Symphony Hall

Last night I attended a concert at Boston's famous Symphony Hall. Despite having watched in my youth "Evenings at Pops" and telecasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Seiji Ozawa, music director, as William Pierce always added) and thinking I had a pretty good idea of what the hall looked like, I was completely surprised to discover a gallery of statuary above the uppermost balcony. What a crazy thing! I was not sure whether the statues were meant to be listening in rapt attention, or whether they portrayed audience members petrified by boredom. (Above, the picture I took with the lousy camera of my cell phone.)

The hall lived up to its renowned reputation. It's a nice antidote to our overly bright New York halls, and that includes renovated Carnegie. The acoustic flatters the orchestra and hides blemishes such as lapses in ensemble or shrillness in violins or high winds.

We in New York City are so used to trumpeting our best-in-everythingness that we take on, despite all our cosmopolitanism, a kind of provincialism. So it is with some humility that I have to admit that the concert experience I had last night was superior in many ways to some recent concert outings of mine in New York City.

Let's start with the program book. Rather than the useless throwaways that litter our concert halls, the BSO's program is produced by the BSO itself. It features a long essay on the concert program, not a puff piece about upcoming events. Steven Ledbetter's program notes are extensive and well written and contain a guide to further reading (and listening). No where is there a presumption of cultural or musical illiteracy.

Levine, much to his credit, eschews "thematic" programming, although the pieces he chose for Thursday's concert had much in common: Mozart's Symphony No. 29 in A; Berg's Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with Thirteen Wind Instruments; and Brahms's Serenade No. 2, in A. All three pieces are for reduced forces; all of them are by composers who were resident in Vienna for much of their careers; and while the Berg is atonal, it is anchored, if not in the key, than on the note A.

Levine is a great conductor because he brings a forceful musical personality to everything he touches. (How deep that musical personality goes is another matter.) He is a master of dramatic momentum, and he knows how to unleash the fullness of an orchestra's sound without losing textural clarity. At their best, Levine's performances bring together intensity and richness of sound, while still maintaining enough flexibility to bring out a musical detail. (I write this as someone who has probably heard live more Levine performances than those of any other conductor--most of those performances at the Met).

The danger with this approach is that not every piece of music sustains dramatic momentum. A case in point is the Berg Chamber Concerto. The last movement, with its abrupt stoppages and whispered coda, resists the usual musical narrative. Levine really could not recover after an explosive first movement and a deeply felt, ruminative second; the last movement had nowhere left to go. Perhaps in future performances, Levine will solve this problem.

To the Mozart, Levine brought the zest and vigor that is his custom in such music; the Andante especially was beautifully played, marred only by too-loud horns towards the end. The central movement in the Brahms is its sublime Adagio, and Levine resisted the temptation to draw it out endlessly, instead eliciting ravishing playing from the orchestra and letting the music make its point.

I can attest to what has been said of Levine lately: that he has revitalized the BSO, and vice versa; that he has managed to keep off most of the weight he recently shed; and that he is bringing a new seriousness and a commitment to modern and contemporary works to these concerts. Bostonians are lucky to have music-making of such a high level, and such a great hall to hear it in.

Last Night at the Met

Last night I went to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time this season. It looks to me as though the audience had internalized Peter Gelb's glamorization campaign--far more well-dressed people were in attendance than I remember from previous seasons. Since I am a firm believer in dressing up for the opera, this is for me a positive development.

I saw Le Nozze di Figaro in the energetic but unimaginative Jonathan Miller production. It's all farce and low comedy; the characters' humanity really has little chance of coming through. The blocking in some places is on a sixth-grade-play level, especially in the third act.

Not helping was Philippe Jordan's finesse-less conducting. His tempi in the first two acts was too fast; the second half was slack. He failed to build the musical tension of the last act so that it could be gloriously released with the Count's plea for forgiveness.

There was also sloppiness between stage and pit; at one point in the second act everything broke down.

Anke Vondung made a winning debut as Cherubino. She has a beautiful voice, and I imagine she is still trying to determine how best to apply it to the Met's acoustic. Erwin Schrott (infamous for his shritless Don Giovanni at Covent Garden) is a charismatic and likeable Figaro. His voice, with its hint of a burr, is, when he chooses to sing, both warm and powerful. Too often, though, he gooses his performance with grumblings and mutterings and other extramusical effects. He needs to dial it down a notch.

Pertusi's dark, highly covered voice was effective for the Count, although his acting is somewhat too broad. Lisette Oropesa filled in for Isabel Byrakdarian as Susanna and did an adequate job; she did, however, encounter some pitch problems. Hei-Kyung Hong sang the countess with authority. Her vibrato is widening, she blurred some of the passagework, but she can still sing with the kind of tone that commentators like to call "creamy."

It was an enjoyable evening, all told. I wouldn't be surprised if the performances improve as the cast starts to gel.

Davis Returns

It's good to see Peter G. Davis back, and in top form, in the pages of The New York Times. Here's hoping we'll see his byline in those pages more often.

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