E-Mail This Article to a Friend Glass wear (continued)

AFTER DECADES OF ABSENCE, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos now makes frequent and welcome returns leading the BSO. His two latest programs were a compelling Brahms evening, with three rarely performed short choral works preceding the not-rare-enough First Symphony, and an evening devoted to two works inspired by Cervantes’ Don Quixote: the first BSO go at Manuel de Falla’s delicious 1923 puppet opera, El retablo del maese Pedro ("Master Pedro’s Puppet Show"), the episode in which our hero gets carried away and wrecks a puppet show in his attempt to rescue the puppet heroine, and Richard Strauss’s popular 1898 tone poem Don Quixote ("Fantastic variations on a theme of knightly character"), which depicts 10 familiar incidents from the book (Don Q attacking the windmill and a herd of sheep, his conversations with Sancho Panza, his death).

The Falla was irresistible, with a staged puppet show enchantingly performed by the Bob Brown Puppets: six on-stage players, all in black, manipulating the arms and legs of the lifesize "real" characters, or hidden behind the puppet-show stage controlling the small puppet characters Don Quixote is watching. There was even a tiny puppet butterfly darting around and alighting on the tiny arm of the puppet heroine in her prison tower. Three singers, not in costume, sang the voices of Don Quixote, Master Pedro, and his boy narrator from music stands in the midst of the small orchestra. Soprano Awet Andemicael, who according to a friend who’s heard her has a lovely crystalline tone, was completely winning as Falla’s coarse little-boy narrator. (The composer wanted a boy soprano whose voice would be "nasal and rather forced . . . rough in expression and exempt from all lyrical feeling.") Tenor Peter Bronder was an excellent Master Pedro and New Zealand baritone Jonathan Lemalu a stirring Don Quixote. The orchestra was in its prime (Elizabeth Rowe the witty flute, Thomas Rolfs the clarion trumpet), and Frühbeck helped (or allowed) the players to scintillate.

Strauss’s Don Quixote is a feast for the orchestra, which turns into a lumbering windmill and bleating, cacophonous sheep that are increasingly menacing. Two bassoons become a pair of chattering Benedictine monks. John Ferrillo’s plangent oboe embodied Don Q’s heavenly vision of Dulcinea. Mike Roylance had a stunning turn on tenor tuba. BSO violist Steven Ansell deserved a best-supporting-actor nomination for the way he captured the touching banality of Sancho Panza’s words of wisdom. Cellist Steven Isserlis was Don Quixote, but his distracting body language was more emotive than his cello. I’ve admired his work with the BSO, but here he didn’t move me. The death of Don Quixote ought to break our hearts — we’re listening to a soul. We got fine musicianship, but not more. Frühbeck was the real master here, letting no detail escape him yet never losing the narrative sweep. After the Falla, the Strauss sounded more Viennese than Spanish, but Frühbeck even managed to give Strauss’s waltz a Latin lilt.

The week before, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus was the hero, singing from memory, as always, and with great warmth three contrasting Brahms choral settings of poems by Schiller (Nänie — a "lament" for the mortality of all things beautiful), Goethe (a turbulent Gesang des Parzen — "Song of the Fates" — about the power the gods have over us), and Hölderlin (the more serene Schicksalslied — "Song of Destiny"). The First Symphony combined driving inexorability, melting tenderness, and nobility. The performance dared to be sonically edgy, even nasty, as well as lovely. I’m not sure I learned anything new about the symphony, but it was true to Brahms — and gripping.

"I’VE NEVER HAD SO MUCH FUN!" exclaimed Benjamin Zander to the well wishers in the Jordan Hall lobby after, of all things, his performance with the Boston Philharmonic of Bruckner’s monumental Eighth Symphony. "Fun" isn’t how most people think of the high-serious, otherworldly Bruckner. But Zander’s Bruckner was fun — in the sense that there was such delight and buoyancy (and variety) in how the orchestra responded to the complicated and sometimes unexpected way Bruckner put the pieces of this enormous work together. For the first three movements, Zander allowed the musical phrases to unfold like a force of nature: stop-action cinematography of flowers opening, continuous but also weirdly discontinuous, reeling between spiritual exhilaration and depressed yet serene soul searching. Then in the last movement, the discontinuities became more frantic. Here was Bruckner the architect of the grand design, yet also desperate to find the right holes in which to put the put his pegs, round, square, or polygonal, juxtaposing not only the themes within the movement but, like Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony, bringing back themes from all the movements and connecting them — which in the end he does — triumphantly.

Zander is a paradox. When he started conducting Mahler, nearly 30 years ago, before Mahler became his professional project, he treated the then relatively unperformed composer less as a symphonist than as a novelist, finding complex psychological subtleties in nuances of phrasing and extremes of tempo and volume. More recently, Zander’s Mahler has inched closer to the center. Good, energetic performances, but the composer was beginning to sound more conventional, and more predictable. I found myself liking the music less.

I don’t think of Bruckner as particularly psychological at all, yet for once I was hearing music that sounded as if it had been composed by someone obsessed and going on at great — and inspired — length in an urgent search for spiritual release. It was serious, profound, but also fun, the way Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or Shakespearean tragedy can be fun.

The orchestra was sensational — brilliant brass work from trumpets, horns, and "Wagner tubas," timpani (Edward Meltzer), harp (Martha Moor), flute (Kathleen Boyd), and clarinet (Thomas Hill). The almost uncanny Peggy Pearson, whose oboe didn’t have any extended solos, came to be the personal voice, the isolated human soul crying in the wilderness, responding to the cosmic happenings in heartbreaking lament, in poignant resignation, in quiet, glowing joy.

There were some rough edges. In the tonal blur of the slow movement, for example, it was hard to distinguish the crucial syncopated string phrase, which returns as a big brass expostulation at the end. Chicken feed. Minor glitches in a thrilling achievement. It was the old Ben Zander. Welcome back!