E-Mail This Article to a Friend Opening nights Barbara Cook and Marilyn Horne; Dubravka Tomšič at the BSO, and John Harbison’s Ulysses BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

The new season opened with an embarrassment of riches — embarrassing mainly because one person could not be in more than one place at the same time. You could hear the BSO and then either Barbara Cook and Marilyn Horne singing together for the first time in Boston, at a gala Symphony Hall concert for the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, or be across the street at Jordan Hall for a Boston Modern Orchestra Project concert in which John Harbison’s Ulysses, music for an unchoreographed evening-length ballet based on The Odyssey, composed 20 years ago, was getting its first complete performance, Gil Rose conducting.

I got to have some of my cake and eat it too. BMOP allowed me to attend the dress rehearsal, which I can’t review, of course, though I suppose no one would object to my saying that I thought the evening’s concert would probably be superb. I’d heard a section of the second act of the ballet, "Ulysses’s Bow," which André Previn commissioned for the Pittsburgh Orchestra and recorded for Nonesuch in 1986. Harbison has now revised and tightened both acts, "Ulysses’s Raft" and "Ulysses’s Bow," and they make a vividly colorful and strikingly unified pair.

One critic once complained that "Ulysses’s Bow" — the part about Ulysses’s homecoming — sounded like movie music. Of course, as a ballet, the entire work is more episodic and has more narrative elements than most symphonies. But would that more movie scores had such inventive scoring (I loved the men turning to grunting swine in the Circe episode, the heroic trumpet solo that suggests the effort of Ulysses stringing his bow, the haunting oboe music that suggests Penelope’s longing). And, frankly, at least from what I heard, Rose has a livelier conception of the score than Previn.

So that night, I felt freer to attend the Cook/Horne gala, which was quite an event. Barbara Cook is, of course, the Broadway baby (creator of the roles of Cunegonde in Bernstein’s Candide and Marion the Librarian in The Music Man) who’s had a second career as a cabaret singer. Her phrasing — for which she acknowledges her indebtedness to the legendary Mabel Mercer, and does a loving parody of Mercer’s emphasis on consonants ("R-r-r-reminnnd me nottt to finnnd you so atttrackkkk-tive") — is about the best in the business. I also love the way Cook bends and squeezes vowels, as she did in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s "It Might As Well Be Spring" ("and it isn’t eeeeven spring"), the way people do when they’re talking with animation.

A couple of years ago, for a concert in East Lansing, Michigan, called "Just Between Friends," Cook teamed up with another legend, grand opera’s most dazzling coloratura mezzo-soprano, Marilyn Horne, who also had several careers (as a new-music specialist working under Stravinsky, or dubbing the singing voice of Dorothy Dandridge in Otto Preminger’s 1954 Carmen Jones) before she became an overnight sensation singing bel canto with Joan Sutherland nearly 40 years ago (and made a landmark recording with Sutherland and Boston’s Richard Conrad). Horne is about to turn 70, Cook 75, and both have voices that have maintained their essential qualities (Horne’s brilliance, Cook’s sweetness). For all their vocal and stylistic differences, they’re also both a couple of earthy dames who aren’t afraid of admitting their ages or joking about their memory lapses (of which there were several at Symphony Hall, including Cook forgetting that Horne had an entire solo set left to do before their final duet).

Wally Harper, Cook’s regular music director and arranger, led a large orchestra and began with a vigorous yet musically attentive Overture from Gypsy ("Curtain up! Light the lights!"). Each of the ample and amplified divas had a solo turn in each half of the show, ending with a duet. Horne was at her best when she wasn’t belting — her close-held microphone hardened the burnished amber of her voice. Her best arrangement was for Rodgers & Hart’s "Bewitched," by Sondheim orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, who begins with flutes. Horne is an intelligent singer with impeccable diction, but her singing has usually been more about vocal production than verbally pointed interpretations. So it was delightful to hear her follow the line "I’ve seen a lot" with a suggestively growled, and syncopated "I mean — a lot!" She seemed to be using an expurgated version of Hart’s sexy lyric, but a memory lapse seems to have led her to start with a stanza (about Sears & Roebuck) that she later repeated in its rightful place.

Don Pippin’s goopy arrangement of "Over the Rainbow" ("I’m not afraid of Judy Garland," she announced) sent her into overdrive, but in "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" (with an intro not used in The Wizard of Oz), she got to play around with her famous coloratura (on the word "spread") and still-phenomenal plunges into down-in-the-basement chest tones.

Her second set began with a strong, unaffected "Georgia on My Mind," then moved on to a well-sung but uninflected "Beauty and the Beast" (missing the tender charm with which Angela Lansbury, on the Disney soundtrack, rescued this bland Sondheim imitation; Horne’s intonation raised some questions, too), and a powerhouse "Bridge over Troubled Water."

Cook had memory lapse, too. Both the touchingly moody atmosphere of "It Might As Well Be Spring" and the needling irony of Sondheim’s "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" were compromised by lost lines. Her interior, nuanced sense of language is so extraordinary, you hate losing a syllable — although the audience was happy to forgive anything. She jived rambunctiously through Duke Ellington’s "I’m Beginning to See the Light" (with Don George’s great lyric: "Used to ramble in the park,/Shadowboxing in the dark,/Then you came and caused a spark/That’s a four-alarm fire now"). She turned Rodgers & Hammerstein’s "This Nearly Was Mine" (from South Pacific, with a richly contoured saxophone solo) and Lerner & Lane’s "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" into full-bodied dramatic soliloquies. But the emotional high point was her medley of Rodgers & Hart’s soaring "He Was Too Good to Me" and Sondheim’s heartbreaking "Losing My Mind," a song from Follies Cook didn’t introduce but which has become indelibly associated with her (it was also a highlight of her recent "Mostly Sondheim" concert, which is now out on a DRG DVD).

The duets included Joe Raposo’s "Sing (Sing a Song)" and a rangy, ebullient Wally Harper arrangement of Irving Berlin’s "Blue Skies." "I’ve had a couple of nifty partnerships with ladies on the stage," Horne said to Cook, "and you’re right up there, baby."

The round of encores included Horne — at her quietest best — in "Look for the Silver Lining," a song introduced by the beloved Broadway star Marilyn Miller, for whom Horne said she was named, and Cook — without a microphone — in an astonishingly moving version of Frankie Laine’s 1945 anthem, "We’ll Be Together Again" (actually written by Laine). Then, holding enormous fold-out scores, they sang the one-ups-woman duet from Kander & Ebb’s Woman of the Year, "The Grass Is Greener" (Horne: "You’re still married, that’s wonderful!" Cook: "You want my husband?" Horne: "I’ve had your husband!"). There’s no business like show business.

THE STAR OF THE BSO gala was, hands down, Slovenian pianist Dubravka Tomšič, a Boston favorite in her first BSO opening. She played, for the first time in public, the glittery, improvisational piano part (the opening solo was probably Beethoven’s transcription of his own improvisation) of the not-often-performed Choral Fantasy, which, in its use of orchestra and chorus and variations on a simple tune, foreshadowed the last movement of the Ninth Symphony 16 years later. The short program, led by principal guest conductor Bernard Haitink, concluded with the Fifth Symphony, which had its premiere at the same concert in 1808 that also included the premiere of the Choral Fantasy (also the Pastoral Symphony, the concert aria Ah, Perfido!, and the Fourth Piano Concerto). The following couple of days, BSO subscribers also got to hear Beethoven’s Consecration of the House Overture and his Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage cantata, in its very first BSO performance.

The lovely though somewhat tentative Choral Fantasy opening night hardly prepared me for Tomšič’s incandescent performance two nights later. It was thrilling to hear her take possession of this piece, from the commanding fanfare of the first chords to the floating tone that seemed to be whispering secrets. As "announced" by Tomšič, the rather trivial theme (which Beethoven had actually written a decade earlier) took on a radiant beauty. You could hear why Beethoven thought it was worth listening to in so many different variants. Tomšič’s astounding trills were a lesson in perfect finger-work, but they also seemed to glow from within, vibrating with an ethereal intensity that became increasingly mysterious. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang with fervor, but it was the piano that fully embodied Christoff Kuffner’s poetic hymn to music.

The chorus also did well by the two contrasting Goethe poems in the Calm [really "becalmed"] Sea and Prosperous Voyage cantata, a brief version of the movement from the ominous to the triumphant we would hear again elsewhere on the program.

The BSO’s first conductor, Georg Henschel, began the very first BSO season 122 years ago with The Consecration of the House Overture. Haitink gave it its proper solemnity, especially in its Handelian midsection. The violins played with a particular fineness. But the ending ran out of steam. Opening night, the Fifth Symphony was extremely fast, energetic, and well played (great basses!), though it suffered from generic blandness. Program annotator Mark Mandel concluded his note by remarking that the Fifth represents "not just what music can be about, but everything that music can succeed in doing." That’s what great performances suggest, whether in the exhilarating all-in-one-breath unity of Artur Nikisch’s 1913 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, or the cosmic expansiveness of Otto Klemperer’s 1955 version with the Philharmonia, or the microscopic, achingly slow, post-modern scrutiny of Pierre Boulez and the New Philharmonia in 1973. It was, I suppose, refreshing to hear a performance of the Fifth that wasn’t about anything at all, but on Saturday night, after Tomšič in the Choral Fantasy had embraced so much of the world, I just didn’t to want to hear Haitink choose yet again not to contend with a masterwork.