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Making it new
The Boston Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestras join the Callithumpian Consort in going modern
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
No long faces

 

Handel and Haydn’s Messiah

This season’s Messiah from Grant Llewellyn and the Handel and Haydn Society (remaining performances December 2 at 7:30 pm and December 4 at 3 pm at Symphony Hall) is buoyant, trim, clear in utterance, light on its feet, and never mawkish, lumbering, or abstractly reverential. None of which should be surprising given that H&H has been operating on the historically informed side of things for almost four decades now.

But before then? In 1857 the chorus was made up of some 600 voices. At Symphony Hall this past Sunday there were 32, and the orchestra numbered just 30. That was a comforting sight, and though the program book was unforthcoming as to which version we were hearing (or for that matter whose particular scholarly edition), better that than another one of those legalistic tangles that discussions of the "real" Messiah so easily turn into.

The actual performance benefitted no end from Llewellyn’s here-and-now presence. Hovering over the notes was a sense of momentum and a steadily heightening emotional pitch; the allotted time span, two and three-quarter hours, seemed just right.

The opening orchestral Sinfony hinted at what was to come. Too often those anxious double-dotted figures, with almost as much silence as sound to them, come off as so many disruptive speed bumps. Here they were palpable intakes of breath. "What comes next?" they said.

If it was a high-end vocal tournament — one of Messiah’s immemorial attractions — you were looking forward to, the rewards were ample. Bass Kevin Short coped manfully with a part that requires a singer be agile and commanding. When a choice had to be made, he plumped for the latter. "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?" sounded angry as hell, mere neatness playing no part in it at all. The young Eritrean soprano Awet Andemichael, with a basic vocal coloration that was fast-spinning and half tart, half sweet, sped through her coloratura; her manner was ingenuous. By comparison mezzo Krista River was stylistic urbanity itself. No one on stage sang English half as beautifully, and she was especially canny at filling out her sound in those nether regions where Handel makes life so difficult for light-voiced altos. Whenever the line ascended, the sun came out. A treasurable artist. Tenor Nathan Granner had lots of opportunities to display a fiery animal vigor, and he seized them.

The choral singing was of solo quality throughout, and one of the quiet pleasures was hearing some ripping I’ll-be-darned details spring to the surface. In "All we like sheep" the chorus tossed off something that was both a bona fide ornament and a bona fide bleat. There were no long faces in this crowd.

_Richard Buell

"A performance extraordinary for its freshness, its rhythmic alertness, and its stupendous but unforced mastery of every technical demand," I wrote in March 2004, describing Garrick Ohlsson’s traversal of the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto with Robert Spano and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. "Big tunes emerged as touching, not sappy. Even in the most gigantic climaxes, Ohlsson’s playing never lacked clarity or nuance." I thought I’d have to wait a long time for another Rachmaninov performance to bowl me over in just this way. But along comes 35-year-old Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, who played her first concerto with the extraordinary Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Caracas when she was eight (she’ll be making her New York Philharmonic debut in March), and her Rachmaninov Second Concerto with Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic had those very qualities of unsentimental freshness, spontaneity, rhythmic vitality, and supreme technical mastery.

Montero plays with big, open-hearted tone that she can also scale back to the most delicate, scintillating flights of fantasy, or meditative quietude, which the orchestra at Sanders Theatre at times overwhelmed, though Zander’s warmth underplayed the tendency of conductors to turn this concerto into mere showpiece. He and Montero made me believe the concerto actually expresses complicated feelings: melancholy, passion, playful humor. The last movement’s famous "Full Moon and Empty Arms" theme had the lilt and lift of a dance rather than the mush of the song Tin Pan Alley turned it into. A special highlight was Bruce Creditor’s eloquent phrasing of the tender clarinet song in the slow movement, which Montero echoed with equal, unsappy inwardness.

The crowd went bananas. Montero returned for two encores, improvisations on tunes suggested by the audience: "I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" (in the style of Bach and Scarlatti, then Brubeck) and then, having asked for a Christmas song, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Rachmaninov turning into Gershwin).

Zander then offered Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s rarely performed Fifth Symphony, which he wrote in 1922, in the wake of the Great War. Mahleresque rustlings of nature turn into a horrific and riveting depiction of military onslaught (ending with the sound of distant drums coming from the balcony), with Creditor (once part of the Naumberg Award–winning Emmanuel Wind Quintet and Boston Symphony Orchestra personnel manager) again stealing the show in the plaintive clarinet lament at the end of the movement. The second movement seemed less compelling, more repetitive (yet another way Nielsen is a precursor of Shostakovich), but Zander and the orchestra made the strongest possible case.

Stephen Drury’s New England Conservatory new-music group, shivaree, with stupendous pianist Yukiko Takagi joining combinations of NEC undergraduates, MA candidates, and post-graduates, had its own share of exceptional playing. The stimulating program began with Sofia Gubaidulina’s inventive Concerto for Bassoon (Adam Smith) and Low Strings (three cellos, three basses). When Drury called John Luther Adams’s solitary and time-breaking waves, for four tam-tams, "hideously loud," some of us chose to listen from the lobby, from which we could see those remaining inside Williams Hall holding fingers in their ears. Carl Ruggles’s brief but powerful Mood: Prelude to an Imaginary Tragedy got a richly rugged performance from violinist Gabriel Boyers and pianist Tanya Blaich. Drury introduced Pierre Boulez’s bewitching and fiendish early Sonatine for Flute and Piano (1949) by saying it has "more notes per square inch than you can imagine." Takagi and flutist Jessi Rosinski not only played but also made me hang on every one of them.

Twice! Because two weeks later, the Boulez opened Drury’s Callithumpian Consort concert (his independent new-music group with many of the same personnel), and it felt even shapelier, since Takagi and Rosinski had already taught me the shape. Boulez’s radical dynamic and timbral veerings were followed by the eerie gossamer of György Ligeti’s 1969 Ramifications — Drury leading 12 string players, each playing a different part, half of them tuned a quarter-tone higher than the rest. This image of eternal inconclusiveness ends with a shocking (but satisfying) long one-note buzz on the solo bass violin joined by dog-whistle high-pitched violins and quiet pluckings before fading into nearly half a minute of complete silence.

Drury jumped another 20 years to Iannis Xenakis’s Epicycles (1989), a single-movement cello concerto with the impressive Benjamin Schwartz (who was just appointed assistant to BSO artistic administrator Anthony Fogg) and a small chamber orchestra (four strings, four winds, four brasses). Deep-rooted folkloric memories surface through the engaging 20th-century cacophony. It begins with a growly duet for cello and echoing bass before extended dark-toned solos for the cellist create tilted tunes one staccato note at a time.

The most recent piece, Paul Elwood’s Stanley Kubrick’s Mountain Home, which dates (appropriately) from 2001, mixes art song, modern chamber music, and hootenanny. The title comes from Elwood’s dream about looking into a canyon and seeing the cabin where Kubrick was born. Elwood wrote his own poetic text, including a spoken recitation of a paragraph of his mother’s 1982 lunar observation. Soprano Ilana Davidson’s clear bright voice was pure moonlight, but I had a hard time making out the words even as I was trying to read along. Elwood himself played banjo and sang a gravelly refrain; master fiddler Matt Combs played tunes originally recorded for this piece by the legendary C&W composer John Hartford.

The BSO itself has also been featuring contemporary American music in its recent concerts. The pre-Thanksgiving-weekend program was scheduled to celebrate landmark birthdays of two elder statesmen, Gunther Schuller (80) and George Perle (90), surrounding their pieces with familiar Mozart (the Haffner Symphony) and Debussy (La mer). But James Levine, perhaps responding to complaints that his concerts have been too long ("the possibility of overtaxing both the orchestra and the audience," as he wrote in his program note), decided to do the two 20th-century pieces on alternate evenings, unfortunately eliminating any radio broadcast of the Perle.

Perle’s 25-minute Transcendental Modulations (1993) apparently suffered some technical mishaps, though without a score at hand I couldn’t tell. On a first hearing, I found it hard to sort out the underlying structure of 12 tempo modulations. Still, I was hypnotized by the continuous unfolding of a texturally elegant almost-narrative emerging from and returning to dark silence, a fabulous Arabian Nights journey, including Sheherazade-like passages for solo violin, hints of a waltz, bouncy playfulness with stop-and-start double takes, ominous threats, and, above all, a pervasive sense of elegy, one theme recalling Tchaikovsky’s "None But the Lonely Heart."

Schuller’s earlier Spectra (1958) plays around with orchestral spaces, the instruments organized about the stage in five mixed chamber groups (each one combining strings, winds, and brasses), with two surrounding sections of strings and percussion. Nothing was where you expected it to be. By the time you figured out where the sounds were coming from, they were gone. It was like a trip to the zoo: first by day — roaring, bellowing, and nervous bleating from every direction; then by night — mysterious birdsongs (alto flute) and birdcalls (oboe) piercing a starry blackness. A devastating catastrophe leaves a wake of chirping and growling before the sudden final explosion. Levine has recorded this piece, but it breathes better in the hall, where the spatial relations add a crucial, otherwise imperceptible dimension. The performance I attended was on Schuller’s actual birthday, November 22, and he looked dapper in a natty yellow sports jacket as he received the warm round of applause.

The unprissy Mozart sprang to life from its very first bars, with their energetic octave leaps and soft, caressingly "bent" response. A clockwork Andante and a minuet with a slower-than-usual trio preceded the final zippy Presto. La mer (three "symphonic sketches" from 1905, only two years before Picasso’s breakthrough Demoiselles d’Avignon) had as many intersecting angles and cross-currents as overlapping waves; a missed, slightly sour trumpet "exit" opening night was a small blemish on the heroic brass annunciations. The second-movement "Play of the Waves" had a slithery shimmer. The finale, "Dialogues of the Wind and Sea," built to virtually martial excitement. The most beautiful playing was flutist Elizabeth Rowe’s pliant, insinuating siren song. The BSO program book quoted from the reviews for La mer’s 1907 American premiere, which the BSO played under the great Karl Muck. The Boston Advertiser’s Lewis C. Elson wrote, "We clung, like a drowning man, to the few fragments of the tonal wreck."

A week later, Levine conducted the East Coast premiere of a work the BSO commissioned with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, his gorgeous and loving tribute to his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Each of the five poems the composer selected from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets — poems praising his beloved, celebrating their love, fearing to lose her — "seemed to me," Lieberson writes, "to reflect a different face in love’s mirror." The scoring is transparent but inventive, complete with subtly seductive bossa nova maracas. Like the poems themselves, the music is both mysterious and open-hearted, with an old-fashioned, rapturous directness. Lieberson feels free to repeat a line or phrase or word. The opening words of the third song, "No estés lejos de mí un solo día" ("Don’t go far off, not even for a day," in poet Stephen Tapscott’s lovely translation), return with increasing urgency in the middle and at the end of the song. They’re a central image for the entire cycle, until the last song ("My love, if I die and you don’t — ,/My love, if you die and I don’t — "), about the "little infinity" of their time on earth together, arrives at an acceptance of the ongoingness of love even after death.

The opening song lists the poet’s reasons for loving this particular person (her eyes are the color of the moon; she moves like the air; she is "the bread the fragrant moon/kneads, sprinkling flour across the sky") and says he couldn’t love her without them. Hunt Lieberson’s wry, winking repetition of the phrase "Yo no te amaría" ("I couldn’t love you") was irresistible. The amplitude and prismatic colors of her sumptuous, insinuating voice, more beautiful, more knowing than ever, filled Symphony Hall. At the pre-concert talk, Lieberson spoke about the physicality of these songs, which I felt in every gesture Hunt Lieberson made: touching her heart, opening her hands in explanation ("You see?"), swaying to post-coital bossa nova rhythms. Singing doesn’t get any more beautiful, yet the following night she was even freer in feeling and in even more ravishing voice.

Neruda Songs joins a small list of memorable contemporary American love-song cycles: John Harbison’s Mottetti di Montale and North and South (both of which Hunt Lieberson has also performed), Yehudi Wyner’s On This Most Voluptuous Night (William Carlos Williams), Andy Vores’s acidic anti-romantic Six Songs on Poems by Margaret Atwood. Ovations followed, many hugs, many kisses. After all, this was all about love.

The concert began with a crisp, playful, and appropriately sinister/grotesque rendition of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche ("Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks"), horn players James Sommerville and Richard Sebring deserving their solo bows, and ended with a glowing, flowing, tender yet teasing and intricately detailed performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Levine really liberates his players, so expressive, characterful, three-dimensional playing came not only from the usual suspects — concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, oboist John Ferrillo, timpanist Timothy Genis — but also from harpist Ann Hobson Pilot and the often too-reticent clarinettist William R. Hudgins.

What better way of following songs about earthly love than with music that depicts the blissful transition from earth to heaven? Unfortunately, an illness in her family forced German soprano Dorothea Röschmann to cancel her second scheduled BSO debut in the very same piece. She was replaced on very short notice by American soprano Heidi Grant Murphy, whose wide-eyed wonderment singing the last-movement’s child’s-eye view of everyday life in Heaven (where Saint Luke slaughters the ox and Saint Martha cooks) was touching but vocally pinched and a little hard to hear. She sang it better with Zander and the Boston Philharmonic two years ago.

No classical-music critic ever had bigger shoes to fill than when Richard Dyer, three decades ago, stepped into Michael Steinberg’s at the Boston Globe. Now, no classical critic will have bigger shoes to fill than when Dyer leaves the Globe, as he has decided he will at the end of the 2005–2006 season. He turned our major daily’s arts pages into a powerful forum for high-level criticism and serious discussion. In recent years, he’s been fighting the national trend to minimize reviews and expand lifestyle features. Despite his tireless efforts, especially his ongoing, eloquent support of the music of our own time and our own place, the Globe’s classical coverage, in a city of unparalleled musical riches, has dwindled to a mere shadow of what Dyer made it. Music lovers and musicians (not to mention readers who enjoy good prose) all owe him a debt of gratitude. His literate, full-hearted voice in our day-to-day discourse about the arts will be badly missed. And personally, I’ll miss our dialogues in print and our usually hilarious and frequently naughty intermission chats.

But this is not an obit, except perhaps for an era. I look forward to reading my friend and colleague — I hope at even greater length — in other venues. Everyone in this community should wish him the best in all his future endeavors.


Issue Date: December 2 - 8, 2005
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