LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Night music

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:02:38 GMT

The Pops aces Sondheim
Classic musicals make substantial enterprises —this is now the best thing the Pops does.

SERENADE US: Isn’t a Broadway musical the sort of thing the Pops is supposed to do?

Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music — his musical version of Ingmar Bergman’s bittersweet comedy of mismatched partners, Smiles of the Summer Night — is the second full-length Broadway show that Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops have undertaken. (Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel was one of last season’s highlights.) This is now the best thing the Pops does. Classic musicals make substantial enterprises — as opposed to soft-serve versions of pop music never intended for a symphony orchestra, skimpy tributes, and spots for guest celebrities, with barely a nod to the gems of lighter classical and “semi-classical” music that were Arthur Fiedler’s specialty. Concert “encores” of Broadway shows have become a staple of New York theater. Why not Boston? Especially since both the conductor and the orchestra are so good at it. Lockhart really gets what makes a Broadway score work, how it alternates the lively and the lyrical. Sondheim’s delicious waltz rhythms overflow with insinuating and infectious solos for winds, and there’s a great solo cello part, so the orchestra actually seemed to enjoy playing this vivid music in its colorful arrangements.

The stars were supposed to be Tony-winning Christine Ebersole and her partner in the Broadway adaptation of Grey Gardens, Mary-Louise Wilson. But the day before the first of the three Pops performances, Wilson — who was to play the elderly Madame Armfeldt (the role created by Hermione Gingold) — bowed out “due to a scheduling conflict.” She was replaced by Boston stalwart Bobbie Steinbach, who brought down the house with her droll, world-weary reminiscence of her illicit but elegant past, delivering “Liaisons” (“I acquired some position, plus a tiny Titian”) in a deep Gingold-like baritone.

Ebersole was dithery and actressy as her daughter Désirée, the fading yet glamorous star of a Swedish touring stock company who still has feelings for an old lover, the lawyer and widower Frederick Egerman (Ron Raines, the only cast member with enough diction to override Symphony Hall’s mushy sound system). Eleven months before the story begins, he remarried, and he’s still infatuated with his young wife, Anne, even though, as he admits in the satirical “You Must Meet My Wife,” she is “unfortunately still a virgin.” Désirée’s current lover is a jealous and narcissistic dragoon, Count Carl-Magnus, whose wife, Charlotte, is so besotted that she’s willing to help him with his extra-marital affairs (“Every day a little death”). In the end, Anne runs off with Egerman’s repressed divinity-student son, Désirée dumps the count, and she and Egerman are left with each other, a little more self-knowing and, perhaps, a little more in love than before. Ebersole’s touching version of “Send In the Clowns” (which, in a documentary, Sondheim once introduced as “a medley of my greatest hit”), at Lockhart’s unhurried yet urgent tempo, was the emotional climax it needed to be.

Grand finales

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:42:14 GMT

The Cantata Singers’ Weill retrospective, Mark Morris leading Dido , Chorus pro Musica’s Carmen
Jeffrey Rink has just ended his 18th and final season as music director of Chorus pro Musica. He’ll be missed.

CARMEN Robert Honeysucker, here with Victoria Livengood, made Escamillo’s “Toreador Song”
the song of seduction that Bizet intended.

Most people probably think of the Cantata Singers as specializing in early choral music, especially Bach, forgetting how much 20th-century and contemporary music director David Hoose has focused on. This season’s “Unveiling Weill” spotlit Kurt Weill, the concerts ranging from Boston premieres of rarely heard works (like the 1929 radio cantata Der Lindberghflug — ”The Lindbergh Flight” — and Die Propheten, an extended section of Weill’s ambitious Biblical epic Der Weg der Verheißung|The Eternal Road) to delicious performances of his most famous songs, some preceding the official program or following intermission. At the final concert last month, soprano Megan Beltran’s poignant rendering of “Fennimore’s Song” — about the humiliation of being a poor relation, from Der Silbersee|The Silver Sea (1932-’33) — made me want to hear the entire opera. The major Weill on that program was the scintillating, characterful Symphony No. 2 (1934). Hoose called it “as close to unfettered joy as Weill can get,” a surprising description of this nervy, restless piece with its echoes of Silbersee, dourly lamenting funeral march, and ominous undercurrent of drumming, though also with a gorgeously overflowing love theme (introduced here by oboist Peggy Pearson). Is the ending festive or desperate?

All season, Hoose paired Weill with composers he evolved from, offered alternatives to, or stimulated: Brahms, Schoenberg, Dallapiccola, Busoni, Orff. We got the world premiere of Lior Navok’s Slavery Documents 3: And the Trains Kept Coming . . . (a Cantata Singers commission, dealing with the Holocaust), and, on the final program, the Boston premiere of Charles Fussell’s High Bridge — A Choral Symphony After Poems by Hart Crane — four extended sections of “The Bridge” plus the visionary “Atlantis,” which Fussell added after the first performance in 2003.

Fussell’s score has an old-fashioned romantic fervor and welcoming tonality — a knowing counterpart to Crane’s intensely rhetorical musicality. “The Harbor Dawn” begins with quiet chiming and then a wash of sound; two lovers are in bed (soprano Karyl Ryczek and tenor William Hite, though surely Crane’s bedmate was a sailor he’d picked up). “Cutty Sark” is an edgier, extroverted folk comedy of tall tales (delivered with gusto by baritone David Kravitz) that turns into something more mysterious and ends with the chorus humming and the words disappearing into the horizon. An extended orchestral “portrait” of Crane is the heart of the piece, but my favorite section was probably the haunting “Indiana,” given mezzo-soprano Janna Baty’s amplitude and luscious vocalism and the glistening pointillism of vibraphone, harp, and celesta. High Bridge now has two endings: “Virginia” — chimes, gong, drum rolls — is a big-finish Scherzo but not the full resolution that “Atlantis,” with its ecstatic repetitions and eerie final diminuendo, represents. I can’t imagine a performance more committed or powerful.

Maestro!

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:31:42 GMT

Interview: Mark Morris picks up the baton
Next week, the Celebrity Series of Boston brings back Mark Morris’s dance setting of Henry Purcell’s 17th-century English opera Dido and Aeneas .

Next week, the Celebrity Series of Boston brings back Mark Morris’s dance setting of Henry Purcell’s 17th-century English opera Dido and Aeneas. Many Morris admirers regard it as his greatest work. He originally danced two of the major roles: Dido, Queen of Carthage, who falls in love with the Trojan prince Aeneas and kills herself when he abandons her; and Dido’s nemesis, the evil Sorceress. Now a different dancer plays both roles on alternate nights. And Morris himself will lead the Orchestra and Chorus of Emmanuel Music, the first time he’s conducted in Boston.

After you stopped dancing in Dido and Aeneas, you had a revival in which Amber Darragh danced Dido and Bradon McDonald danced the Sorceress. Now each of them is doing both roles in the same performance. why do you think it’s necessary that one dancer play both roles?
It makes more sense. When they split the roles, I wasn’t sure if either of them could pull it off. But they more than proved they were each capable of doing the whole piece. It’s better for continuity — it’s over in a second. I like that whirling activity of one person getting worn out by the end of it.

How important do you regard the gender of the dancer in these roles?
It doesn’t matter to me. It has to do with who is great at it. I choreographed Dido on a woman and the Sorceress on a man. The poor things never got to do it. I learned the parts from that, me looking at it and deciding what should happen.

Many critics call you dance’s most musical choreographer. What do you think they mean by that? In what ways do you think of yourself as musical?
Musical is a trick question. I’m not sure what it means. It used to be a secret code for homosexual, and I’m proud to claim that. That term is used both to damn and to praise. I like to think it’s because I have great taste in music and a great sense of music. My choreography is always considering the structure and flow of the music. That’s what I hope it means. I have no problem with gorgeous dances to gorgeous music. People say I’m “slavish” to music. I told a critic years ago to look at a dance as if it were from a culture with which he was unfamiliar. Then you’re not so horrified by the fact that we sometimes dance to the beat. We work really really hard to master the techniques of rhythms, line, flow. It’s what the music tells us to do. I don’t expect other choreographers to do what I do. Good dances don’t have to resemble what I do.

Epic undertaking

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:26:59 GMT

Berlioz’s Les Troyens at the BSO; Opera Boston attempts Verdi’s Ernani
The act four sequence of quintet, septet, and love duet is non-stop musical orgasm.

MORE ORATORIO THAN OPERA So James Levine decided to program Les Troyens in concert,
and the result was overwhelming.

I just got home and I’m still shaking. Along with about 2000 other concertgoers, I spent this Sunday afternoon and evening at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s full performance of Berlioz’s epic Les Troyens — his operatic dramatization of Virgil’s sprawling story of the Trojan War and its aftermath, one part dealing with the fall of Troy, the other with the Trojans at Carthage and centering on the doomed love affair between Aeneas, the surviving Trojan prince, and Dido, the widowed queen of Carthage. Les Troyens is one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of opera, and it has some of Berlioz’s most adventurous, powerful, and unbelievably gorgeous music. The act four sequence of quintet, septet, and love duet is non-stop musical orgasm (which is what it’s supposed to represent). In 1972, Sarah Caldwell presented the first complete American staging. This was Boston’s first chance to hear it since.

James Levine has led Les Troyens numerous times; that includes two Metropolitan Opera productions, the last of which, in 2003, featured the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s towering Dido and Ben Heppner’s glorious Aeneas. (Their love duet had some of the most sublime singing I’ve ever heard.) But this BSO performance may have been even closer to his heart. He seems to have solved all his problems with the orchestra, which was with him every inch of the way, “the way” encompassing some five hours of music separated by a dinner break. And John Oliver’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus outdid even itself in precision, dramatic responsiveness, and passion. There were separate evenings devoted to each part. But this complete performance was the one the true Berlioz lovers came to be overwhelmed by.

At Levine’s press conference for the 2008–2009 BSO season a week ago Monday, a highlight of which is Verdi’s brooding political opera, Simon Boccanegra, the question came up about opera in concert. We enjoy opera on the radio and on CDs, he replied, so why not in concert, especially if it’s an opera with powerful orchestral scoring rather than a lot of scenic effects or dramatic action you want to see play out. Les Troyens certainly fits that category. Berlioz’s own libretto, borrowing some radiant poetic language from Shakespeare, seems almost more oratorio-like than operatic. (It’s not in “scenes” but in “tableaux.”) Caldwell’s staging was memorable, but the two inadequate Met productions distracted from rather than added to the experience. At a day-long symposium at Harvard, Levine talked about how much more vivid the Trojan Horse of our imagination is than any stage image could be.

On (and off) track

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:55:32 GMT

Boston Lyric Opera’s Seraglio , BU’s Barbiere di Siviglia , Andy Vores’s No Exit , the BPO’s Bartók and Brahms
It’s an expensive, elegant set, a lovingly detailed theatrical reproduction of railway cars on the Orient Express, the famous train connecting Paris and Istanbul.

THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO: What kind of harem is located aboard the Orient Express?

Last Friday’s Boston Globe Arts & Performance section devoted (wasted?) an entire page to color photos of the set designed in 2002 by Allen Moyers (who’s not mentioned) for Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (“The Abduction from the Seraglio,” or in plainer English, “The Harem Rescue”) — a production shared by six opera companies including Boston Lyric Opera, whose current English-language revival is at the Shubert Theatre through May 6. It’s an expensive, elegant set, a lovingly detailed theatrical reproduction of railway cars on the Orient Express, the famous train connecting Paris and Istanbul. It would be a terrific set for Murder on the Orient Express or some spy story.

But it doesn’t serve Mozart’s youthful masterpiece of farce and high-minded ethics. The best comedy is based on logic so absolute it becomes absurd; the more seriously the characters take their plight, the funnier the ramifications. But putting on a train an opera about a Spanish nobleman trying to rescue his lady from a harem forces it into a false absurdity. Belmonte’s repeated question — “Is this the Pasha Selim’s house?” — makes no sense. (In 1991, BLO had the equally cockamamie idea of setting Rossini’s Cinderella opera on a boat.) We should be feeling the danger of characters in a powerless position. Can the Pasha’s threats to execute the lovers carry any weight if they’re en route to Paris? The elaborate rescue scene itself, a long stretch without any music, is one of the production’s few dead spots.

Let’s get the worst over with. The aspect of James Robinson’s stage business that drives me crazy (as it did in BLO’s L’elisir d’amore earlier this season) is that he doesn’t trust the music. At the most inopportune times, someone is invariably distracting us from what should be our center of attention. The most moving moment in the opera is Konstanze’s great aria “Martern aller Arten” (“Torments unrelenting” in the Andrew Porter English translation BLO uses), in which she heroically refuses to capitulate to the Pasha’s threats — which here consist of silks, furs, jewels, and perfume! While she’s singing about facing death, Osmin, the Pasha’s harem keeper, enters with a large hookah, and Konstanze’s servant, Blonde, pours Konstanze’s leftover champagne into her own glass and chug-a-lugs it during the long climactic high note. Can this be the right place for an easy laugh?

Orpheus in the afterworld

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:34:11 GMT

Harbison and Mahler at the BSO, and the return of Dubravka Tomsic
Tomsic’s last Boston recital was four years ago. We can’t afford to be without her this long.

THE VOCAL AFTERLIFE: Anne Sofie von Otter wasn’t an ideal Earth Mother, and Nathan Gunn
gave us monotonous Milosz, but Kate Lindsey embodied Louise Glück’s Eurydice.

On paper, it seemed like a good idea to pair John Harbison’s big new BSO commission — Symphony No. 5, which incorporates settings of poems about Orpheus by the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, Pulitzer-winning former poet laureate Louise Glück, and Rainer Maria Rilke — with Mahler’s late “song-symphony, Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”). It’s a neat package. Each requires two singers, and each deals with large “life questions.” But perhaps music director James Levine underestimated the ambition and the power of the Harbison. In performance, they were less complementary than competitive. After the half-hour-plus Harbison, I didn’t want to deal with an even longer vocal-symphonic work in a similar elegiac vein, even if it is one of my favorite pieces of music and I’ve admired the way Levine has conducted it. The two mezzo-sopranos in these pieces are also singing together in the next BSO program, Berlioz’s epic Trojan War opera, Les Troyens. Was having them appear in two back-to-back concerts the real backstory for this awkward programming?

I found the Harbison thrilling, though (or because) it’s quite an unusual piece. The first movement, about as long as the other two put together, is a setting of Milosz’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” his personal modernization of the Orpheus myth (in an eloquent English translation he did with Robert Hass). An orchestral prelude begins with a wild upward swing, a heaving cry of grief; then there’s sudden quiet as the baritone intones: “Standing on flagstones at the entrance to Hades.” The vocal setting is a stark recitative, surrounded by a swirl of atmospheric and psychological orchestral responses to the poem. Snarling muted trombones reflect “the headlights of cars [that] flared and dimmed” as Orpheus hesitates at the “glass-panelled door” to the underworld. He remembers Eurydice calling him “a good man” — that shimmering echo is then punctured by the reality that “He did not quite believe it,” because “Lyric poets/Usually have — as he knew — cold hearts./It is like a medical condition./Perfection in art/Is given in exchange for such affliction.”

All over again

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:17:48 GMT

Brahms from Levine and Kissin, Emmanuel’s Bach B-minor Mass, the Cantata Singers’ Kurt Weill cabaret
The Boston Symphony Orchestra program for last week’s four concerts was a familiar one.

BRAHMS BOY? Evgeny Kissin played with phenomenal dexterity and large-scale grandeur, but the
reflective and searching nature of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto eluded him.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra program for last week’s four concerts was a familiar one: a Brahms symphony (the Third) was followed by one or the other of Brahms’s two piano concertos. These works, in similar configurations, have all been heard at Symphony Hall within the last 18 months. Yet the concerts were sold out and greeted with vigorous enthusiasm. Even individual movements got their own smattering of applause. This series was organized to prepare for a new EMI recording, though who is actually going to release it and when is now in some doubt.

No doubt about the source of the excitement: BSO maestro James Levine was leading superstar Russian virtuoso Evgeny Kissin, at 36 still a romantic figure with his stiff Old World demeanor and haunted pallor. And if anyone alive today is equal to Brahms’s technical demands, it’s Kissin.

At the opening concert on April 8, however, the symphony plodded, and though Kissin played the late B-flat concerto, No. 2, with phenomenal dexterity and large-scale grandeur, he seemed to have no clue about the reflective and searching nature of the music. The piece sounded like Rachmaninov. The Andante is one of the glories of Brahms. It opens with a great cello solo, which Jules Eskin played with ravishing and glowing warmth. But in this most emotionally and intellectually but least technically challenging section of the concerto, Kissin merely hit all the notes. Still, he wowed the audience, and after being called back repeatedly, he played Chopin’s charming “Minute” Waltz (though with only the barest hint of charm). Did it matter that Chopin had no connection with the rest of the program? At least on the following night, I was told, one of his two encores was a Brahms waltz (along with a Chopin scherzo).

Passion-less

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:57:06 GMT

Bernard Haitink and the BSO; Dominique Labelle with the Handel and Haydn Society
If the St. John Passion is Bach’s equivalent of lesser Shakespeare, the St. Matthew Passion is Bach’s King Lear.

QUIET SPIRITUALITY? As performed by András Schiff and Bernard Haitink, the slow movement of
Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto had more of it than Haitink’s entire St. Matthew Passion.

If the St. John Passion is Bach’s equivalent of lesser Shakespeare, the St. Matthew Passion is Bach’s King Lear. In the wake of the moving St. John that Michael Beattie had led with Emmanuel Music the week before, I was especially eager to hear the St. Matthew with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under its conductor emeritus, Bernard Haitink, who at 79 was leading it for the very first time. The results were mixed.

There was some excellent work. Celebrated British tenor Ian Bostridge was a worldly rather than otherworldly Evangelist. Some people find him mannered (he has the gangly slimness of the effete Pre-Raphaelite poet Bunthorne in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience), but he also seemed committed, caring, despairing, even outraged. Australian tenor Steve Davislim (in his BSO debut) sang with accuracy and intensity. The obbligato accompaniments — which included stellar, imaginative playing by guest Laura Jeppesen on the viola da gamba — were beautiful and expressive. And a handful of outstanding Boston singers really familiar with this music — baritone David Kravitz (the angry young Jesus in the Cantata Singers’ 2004 St. Matthew, powerful here as both Peter and Pilate), bass Mark Andrew Cleveland (an affecting Judas), and (wasted in even smaller roles) soprano Kendra Colton, mezzo Paula Murrihy, and tenor William Hite (the Cantata Singers’ Evangelist) — put most of the visiting vocalists to shame.

As a whole, though, this St. Matthew was an anemic three-and-a-quarter-hour exercise in which Haitink appeared to be trying to balance old-fashioned full-throated Bach with leaner, historically informed early-music practice. In the end he offered neither insightful moment-to-moment phrasing nor larger spiritual illumination, capturing little of Bach’s drama, tension, or passion.

The St. Matthew Jesus needs to seem to be holding back, but German baritone Thomas E. Bauer was understated without suggesting reserves of power. The alto soloist sings one of Bach’s most profound prayers for mercy, “Erbarme dich,” which requires a true contralto (or countertenor) with a bottomless range that embodies the Earth itself, pleading for all humanity. It seemed perverse to cast in this role the affectless mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn (evidently a favorite of her Dutch compatriot Haitink), who sang with no conviction and whose thin sound had no lower register at all. (She was a little better in duet with the perky soprano Marlis Petersen.) The bass has the final aria, “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” (“Make yourself pure, my heart”), the “lesson” of the Passion to which all the preceding music leads: “I myself will be Jesus’s tomb — he will rest in me.” Haitink rather rushed British bass Peter Harvey through this. Lacking either vocal or emotional penetration, Harvey could have been delivering a weather report.

Is there a pianist in the house?

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:23:23 GMT

A last-minute Emperor at the BSO, Gatti and Ohlsson, BLO’s Elisir, and Brahms meets Weill with the Cantata Singers
Moved and excited by pianist Leon Fleisher in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Boston Symphony, I wanted to hear it again.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON: Their impromptu Emperor was a season highlight — will the BSO bring
Anton and Julian Kuerti back?

Moved and excited by pianist Leon Fleisher in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Boston Symphony, I wanted to hear it again. But at 6 pm a week ago Tuesday, Fleisher, with a bad stomach flu, cancelled, and the Austrian/Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti — in town to hear the debut of one of the BSO’s two new assistant conductors, his son Julian — agreed to go on, without rehearsal. I was disappointed — but not for long.

This also became the BSO debut of the 69-year-old Kuerti, a masterful and elegant player who studied with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski and at the Longy School, and who played the first movement of the Grieg Piano Concerto at a children’s concert with the Esplanade Orchestra under Arthur Fiedler a week before his tenth birthday. Fleisher, at 79 still troubled by focal dystonia in his right hand, had to slow down the fast movements and still missed a few notes. (He played “beyond the notes.”) But Kuerti, playing from memory, hit them all, jawdroppingly full speed ahead. His sound is softer-edged than Fleisher’s jewel-like pointedness, but also crystalline, transparent, and so precise that every note is distinguishable, even flying by at hummingbird speed. The Emperor is full of trills, and Kuerti’s are virtually birdlike, rising over gravity before floating downward.

Kuerti doesn’t have Fleisher’s muscularity or heroic sense of drama, but he shares Fleisher’s extraordinary musical continuity. He seemed to play each movement, especially the slow, songful middle movement, in a single breath. His pacing was flawless, especially in Beethoven’s unbroken transition from the inward slow movement to the extroverted, dancing finale, which he plunged into with breathtaking daring.

This was the second consecutive BSO program during which a major soloist had to cancel. The previous week, baritone Thomas Quasthoff sang a set of Schubert songs and then lost his voice. At the remaining concerts he was replaced with the Brahms Serenade the BSO had played the week before.

Meanwhile, Kuerti’s 31-year-old son, who had provided such sympathetic and imaginative support for Fleisher, delivered the same for his father’s very different approach. Surely the BSO will reschedule this memorable pairing, and with some advance notice.

Great gifts

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:07:38 GMT

Julian Kuerti leads the BSO and Leon Fleisher, Stockhausen’s Mantra at Harvard, Emmanuel’s St. John Passion
Knussen’s interludes, barely seven minutes, are a complex but attractive mix of the seductively creepy and the intricately lively.

HE RAISED THE BEETHOVEN BAR IN THE ’60s: And at nearly 80, Leon Fleisher is keeping it high.

There’s been a lot of buzz about one of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s two new assistant conductors, 31-year-old Julian Kuerti (son of pianist Anton Kuerti), who made his BSO debut leading a program that leapt from Oliver Knussen’s The Way to Castle Yonder (three brief instrumental interludes from the second of his two Maurice Sendak operas, Higglety Pigglety Pop!) to Dvorák’s dark D-minor Seventh Symphony to Beethoven’s brilliant Emperor Concerto with master pianist Leon Fleisher. What did this rangy concert tell us about him?

Knussen’s interludes, barely seven minutes, are a complex but attractive mix of the seductively creepy and the intricately lively. (He calls the opera a “theatrical requiem” for Sendak’s dog.) Castanets, jingle bells, and tambourine create a moody fantasy world. Kuerti kept me mesmerized. But Knussen’s writing is so compact and colorful, interpretive skills may not be crucial. Dvorák requires more, such as a sense of Bohemian folk rhythms that few Americans have. Kuerti seemed both too smooth (understating Dvorák’s dynamic and rhythmic contrasts and rough edges) and too rough (in ensemble polish). This thoroughly professional, very musical performance lacked a distinctive identity.

But in the familiar Beethoven, Kuerti revealed great gifts. Placed last on the program (concertos usually close the first half), this was what most of us were waiting for — to hear Fleisher, whose Beethoven recordings in the 1960s raised the bar for all future performances. In 1965, suffering from undiagnosed focal dystonia, he lost the use of his right hand. He’s made a remarkable recovery, though his performances using both hands are still rare. So it was one of Kuerti’s jobs to keep Fleisher in the foreground, to follow where he led. Kuerti not only came through with flying colors, he put his own stamp on this warhorse, to keep Beethoven fresh, vital, and rhythmically alive.

From his first entrance, Fleisher was unmistakably himself — with that glittering sound like cascading diamonds. He kept a score on his piano (at nearly 80, does he no longer trust his memory?), and he had to keep it from sliding onto the keyboard. Yet he was focused and concentrated. He missed notes in the two fast movements (scales are still hard for him), but the section of the first movement that sounds like an otherworldly music box was as magical as ever. The songful, hymn-like slow movement unfolded sublimely. (He told WBUR’s Robin Young that playing for him was an exercise “in anti-gravity.”) At the end of the movement, the theme of the third movement appears — slow and questioning before Fleisher let it explode into pure, dancing exhilaration. The fingering may still give him problems, but the musicianship is thrillingly intact.

Singers’ delight

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:29:57 GMT

Spring Arts Preview: Opera and vocal works lead the season
The season may be starting to wind down, but there remain some events music lovers have been waiting for all year.

LOVE AND HONOR: Barbara Quintiliani sings Verdi’s Ernani with Opera Boston.

The season may be starting to wind down, but there remain some events music lovers have been waiting for all year. The BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA closes with its most ambitious undertaking: James Levine conducting Berlioz’s grand and gorgeous epic, LES TROYENS, a two-part history of the Trojan War centering on two doomed heroines, Cassandra and Dido (Part I: April 22, 24, 26; Part II: April 30 + May 2; both parts: May 4; 617.266.1200). Dido reappears when the CELEBRITY SERIES OF BOSTON brings back Purcell’s DIDO AND AENEAS, the first great opera in English, with Mark Morris’s profound choreography (the same dancer playing both the Queen of Carthage and her ruthless nemesis) and Morris himself conducting the Emmanuel Music orchestra and off-stage voices (Cutler Majestic Theatre: May 28–June 1; 617.482.6661).

OPERA BOSTON offers a rare production of Verdi’s early and richly melodic Ernani (based on a Victor Hugo novel of love and honor), with Gil Rose conducting marvelous Verdi soprano Barbara Quintiliani, tenor Eduardo Villa, and baritone Jason Stearns in his first Boston gig since Chorus pro Musica’s Pagliacci last June (Cutler Majestic Theatre: May 2, 4, 6; 617.451.3388). BOSTON LYRIC OPERA gives us six chances to board the Orient Express in its fine English version of Mozart’s tuneful harem comedy The Abduction from the Seraglio (Shubert Theatre: April 25–May 6; 617.542.4912). The Boston Conservatory’s GUERILLA OPERA presents the world premiere of Andy Vores’s No Exit, this brilliant composer’s version of Sartre’s famous one-act play (Zack Box: April 24-27; 617.912.9240).

EMMANUEL MUSIC has John Harbison conducting Bach’s B-minor Mass (Emmanuel Church: April 12) and a Schumann chamber concert (April 6; 617.536.3356). David Hoose and the CANTATA SINGERS wrap up their exploration of Kurt Weill with a “Weill Cabaret” (Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center: April 6) and his rarely performed Symphony No. 2, on a bill with Charles Fussell’s new High Bridge, which is based on Hart Crane (Jordan Hall: May 9; 617.868.5885). Martin Pearlman’s BOSTON BAROQUE brings us Haydn’s The Creation, with soprano Heidi Stober, tenor Brian Stucki, and bass-baritone Kevin Deas (Jordan Hall: May 2-3; 617.484.9200). And Sir Roger Norrington is scheduled to lead Haydn’s Tragic Symphony and Harmoniemesse with the HANDEL AND HAYDN SOCIETY (Symphony Hall: April 4 + 6; 617.262.1815).

The marriage of Heaven and Hell

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:58:35 GMT

Levine’s Schubert and Bolcom, Boston Baroque’s King Arthur, Jan Curtis
It’s been a joy to see James Levine back on the Symphony Hall podium, with his admirable combination of vitality and sensitivity.

KING ARTHUR: Martin Pearlman led with charm, delicacy, outbursts of vigor, and an uninterrupted
connection with Purcell’s irresistible melodies.

It’s been a joy to see James Levine back on the Symphony Hall podium, looking in robust health and conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra with his admirable combination of vitality and sensitivity. His latest concert began where he’d left off the previous Sunday afternoon, with Schubert. His piano accompaniment of German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff in Schubert’s great song cycle Winterreise had been a triumph. Now he led the 19-year-old Schubert’s marvelous Symphony No. 4 in C minor. (The composer himself later named it the Tragic.) The orchestra played with multi-dimensional layers and depths of sound, from the reverberant opening chord of the slow introduction through the ensuing agitation of the first movement, the lyrical unfolding — with dramatic interruption (for me the high point of the symphony) — of the second, and a Minuet (interrupted by a folk dance) and Finale so light on their feet, I had visions of a corps de ballet dancing them.

Then Quasthoff returned in a selection of five famous Schubert songs, not with piano but with orchestrations by Webern, Reger, and, of all people, Offenbach. (They’re all on his recent Schubert-lieder CD with Anne Sofie von Otter and conductor Claudio Abbado.) These orchestrations are fascinating but not nearly as piercing or poignant as Schubert’s own starker piano versions. Still, Quasthoff is a masterful and unaffected interpreter, and only one creaky high note hinted that he was under the weather. (The next day, suffering from a severe cold, he cancelled his remaining concerts, one of them at Carnegie Hall, and returned to Germany.)

The Offenbach was the famous “Ständchen” (“Serenade”), with charming guitar-like pizzicati. Webern’s lean and sinuous winds gave an insinuating irony to “Tränenregen” (“Rain of Tears,” from Die schöne Müllerin), though his orchestral cushion for “Der Wegweiser” (“The Signpost”), one of the greatest Winterreise songs (“I wander on relentlessly,/Without rest, and seeking rest”), undercut the desolation. Quasthoff rose to heights of heroism and bitter sarcasm in “Prometheus” (Reger), Goethe’s condemnation of the gods. In Reger’s horror-movie wild ride for “Erlkönig” (“The Erlking”), Quasthoff was bone-chilling in the voices of seductive demon, terrified child, and falsely comforting father.

A Violetta to die for

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:33:09 GMT

Teatro Lirico I at the Majestic Theatre, March 2, 2008
Ukrainian soprano Marina Viskvorkina gave an extraordinary performance as the consumptive courtesan Violetta Valéry.

Conquering heroes

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:34:46 GMT

Winterreise from Thomas Quasthoff and James Levine, the Cecilia’s Handel, Levine’s return, Brendel’s farewell
One sign of Boston’s rich classical-music scene is that there are often hard choices to make when two outstanding events are scheduled at the same time.

WINTERREISE: Thomas Quasthoff and James Levine were in their element.

One sign of Boston’s rich classical-music scene is that there are often hard choices to make when two outstanding events are scheduled at the same time. I can’t remember a worse conflict than the one at 3 pm last Sunday. At Symphony Hall, James Levine was accompanying bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, one of the world’s greatest living lieder singers, in the greatest song cycle ever written, Schubert’s Winterreise (“Winter Journey”). At Jordan Hall, Donald Teeters was celebrating his 40th anniversary leading the Boston Cecilia, which must have played more Handel operas than any other group in town, with a spectacular line-up of veteran and up-and-coming Handel singers in the Handel bash to end all Handel bashes — an endless stream of some of the most gorgeous arias and choruses ever written. Impossible. Since Winterreise is shorter, I opted to hear it whole then rush across the street to Cecilia. I wasn’t disappointed by either one.

One of countless extraordinary moments comes in the second song of Winterreise, “Die Wetterfahne” (“The Weathervane”). “Inside, the wind plays with hearts,” the singer laments over the faithlessness of his beloved, “just as it does on the roof — only not so loud.” Quasthoff and Levine took a long pause and Quasthoff sang the last part, “nur nicht so laut,” almost in a whisper, as if in awe of the mystery of the human heart and its ruthless, unpredictable changeability. I’ve seldom heard performers make so much of this moment. But it was not a gimmick. It felt completely natural and lived through. Even in cavernous Symphony Hall, I was drawn into one of music’s most intimate experiences.

Quasthoff was in his element. His voice has deepened and darkened, and his beautiful tone filled out every phrase, loud and soft, high and, especially, low. Levine gave one of his most sensitive, understated, eloquent performances. They made particularly striking the several songs in which there are abrupt switches between a twinkling fantasy of hope (a dream of springtime, the arrival of a letter) and the stark, hopeless actuality. The loud explosions after Quasthoff’s held-back, trancelike singing always sounded like escaping cries of woe.

In this late work, Schubert explores questions of existence: of God and pain. “Mut!” (“Courage!”) is a hearty drinking song that ends, “If there is no God on earth,/Then we ourselves are gods.” But this is not the answer to the question “Why, if I have done no wrong,/Should I shun mankind?” Quasthoff sounded almost hypnotized by the “signpost” that pointed him on his endless journey from which no one returns, just as he seemed mesmerized by his vision of crows ceaselessly circling him.

Unembarrassed riches

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:58:08 GMT

Dutoit and Elder at the BSO, Collage’s Berio, Boston Conservatory’s Turn of the Screw, and Kurt Weill at the Gardner and the MFA
Some weeks Boston has such musical riches, one wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW: Astounding, phenomenal, superb were adjectives that came to mind.

Some weeks Boston has such musical riches, one wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. After a slow start to 2008, we’ve been treated to superlative concerts of contemporary chamber music and big orchestral events, intimate soirees of theater and cabaret songs, and a powerful production of a modern opera classic. Who needs to go to New York?

James Levine returns to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra this week, but in his absence, two guest conductors have delivered the goods. Charles Dutoit was back with a satisfying program that began with Swiss composer Frank Martin’s elegant and unsettling Petite symphonie concertante, for harp (Ann Hobson Pilot), harpsichord (Mark Kroll), piano (Randall Hodgkinson), and two string orchestras (the BSO). Sir Colin Davis led it last at Symphony Hall in 1984 (with Pilot and Kroll), and Dutoit led it at Tanglewood in 1990. It was refreshing to hear the offbeat accents of Martin’s inexorable machine, though one could imagine it all being more overtly seductive or insinuating.

It’s almost always a treat to hear the Cubist angles and memorable tunes of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto. Dutoit and the 31-year-old German virtuoso Viviane Hagner (in her BSO debut) kept it from wading in saccharine. In 1923, it was considered all but unplayable. Now it’s tossed off with almost too much abandon. The great performances (Joseph Szigeti under Sir Thomas Beecham is the benchmark) are also meditative and daringly exploratory; this one was merely enjoyable.

The big hit was Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, the “Organ Symphony,” with BSO organist James David Christie, providing the reverberating buzz of the newly refurbished Symphony Hall organ not only in the magnificent, grandiloquent outbursts but also in the quieter undercurrents (like a cellphone on mute vibrating in your pocket). Dutoit and the orchestra made this frequently trudged-out warhorse seem like a young stallion.

British conductor Mark Elder led a gripping version of a real rarity: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4, withdrawn (with Stalin’s encouragement) before its premiere in 1936 and finally resurrected in 1961 (the BSO’s only previous performance was 30 years ago). It’s more than an hour long and has Shostakovich’s largest orchestra (six flutes and/or piccolos; eight horns — though Elder used nine). The composer called it his artistic credo. Two long, complex movements surround a short scherzo-like Moderato con moto. But it’s constantly veering from shrieks of agony to laughing carnival calliope, never staying in the same place for long. If you compared it to a painter, Hieronymus Bosch might come to mind. The playing, with antiphonal first and second violins, ranged from ticklish to brutal but was always clear and pointed, even delicately pointillist. Elder spoke to the audience before the downbeat, and his excitement about the piece seemed to galvanize both the players and the audience. And perhaps himself as well.

‘A miracle!’

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:02:02 GMT

Emmanuel’s memorial for Craig Smith, plus Russell Sherman’s Bach, the Royal Concertgebouw, and Handel’s Semele
“Deep, tough, devout — and in church! It’s a miracle!”

MARISS JANSONS: Challenging the BSO on its own turf.

At the stirring memorial program for Craig Smith at Emmanuel Church last week (January 31, what would have been Smith’s 61st birthday — also Schubert’s birthday), the Reverend Edward Mark put at the top of his list of things he loved most about Craig Smith the weekly Bach cantatas that Smith inaugurated at Emmanuel 37 years ago as part of the Sunday liturgy (as they were in Bach’s time): “Deep, tough, devout — and in church! It’s a miracle!”

The program included short tributes by a dozen friends (mostly musicians) punctuating — and punctuated by — music dear to Smith (Bach, Schütz, Schubert, Mozart). They told hilarious stories about the famously disheveled and seemingly disorganized maestro. His dear friend Susan Zawalich reported how Smith himself loved to tell the one about the Brookline dowager who exclaimed, when he told her that he worked at Emmanuel Church, “Oh, you mean with that awful Craig Smith!” “Craig,” Zawalich concluded, “passionately believed that extremism in the defense of art was no vice.” None of the speakers shied away from the tough truths, about Smith’s failed kidney transplant or the periods of “troubles” with the church hierarchy about continuing Emmanuel Music.

More than 100 musicians, from among the earliest Emmanuel alumni to the stars of Smith’s Mozart and Handel collaborations with Peter Sellars and on to the current stellar personnel, poured into the altar space, part of the expanded choir or the expanded orchestra. Many who didn’t actually perform were part of the overflow crowd that came to pay respect. One common thread among the speeches was how cooperative musicmaking was under Smith, how much love and respect flowed back and forth, and how that love was reflected in their performances.

Country for old men

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:43:51 GMT

Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, BMOP, Marc-André Hamelin, and Sasha Cooke
A youthful 80-year-old Sir Colin Davis was back in front of the Boston Symphony Orchestra last weekend with one of the pieces he loves most.

THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS: Sir Colin kept the music rolling forward in great, rich, melodic waves.

A youthful 80-year-old Sir Colin Davis was back in front of the Boston Symphony Orchestra last weekend with one of the pieces he loves most, Sir Edward Elgar’s vast cantata The Dream of Gerontius. (He led the only other BSO performance, in 1982, when he was 55.) The text is about half of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 900-line poem about the death of an “old man” (“Gerontius” — as in “gerontology”) and his soul’s journey to Purgatory. In his essay in the BSO program book, Michael Steinberg calls this “spiritual drama . . . the greatest work of sacred music between the Verdi Requiem and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.”

Elgar’s cantata has neither Verdi’s ferocious drama nor Stravinsky’s hieratic purity, though it whispers of both. It’s focused more on an individual’s suffering and redemption. Newman was an Anglican theologian who controversially converted to Catholicism in 1845, a time in England when Roman Catholics were still persecuted. He wrote his long poem 20 years later, and it was an important work for the Catholic Elgar.

“Fervent” perhaps best describes the music. There isn’t a moment that doesn’t sound sincere or like an apt musical counterpart to Newman’s plush Victorian diction (“before the Throne/Stands the great Angel of the Agony,/The same who strengthened Him, what time He knelt/Lone in the garden shade bedewed with blood”). Without rushing, Sir Colin kept the music rolling forward in great, rich, melodic waves, each new climax bigger — and more fervent — than the last, yet never syrupy, and by the end quite moving.

The long Part II post-mortem is more full of incident than the long Part I, which is devoted to the passing away of Gerontius. Tenor Ben Heppner sang firmly despite occasional rough spots, but with rather undifferentiated fervor in expressing his eagerness to have shuffled off his mortal coil, his amazement that his mortal fear has dissolved, his repugnance at the demons eager to drag to Hell the newly departed spirits.

As Gerontius’s guiding angel, British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly sang with a kind of rapturous restraint and a vivid, almost conversational but warm-toned projection of Newman’s consoling words. Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley, both Priest and Angel of the Agony, had a ringing voice, precise articulation, and, yes, fervor. The orchestra played with full-throated ease, and John Oliver’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus outdid itself, singing — from memory, as usual — the Priest’s “Assistants,” echoes of Gerontius’s mourners, dread demons, and celestial choirs

Movie music

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:48:01 GMT

The BSO, Handel and Haydn, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, the Cantata Singers, David Daniels, and Teatro Lirico d’Europa’s Tosca
Classical music in 2008 Boston did not get off to a brilliant start.

TOSCA: Nothing boring or passionless about this Tosca and Scarpia, or the Teatro Lirico production.

Classical music in 2008 Boston did not get off to a brilliant start. Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in two uninspired programs, the first with two over-familiar Richard Strauss tone poems (Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel) and the even more familiar Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the second with Norwegian soloist Leif Ove Andsnes in the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto (“Full Moon and Empty Arms”) and yet another Strauss tone poem, the Alpensinfonie, glamorously orchestrated but endless Hi Def travelogue music. (The sun rises; we go up the mountain; we get to the top; a storm comes; we go back down; it gets dark.) Andsnes may be too refined a player to go up against Rachmaninov’s deep, dark, throbbing violins. (The BSO’s were luscious.) But his understated poetic sensibility, subtle phrasing, and impeccable execution were refreshing. John Ferillo’s insinuating oboe solo in Don Juan and Kenneth Radnowski’s alto saxophone in the Mussorgsky were particular treats.

The following week, Sir Colin Davis (now a dapper 80!) led Mozart: a transparent but stodgy Linz Symphony (a masterpiece Mozart threw together in less than a week) and a touching 23rd Piano Concerto, his most intimate, with Mitsuko Uchida, who played perhaps more for pathos than for a deeper melancholy. Still, Mozart with any soul at all is rare enough, and Uchida’s ravishingly delicate touch was an audible pleasure. Davis followed Mozart with a zippy, buoyant, Mozartian account of Schubert’s Second Symphony, a piece composed when he was only 16 but already Schubert.

The Handel and Haydn Society had what might have been a good idea: combining music written for a variety of 17th- and 18th-century English theatricals with a trio of actors reading dramatic scenes from the same period. For this sort of mélange to work, the music and the drama need to illuminate, or at least reflect, each other. But the concert was a jumble. The two Huntington Theatre actors, and even the charismatic Blair Brown, in some of theater’s craftiest, sexiest scenes, read too fast, didn’t project (the edge of the Jordan Hall stage is a tricky place to project from), and delivered most of their lines as if they were all too, too precious for words. Huntington director Nicholas Martin wrecked a more raucous scene from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (the source of Mack the Knife) by having the actors speak a passage that actually includes several songs — marvelous songs with more memorable tunes most of the other music on the program. And the actors might have sung at least as well as Jason Grant, the young bass who gargled his way through most of his music. Nothing Grant did, however, was as uncomprehending as Mark Blum’s recitation of Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech from The Tempest, with his consistent emphasis on the wrong words: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”; “spirits . . . melted into air, into thin air” (as opposed to thick air?).

Too much too soon?

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:34:09 GMT

Classical goodies for 2008
Two of the most exciting concerts announced for this winter are on the same date, February 24.

COMING NEXT MONTH: The Celebrity Series of Boston brings countertenor David Daniels to Jordan Hall.

Anyone for cloning? Two of the most exciting concerts announced for this winter are on the same date, February 24. The CELEBRITY SERIES OF BOSTON is presenting the great German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff in Schubert’s greatest song cycle, Winterreise (“Winter Journey”), with no less an accompanist than James Levine (Symphony Hall; 617.482.2595). And BOSTON CECILIA, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Donald Teeters’s directorship, is having a Handel bash, with more than a dozen singers (Jordan Hall; 617.232.4540).

Maestro Levine will also conduct Quasthoff in a BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA program of Schubert (the Tragic Symphony No. 4 and five songs orchestrated by Webern, Reger, and Offenbach!) and William Bolcom (the premiere of his Symphony No. 8, for chorus and orchestra). That’s February 28–March 1 — don’t forget it’s a leap year. The week before, Levine is doing Mozart, Berg, and Brahms, with pianist Peter Serkin and violinist Isabelle Faust (February 21-23, 26).

BSO guest conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos is concentrating on Richard Strauss (Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel, January 3-5, 8; An Alpine Symphony, plus Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto with Leif Ove Andsnes, January 10-12). Colin Davis will be here with pianist Mitsuko Uchida (January 17-19, 22) and in one of his specialties, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, with Sarah Connolly, Ben Heppner, and Gerald Finley (January 24-26). Among the BSO’s other visitors: Charles Dutoit (February 7-9, 12); Mark Elder, with violinist Vadim Repin (February 14-16); Julian Kuerti, with pianist Leon Fleisher in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto (March 6-8, 11); and Daniele Gatti, with pianist Garrick Ohlsson (March 13-15). Principal guest conductor Bernard Haitink will return for Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, with celebrated tenor Ian Bostridge as the Evangelist (March 20-22), and a Bartók/Schubert evening, with pianist András Schiff (March 27-29; 617.266.1492).

The Celebrity Series also has a promising line-up. Countertenor David Daniels will do a recital with pianist Martin Katz including Brahms, Handel, songs of the Italian Baroque, and later French and English songs (Jordan Hall, January 19). Pianist Marc-André Hamelin will play Haydn sonatas and pianist/composer Alexis Weissenberg’s enchanting Sonata in a State of Jazz (Jordan Hall, January 25). Mariss Jansons leads the great Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam in familiar Berlioz and Debussy (Symphony Hall, February 1). The Guarneri and Johannes String Quartets join forces for an evening to include octets by Mendelssohn and William Bolcom (Jordan Hall, February 15). Pianist Alfred Brendel plays classic repertoire (Symphony Hall, February 22), and Imani Winds make their Boston debut with wind quintets from more than the two usual continents (Jordan Hall, March 15). Federico Cortese leads clarinet star Richard Stoltzman and the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra (GBYSO) in a 50th-anniversary celebration concert (Mahler and Bernstein at Symphony Hall, March 9). And violinist Gil Shaham returns with pianist Akira Eguchi for an unusual program of Bach, Walton, and Spanish composers (Jordan Hall, March 30; 617.482.2595).

Love and loss

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:17:34 GMT

Classical: 2007 in review
Boston’s biggest classical-music story this year was also its saddest.