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The coolest month
Elliott Carter’s Boston Concerto, the Brentano Quartet, and Dubravka Tomsǐc
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

For half a century, Elliott Carter, who is now 94 years old, has had a reputation for being the composer of difficult music. As with many artists, though, his new works help clarify what he was up to earlier. His latest piece, Boston Concerto, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, just had its world premiere. And though it may be hard to play, it’s one of Carter’s easiest pieces to grasp. It’s his version of a tone poem, a musical composition that tells a story (like Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote) or has some pictorial image behind it (like Mussorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition).

Carter has, in fact, been doing this from the very beginning. In his stunning First String Quartet, from 1951, a section marked "Allegro scorrevole" depicts the polyphonic "scurrying" of the desert creatures he saw when he was living near Tucson. His grand Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei ("I am the prize of fleeting hope," begun a decade ago) follows a soap bubble, in a Latin poem by Richard Crashaw, as it floats over the human landscape. And now in Boston Concerto, it’s not sand or air but raindrops. The dedication is to Carter’s wife, Helen, and the epigraph comes from William Carlos Williams’s "Rain":

As the rain falls

so does

your love

bathe every

open

Object of the world —

There are six interludes, each for a different combination of orchestral sections (nostalgic flutes and clarinets, for example, played "tenderly"; jazzy piano, vibraphone, and harp; violas and basses; mysteriously sustained veils of "tranquil" brass — horns, trombones, and tuba — that become denser and increasingly threatening). But the piece opens with an onomatopoetic rainstorm ("Allegro staccatissimo"), and each of the interludes is followed by a "ritornello" — a recurring section (as in a Baroque concerto grosso) — in the form of a musical shower, or drizzle, or downpour in sheets, before the final pitter-pat is reduced to a poignant trickle. These rain showers are bewitchingly orchestrated, beginning with pizzicato violins and plinking harp, high-pitched winds and muted brass, and little tappings from diverse percussion; and in true Carter fashion, the rain infiltrates and punctuates the interludes with little splashes, sprinkles, blurps, and plops.

The interludes don’t really tell specific stories, but the moods and colors keep changing. We create our own scenarios. The section for oboes and bassoons seemed the loneliest, the instruments most isolated; the final section for violins and cellos was the most intense and passionate. Opening night, the playing ranged from fully confident, especially in the rainy ritornellos, to a little tentative. But the audience seemed to get it, and it rose to its collective feet when Carter spryly emerged from the wings. He seemed so pleased with the orchestra and conductor Ingo Metzmacher (who took close to three minutes longer than the 15 minutes indicated in the score) that he almost forgot to turn around and acknowledge the cheers.

The evening began with a piece by the composer perhaps most influential on Carter, Charles Ives, whom Carter discovered when he was still a teenager and who became his first mentor. Ironic to have such a heavily American program led by a German conductor, but this was internationalism at its best. Three Places in New England, in its reconstructed original version for large orchestra (completed by 1921), opens with Ives’s The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment), his solemn "Black March" depicting Augustus St. Gaudens’s monumental bas relief of Colonel Shaw and the first black infantry division in the Civil War (across Beacon Street from the State House). In the raucous July 4th picnic at Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut, with its overlapping marching bands and visionary image of Liberty, Metzmacher balanced humor and spirituality. And the idyllic The Housatonic at Stockbridge, a memory of the Ives’s return from their honeymoon, was quietly rapturous.

The BSO has been plagued with cancellations lately. Soprano Dorothea Ršschmann didn’t sing in Bernard Haitink’s Mozart and Mahler concert, then ailing Italian conductor Fabio Luisi was replaced by former BSO assistant conductor Ilan Volkov, who played Mussorgsky’s Pictures instead of Richard Strauss’s scheduled Ein Heldenleben (the highlights were violinist Christian Tetzlaff’s silky, insinuating, and dazzling rendition of Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and freelancer Michael Leonard’s alto sax in Mussorgsky’s "Old Castle" movement). But the biggest disappointment was the last-minute cancellation of the great German lieder singer Matthias Goerne in six of Mahler’s settings of folk poetry from the anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Boy’s Magic Horn") — all-too-timely songs dealing with, among other things, sinister aspects of military life and ghosts of dead soldiers. The substitute was a young Canadian baritone, Brett Polegato, a not particularly imaginative singer with a pleasant lyric voice that was both too light for these songs and for Symphony Hall, even with Metzmacher keeping the orchestra to a whisper (and a crawl). Polegato added Mahler’s greatest song, his setting of Friedrich RŸckert’s "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I am lost to the world") and dropped two of Mahler’s folk poems. But nothing he sang demonstrated either character or commitment.

Metzmacher ended with a sizzling rendition of Bart—k’s suite from his sinister "pantomime," The Miraculous Mandarin. In every piece but the Carter, which has no timpani, recently retired BSO principal percussionist Everett Firth made a surprise return. I doubt any timpanist alive has such subtle shadings of sound. And clarinettist William R. Hudgins had a field day as Bart—k’s shady siren’s three horny victims.

I’VE BEEN EAGER to hear the Brentano String Quartet, and thanks to the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, I got my wish. For three years, the Brentano has been working on a fascinating project, commissioning 10 composers to respond to individual movements from Bach’s late masterpiece of counterpoint, The Art of the Fugue — 18 pieces, mostly fugues, based on a single theme, with no indication from Bach of which instrument or instruments he was writing for. Some musicians think the music is purely abstract — though probably most agree it was intended for keyboard. Bach never completed the last fugue.

It’s a noble project, and three of the responses were remarkable: Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina’s harrowing rethinking and completion of the last fugue, with her characteristic upward-swerving glissandos, shrieking tremolos, and sudden silences; Scottish composer David Horne’s witty and angry Subterfuge, mostly in nasty pizzicatos, taking off from Bach’s dotted rhythms in the Contrapunctus VI ("in the French style"); and Stephen Mackey’s Lude, in which he adds a "pre-Lude," an "inter-Lude," and a "post-Lude" to Bach’s 11th. There was also Bruce Adolphe’s romantic answer to the second; a mixture of melodrama and hora by Israeli-born Shulamit Ran; and rather predictable pieces by Charles Wuorinen and Nicholas Maw. Worst was Wynton Marsalis’s almost note-for-note rewrite of Bach’s 12th fugue. Except for the Mackey, which incorporates Bach’s entire fugue, the Brentano either preceded or followed each new piece by the original Bach transcribed for string quartet.

Some ticketholders, it seems, were expecting Bach rather than a new-music concert (with rather unhelpful, self-serving, new-music notes written by the composers); many fled at intermission. Those who stayed seemed to love what they heard. I’m still divided. I got tired of hearing 19 four-to-five-minute movements in a row, without much expansion or development. Chou Wen-chung’s piece was intended to be the first movement of a full-length quartet. Not very satisfying to hear only a piece of a piece.

At the post-concert Q&A, Adolphe, the only composer present, praised the Brentano for having "the most in-tune major chords I’ve ever heard." They certainly played with impeccable intonation and refinement. But the actual quality or color of the sound rarely changed. Or the mood. One reason I liked the three pieces I liked was that the composers forced the players to be less restrained, more varied, even agitated. Too bad Bach wasn’t around — maybe he could have gotten them to feel more than the same relentlessly detached, even-handed respect for his astonishing music. I found the playing elegant and lovely to the point of lifelessness.

I’VE LEFT MYSELF LESS ROOM to write about the glorious Slovenian pianist Dubravka Tomǐc than she deserves. But in a way, she poses the least complicated challenge to write about. She’s simply one of the greatest musicians alive, and everything she does is on the highest level of virtuosity and insight. What would Boston be like without her annual rejuvenating visit? And this year, when we needed her more than ever, she played what might have been her very best Celebrity Series recital.

The program was beautifully constructed: the rarely played late C-major Haydn Piano Sonata (the first of his last set of three), Beethoven’s Opus 109 (the first of his last three), and — after intermission — Chopin: the F-minor Fantaisie, with its brooding, inexorable march, its high explosives, and final rockabye-baby elegy (for a dead soldier?); another lullaby, the dreamy Berceuse; and a selection of 10 Žtudes from the 24 of Opus 10 and Opus 25, beginning with yet another lullaby (25/2) and performing the famous "Black Key" ƒtude (10/5) and the first and last Žtudes of each set (including 10/12, the "Revolutionary" ƒtude).

Tomǐc captured not only Haydn’s wit but also his compositional density, and she made them both sing. The Beethoven had the spontaneity of an inspired (though thoroughly logical) improvisation, erupting in the powerful Prestissimo and resolving in aching simplicity with the repeat of the hymn that sets off the final series of variations.

Tomǐc plays with an uncanny sense of continuity — an unbroken, seamless line that comes not from blurring the notes but from articulating each and every one, with a prismatic arsenal of color at her disposal, even at the most heartpounding speeds. This dazzling technique is never an end but a means of achieving emotional directness and poetic insinuation. Each Žtude felt like a poem.

The audience was beside itself, and it got five encores: whirring Liszt (La leggierezza), effortlessly glittering Moszkowski, elegantly piercing Scarlatti, devilishly comic Villa-Lobos (Polichinelle), and the heartbreaking Aleksandr Ziloti arrangement of a Bach prelude, ending, as Tomǐc ends most concerts, just barely on this side of silence.

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