Terfel time

Plus Leon Kirchner, at the BSO

by Lloyd Schwartz

The BSO launched its 117th season and Seiji Ozawa his 25th year as music director in the best possible ways. The opening-night gala introduced to Boston a genuine celebrity, the 32-year-old, six-foot-four Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel. Two nights later, the first subscription concert featured a major new work commissioned by the BSO from a major living composer, Leon Kirchner (a premiere actually postponed from last season, when Kirchner suffered an aortic aneurysm before he'd completed his orchestration).

At the intermissionless gala, overtures by Mozart and Wagner alternated with Terfel singing six arias by the same two composers, in which he created six distinct characters. There was the factotum Figaro, the birdcatcher Papageno, both the elegant Don Giovanni and his earthy servant Leporello, Wolfram von Eschenbach (the idealistic medieval minnesinger from Tannhäuser), and the doomed Flying Dutchman. (How different from the identical characterizations of BSO favorite Jessye-One-Note Norman.)

Terfel's voice is big and rich and effortlessly full, from darkest sub-basement to gleaming top. As a personality, he combines swagger and sensitivity. And his acting is as natural as his singing. He'll stand erect and dignified or bend forward to confide in the audience, roll his eyes or stare in concentration, gesture mimetically (brushing the side of his index finger across his moustache in imitation of Elizabeth Ostling's Papageno pan-pipe glissando), or do a soft-shoe -- whatever it takes. He seems to love being on stage. In the final rehearsal (to which press was invited), he seemed even freer, more playful, with less of an agenda of "acting out," underlining "explanations" of the arias. He chatted up the audience with an explanation of Leporello's famous "Catalogue" aria. The words were in the program book, but Terfel's comments were superfluous because he's so thoroughly capable of becoming the character he's singing, just in the way he adjusts his voice, his body language, his mobile face.

He also pays attention to the words and sings from within them. His diction is impeccable: you can make out every syllable, in German, Italian -- even English. And the idiomatic accents, like everything else about him, are utterly convincing without ever sounding studied.

In each of these arias, he conveyed the complexity of the character. Figaro was teasing but also angry at the young nobleman Cherubino's liberties with Figaro's fiancée. Leporello applauded with lewd envy his master's staggering number of conquests (he even showed Maestro Ozawa his "little black book"), yet he was also appalled by them as well. Each time Leporello repeats the words "la piccina" -- the numerous little girls on Don Giovanni's list -- Terfel gave it a slightly different inflection, revealing an increasing disgust with the central indifference of Giovanni's sexual obsession. The overpowering Dutchman monologue captured not only the profound despair of the eternal wanderer but also his cynicism and irony and his deep desire to find the angelic woman who could release him from his fate.

The two encores were from Terfel's Rodgers & Hammerstein album: "It Might As Well Be Spring" (at the rehearsal, having been released for a couple of days from Figaro rehearsals at the San Francisco Opera, he sang coyly "I feel so gay in a San Francisco" -- as opposed to "melancholy" -- "way") and "Some Enchanted Evening." They, too, were beautifully sung -- and what's the last time you heard either of these standards done without artificial amplification?

At the press conference after the morning's rehearsal, Terfel announced, teasingly, I hope, that he wants to retire to the golf course by the time he's 40, so in the next decade he'll be taking on more and more-demanding roles: Wotan, Hans Sachs, Falstaff. But signs point to a longer career than he has in mind. He's too good, and his voice is too healthy. As far as I'm concerned, the more Bryn the better.

The gala started a bit late because, as new BSO managing director Mark Volpe announced, an accident on the Mass Pike meant that "key personnel are being rerouted." It was Seiji Ozawa himself who got waylaid behind the accident on his way back from his home in Newton to Symphony Hall. A cell-phone call led to a state-police escort's getting him off the Pike and onto Storrow Drive.

Ozawa, obviously smitten with Terfel, was a considerate and helpful accompanist, though in the Dutchman aria he occasionally let the orchestra cover the singer. The Mozart overtures were generic. At the rehearsal, the only expression Ozawa requested was "happy" in the Figaro Overture -- and at the concert, in the new, spruced-up Symphony Hall, the strings began with an ominously muffled sound, even given the new risers for the orchestra. Later, they sounded fine. The Tannhäuser Overture was awful, rhythmically sagging, emotionally leaden, and way too loud.

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Leon Kirchner's new piece, Of things exactly as they are, is a large-scale cantata commissioned by the BSO for the 25th anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. It's the latest step in Kirchner's unstated project of Americanizing, in his singularly granitic and lyrical way, the tonal principles of his great teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. Kirchner happily acknowledges the debt this "duo-drama" owes to his master's lyrico- psychological monodrama, Erwartung.

Setting private and apocalyptic poems about love and art and the end of civilization by Robinson Jeffers, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell (all Americans), Kirchner constructs a kind of operatic libretto. The full chorus, violently atonal, declaims Jeffers's cosmic near-hysteria ("this bulging/Eyeball of water/It is the staring unsleeping,/Eye of the earth, and what it/watches is not our wars"). In contrast, with Dickinson's ecstatic, inebriated "Wild Nights" he depicts roiling intimacy in a love duet for soprano (the quietly radiant Roberta Alexander) and baritone (William Stone, a bit strained and ponderous). In lines from Millay's "Renascence" ("I know not how such things can be"), with gently accompanying winds and women's chorus, the soprano resigns herself to the hopelessness of this gorgeous affair.

How this "plot" gets turned into art becomes manifest in the new rhythms of a brief passage for chorus from Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar" ("Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar") -- with the transforming guitar in turn transformed into piano, celesta, harp, and glockenspiel. Stevens's "things exactly as they are" become significantly more explicit in Lowell's grimly humorous "Central Park," a big monologue for baritone: "straps down, and sunning openly,/each precious, public, pubic tangle/an equilateral triangle. . . . The lion prowled his slummy cell,/surviving his life-term in jail --/glaring, grinding, on his heel,/with tingling step and testicle. . . . We beg delinquents for our life. Behind each bush perhaps a knife,/each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub,/hides a policeman with a club." Then in an epilogue, phrases from the preceding poems reappear. Millay's "I know not how such things can be" echoes in a more quietly hopeful if more fragmented "such things can be."

The piece is gripping, unquestionably powerful -- and demanding. Kirchner's Quixotic collage certainly wrestles with the fundamental questions these poets ask about living. The more aggressive sections, though, with their big chorus and complex battery of brass, strings, and percussion, have a more familiar sound than the more lyrical ones, with their exquisite writing for piano (played by the superb Randall Hodgkinson) and winds. Much of the thick orchestration and the pompous choral outbursts -- too much like a Greek chorus for the American colloquialism of the poems -- tend to obliterate the all-important words. Even reading along with the text I got lost.

Some of the most inventive passages obliterate words deliberately. "Wild Nights" ends with the two lovers singing the words out of order. In "The Man with the Blue Guitar," as program annotator Stephen Ledbetter, who sings in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, tells us, syllables are dropped; voices echo one another a fraction of a beat later "to produce a misty susurration of sound." But not all the incomprehensibility was deliberate.

Part of my reservation may be about the performance itself. Ozawa may have overstated those big word-obliterating moments, and there was something stilted, even monochromatic, about the overall spirit. William Stone intoned "Central Park" without a trace of Lowell's wit or irony: he evoked the "precious, public, pubic tangle" of the sunbathers in Central Park with a solemnity more befitting Jeffers's "bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of faiths." Ozawa didn't succeed in making connections between the disparate parts with the conviction Kirchner himself had when I heard him play through the piece at his home. I missed Kirchner's own mercurial spring.

So I cherish my memory of Kirchner's piano reduction, which sounded both more original to me -- a magnificent new piano sonata with words -- and more inwardly felt. Kirchner's own "performance" made me hear more of the music and made me like it more. Maybe this ambitious work hasn't yet found its most propitious form. Maybe smaller forces (a piano, two soloists, and a chamber chorus?) could make all the words, all the music, and Kirchner's grand dramatic design more truly audible.

It didn't help either that the Kirchner was part of a long program that also included a tedious, inflexible, inadequately prepared Jupiter Symphony (much worse than any of the Mozart at the gala) and a vigorous but rough and very loud Also sprach Zarathustra (in which Ozawa at least showed he can now conduct a waltz). These were several rehearsals away from plausibility. Although if most of the rehearsal time went to Kirchner, that's things exactly as they should be.