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Harnoncourt returns to Boston
Plus Haitink at the BSO and the Tal Trio
BY DAVID WEININGER

When Nikolaus Harnoncourt arrives to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic at the end of this month, it will be his first visit to Boston in longer than almost anyone can remember. Harnoncourt conducts regularly in New York but rarely undertakes the kind of extensive visit to the US he will be making with the Philharmonic anymore.

"It’s a real problem for me, because I suffer from extreme jet lag," he says on the phone from his home near Salzburg, Austria. "So when my clock is disturbed, I need a good three months to get in order again. At my age, to give away three months is not so simple."

Aside from a reluctance to undertake stateside touring, Harnoncourt, 73, shows few other signs of slowing down his busy musical life. Besides his continuing work with the Concentus Musicus of Vienna, the vanguard period-instrument orchestra that he founded in the late 1950s, he also regularly conducts and records with Europe’s great orchestras in repertoire that ranges from Beethoven to Berg. One could be forgiven for thinking that there are two Harnoncourts: the period-instrument "specialist" and the "Romantic." It’s an idea he says he understands but rejects.

"Really, I am simply an enemy of ‘specialism,’" he says. "That sort of division didn’t exist when I started making music." He founded the Concentus Musicus to perform Bach and other Baroque music because he felt that "the music was much better than the performances. It was exciting in temperament if I looked in the score, but when I played it with the orchestra [the Vienna Symphony, where Harnoncourt was a cellist for 17 years], it was not very satisfying. It was like marmalade without structure."

His goal is "always to bring emotion and Romanticism to music," whatever its era. "But it is absolutely necessary to know a lot of things to make music correctly. And it’s the same whether you play Berg, Stravinsky, or Bach. When you approach with nothing more than emotion, you can make very beautiful sound, but you can make terrible mistakes at the same time."

His shake-things-up attitude served him well when, in the early 1990s, he and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe recorded the complete symphonies of Beethoven, whose Pastorale Symphony will be on the bill at Symphony Hall. "Already in Beethoven’s first symphonies and concertos, he came like a devil," Harnoncourt says. "Absolutely new ideas — one could feel already the demonic possibilities. I felt that conductors and orchestras approached Beethoven from the side of the late-19th century. They did not regard him enough as what he was earlier — a real explosion in his time. For me it was relatively easy to approach him from the standpoint of earlier Viennese classicism and to feel what he did for the first time, the shock. The spirit of the first performance — this spirit is very important to me, and I want to have it all the time, whatever orchestra I conduct."

Also on the program are Strauss waltzes, which are to the Vienna Phil what Sousa marches are to the US Marine Band. The Philharmonic’s approach to Strauss, says Harnoncourt, comes out of the local dialect. "You can immediately recognize a Viennese by his way of speaking. The spirit of the Viennese people is coming out of a mix of nations. And these form the language and the way of thinking, which are always on the edge of death — but at the same time, a kind of joy-in-sadness, or sadness-in-joy.

"Three composers really composed in this Viennese dialect: Schubert, Johann Strauss, and Alban Berg. And with the Vienna Philharmonic, the way they speak with each other is the way they feel the music. You need about five minutes to get this spirit — anywhere else with the best orchestra you need an hour."

And he rejects any attempt to label the Strauss works "light" music: "It is such absolute nonsense." And he pulls out a surprising analogy: "For me, actors like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton are equal to the best actors of Shakespearean drama. A composer like Mozart could write dance music as well as symphonic music and opera. And a minuet by Bach or Mozart tells as much as a slow movement."

Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Vienna Philharmonic perform at Symphony Hall on February 28 at 8 p.m., courtesy of the FleetBoston Celebrity Series. Remaining tickets are $50 to $105. Call (617) 482-6661.

NEW AND FAMILIAR FACES: Bernard Haitink seems to be an ever-more-comforting figure in this interim between BSO music directors. He begins his annual stint with the BSO with a program including Mozart’s Haffner Symphony and the concert aria Ch’io mi scordi di te ... Non temer amato bene, featuring pianist Klára Würtz and soprano Dorothea Röschmann. The latter returns after the intermission for Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Performances are February 27, March 1, and March 4 at 8 p.m., and February 28 at 1:30 p.m. Tickets range from $25 to 84. Call (617) 266-1200. Also, the Tal Trio is the first group to study in NEC’s new Piano Trio Training Program under Vivian Hornik Weilerstein. They have an ambitious program for their first local performance — trios by Beethoven, Dvorák, and Shostakovich. It’s at Jordan Hall at 8 p.m. on February 26, and it’s free; call (617) 585-1100.

Issue Date: February 20 - 27, 2003

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