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Veterans’ day
Frühbeck de Burgos at the BSO, Russell Sherman and Wha Kyung Byun, Frederica von Stade and Samuel Ramey; plus the Cantata Singers
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ


This past week, some veteran musicians lit up the Boston musical scene. The BSO completed its best season in years (30?) with the return of the 70-year-old Spanish conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (a Burgos native) for the second time this season. In January, he led Berlioz’s tender and touching Christmas oratorio, L’enfance du Christ. This time he offered sexier Berlioz — the early masterpiece La mort de Cléopâtre (a piece whose structure and harmonics were so original, the Conservatoire judges wouldn’t award it the Prix de Rome, but it was so good, they couldn’t award the prize to anyone else) — and the sexy complete score for Ravel’s famous 1912 ballet for Diaghilev, Daphnis et Chloé, which was first danced by Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina.

In Cleopatra’s "Scène lyrique," Berlioz combines the grandeur of a Racine monologue with his own musical sensuality. The refrain, in which the dying queen recalls her past magnificence, rising "like Venus on the bosom of the sea" (a theme Berlioz recycled in the more familiar Roman Carnival Overture), presages the gorgeous melodic contours of his later love music. Cleopatra’s gasping death throes are among his most startling dramatic effects.

It’s a superb vehicle for a heroic mezzo-soprano. Jennie Tourel, Janet Baker, and — with the BSO — Jessye Norman all had success as Cleopatra. Frühbeck’s mezzo was a young German singer who has studied at Indiana University, Nadja Michael. She looks like a model: willowy and blonde. Unfortunately, her voice has a major wobble, and only her steely top notes had any forward thrust. She swallowed her words and dissipated the rhythms that were so alertly iterated by Frühbeck and the orchestra. A friend confessed that he had lost his place and couldn’t find it again because Michael’s diction was so mushy.

Her most striking moment came after the piece was over, when she turned to leave the stage — revealing what only the musicians sitting behind her could know, that the back of her clinging white gown was cut about as low as the back of a dress could be cut — maybe even lower. An audible gasp arose from the audience, followed by numerous intermission references to Cleopatra’s asp.

The sensual treat was the Ravel. Daphnis, with its broad palette of orchestral colors and wordless choral ejaculations, might be the most elegant piece of vulgar music ever written. It’s a work the BSO has owned since the early days of Karl Muck, Pierre Monteux, and Serge Koussevitzky, who performed only the second suite. The complete hour-long ballet was introduced by Charles Munch in 1955. Bernard Haitink conducted the chastest version, Seiji Ozawa the loudest, Pierre Boulez the most insinuating. Frühbeck’s throbbed with excitement and built to orgasmic climaxes without rushing. He maintained Ravel’s rhythmic flair and reveled in each hue and tint of the kaleidoscope. The orchestra was truly virtuosic, and Elizabeth Ostling, acting principal flute, deserved the special round of applause for her enchanting performance of the famous flute solo.

PIANISTS Russell Sherman and Wha Kyung Byun celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary in public in a special free recital a week ago Wednesday, a high point of the Jordan Hall Centennial Concert Series. Sherman is surely Boston’s most exploratory and compelling pianist. He’s not a composer (as far as I’m aware), yet he plays as if he were composing on the spot. Byun is better known as a teacher than a performer, though her occasional public appearances are cherishable. Their joint appearances are all too few and far between.

They chose a daunting and surprising program, beginning with Schumann’s seldom-heard Andante and Variations (Bostonians last heard it in its original version, including two cellos and horn, played by Garrick Ohlsson and Robert Spano with the BSO Chamber Players). The evening’s pleasures began with Schumann’s densely chromatic opening and the lilting overlapping ripples that opening releases. Everything Byun and Sherman played, beginning with the Schumann, had a great expansiveness of reference. Six years after Chopin’s famous B-flat-minor Sonata funeral march, Schumann incorporated a similar one (perhaps an acknowledgment to Chopin), then the music of a grand toast. Sherman especially emphasized the almost Shoenbergian harmonies. And each variation made a new and enlarging point.

Busoni’s delightful Duettino concertante is a two-piano rendering of the joyous Finale of Mozart’s F-major Piano Concerto, K.459, which anticipates the teasing comic duet between Papageno and Papagena in Die Zauberflöte. I’m not at all sure who won the duel between Byun’s tickling trills and Sherman’s solid chords.

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Issue Date: May 14 - 20, 2004
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