E-Mail This Article to a Friend Gold ring James Levine’s Wagner at Tanglewood BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

One of the high points of James Levine’s first season as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was the concert performance of Wagner’s Der fliegender Holländer ("The Flying Dutchman"). He said afterward that he was committed to making opera an important part of the BSO schedule, but when asked whether there’d be more Wagner, he demurred. Wagner’s operas need the large forces of an organization like the BSO, so Boston performances have been scarce. For his first Tanglewood season as music director, Levine programmed a concert comprising an act each from two of Wagner’s greatest operas and featuring Metropolitan Opera star Deborah Voigt (who was to sing Senta in Dutchman but because of inflamed vocal cords appeared in only the third and last performance). The orchestra, however, was not the BSO but the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, which is made up of this summer’s select young music "fellows" studying at Tanglewood. Levine devoted some 30 hours rehearsing this ensemble — an extraordinary contrast to the tight schedules of professional players with union contracts. And it showed.

The evening opened with the first act of Die Walküre, the one completely human act in Wagner’s Ring, and ended with the final act of Götterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Gods"). In a fully staged production, even with supertitles, it’s hard to watch the stage and get all the words. But in this concert version, Wagner’s words (he was his own librettist) were front and center, the English projected right above the orchestra in the Tanglewood shed, and Levine made it evident how the words drive the music. That music is something like what Eugene O’Neill did in Strange Interlude, where characters not only speak to each other but also say aloud (to themselves and to the audience) what’s in and on their minds. Wagner’s music also suggests things characters don’t know — connections they’re unaware of, foreshadowings of triumph or doom.

Levine understands this complex story inside and out. The cello solo (Lachezar Kostov) early in Die Walküre said more than words could about the bonding between Siegmund and Sieglinde, even before the two about-to-be lovers realize they’re twins. Oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and English horn became multiple Sheherazades. The act began with incisive basses and cellos expressing the desperate thudding footsteps of the storm-beaten Siegmund racing through the dark forest to escape his enemies. And Levine’s seating plan (cellos behind first violins, basses behind cellos) made it easier to notice the basses dropping out as Siegmund collapses from exhaustion, and easier to hear the very different music played by the conductor’s antiphonal first and second violins.

Trumpets and oboes captured the unearthly glow of Siegmund’s sword. Four harps, on a high platform stage left, embodied the voices of the spring that ends the winter storm of the twins’ suffering and, later, the seductive serenade of the Rhinemaidens. Their watery music at the beginning of Götterdämmerung (one of Wagner’s most appealing passages — T.S. Eliot quotes the Rhinemaidens’ ululation in "The Waste Land") had a transparent fluidity. Siegfried’s Funeral Music had a pounding, blazing intensity. And even with the singers positioned behind the orchestra, the vocalists were with few exceptions audible. Although with so much drama emerging from the orchestra itself, less depended on the more variable "acting" of the singers.

The best performances were by tenor Christian Franz, especially in Siegfried’s teasing back of the Rhinemaidens (Lyubov Petrova, Maria Zifchak, and Jane Bunnell — each an individual); chocolate-voiced soprano Melanie Diener, touching when Gutrune discovers how badly she’s been used by her malevolent brothers; and huge, dark-toned Danish bass Stephen Milling, a late replacement, as the threatening and sarcastic Hunding. (I was sorry not to see the originally announced young Russian bass Mikhail Petrenko, who stirred up some controversy as the BSO Holländer’s Daland but who was creepily convincing as both the nasty Hunding and the sinister Hagen in Valery Gergiev’s bizarre 2003 Ring at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre.) As Siegmund, tenor Clifton Forbis sounded old, slightly worn and wobbly; then about three-quarters of the way through the act he rose to the climactic high notes when Siegmund reveals his name and again when he pulls the magic sword from the tree trunk.

Bass-baritone Alan Held gave a subtle rendering of the morally ambiguous Gunther, but veteran bass John Cheek, another last-minute replacement, was a weak, mostly inaudible Hagen. The men of John Oliver’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus made a surly gang of Hagen’s henchmen.

It was a good but complicated evening for Voigt. She’s sung Sieglinde numerous times and barely needed her score. Her voice had the familiar platinum shine, and she sang every word with point, indicating both Sieglinde’s meek obedience and stealthy evasiveness when around Hunding and her increasingly conspiratorial relationship with Siegmund. Yet every syllable sounded calculated. She looks very glamorous now that she’s lost so much weight, but Sieglinde isn’t a glamor character, and Voigt, at least in this concert, hadn’t figured out how to convey Sieglinde’s earthiness, her misery, her plainspoken honesty. I was tickled by one of the few bits of "semi-staging." Near the end of the ecstatic love duet, she nestled in Forbis’s embrace, her back to him (there hadn’t been much eye contact between them even before this), as if they were lovers in an operetta, or posing for a wedding photo. The gesture was utterly inadequate to the duo’s incestuous sexual ferocity.

Voigt was less "schooled" in her very first Brünnhilde, the heroine of Götterdämmerung and the entire Ring. She has the vocal glow for most of this role, and perhaps that glow would have been brighter if she hadn’t just sung Sieglinde. But her stamina seemed to give out during the Immolation Scene: the final phrases were suddenly hard to hear. More damaging was the lack of grief in her voice. Still, this was a milestone for her, a first glimpse of what will surely become a major role.

What was profoundly moving was the sweep of the final "Redemption" theme, Levine and the orchestra catching us up in Wagner’s vision of the cost of what it takes to be fully moral and fully human. All the more reason to want more Wagner in Boston.