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Guilty pleasures
Barbara Cook, Anne Sofie von Otter, Emmanuel’s Saul, Ozawa and Rostropovich
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

What have we done to deserve such bliss? Within a week, Bostonians had the opportunity of hearing two sublime vocal performances. One was Broadway and cabaret legend Barbara Cook singing Stephen Sondheim’s "Losing My Mind," from Follies (1971); the other was the Swedish opera and lieder mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter singing one of Handel’s greatest arias, "Scherza infida" ("Play, faithless one, in the embrace of your lover while I, betrayed, go forth into the arms of Death"), from his late opera Ariodante (1735). Two expressions of despair — torch songs, I suppose you could call both of them. The Sondheim is about obsession:

The sun comes up,

I think about you.

The coffee cup,

I think about you.

I want you so,

It’s like I’m losing my mind.

This parody of torch songs transcends parody to achieve a kind of tragic stature. The Handel is about the tragedy of betrayal, which has no recourse but death.

Cook’s FleetBoston Celebrity Series concert at Symphony Hall was called "Mostly Sondheim," and it included not only Sondheim selections but also a number of songs (some most surprising) that Sondheim told New York Times interviewer Frank Rich he wished he’d written ("Hard-Hearted Hannah," "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee," "The Trolley Song," "You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun"!). Cook has actually appeared in only one Sondheim show, the famous 1985 revival of Follies, in concert (preserved on an Image DVD), in which she sings the part created by Dorothy Collins: Sally, the showgirl who marries the wrong stage-door-Johnny and regrets it every day of her life.

At 74, Cook still has that unmistakable, heartbreakingly luminous voice — now a little darker around the edges, a little smokier, more grown up — with which she makes "Losing My Mind" and the poignantly ironic "In Buddy’s Eyes" (about that wrong man’s devotion) seem written just for her. The climactically rising line of "I want you so" and the subtle waver on the first syllable of "losing" are the qualities of great lieder singing, the feeling that the performer is actually living what she is singing. She makes me want to hear her sing Schubert. Except that I also never want her to give up the classic American theater repertoire — our equivalent of Schubert.

One great moment was completely associated with her, and it had nothing to do with Sondheim — or singing. She can no longer reach the top notes of Leonard Bernstein’s "Glitter and Be Gay," the satiric aria from Candide that she introduced. But she recited the spoken dialogue with the same cutthroat irony that she had on the original cast recording and that no other singer has ever come near.

She got incisive rhythmic support from her long-time accompanist, Wally Harper, and from bassist Jon Burr. And for her one encore, she sang, without a microphone, at her purest, clearest, and most interior, yet still filling Symphony Hall, "Anyone Can Whistle," the title song from Sondheim’s first Broadway flop (now a cult favorite): "What’s hard is simple, what’s natural comes hard." Not for Cook. Not even a cell phone going off at the quietest moment could spoil the unaffected, natural eloquence of her singing.

The title role of Ariodante has been recorded by such extraordinary singers as Dame Janet Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. But neither of them had the profound imaginative support conductor Marc Minkowski and his youthful Baroque orchestra, Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble, gave Otter at Jordan Hall (also a Celebrity Series event). Minkowski slowed Handel’s galloping accompaniment (the knight going forth to meet death) to an achingly reluctant tread (it was like the slow but uncanny tempo of Barbra Streisand’s "Happy Days Are Here Again"). This gave Ariodante’s anger in the phrase "per tua colpa" ("by your fault") an unexpected weight. And Otter sang the middle section, in which Prince Ariodante threatens to return from the grave and haunt his apparently unfaithful Ginevra, with a kind of spitting staccato (especially on the sibilant word "spezzar," "to break"). Then she took the da capo (Handel’s inevitable "repeat from the top") at a stop-breathing pianissimo, with the most quietly subtle ornamentation beautifully suggesting a catch in the voice, and bottoming out on the darkest word, "morte" ("death"). How powerful — and how rare — for such unmediated expressiveness to go hand in hand with convincing Baroque style.

These would have been wonderful concerts even without such high points. Minkowski delivered with rhythmic élan and evocative coloring Handel’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No. 1 and a suite full of marvels from Rameau’s last opera, Les Boréades ("The Sons of the North Wind"). And though in less effulgent voice than in "Scherza infida," Otter also nailed (in perfectly enunciated English) the needling sarcasm of Dejanira, the bitter wife of Hercules. Still, in the two pieces I singled out, Cook and Otter achieved something even more memorable — and precious.

HOW DO YOU SURPASS your own legend? In 1981, as guests of the Cantata Singers, Emmanuel Music director Craig Smith joined forces for the first time with young stage director Peter Sellars, and their production of Handel’s Saul, an oratorio never intended to be staged, resulted in one of the most thrilling events in Boston’s musical life. Now Smith was back at Emmanuel Church, with one of his original cast members, countertenor Jeffrey Gall (as David), and some members of the original orchestra (harpist Martha Moor in her crucial "role" as the Psalmist’s instrument of consolation; continuo cellist Shannon Snapp a continuing force of drama). Several of the original participants were in the audience (including Sellars himself and soprano Susan Larson, who sang Saul’s "good" daughter, Michal, a character not in the Bible; her great lament, "In sweetest harmony they liv’d," was the oratorio’s most profound voice of love and reconciliation). Present too, with their memories still vivid, were many members of that audience.

Was this Saul as good? Yes and no. Sellars’s miraculous staging had been a revelation of the complexities of character and political intrigue (Saul was a paranoid Nixon figure, down to the tape recorder; David a mixture of Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern, naive yet calculating). The dramatic context heightened the musicmaking. It allowed Saul’s bitchy daughter, Merab (Hazel O’Donnell), to make an astonishing change from near-hysterical coloratura giggles (which mocked her father’s mental inconsistencies) in the opening section of the long da capo aria "Capricious man" to sobs of sadness in the repeat. In concert, such a radical change might have seemed bizarre. The relationship between David and Saul’s son Jonathan, who "meant more than woman’s love" to David, was much more fleshed out in the staged version, and it encouraged Karl Dan Sorensen to sing with more openly tender affection — and epicene sensibility — than Frank Kelley could do in concert.

Yet Kelley was commanding in his defense of David, and Kendra Colton caught Merab’s subtle shift from haughtiness to warmth. Soprano Jayne West’s sweet voice was at its most touching, lovingly girlish as Michal. And Gall was able to siphon his memorable characterization entirely through his still-extraordinary voice. Paul Guttry (Samuel), Susan Trout (the Witch of Endor), Gerald Thomas Gray, David McSweeney, and Donald Wilkinson surpassed themselves in small roles. The Emmanuel Orchestra and Chorus (under chorusmaster and harpsichordist Michael Beattie) were in prime form. Smith led this uncut, nearly four-hour epic with simultaneous delicacy and authority, at times less expansively than he did 21 years ago, though the famous Dead March was devastating in its deliberateness. And these days, the "Mourn, Israel" chorus doesn’t need staging to heighten its relevance.

The one immeasurable gain was baritone Sanford Sylvan as Saul. In dignity, in power, in his subtlety at expressing his derangement, in the tragic awareness that he has caused his own downfall ("of my own ruin author!"), and in the sheer magnificence of his voice, Sylvan must now be the greatest interpreter of this role ever. He was the burning center of this very great work.

MY PENANCE FOR THESE GUILTY PLEASURES was sitting through the disappointments of Seiji Ozawa’s antepenultimate program as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which began with a repeat performance of John Williams’s 1999 for Seiji!, an exercise in orchestral color that shows off the variety of good playing in the BSO’s various sections. It’s a tribute to Ozawa, and some have called it a portrait of him. But in its third BSO performance, it remains unmemorable and thin. How many more-substantial new works has the BSO never reprised?

At least it was shorter than the 34-year-old French composer (born in Caen) Eric Tanguy’s Cello Concerto No. 2, which was composed for the beloved Mstislav Rostropovich, who was celebrating his 75th birthday. "Tripe à la mode de Caen," my waggish neighbor jotted into his program. "It almost made for Seiji! seem good," a friend commented during intermission. Program annotator Robert Kirzinger described an earlier "style" of Tanguy’s as "music in which the harmony, melody, and form of a piece are (often) determined in part through spectral analysis of some acoustic model." That’s exactly what this concerto sounded determined by, if you know what I mean.

After intermission came the Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák Cello Concerto, a Rostropovich signature piece (he’s recorded it eight times, including once with Ozawa; his version with Herbert von Karajan is on the new 75th-birthday tribute set). He played it on an almost chamber-music-like reduced scale and got a wild ovation. But to my ears he did not have his old drive, size, beauty of tone (except in some of the softest parts), or intense focus, and Ozawa’s alternation of sluggish tempos and forced climaxes didn’t do Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák justice. The piece seemed to end in several different places — there was even a small eruption of applause well before the real ending.

But this was more a sentimental than musical occasion for these old friends and collaborators, and the high point was surely Ozawa leading the orchestra in a heartfelt "Happy Birthday," with the audience joining in. Rostropovich bowed with his arms crossed over his chest and kissed everyone in sight before finally exiting with the BSO’s attractive Russian associate concertmaster, Tamara Smirnova — in full sight of his celebrated wife, the great soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, who was in the audience to join the celebration.

Issue Date: April 18 - 25, 2002
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