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Promises, promises
Levine plays Carter at the BSO and piano with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players; Emmanuel Music does Israel in Egypt
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

James Levine has kept his double promise to focus on living composers and to help make significant contemporary works more familiar by repeating them. Last season, he scheduled Elliott Carter’s Partita, the complex first movement of his largest orchestral work, the 45-minute Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei ("I am the prize of fleeting hope"). Levine preceded Partita with the world premiere of the piece the BSO had commissioned from Carter to serve as an introduction to the complete SymphoniaMicomicón, named after the imaginary kingdom invented for Dorothea by the curate in Don Quixote. Three minutes long, Micomicón is a dramatic and elusively fluid microcosm of the macrocosmic Symphonia, a picture-in-little of what Carter himself described as one of the central concerns of his music: "how human beings live in this constantly changing world — not only the world outside ourselves but within ourselves." My intention" he’s written, "was to present the many changes and oppositions in mood that make up our experience of life."

Now this past week, for his third subscription concert as BSO music director, Levine led what was only the second American performance of the complete Symphonia and the very first ever to include the introductory Micomicón. (Since each movement was actually commissioned by a different orchestra, they’ve mostly been played separately. The only previous complete American performance of the Symphonia proper was in January 2002, at Sanders Theatre, when the courageous James Bolle and his Monadnock Festival Orchestra, in cooperation with the Harvard Music Department, did what no major American orchestra had been willing to undertake in the seven years since Carter completed it.)

Carter’s music has a reputation for being difficult — to hear as well as to play. For the audience, one reason for this difficulty is the absence of musical repetition — his major departure from one cornerstone of Western music, the basis for what we think of as melody. He says that in a world "deluged by advertising and propaganda," which make everything "mechanical and inhuman," he wants to "avoid the idea of mechanical repetition." "My music seeks the awareness of motion we have in flying or driving a car and not the plodding of horses or the marching of soldiers that pervades the motion patterns of older music." So Carter takes his subtitle from the 17th-century English metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw’s Latin poem "Bulla" ("Bubble"), in which a bubble floating over the world provides a running commentary on its relation to what it observes below ("I am the flower of air, the star of the sea, . . . the golden wit of nature, . . . the golden daughter of treachery, . . . the glass of the blind goddess, . . . the creed of fortune by which/she confirms the tenuous faith/of drunken mortals and seals their documents."

We have to listen in a new way — not to follow the music but to ride along with it. Symphonia is like a basketball game for 100 players, who are sometimes on the same team — you stay alert because you can never predict who’s going to get the ball next. ("Partita" is an Italian word meaning "game" or "match.") You’re constantly surprised by the orchestral reconfigurations, the changing colors and textures — and emotions, from playfulness to tenderness to an almost otherworldly mysticism (no one has ever written more soulful slow music) to deep sorrow (sometimes all at once). These qualities are surely why musicians like Levine and Pierre Boulez are so interested in Carter.

The BSO left few helpful stones unturned. Two days before the concert, Harvard’s Music Department and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies joined the BSO in presenting an all-day Carter symposium, at which scholars, performers, interested BSO subscribers, and students listened to papers and a panel discussion and watched a new documentary, A Labyrinth of Time, by the Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer, which includes a lively discussion between Carter and Boulez about how much freedom a conductor has interpreting a score. (Boulez admits that if a composer’s markings don’t work, he departs from them. "There’s no right way," he says, "it’s all relative." Carter shrugs dubiously.) And there’s a delicious episode in which Carter, working with pianist Ursula Oppens on the opening of his Piano Concerto, a piece she’s played numerous times, gets her to play with exactly the expression he wants — "dreamlike, as though you were thinking about something far away" — while he also tells her that performers should play the way they want. Both Carter and maestro Levine were in the audience, and both answered questions. Carter’s remarks about repetition that I quoted above were made during this symposium. Even dinner was provided.

The BSO concert itself was long but brilliantly put together — Carter on the first half, Beethoven’s huge Eroica Symphony after intermission. Both long pieces flew by. And the juxtaposition was a revelation. The Carter opened the audience’s ears (maybe also the players’) to some neglected aspects of the Beethoven. Like the spatial elements, which are hard to hear on a recording. In the Symphonia, sounds keep emerging from opposite corners of the stage — criss-crossing, punctuating, interrupting. Beethoven, it became apparent, was doing the same thing. (It’s more audible now that Levine has the first and second violins seated antiphonally, as they were in Beethoven’s time.) Carter’s music is, as Robert Kirzinger pointed out in his pre-concert talk, all about "different textures moving at different speeds" — often simultaneously. Hearing the Carter helped tune one in to the contrasting textures and speeds in the Eroica — though in Beethoven they’re more sequential than simultaneous.

The freshness of Levine’s Beethoven (the most convincing Beethoven by a BSO music director in more than 30 years) must have been inspired by the experience of playing the Carter. Thursday night, his Eroica was still slightly ragged but electrifying — exhilarating and moving. After the Carter, it was a great release to hear traditional melodies and harmonies, and the rousing Finale made an exciting conclusion to the whole concert.

But maybe hearing Beethoven first (I know, I know — what could follow Beethoven? would anyone stay?) might have provided similarities, points of reference, landmarks to help the audience navigate the difficulties of the Carter. His three movements, for example, form a traditional pattern (fast, slow, fast), a narrative — enormously richer and more satisfying together than separately.

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Issue Date: November 19 - 25, 2004
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