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Agonies and ecstasies
Michael Tilson Thomas’s Mahler, Paavo Berglund’s Sibelius, Teatro Lirico d’Europa, Boston Lyric Opera, and Andreas Scholl
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ


Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, was once a familiar figure on the Boston landscape: assistant, associate, then principal guest conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and later director of the ill-fated summer classical festival at Great Woods. Many people thought that with his stellar pedigree (working with Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Copland), his bravura technique, and adventurous programming, he should have been given the appointment Seiji Ozawa got. But he seems to have found an ideal home in San Francisco. He and his Grammy-winning group (Best Classical Album of 2003 for their Mahler Third Symphony) blew into town March 22 for a FleetBoston Celebrity Series concert and blew the audience away.

They started with the Boston premiere of a piece they had commissioned from John Adams: My Father Knew Charles Ives, a three-movement tribute to the composer who brought American music into the 20th century and to Adams’s New Hampshire birthplace. Adams was present and received a warm ovation. But after Nixon in China the week before, I thought the new piece owed too much to Ives (the overlapping of events, the Americana of marching bands and jazz bands, anthems, misty lakes, and bells knocking against wooden docks) without becoming sufficiently Adams. When Stravinsky took on Pergolesi or Tchaikovsky, the music sounded like no one but Stravinsky; for its first two movements, Adams here sounds too much like Ives. His familiar minimalist style returns in the third movement ("less about Ives," he says, "and more about John Adams"), but compared with the best of Nixon or his Violin Concerto, Adams’s minimalism here sounded merely facile.

There was nothing facile about the rest of the program. Tilson Thomas gave us a Mahler Fifth Symphony that bristled with fresh insights and gloried in telling detail. One key to any Mahler symphony is juxtaposition. Mahler keeps bumping one kind of music against another. A funeral march suddenly becomes a love song of aching nostalgia, which in turn becomes an explosion of wild grief, until the march returns. Each new expression undercuts the last. Excessive passions are tempered by the relentless irony of their interaction. MTT was a master of transition — the symphony was almost about transition. Moment to moment, for an hour and a quarter, we were kept on our toes. It was impossible to be complacent, because the performers never were.

The orchestra sounded energized yet played with refinement. Even in the most ferocious, cacophonous outbursts, the various interweaving lines remained distinct and audible. Because each episode was defined — outlined — as a dramatic moment, an event, it was easy to hear the way Mahler connected them: how the opening theme for solo trumpet re-emerged later tapped out on the timpani; how the floating love song of the famous Adagietto (here taken at a deliberate yet buoyant tempo, and played with great tenderness) speeds up as part of the celebratory finale.

There were numerous surprises. One of my favorite moments in the Mahler Fifth comes when the funeral march turns into a kind of death tango — morbid and lubricious. Tilson Thomas turned that tango into more of a keening lament. I didn’t like it better, but it gave me something new to think about. In his program note, Michael Steinberg talks about the "joyous vitality" of the long Scherzo. I was listening for that exuberance. But for Tilson Thomas, the Scherzo, with its alternately boisterous and elegant country dances, was first dreamy, then demented, swirling — much more complicated and fiendish, so that the heavenly Adagietto, next, was all the more a release from the nightmarish Walpurgisnacht. At every moment, MTT and SFO were a single entity.

PAAVO BERGLUND, the Finnish conductor 15 years MTT’s senior, and now visibly frail, made his belated BSO debut in an unusual and demanding program: early works by Benjamin Britten (his delicately lean, swooning arrangement of the "floral" movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony and his 1939 Violin Concerto, with its underlying Spanish rhythms a Requiem for the anti-Franco forces); followed by Sibelius’s last two symphonies, a Berglund specialty (he’s recorded all seven of his countryman’s symphonies three times).

The violin soloist in the Britten was Frank Peter Zimmermann, elegant and heartfelt, mowing down the technical challenges without simplifying Britten’s complex mixture of satire and elegy. The audience wouldn’t let him go, so he played, for the fun of it, Paganini’s insanely difficult variations on "God Save the King" (left-hand pizzicatos, trills, triple-stops, insectlike sul ponticello playing so squeakily high on the violin bridge it provoked giggles).

In the bewitching Sibelius Sixth, Berglund made the lilting folk songs and dances of the Finnish countryside seem to emanate from the rustlings of Nature itself. He caught the way Sibelius keeps the four movements hanging in the air, unresolved until the symphony’s very last notes, just as he captured the ebb and flow of the ever-changing but ultimately heroic and elegiac single-movement Seventh, ending with an astonishing, all-embracing chord. The BSO has had two notable Sibelius champions, Serge Koussevitzky and Colin Davis. Now it has a third. The orchestra was magnificent, and the players expressed their gratitude by remaining seated, applauding the maestro, even when he asked them to stand.

THE WEEK BEFORE, I’d been disappointed in the German mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier’s detached rendition of Wagner’s ecstatic Wesendonk Lieder. But I got to hear her again in Chicago, singing Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer ("Poem of Love and the Sea") with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In French she did everything I wish she had done in German. She brought to this unusual orchestral triptych about the death of love both verbal nuance and a surprising intensity of melancholy, and she was in even more glamorous voice. She fleshed out the contours outlined by the dashing young Russian conductor Andrey Boreyko, music director of the Winnipeg Symphony and conductor designate of the Hamburg Symphony, who also led splendid performances of Franck’s gorgeous tone poem Le chausseur maudit ("The Accursed Huntsman") and Prokofiev’s brilliant Fifth Symphony. The BSO ought to line him up soon.

I also heard the 35-year-old Polish-Hungarian pianist Piotr Anderszewski — one of the increasingly rare piano performers of Bach, whom he plays with as much dynamic flexibility and tonal beauty as he plays Chopin. He was last here in 2002, playing Bartók with the BSO. We need to hear him in recital.

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Issue Date: April 9 - 15, 2004
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