E-Mail This Article to a Friend Illusions Levine’s American program, Jens Georg Bachmann, Ben Zander, and H&H’s Dido BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

James Levine, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first American music director, shifted his base of operations from the Champs Élysées and Notre-Dame to Stockbridge and Harlem. In other words, from an all-French opening night to an all-American follow-up. If the American program didn’t cohere quite as satisfyingly, well, we’re a bigger country with wider differences in outlook and temperament — the pieces didn’t seem exactly on speaking terms. In the final and most popular work, George Gershwin’s Concerto in F (in its very first BSO subscription performance), which must have come as something of a relief from the more intense demands of the previous pieces, French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the orchestra still seemed in the French mode of the previous week (Ravel imitating Gershwin more than Gershwin imitating Ravel), boisterous enough, but a little self-consciously naughty and "jazzy," a Peugeot driving down Amsterdam Avenue — though it was extremely well played. The audience hardly seemed to mind that Thibaudet’s precision and elegance came at the expense of Gershwin’s New York urgency. (On the radio next day, I could hear more of the piano over the orchestra, so the performance sounded slightly less precious.)

The Gershwin begins darkly, with cymbals and pounding timpani, and for a moment it seemed a continuation of the dark, heavily percussive last movement of Elliott Carter’s Three Illusions, which was receiving its world premiere. The "illusions" (or delusions), each lasting about three minutes, are Micómicon, a fantasy kingdom in Don Quixote; Fons Juventatis, the classical fountain of youth; and More’s Utopia, as sinister and ironic and scary a piece as Carter ever wrote. What could be more of an illusion than the idea of living in a perfect society? ("Utopia" is Greek for "no place.") More was beheaded for not sanctioning Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the piece gets chopped off at the end with an abrupt sforzando.

There’s more music in these short pieces than in some entire symphonies, with many of Carter’s contrasting and contradictory passages going on simultaneously and all of them stunningly orchestrated. The playing was stunning too. We’ve heard the mercurial Micómicon before; Levine commissioned it to precede his performance last year of Carter’s Partita, the first movement of his longest orchestral work, Sinfonia. A few months later it served as Levine’s introduction to the complete Sinfonia. Micómicon begins with crashing cymbals and a brassy fanfare. Fons Juventatis (the last to be completed, just a year ago) is lighter, a watery scherzo, a seductive musical "spray," beginning with a rising harp glissando and fluttering flutes and ending with quiet little points of xylorimba, horn, and harp. More’s Utopia is a grim concertino for percussion, with sweet, rhapsodic episodes for strings interrupting or underlying the ominous hammering. Carter, who’ll turn 97 in December, was on hand to receive a prolonged standing ovation. The next morning he left for Chicago to attend another premiere.

The first half of the American program began with an alternately raucous and haunting performance of Ives’s Three Places in New England (in a reconstruction of the full-orchestra version Ives completed in 1921 after nine years of work and then abandoned in 1929 for a chamber-orchestra version). The first movement, The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and His Colored Regiment), is one of the noblest pieces in American music, with its moving transformation of Stephen Foster’s "Old Black Joe." In the second movement, Putnam’s Camp, Redding Connecticut, Ives’s recollection of an exuberant childhood picnic is interrupted by a mysterious vision of Liberty. The last movement, The Housatonic at Stockbridge, is Ives’s quietly ecstatic celebration of his idyllic honeymoon in the Berkshires.

The Ives was followed by a loving performance of Lukas Foss’s 1960 Time Cycle, with soprano Dawn Upshaw singing Foss’s elegant pointillist settings of poems by Auden, Housman, and Nietzsche (the one Mahler used so memorably in his Third Symphony) and perhaps too predictable a setting of a harrowing paragraph from Kafka’s diary — all about the nightmare of time. Levine got to know this piece when he was accompanying its original performer, Adele Addison, around the time of its premiere. For all Upshaw’s accomplished, intelligent singing, she didn’t attempt anything like the astonishing range of vocal character and verbal nuance you can hear from Addison on the recording she made with Leonard Bernstein just after the premiere.

You didn’t hear anything like that at the next BSO concert, 33-year-old BSO assistant conductor Jens Georg Bachmann’s Symphony Hall debut in a cramped program of 19th-century German music: Weber’s Oberon Overture, Schumann’s Piano Concerto, and Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. Exceptionally good playing (William R. Hudgins’s quicksilver opening of the Mendelssohn scherzo) took turns with some unacceptable playing (Keisuke Wakao’s ugly oboe solo launching the Schumann; very sloppy brasses). Bachmann, who’s been Levine’s assistant conductor in Munich, had all the mannerisms of a movie star playing a conductor, but he added little to my understanding of these works. He seemed to be following rather than leading the orchestra, letting rhythms slacken into dead spots. I’ve admired pianist Andreas Haefliger, but here he lacked playfulness and nuance.

Far more exciting Schumann was delivered by Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic. Their Rhenish Symphony — uninhibited yet unforced — snapped, crackled, and popped: bursting with exuberance; suspenseful; flowing; joyous and solemn in all the right places. The concert began with an intense and searching Brahms Tragic Overture. In between came the overdue Boston premiere of John Harbison’s 1989-’90 Viola Concerto, with the rich-toned yet sensitive and rhythmically alert Kim Kashkashian. Harbison uses a small orchestra then reduces it further into intimate chamber ensembles, so you can hear every note of the viola. It’s a mercurial piece — fresh, dappled, powerful, and utterly exquisite in those smaller groupings. For her encore, Kashkashian played a soulful Armenian folksong, "The Crane," about being displaced from one’s native land.

In 1685, Henry Purcell composed his only opera, Dido and Aeneas, for a girls’ school. Production values were surely not high; yet Dido remains one of the supreme pieces of English vocal music. The Handel & Haydn Society got its priorities backward, substituting glitzy production values for musical insight. Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng covered the Cutler Majestic stage with a real wading pool that most of the characters had to slosh through; even conductor Grant Llewellyn and the designers soaked their bare feet for the curtain calls. The chorus carried beachballs and a bare-chested sailor (tenor Ryan Turner) came out holding a surfboard. Aeneas (Panamanian-American baritone Nmon Ford), the major non-African character in the opera (he comes to Carthage, in North Africa, from Troy, in southwestern Turkey), sported an Afro. In the middle of the puddle was an island that looked like a large, scaly poodle, on top of which Dido, Queen of Carthage (Irish mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy), was stationed. At the end, when Dido kills herself because Aeneas leaves her to found the Roman Empire, the island ignited in projected flames and the flames sank under projected waves.

But none of the fancy stage gimcrackery made contact with or brought out anything the music was expressing, and neither could it hide the limp conducting (though some of the playing was good) and, for the most part, only adequate singing. Murrihy, at least, had a lovely voice and an unaffected delivery. Ford was imposing but not stylish. The witches, carrying little orange pails and shovels, were familiar caricatures with nasal squawking — even less threatening than usual. Will anyone present remember a year from now what heavenly music Purcell wrote or how moved they were by it?

Let me apologize for a mortifying error in my last review. Writing about the wonderful waltz in Debussy’s Jeux, I said that he was also the composer of the most famous French waltz, La valse, which every Music 101 student knows was written by Debussy’s contemporary and alter ego, Ravel. I had intended to convey that not all great waltzes were from Vienna. I wish I knew what synaptic glitch triggered my mistake. Maybe I need a break from classical music. I think I’ll go listen to my favorite Beatles song, "(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction."