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What’s it all about?
The St. Lawrence String Quartet’s Golijov, Antonio Pappano at the BSO, the New England Conservatory’s Cavalli, and the Alloy Orchestra
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

The St. Lawrence String Quartet started in Toronto, in 1989, but the players now live in California. Maybe that helps explain their odd mixture of restraint and theatricality. On the one hand, they’re educators, in residence at Stanford University, and have worked with music educator Robert Kapilow; but they’re also collaborating with the showy, athletic Pilobolus Dance Company. At Sanders Theatre, the quartet just gave its debut recital for the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, part of a series devoted to the Argentinian-Jewish composer Oswaldo Golijov, who now lives in Newton. The same dichotomy persisted.

The concert began with one of Haydn’s less familiar quartets, Opus 64, No. 2, in B minor, an unusual mixture of serious meditation and Haydn’s impulse to joke. The players had a natural, unaggressive sound, nudging us at Haydn’s musical surprises, but it was all a little careful, narrow in tone and emotional range — "with," though not really "inside" the music, "well-played" yet never quite coming to life. Violinist Geoff Nuttall dominated; violist Lesley Robertson (the group’s only woman) was so recessive she was hard to hear unless she was playing solo.

Ravel got a different kind of performance. His only string quartet risks a kind of preciousness. It can be too pretty, too delicately perfumed. But that was not the kind of preciousness that bothered me this time. Instead, the piece sounded more like a series of sound effects with no emotional center: "listen to this pianissimo — now listen to the pizzicatos." The players seemed too pleased with themselves. But the pizzicatos in the virtually all-pizzicato second movement (an idea Ravel borrowed from Debussy’s one string quartet) were aggressive, forced, not tickling or teasing or suggestive of something magical or uncanny. And not always together. At least we were able to hear the suave tone of Robertson’s viola in the slow movement. The audience was enthusiastic, but I don’t think I was alone in my reservations.

In Golijov’s Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, the St. Lawrence, as on its Grammy-nominated 2002 EMI recording, was joined by clarinetist Todd Palmer. This may be Golijov’s best piece, inspired by the 12th-century cabalist rabbi from Provence. In three central movements, with a substantial Prelude and Postlude, its sources are in Hebrew litany and Yiddish song and dance; we hear chant, lament, and raucous/ecstatic klezmer. The performance was utterly uninhibited: Nuttall’s leg repeatedly kicking out; Palmer finishing a phrase by popping one of his five different clarinets out of his mouth and leaving his mouth gaping in an amazed "O!"; all four string players (violinist Barry Shiffman and cellist Christopher Costanza are the two I haven’t yet mentioned) sawing breathlessly away at Golijov’s high-intensity tremolos.

There are probably too many tremolos. The piece goes on too long. Not because 35 minutes is too long for a string quartet but because too much of the best material seems repetitive without deepening, not taking us to some new place where the music that inspired Golijov doesn’t already take us. His idea is to incorporate into classical formats music from nonclassical sources. It’s a worthy goal. Two of the 20th century’s greatest composers — Stravinsky and Bartók — created revolutionary masterpieces with this approach. But Golijov’s lively musical combinations are more insistent than inventive. At heart, there’s something sentimental here. I thought of Sid Caesar’s spaced-out modern-jazz sax-fiend, Progress Hornsby, or the Blues Brothers — imitations so skillful they almost persuade you they’re the real thing. They’re not, however likable they might be, and at their best when they know when to stop.

ANTONIO PAPPANO, music director of the Royal Opera, returned to the BSO after a less-than-satisfying debut in 2001. His program then was an odd one: a Walton overture, Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony (once a BSO staple), and the Brahms Second Piano Concerto. This time it was more coherent: Debussy’s insinuating Prelude à "L’après-midi d’un faune," the Berg Violin Concerto (with Gil Shaham), and the Shostakovich Symphony No. 10. Though the Debussy was completed in 1894, some people call it the first major orchestral work of the 20th century. So in some way, this was a concert of 20th-century music. Pappano gave us very soft and very loud, very slow and very fast, but let very little Modernism intrude. This opera conductor went for the tunes. Berg and Shostakovich sounded as if they had been disciples of Tchaikowsky.

Pappano has admirable skills: uninhibited energy, a capacity to vary dynamics and shape phrases unmechanically, a sharp sense of where each segment of music begins and ends, a consistent textural clarity (though I missed the transparency of James Levine’s antiphonal seating arrangement of the first and second violins the week before, not to mention his uncalisthenic podium demeanor).

What Pappano doesn’t seem to have is a feeling for larger architectural continuities or any deep conviction that music is "about" anything outside itself. Debussy, after all, evokes Mallarmé’s poem about a mythical woodland creature in the throes of sexual longing and frustration. Beginning with Elizabeth Ostling’s lovely, charmingly phrased but emotionally chaste flute solo, Pappano’s tempo was slow but not erotic; his Debussy could have been more about trees than sex. The Violin Concerto, "to the memory of an angel," is Berg’s elegy for Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, who died of polio at 18. Berg actually quotes a Bach cantata in the second movement. Shaham’s playing was warm-toned, varied, and technically impressive, with a lot of fancy footwork, but — like the orchestra — emotionally generic. Nothing seemed to be at stake except the notes. Where was the enchanting Manon? Where was the desolation at her loss?

Shostakovich’s Tenth, which has been played a lot around these parts in recent years, is often considered his greatest symphony. To me its power is compromised by a self-indulgent long-windedness. Shostakovich wrote this in 1953, just after the death of Stalin, who’d threatened the composer’s life and career. This symphony has a buried program. Both the third and last movements end with the incessant repetition of the notes that (in German spelling) suggest the composer’s name — an assertion of his survival, and of his ego, with more than a bit of gloating. Last year, Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic found another clue. Famous for his Mahler, Zander understood Shostakovich’s quotation of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 — his setting of lines by Nietzsche: "Man is in the greatest need. Man is in the greatest pain." Neither BSO clarinetist William R. Hudgins, who introduced this theme, nor the players who repeated it later, nor Pappano himself, seemed to recognize that this theme had a very specific meaning. If the playing doesn’t connect the melody to those particular words, the long opening movement, with its endless repetition of this theme, loses its point.

The second movement had all the point it needed by being short and fast. The BSO executed this aspect powerfully, including the slash-and-burn conclusion. The performance deserved the hand it got. But by building excitement only out of what is most overtly exciting, it also exposed the work’s major flaws instead of showing how those flaws are part of its greatest strength: its impassioned political autobiography.

YEARS FROM NOW, when the students who participated in the New England Conservatory’s inert, under-imagined production of Cavalli’s lovely 350-year-old opera La Calisto are performing in early-music festivals or regional opera or summer stock, or selling real estate — when they look back on this experience, what will they remember having learned from it?

The professionals certainly let them down, first by putting them in an opera arranged in an outmoded style (not just with modern instruments, though these were well-played, but with destructively syrupy textures), in a horrible translation that forced stiff English into music intended for the rhythms of Italian (someone actually had to sing the word "clothing" as "clo-thee-ING," with the stress on the last syllable); limply conducted so that musical lines had no rhythmic energy; clumsily staged (what good is teaching young opera singers feeble Baroque mannerisms before they learn how to establish character, how to move, and how to relate to other people on the stage?); with cheap-looking sets (was that Jacuzzi surrounded by a shower curtain supposed to be a woodland grotto?) and even tackier costumes (whose theme song could have been "Glitter and Be Gay").

Though none of the students was electrifying (as some student performers have been), a handful of them had professional potential (this review refers only to the opening-night cast). The performers with the best voices didn’t always have the liveliest stage presence, and vice versa. Everyone needed to work harder — much harder — on diction. One new phenomenon for a student production: one of the best singers was a countertenor — Jason Abrams, who was in all performances. Of course, they were all getting practice in front of an audience. But one thing every performer needs to learn is that performance for its own sake is almost worthless unless it has some emotional, intellectual, or aesthetic truth — otherwise why perform?

What a wasted opportunity.

MY ONE UNALLOYED PLEASURE of the week was supplied by the Alloy Orchestra (think anyone’s ever made that pun before?) in its brilliant live accompaniment, at the Somerville Theatre, for Buster Keaton’s grandest silent comedy, The General (the name of the train run by the Keaton character, a Confederate army rejectee) — along with Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero, the most complexly ironic treatment of American heroism in film. The "orchestra" is actually a trio: Boston-based Terry Donahue ("junk percussion" and accordion), Roger Miller (known among rock fans for his work with Mission of Burma, here playing synthesizer), and Ken Winokur (percussion and clarinet). You can hear how good they are on the new Image Entertainment Keaton DVD. There’s never a moment when the score, dazzlingly timed, doesn’t reinforce a sight gag or illuminate some quality of the action. Without diminishing the comedy, the music is also truly heroic, evoking the large scale of what was the closest Keaton came to producing an epic. The merging of the two main themes — the riveting "train" music and the visceral "war" music — is thrilling. And chilling.

Maybe all musicians should project in their mind’s theater their own "movie version" of whatever they’re playing.


Issue Date: January 30 - February 5, 2004
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