E-Mail This Article to a Friend Good start But some disappointments compromise the high level BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

If every upcoming concert were on the level of the latest installment of Emmanuel Music’s Schumann series, 2005 would be a wonderful year. Pianist Judith Gordon appeared in all four pieces: Schumann’s Second Sonata and Presto Passionato (his original last movement for that sonata); the rarely played Ballszenen ("Scenes at a Ball"), nine national dances for piano four-hands, in collaboration with pianist Kayo Iwama; and the song cycle Kernerlieder, with baritone James Maddalena. The sonata is ambitious, complicated, and beautiful. Gordon’s performance captured its melodic and rhapsodic qualities and its structural clarity. Her tone was sparkling, though the hollow acoustics of Emmanuel Church tended to blur it. After intermission, it was fascinating to hear Schumann’s first version of the finale, which is a virtual perpetual-motion machine with no let-up — but less firmly structured than the later rondo. Gordon’s rippling fingerwork was breathtaking — and here every note sounded.

Ballszenen, the late Schumann scholar John Daverio says in his biography of the composer, was intended for talented amateurs. Evidently extremely dexterous ones — though the short dances are not equally inspired. The quietly lilting first waltz is the best. Gordon and Iwama were animated and impressively (95 percent) coordinated.

The great event, however, was the Kernerlieder. Maddalena (probably best known for creating the part of Richard Nixon in John Adams’s Nixon in China, and for his major roles in the original Peter Sellars productions of Don Giovanni, Cosí fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro, and Handel’s Orlando and Giulio Cesare) was in distressingly rough voice a few years ago. At Emmanuel, handsomely slimmed down, he sounded as good as ever, from bottomless, reverberating low notes to an uncanny high falsetto in the voice of a young girl who wants to become a nun. He’s one of the truly great American lieder singers — on the level of celebrated German baritones like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Thomas Quasthoff. He’s also an empathetic artist, a powerful actor who never becomes "actory." And in these songs that mingle despair and determination, where wandering away from home is the only consolation (wild forests are more comfort than tame meadows), he was moving and inward, capturing each emotional nuance and contradiction. This was a magnificent performance of a seldom-performed masterpiece, and Gordon’s sensitive and radiant accompaniment made her a full partner.

INTERMEZZO, a chamber-opera group that began its third season with its sixth (!) world premiere, is a company you want to like. Composer David Paul Gibson’s Verlaine and Rimbaud has a great subject, the mutually inspiring but destructive relationship between two of the 19th century’s greatest French poets — the conservative and successful (and married) Paul Verlaine and the radical Arthur Rimbaud. (Another attempt to deal with this subject is Agnieszka Holland’s 1995 film Total Eclipse, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud.) Gibson’s music is more Verlaine than Rimbaud, in the conservative tradition of Giancarlo Menotti (whom he assisted at the Spoleto Festival), but more generic and without the memorable tunes (except when he quotes from Fauré in the climactic dream sequence). His libretto veers between the banality of abstractions ("Great genius comes at a great cost") and the banality of soap opera ("There is no ‘us’ — there never has been"). (Intermezzo begins its next season with the real Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief.)

Gibson was also responsible for the staging, which focused more on blocking and theatrical gestures (the poets circling a table or tossing pages of paper around the stage) than on depth of characterization. Baritone — and company director — John Wittlesey was a sympathetic Verlaine, tenor Aaron Sheehan (who had the best voice) a sexy/smirky Rimbaud, full of attitude. Soprano Kaja Schuppert, thin-voiced and vocally strained, was Verlaine’s needy wife, Mathilde, and the strong mezzo Sharon Brown was her embattled mother. In some ways, the most vivid work came from musical director James Busby, elegant at the piano, and violinist Stanislav Antonevich.

It was a serious mistake to precede the opera with "Verlaine," "Rimbaud," and "Mathilde" singing settings of the two poets by Fauré, Debussy, and Benjamin Britten. Wearing their costumes, the three singers were supposed to be doing these songs "in character," but this music is harder than Gibson’s, and these texts are far subtler than his libretto. Sheehan made the best impression, but everyone’s French sounded high-schoolish, and the performances remained un-characterized, except for Busby, who played like a French angel.