on singing") in constant opposition to fragments of ancient Greek "spoken" by Orpheus himself to a bardic guitar (Oren Fader). Syringa deals with the way music, constantly passing through time, reflects the way life itself passes.

Nessinger (who, I was told, was recovering from an illness) was hard to hear alongside bass-baritone Jan Opalach’s incantatory Greek declamation, and her stiff, "correct" diction hardly reflected Carter’s instructions to avoid a "mannered" style and "maintain a very simple and straightforward delivery, even if this requires slight adjustments in the notated rhythms." Trying to listen to her English forced me to ignore Opalach’s Greek, so the whole piece seemed unbalanced. Still, it was exciting to hear it at all, and especially in this remarkable context.

THE BOSTON EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL presented England’s renowned Hilliard Ensemble in a program of 15th-century music by Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prés at Cambridge’s reverberant St. Paul Church. This quartet — countertenor David James, tenors Rogers Covey-Crump and Steven Harrold, and dour baritone Gordon Jones — have an impeccable sense of pitch and a human quality that many early-music singers seem to avoid. They sing less like angels than like people in the throes of profound devotion. Dufay’s exquisite Se la face ay pale Mass (using a theme he’d composed for a love ballade), with its overlapping waves of æthereal sound, was interspersed with Josquin’s earthier, more richly textured, more directly emotional Bible settings (the Death of Jonathan and Saul — "How are the mighty fallen") and prayers (a heartbreakingly slow Ave Maria). The Hilliards are also admired for their contemporary music. Maybe that’s one reason they never forget they’re singing about something.


Issue Date: March 11 - 17, 2005
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