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Fulfilling potential
Ben Zander’s Resurrection, Don Pasquale at BU, Gennady Rozhdestvensky at the BSO, and the Takács Quartet with Andreas Haefliger
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

I dug up my review of Benjamin Zander’s first performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) with the Boston Philharmonic — 22 years ago at Symphony Hall. "This was not a respectable performance," I wrote. "It was a great one." I wanted to read what I’d written then, because Zander’s performance of the Mahler Second at Symphony Hall last week, with some of the same personnel (the Chorus pro Musica under the direction of Donald Palumbo, now chorus master of the Chicago Lyric Opera, and Martha Moor playing harp), left me baffled. The orchestra is now much stronger. And the chorus, which enters in the last movement, like the chorus in the Beethoven Ninth, was again glorious. In 1982, I was overwhelmed by Zander’s sense of Mahler’s personal psychological turmoil, as opposed to the magnificent single-minded, im-personal communal spirit of the now legendary 1979 performance by Claudio Abbado with the Boston Symphony. I praised the way Zander conveyed Mahler’s "multiple pulls": forward, through his use of portamento (a carrying forward), transporting the music beyond death to ultimate resurrection; and backward, through rubato (a holding back), reluctant to let go of the things of this world. These opposite impulses created in every phrase a drama of psychological tensions that found release only at the very end.

I didn’t feel these simultaneous pulls last week.

Not that the performance wasn’t impressive. The Boston Philharmonic sounded quite splendid in Symphony Hall. The strings were unified, though it was disappointing to have first and second violins on the same side of the stage when only the week before, in Zander’s performance of the Mahler Ninth with the New England Conservatory’s Philharmonia Orchestra, they’d been divided, as they were in Mahler’s time. The brasses were extremely musical, especially in the haunting episodes when they’re playing off stage, but even at extremely loud volumes. And the winds were prismatically colorful (Peggy Pearson the exceptional principal oboist).

And yet, preceded by Zander’s half-hour lecture demonstration, with the orchestra playing examples, the symphony seemed more like an extension of the demonstration. Zander’s earlier performances (were they the ones before he started giving his own pre-concert lectures?) felt riskier, more like direct confrontations with experience, the audience participating in a process of discovery along with the orchestra. "Quest" is the root of "questioning." That quest for meaning was something that made Zander’s Mahler so special. Maybe he’s now beyond the discovery stage. To make major-label (Telarc) recordings with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, maybe he’s had to have more answers than questions. Or maybe the teacherly instincts of his pre-concert talks are interfering with his instincts as an artist.

In 1982, the alto soloist in the fourth-movement "Urlicht" ("Primal Light"), the symphony’s first glimpse of Heaven, was Jane Struss, with whom Zander has had a unique and long-standing musical partnership (she’ll end this season’s "Mahler Journey," April 29 and May 1 and 2, with Mahler’s great Rückert song "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" — "I have become lost to the world"). Both Zander and Struss seemed to have an uncanny simultaneous intuition about the fundamental nature of Mahler — a "vision" that made their performances so different from Mahler-as-usual: more inward, more truly psychological, more felt from moment to moment. Struss’s heavenly octave leap (on "Himmel" — "Heaven") provided a musical body for the rising soul (a friend described it as a kind of mysterious "falling upward"). When in the last movement she sang "O glaube, mein Herz" — "Believe, my heart!" — she communicated a desperate yearning, a need, even a warning. Everything was at stake.

This short movement has to consolidate everything that comes before — it can’t afford to be only about hitting the notes. The singer this time was Susan Platts, a young Canadian contralto with a big, warm voice and palpable musical intelligence. She’s sung a lot of Mahler, and she has the right vocal weight and color. It was a little unsettling that she occasionally slipped below the pitch. But the real problem was how little urgency she conveyed. That octave leap was hardly an event, hardly even a leap. "O glaube" didn’t begin to suggest the intense conflict behind this request. Soprano Ilana Davidson had more urgency, but her bright voice didn’t blend well with Platts’s rounder sound. Only the chorus and some of the solo players made me feel they were living through this, not just delivering information.

I didn’t feel much emotion in most of the playing, only the externalizations of emotion: vigorous contrasts between loud and soft, fast (sometimes too fast) and slow, refined and deliberately coarse playing. Where was the inner struggle — and tenderness — once so piercingly embedded in every phrase? I joined the ovation that greeted the end. Professional performances aren’t often this good. But the very things I admire most about Zander performances were missing. Last November, the BPO and guest soloist Mitsuko Shirai finally blossomed in their third performance. Maybe this Mahler Second was also a performance shy of fulfilling its potential.

LATELY, MY THOUGHTS have been drifting to musical pedagogy. In Zander’s Mahler Ninth with the NEC Philharmonia, the more focused middle movements had more life and conviction — and were more skillfully played — than the extended outer movements, which seemed relatively unshaped. Is confrontation with such an ambitious technical challenge, for a single public performance, what these gifted but mostly unformed students need most? In 1997, Zander took NEC’s Youth Symphony Orchestra on a tour of Brazil with the Mahler Fifth, which they performed nearly every night — with extraordinary results. What he teaches an orchestra — phrasing that "crosses the bar line," a sense of ensemble in which each player is listening to all the others — may be too much to ask from a one-shot event. Mightn’t something less technically demanding lay a firmer groundwork for those more important lessons?

Last year, the BU opera program attempted Mozart’s Idomeneo, an opera that requires intimate knowledge of an artificial style that was already dated in Mozart’s time, a style even professional companies have a hard time re-creating. How many useful things could those students take away with them? This year, stage director Sharon Daniels and music director William Lumpkin chose Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, a comic opera that asks for beautiful bel canto singing but even more for a strong sense of character and believable human interaction. This is just what Daniels focused on — the characters seemed plausible and fallible human beings, not just stereotypes. This emphasis will serve the performers well in whatever they do next. And these pedagogical priorities also gave the audience a genuinely charming — and touching — experience.

THAT MISCHIEVOUS RUSSIAN CONDUCTOR with the hard-to-pronounce last name, Gennady Rozhdestvensky (the stress is on the second syllable, if that helps), was back on the BSO podium for two weeks, with an all-Czech program followed by a Russo-Finnish program. Except for the three Slavonic Dances by Dvorák, none of the pieces had ever been played by the BSO.

Josef Suk’s somberly atmospheric 1909 "symphonic poem," A Summer’s Tale, lasted almost an hour. Three movements would have been easier to take than five. Bohuslav Martinu’s 1956 Piano Concerto No. 4 (Incantation) seemed the work of a mad genius — compelling but (dare I say) wanting in coherence. Pianist Viktoria Postnikova (Mme. Rozhdestvensky) gave a riveting performance (as in Rosie the Riveter). Dvorák’s Slavonic Dance No. 2 is so familiar, at the second bar, the maestro turned to the audience and grinned. Then he turned and grinned again just before the third dance was over.

The second week was better. Yet another Rozhdestvensky, 34-year-old son Alexander, played all six of Sibelius’s sly violin Humoresques — beautifully, with full yet unaffected tone, plenty of dash, and great sensitivity of phrasing. (Take that, Joshua Bell!) His mother, in the first row of the balcony, led the enthusiastic applause. The Sibelius was surrounded by two concert overtures, the 17-year-old Glazunov’s tuneful but too-long-by-half Overture on Three Greek Themes and the 35-year-old Prokofiev’s astringent American Overture (1926), for 17 instruments. Shostakovich’s enchanting Seven Adaptations of Finnish Folk Songs (1939), in their American premiere, picked up nicely from the Sibelius. They were sung with teasing charm by Russian-American soprano Dina Kuznetsova (Gilda in Boston Lyric Opera’s recent Rigoletto) and Oregon tenor Carl Halvorson.

What brought down the house were 14 excerpts from Shostakovich’s raucous and hilarious music for a 1931 circus revue, Hypothetically Murdered. British-born/Moscow Conservatory–trained composer/arranger Gerard McBurney’s brilliant "reconstruction" of the surviving piano score was almost a parody of Shostakovich. Who wouldn’t love music with a police whistle, a car horn, a thunder sheet, a whip, and a lion’s roar? Katherine V. Matasy got a huge hand for her mal-de-mer–ian accordion solo. A woozy waltz was another high point. This piece ought to become a BSO staple.

FOR THE FLEETBOSTON CELEBRITY SERIES, the Takács Quartet returned to Jordan Hall with pianist Andreas Haefliger for a glorious concert in which everything worked. The program focused on the relation between joy and sorrow. Haydn’s Opus 54 No. 2 String Quartet begins with a vivacious C-major Vivace, then plunges into an aching C-minor lament that it takes the remaining two movements to recover from, with more surprising alternations of laughter and tears (or laughter through tears). Bartók’s Fifth Quartet is a breathtaking five-movement palindrome, densely alternating folk-inspired dances with eerie nocturnal dreamscapes. At one point in the last movement, a cheap hurdy-gurdy theme surfaces out of nowhere, then vanishes before the final wrap-up. And in Dvorák’s beloved Piano Quintet, exhilarating, tuneful dances alternate with soulful arias. The Bartók is by far the hardest of the three pieces to play, and yet good Bartók performances are not as rare as Haydn performances in which classical decorum is maintained without minimizing the powerful emotional content. Bravo and double bravo!

The Takács seems more perfectly balanced and cohesive with each visit. Edward Dusenberre’s violin is the soul of refinement; Károly Schranz’s provides the underpinning of rhythmic energy. Roger Tapping turns his viola outward with a glittering edge rare in viola playing, then inward to let his sound blend with the group’s. András Fejér’s cello sounds almost human, like deep humming. Haefliger made a glistening, scintillating partner. The Dvorák, for all its rhapsodic oomph, had a rare transparency, concurrently full-hearted and elegant. After the marvelous 1953 Budapest Quartet recording with Clifford Curzon, it’s the best performance I know. A standing ovation from an audience packed with chamber-music cognoscenti meant an encore — the Scherzo "of a very good piano quintet by Dvorák," Dusenberre announced. A knowing sigh of recognition and anticipated pleasure filled the hall.


Issue Date: February 27 - March 4, 2004
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