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Darkly blooming
James Levine leads two BSO premieres; Teatro Lirico’s cool (and hot) Carmen
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

It’s such a treat to have the director of a major cultural institution like the Boston Symphony Orchestra exhibit artistic convictions, even if one doesn’t share all his tastes. Not every subscriber will cheer James Levine’s plan for the next two seasons: 11 concerts juxtaposing Beethoven and Schoenberg, with several Beethoven-only and Schoenberg-only events and a Beethoven/Schoenberg Chamber Players concert (with the legendary soprano Anja Silja and Levine as both conductor and pianist). The open-minded, however, may discover that Beethoven, that misunderstood radical, isn’t as intimidating or as nasty as they feared, especially when he’s paired with Arnold Schoenberg. Levine, bless him, is determined to make Boston love them both. Some of the music is sure to remain mysterious and difficult, but as we get used to Beethoven, we’ll recognize his comic side, his romantic extravagance, and how beautiful and intriguing and emotionally compelling he can be, and how like Schoenberg he really is. Yes, by hearing Beethoven alongside Schoenberg, we may someday learn to appreciate Beethoven.

Levine made the final podium appearance of his first season as the BSO’s music director with one of his archetypal programs: two world premieres by composers he admires (who are very different from each other), a seldom-played late masterpiece of serialism by the greatest 20th-century composer, and one of the most melodic and endearing of all orchestral scores, Brahms’s Second Symphony — which after its first BSO performance in 1882 made one reviewer plead for at least one melody.

Premiere #1 was John Harbison’s Darkbloom, his seven-minute "overture for an imagined opera," which uses music he had intended for an aborted opera based on Nabokov’s Lolita, a project he was dissuaded from after the Catholic Church sex scandals broke, not to mention the difficulty of casting a nymphet who could be heard over a large orchestra. (Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, is the name of the mysterious woman accomplice of Humbert Humbert’s nemesis, Clare Quilty.) In his program note, Harbison never mentions the intended subject of his opera, though he slyly refers to its "young female lead." The music is sighing and sinister; like Debussy’s elusive Jeux, it depicts a sexually charged tennis game, in which the music for the ball going back and forth picks up on the desperate, slurred cajoling ("Will ya, huh?") of the opening theme. The colors are darkly transparent, and the final little giggle for piccolo, glockenspiel, piano, and harp makes a teasingly suggestive conclusion.

Levine is also a big advocate of Charles Wuorinen (born in 1938 — same year as Harbison), and Wuorinen’s new Fourth Piano Concerto (completed in 2003) begins well, with elegant arpeggios and piquant pairings (piano with piccolo). Three contrasting (and increasingly shorter) movements display big dynamic and rhythmic shifts, with big-bang outbursts and a very quiet ending. The orchestration is skillful, but the concerto seems more noty than emotionally engaging, with few memorable passages, few surprises, and not much profile. It wasn’t hateful, but it didn’t hold my interest.

The performance seemed secure and committed; pianist Peter Serkin shimmered and pounded exquisitely. But he was even more glittering in the uncanny pointillism of Stravinsky’s mysterious, diaphanous, and short late venture into the 12-tone system, Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1959). Although the BSO has done it twice before, New York City Ballet audiences probably know it better than any concertgoers — it’s the Balanchine ballet that, in 1963, first catapulted a certain talented young ballerina into the dance stratosphere. "This is Suzanne Farrell," Balanchine said when he introduced her to Stravinsky. "Just been born." It’s probably easier to absorb this compact 10-minute work when you "see" it, with Balanchine’s upside-down lifts and luxurious backbends reflecting the score’s intricate structure, but once you get to know it, even without the visuals, it’s ravishing.

The Brahms was not the usual tender pastoral idyll but a powerfully logical and unstoppable musical structure. Levine let us hear the shadows darkening those pretty tunes and Viennese waltzes. It too could have been called Darkbloom.

BIZET’S CARMEN, with its dramatic plot, its stream of unforgettable songs, its vibrant orchestral color, and its extraordinary title character, is always welcome. Boston Lyric Opera’s free production on Boston Common, in 2002, attracted more than 50,000 people. Jossie Pérez, the young mezzo who sang the title role, is now singing at the Met. (BLO has just announced a free outdoor production of Verdi’s Aida for 2006.)

Bizet’s masterpiece works even better close up, and with a more grown-up heroine, so Giorgio Lalov’s irresistible Bulgarian touring company, Teatro Lirico d’Europa, provided an even more compelling evening of musical theater. At the heart of this production were gripping performances by the two central characters, especially American mezzo Kristin Chavez in the title role. Chavez, who’s sung Carmen with the New York City Opera, is a dark-haired beauty whose plush voice fills this role as effortlessly as a quarter slides into a parking meter (or a hand slides up a thigh). She can dance and even play the castanets (which she kept in her bodice). She knows not only what every word means but also what every syllable intends. And she never resorted to the hands-on-hips Carmen cliché (though high-fives may not really be an appropriate substitute).

Carmen is a female Don Giovanni, all id, for whom taking sexual liberties is a metaphor for every other kind of liberty. Chavez’s Carmen enjoys her freedom, enjoys not taking life seriously — she has a particularly vivid sense of humor. (Much of Carmen, like Don Giovanni, is a "dramma giocoso.") But she also convinces you that at heart, freedom to choose whom to love or how to live is no joke, and she’s willing to die for it. One neat touch in Lalov’s otherwise predictable staging came when Carmen talks Don José into letting her escape: she takes the rope with which he had her tied up and loops it around him. In the final scene, this stage image reverberated when he sang about their being "bound together."

Jeffrey Springer’s Don José wasn’t so complicated, though his big, well-produced voice met the increasing demands of this part. He was stiff at first, in an unbecoming and ill-fitting yellow corporal’s uniform, but when Carmen threw him over for the matador Escamillo, his uncontrolled frustration turned into a force of nature.

Escamillo was Mariinsky/Bolshoi baritone Vladimir Samsonov, a marvelous Rossini Figaro in another opera that takes place in Seville. His Italian was more fluid than his French, and he looked more comfortable as a comic factotum than as a sexy celebrity. He entered Lillas Pastia’s dive by instantly leaping onto a table; it was hard to see why Carmen would give up José for him. Micaela, José’s peasant girlfriend, was Bulgarian soprano Veselina Vasileva, who seems more comfortable with worldly sophistication (Violetta in La traviata) than innocence (Mimi in La bohème). It was odd to see this village maiden arriving in Seville wearing spike heels. Vasileva has a lovely voice with radiant top notes, but here it was less steady than in previous Boston performances.

Some of the supporting characters seemed to be having great fun — and were great fun, especially Giorgio Dineff and Hristo Sarafov as the Gypsy smugglers (even their curtain call was a hoot) and Liubov Metodieva and heroic-voiced soprano Viara Zhelezova as Carmen’s card-reading buddies, Frasquita and Mercedes. Jury Hadjeff gave a subtly detailed performance in the small but important role of Jose’s commanding officer, Zuniga.

The small but earthy-voiced chorus is one of Teatro Lirico’s strongest attractions. In Valentine Topencharov’s cramped set for the square in Seville outside a brick cigarette factory, the performers had so little room to stroll, they strolled more like zombies than living human beings. The brick walls worked better indoors, for Lillas Pastia’s, and for the outside of the bull ring, but the best set was the simple mountain pass between two stone outcroppings. The best playing from the surprisingly sloppy orchestra, and Krassimir Topolov’s best conducting, came with the enchanting prelude to the scene in the mountains. The opera’s famous overture was tepid and square; the energy for Carmen’s seductive Gypsy dance and the flamenco dances came not from the pit but from the dancers themselves (including three from Ballet Arabesk, whose one male dancer was even prettier than Carmen).

But once again, for all its limitations as a touring company, Teatro Lirico d’Europa provided us with a satisfying, moving, and witty performance of an opera that ought to get more satisfying performances than it does. Not because it was lavish or had big names, or even because its intentions were sincere, but because it did the most important things right. Come October, we’ll be back in Seville with Rossini’s Figaro, and then in Vienna with Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (in a Czech Opera Prague production); in February and March, we’ll get Lucia di Lammermoor (which will be interesting to compare with Boston Lyric Opera’s rarely performed French version) and Mozart’s magical Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute"). Olé.


Issue Date: April 1 - 7, 2005
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