MUSIC REVIEW: Tanglewood Weekend, July 30-Aug 1

TANGLEWOOD
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
JULY 31, AUG. 1, 2010

Reviewed by Clarence Fanto

(LENOX, Mass., Aug. 1, 2010) — While James Levine is missed this summer, particularly at the Tanglewood Music Center where his intensive mentoring of advanced music students is especially valued, his absence has given a little-known conductor a turn in the spotlight.

Juanjo Mena, a dynamic 44-year-old Spanish conductor coincidentally just appointed as the next music director of the BBC Philharmonic, made a highly auspicious debut with the Boston Symphony on Saturday evening (July 31) substituting for Levine in a program the BSO music director first performed at Boston's Symphony Hall last February. Mena is the former music director of the Bilbao Symphony, and his American podium appearances have been confined primarily to well-received guest-conducting stints with the Baltimore Symphony.

Levine's shrewdly-conceived tripleheader of works representing the evolution of 20th century German Romanticism opened with Alban Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, a first performance at Tanglewood for this gnarly, groundbreaking 1914 work consisting of three episodic rhapsodies for large orchestra. Berg was heavily influenced by Mahler and by his mentor Arnold Schoenberg but forged his own style in this early work, combining occasional mild dissonance with thematic elements that take the Romantic aesthetic to the next level. The militaristic concluding March seems to reflect the anomie and angst afflicting Europe on the brink of World War One.

While this music is unlikely to turn up in a classical aficionado's iTunes library, it's well worth hearing, especially in the crisp, authoritative performance led by Mena that featured slashing brass and percussion attacks and well-blended ensemble that also showcased some especially silken string playing.

Levine had chosen one of his favorite Metropolitan Opera lyric sopranos, the Korean-born Hei-Kyung Hong, for this concert. However, hers is a not a big voice, and she may have been hard to hear in the mid- and back sections of the cavernous Shed; beyond that, her interpretation of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs was emotionally arid and not always pitch-perfect.

More's the pity, since the composer's final completed work — literally, his swan songs — is based on the poetry of Herman Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff, and the transcendental purity of the writing for orchestra and voice makes this some of Strauss's greatest music. Premiered in London just a few months after his death in 1949, they combine his farewell to life — he spent his last years as a frail, broken man, distraught over Germany's implosion as the Third Reich disintegrated — with a final token of love for his wife of 54 years, Pauline, a formerly famous soprano.

The songs are iimbued with resignation, acceptance of death and belief in ultimate transfiguration of the soul, quoting the final measures of Strauss's early tone poem, "Death and Transfiguration." The last song, "At Sunset," soars into the heavens on the wings of a flute depicting a nightingale— an otherworldly sound palette.

In his "Exit Ghost," novelist Philip Roth pays tribute to "Four Last Songs" for "the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity. For the purity of the sentiment about death and parting and loss. For the long melodic line spinning out and the female voice soaring and soaring. For the repose and composure and gracefulness and the intense beauty of the soaring. For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of 82, stands before you naked. And you dissolve."

Mena conducted a spacious performance, allowing the long lines of the music to spin out with clarity, emotional depth and a sense of time suspended, despite Hong's lack of projection and air of detachment.

Mahler's Fourth, at just under an hour one of his more concise symphonic statements, is also an ode to life-after-death, with a final movement for soprano and orchestra that depicts a day in heaven as imagined in a poem based on a Bavarian folk song, part of the "Youth's Magic Horn" collection that so inspired the composer. Here, Hong was more in her element, conveying with charm if not profundity "dancing and springing, skipping and singing, while Saint Peter in heaven looks on."

Mena demonstrated a keen grasp of the entire symphony, conducting at the highest level of inspiration, bringing out details and allowing the music to breathe as only a few other conductors (including Levine) have achieved in this listener's experience. The orchestra played at the top of its game (with memorable solos by principal horn James Sommerville and by concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, both of whom had also excelled in the "Four Last Songs") and the closing deep plucks of the harp's lowest string hung suspended in air, timeless in repose.

On Sunday afternoon and Friday evening, Charles Dutoit — chief conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, soon to wind up 21-seasons as artistic director of the orchestra's  three-week Saratoga Springs residency — demonstrated anew his mastery of podium technique. His high-octane performance of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" in the Ravel orchestration was taut, detailed and highly colorful; the BSO delivered some of the season's most virtuosic playing, with top-of-the-line solos by the brass choir and the battery of percussion. The opener, Sibelius's early Karelia Suite (another Tanglewood first performance) was by turns charming and full-blooded.

But the 12,000 or more listeners who filled the Shed and lawn (my rough estimate) had come out to hear the classical world's official superstar, Yo-Yo Ma; fortunately, rather than the umpteenth performance of Dvorak Cello Concerto, he gave an impassioned, technically stunning account of Elgar's Cello Concerto. This supreme masterpiece, the British composer's last major score, was completed in 1919; it combines qualities of nostalgia, melancholy, resignation, even desperation with outbursts of great energy and moments of wit and irony.

No doubt, Elgar's disillusionment following the end of the so-called "Great War" informed the concerto, which was played at Tanglewood by the formidable Jacqueline Du Pre with her husband, Daniel Barenboim, on the podium in August 1969. Ma teamed with John Williams to perform it here seven summers ago. With Dutoit offering a grandiloquent, visceral and sweeping orchestral accompaniment, Ma summoned up tremendous reserves of emotion and skill, demonstrating a command and mastery that was stunning in its impact.

Perhaps his wife's close call falling from a cliff while on safari in Africa last year has inspired Ma to even deeper introspection. "I am a different person since then," he told the Wall Street Journal recently. "I'm just so unbelievably grateful that she's here, that we still have a life together. It affects everything — he way I live, the way I play. There are moments when the answers about who you are and what you're doing can change suddenly. Even if we don't like change, we change anyway."

 

He described a new-found ability to relax —  "I'm not as tense now. With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear. So the more you can collect that energy and be unblocked and be totally present, the more you can say, 'I'm here because I really want to be; there's no other place I'd rather be.' "

Whatever the case, his performance of the Elgar was a revelation; not since the DuPre-Barenboim collaboration (or on a classic recording with Sir John Barbirolli) have I encountered such a summit of inspiration in a performance of Elgar's concerto.

Friday night's highlight was the impressive debut of pianist Kirill Gerstein, a rapidly-rising Russian who tore into Tchaikovsky's tired warhorse, the Piano Concerto No. 1, and gave life to a work that some of us would prefer seeing headed toward the glue factory. It would be more revealing to hear Gerstein in substantive repertoire (such as he performed in a solo recital the next evening at the Tannery Pond concert series in New Lebanon, N.Y.) but he wowed a large Tanglewood audience with major technical chops and a wide dynamic range that may well presage a top-echelon career.

Dutoit's razor-sharp leadership of music from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" ballet demonstrated once again his sterling reputation as a wizard of the podium; hopefully, his exit from Saratoga won't mean he'll be a stranger to Tanglewood, where he studied with Charles Munch in the 1950s and where he has been guest-conducting the BSO most summers since 1980.

In all, it was a weekend of sharp contrasts and a remarkably wide range of musical experiences, including a memorable performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 by the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra led by David Hoose, especially noteworthy since the players are all high-school age), and Sunday night's first-of-three stagings of Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" featuring TMC vocal soloists and chamber orchestra. Hard to believe, but the BSO season is at the halfway mark. Few would argue that in the summer, the pages fly off the calendar at a breakneck pace.

 

 

Clarence Fanto reviews music for Berkshireliving.com and is a contributing editor of Berkshire Living.