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Relationships
James Levine on seasons past and future, and why Schoenberg and Elliott Carter are good for you
BY DAVID WEININGER

"That’s nifty, huh?" says James Levine with satisfaction. He’s talking about one of the 11 programs he’ll conduct with the orchestra next season. It comprises four works that were commissioned by the BSO: Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Dutilleux’s Second Symphony (Le Double), Elliott Carter’s Boston Concerto, and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. It’s a nod to the orchestra’s past and present as well as a harbinger of the future. It is, as Levine says, nifty.

That’s also how most would describe his inaugural season as the BSO’s music director. Aside from a few rumbles about wear and tear on the players and a few grumbles about his taste in new music, there’s been near-unanimous acclaim for his stewardship and for the high level at which the orchestra is playing. For a public hungry for change after the Ozawa years, it’s been, well, pretty nifty.

Asked to reflect on the current season, his part of which is now concluded, Levine prefers to put the emphasis on the orchestra and their relationship, which has been quick to develop. "One of the real pleasures of this whole season for me was that we got further with each program than I had any reason to know we would," he says over the phone from Symphony Hall, his voice slightly hoarse from long periods of work. "When I say it went as well as I could have hoped, I don’t mean that I think we had ideal performances. It means that it gives us a place to stand where the future work can be less wearing in some respects. Because the more you have the feeling that the pile of things you’re able to do without knocking yourself out is intact, you’re very much more willing to knock yourself out like crazy to get the other things."

Relationships fill Levine’s second season: with the orchestra’s past (the opening concert is a French program) and with the living composers he champions (including Elliott Carter, George Perle, and Gunther Schuller). But the major relationship is between Beethoven and Schoenberg, to whom he’s devoting 11 concerts over the next two seasons. I ask him how we should begin to think about these composers together: music’s paradigmatic hero and its principal bête noire.

"I think that will come over the course of the programs," he answers. The impulse came during his work with the Munich and Met orchestras. "I gradually had this feeling in all my instincts that these two guys had something very profound in common. In a way, their innovations, their developments were the most significant of all." They’re linked, he says, in a certain kind of dialectic: "You have these two facets of artistic content going forward at the same time: the absolute purity of form together with a constant need to stretch — to push the envelope, I guess we say — stretch it in content to an almost unrecognizable degree.

"Beethoven was on some kind of a track of inner necessity to do it better, and do it new, and do it as far as he could imagine it." His path of radical innovation begins, Levine explains, with the Second Symphony, which is on a Beethoven program next season. "From then on, he writes with a density, with a resolution, with a success, with a complexity that doesn’t occur again until Schoenberg."

Levine gets great pleasure from discussing what he’s planned. ("I tried out seven of these programs in Munich and the audience and the orchestra just lit up.") A large choral work from each composer gets it own program: Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. One concert juxtaposes Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony with Beethoven’s Ninth. And a fascinating chamber-music program opens with Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte and ends with Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. ("There’s a piece I can never get enough of. I mean, wow!")

Many still shudder to hear Schoenberg’s name, linking him with everything that went wrong with music in the 20th century. Levine remains an unapologetic enthusiast, calling him the greatest composer of his era. He realizes, though, that the connection takes time and effort to develop. "You understand that when I say to you that I think that Schoenberg was perhaps the most significant musical figure of an entire century, I had a terrible time learning Schoenberg when I was a kid. The reason I kept struggling to do it was because I loved and respected a handful of people, one in particular [Walter Levin, first violinist of the LaSalle Quartet], who clearly didn’t have the slightest conflict about it."

That brings up one more relationship that Levine is looking to engineer: between the BSO’s audience and the often thorny contemporary music he loves and insists on programming. That’s a rapport that he knows can be neither rushed nor made to feel compulsory. Walter Levin, he says, "never force-fed me, and I don’t force-feed people either. But there’s an important thing that has to happen here. Elliott Carter is 95 years old. Next year, George Perle will be 90, Gunter Schuller will be 80, Milton Babbitt will be 90. And I’m not gonna let happen to these guys what happened to Sessions." He means Roger Sessions, the Princeton composer whose music went largely unnoticed during his lifetime. "I thought, here we have the chance to say: ‘Here are a few of our really great composers,’ who are great in the sense of Webern and Schoenberg. That is, in the sense that they are not easy to get right away, and a relationship with them has to occur.

"And it’s not the fault of the audience." He insists that the biggest barrier to appreciating these composers’ music is not having a group of musicians who speak it as a common language. "My point is, I want the BSO to have a Carter repertoire, the way they have a Bartók repertoire. And I want it while he’s the guy who’s still writing real music at his stage of the game. Especially as music gets complicated post-Schoenberg, the audience needs to hear it. They need to be able to listen to it while it’s going on. And they need to find out if there’s anything that would cause them to want to come back to hear it again."

Levine admits that some of the music of newer composers "is not for me, in that it is not, in my opinion, successful on its terms. But there’s a lot of music that is successful on its terms that just isn’t for me to conduct." He’s never led a piece by Shostakovich or Bruckner. "No matter how I study that music, I do not develop a conducting relation to it. I’m fortunate that there aren’t more blocks like those. I’m lucky that there’s a lot of music I love. But even where the new composers are concerned, I’m always after their publishers to send me all their scores."

Studying those, I suggest, must keep him pretty busy. "But it’s so wonderful, so stimulating. When I go on vacation, I have a great chance to do this, because for me vacation means not rehearsing, not performing, not practicing, but studying new scores. It’s just like reading books. It’s a pleasure."

Details of the BSO’s 2005–2006 season can be found at www.bso.org


Issue Date: April 1 - 7, 2005
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