E-Mail This Article to a Friend Reaching for heaven Itzhak Perlman, the BSO, and the Back Bay Chorale’s Das Paradies und die Peri BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

As opposed to the high-powered duo of Evgeny Kissin and James Levine in mid April, it was only half of the most recent Bank of America Celebrity Series chamber-music team who filled Symphony Hall: superstar violinist and late-night raconteur Itzhak Perlman, returning for his 14th Celebrity Series appearance. His excellent partner, Sri Lankan pianist Rohan De Silva, is not a famous soloist but a specialist in "collaborative arts" — in other words, an accompanist — and one who works with many of the best-known violinists. The problem with celebrity chamber recitals is that the accompanist takes a back seat to the star, even when they’re both playing parts of equal weight. It didn’t look promising that the lid on De Silva’s piano was almost closed ("short-sticked") for Mozart’s Sonata in E minor K.304, which the score calls, as Steven Ledbetter’s program note pointed out, a work for keyboard "with the accompaniment of a violin," and for Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, one of the most intricately collaborative works in the chamber-music repertoire.

These pieces were already compromised by the vast size of Symphony Hall. But parts of the concert were more collaborative than one might have predicted. The Mozart, one of his best "violin" sonatas, had a real give and take, in both the subtle opening Allegro and the songlike second-movement Menuetto. Perlman didn’t play every note for pure sweetness, and the rough edges suggested a thoughtful response to Mozart’s combination of elegance and urgency. And though De Silva’s voice was muffled, what he had to say had point.

The Beethoven, the largest work on the program, was less successful. In the beautiful variations movement, Perlman’s tone didn’t vary much, and the piano sounded even more repressed. The performance was refined and songful, but it didn’t exactly "speak." Where was anything remotely like the intense drama, the searching inwardness, and the demonic ferocity you can hear from Joseph Szigeti and Bela Bartók (hardly an accompanist) at their historic reunion concert at the Library of Congress in 1940? At least Perlman and De Silva seemed to be listening and responding to each other, and that counted for something.

The second "half" consisted of two lighter works, each in two movements (one slow, one lively): Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Episodes for Violin and Piano, a work commissioned for Perlman, which he introduced in Clearwater, Florida, a year ago, and Bedrich Smetana’s From the Homeland (1880). For a moment, I thought the Zwilich, with its old-fashioned, yearning Eastern European melodies, might be the Smetana. But I doubt Smetana ever asked a violinist to play left-hand pizzicati, which Perlman did with bravura aplomb. In From the Homeland, Perlman throbbed with emotion (or, at least, with tone), and it ended in a lively Czech folk dance.

We were already on the road to Encore Land.

After returning to acknowledge the bravos, and then without leaving the stage, Perlman played a string of six bon-bons. De Silva was there too, but the pretense of a collaboration was now over. These were mostly short fast pieces composed, arranged, or transcribed by legendary violinist Fritz Kreisler. Perlman joked as he tried to organize his scores ("Just props!") and announced each piece in that familiar and charming guttural growl. The froth was delightful, real whipped cream, not Reddi-wip, and not all of it just froth. What Perlman called Gluck’s "Melody" was actually an arrangement of the heavenly Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo; Perlman was at his suavest, but he ignored the many opportunities for expressive phrasing (like Gluck’s echo effects) — it was very pretty but oddly flat. The fiery Spanish Dance from Falla’s La vida breve was livelier and more effective, and the perfect place at which to stop.

THIS BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S subscription season ended on an odd note. Guest conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos went the warhorse route with Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and two-thirds of Ottorino Respighi’s Roman trilogy, Fontane di Roma ("Fountains of Rome") and Pini di Roma ("Pines of Rome") — and Symphony Hall was packed. The Respighis, favorites of Toscanini, who led the premiere of Fontane in 1916 and the American premiere of Pini in 1926 and later recorded them, aren’t played as often as they used to be: Fontane hasn’t appeared on a BSO subscription concert since Seiji Ozawa did it in 1977, and Pini was last led by the late Giuseppe Sinopoli in 1992. The Emperor Concerto, on the other hand, last turned up at the BSO only last year, James Conlon conducting Jonathan Biss. It is, after all, a very great work, whereas the Respighis are enjoyably picturesque display pieces. They must be favorites of Frühbeck’s, since he had previously conducted them at Tanglewood. He was all smiles.

He certainly milked them for all their saturated Technicolor, throwing himself into them, rocking up and down from the waist at the biggest climaxes. The players complied. The refurbished organ (James Christie) shook the hall. The usually reticent William H. Hudgins poured on the clarinet sound. "La Fontana di Villa Medici al tramonto" ("The Fountain of Villa Medici at Sunset") ends with the tolling of bells and a recording of real nightingales. Respighi’s own program note waxes poetical about his images. Children dancing in circles, for instance, in the pine groves of Villa Borghese, and playing at soldiers, "are intoxicated by their own cries like swallows at evening." Some of this also sounded like the noise of heavy traffic. And the tread of soldiers marching along the Appian Way at dawn sounded less like an ancient "consular army" than like an ominous premonition, circa 1924, of a later mustering of Italian troops.

The preceding Beethoven had some surprises — a massive annunciatory chord in the orchestra followed by an explosive, rhythmically pointed flourish from Stephen Kovacevich at the keyboard and an especially tender second theme. This was the American-born pianist’s first BSO performance since he played under Colin Davis 33 years ago. He has a flinty sound that’s both bigger and harsher than what you hear on his recordings, though in the slow movement he produced a rounder, pearlier tone, with trills fluttering gracefully (not feverishly) up the scale. His transition from the pianissimo delicacy of the Adagio ma non troppo to the skipping Rondo finale was nicely teasing. Frühbeck drove the orchestra to a big finish.

I wouldn’t call this an illuminating performance on the level of past BSO Emperors with Russell Sherman and Dubravka Tomsic (utterly different from each other). On Tuesday, someone booing belligerently from the balcony triggered a standing ovation that suggested most of the audience would prefer not to wait three more decades to hear Kovacevich again.

Another standing ovation was part of a poignant end-of-season ritual: hail and farewell to the BSO retirees. The three departing players this year have played a total of 116 years with the BSO. Richard Mackey has been in the horn section since 1972. Former principal violist Burton Fine joined the BSO in 1963, the same year as percussionist Thomas Gauger, whose final Symphony Hall appearance included his tingling triangle in Pini.

THIS SEASON, three organizations, in conjunction with the inauguration of Emmanuel Music’s five-year exploration of the solo, chamber, and vocal works of Robert Schumann, have presented his three largest works for chorus and orchestra. David Hoose and the Cantata Singers gave us Szenen aus Goethes Faust. Craig Smith led Emmanuel Music in Schumann’s only opera, Genoveva. And this past Saturday, the Back Bay Chorale’s Scott Allen Jarrett (who is completing his PhD thesis at BU on Schumann’s choral music) led his group and the Emmanuel Orchestra in Das Paradies und die Peri ("Paradise and the Peri"), Schumann’s oratorio based on an episode from Thomas Moore’s popular poetic Persian fantasy Lalla Rookh. (The Beacon Hill Persian restaurant Lala Rokh was one of the sponsors.)

As far as I’m aware, this was only the third Boston performance of Das Paradies in some 35 years, and each time I hear it, I wonder why it isn’t done more often. The story of the earthbound fairy who’s trying to get into Heaven (Peris turn up again more satirically, but also with some poignance, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, which is subtitled The Peer and the Peri) is the framework for some of Schumann’s most colorful, spiritual, and rhythmically seductive music. On her third try, after musical journeys to India, Egypt, and Syria, the Peri brings a sinner’s tears of remorse to the Pearly Gates and is allowed to enter. Schumann’s experiments include the pre-Wagnerian use of musical themes that relate to specific characters or situations and "through-composed" arias and choruses that don’t come to an abrupt stop for applause but are part of a continuous flow of delicious lyricism.

Jarrett kept this flow flowing and the playing and singing both vigorous and refined (all a little swallowed up in the hollow acoustics of the Jesuit Urban Center). The chorus sang with fervor. Peggy Pearson’s stabbing oboe solo gave heartbreaking voice to the penitent’s tears. The splendid vocal soloists included young tenors Bryan Register and Stefan Reed, soprano Shannon Salyards, bass Aaron Engebreth, vibrant mezzo-soprano Janna Baty as the sympathetic Angel, and clear, bright-voiced soprano Elizabeth Weigle (Pat Nixon in Opera Boston’s Nixon in China) as the Peri longing for salvation. I suspect I was not the only member of the audience who went out into the chilly night air feeling uplifted and grateful and singing inside.