Reviews of Lance's Tanglewood Festival Chorus Performances

By Andrew L. Pincus

Special to The Eagle

LENOX -- If it had been with anybody but Itzhak Perlman, the concert probably would never have happened.

The celebrity violinist made his conducting debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood on Saturday night, and a disheartening event it was. The man has so much music in him, yet so little came out.

The playing in Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms, on an autumnal evening before one of the season's largest audiences, was without character, without expression, without spirit.

There is a long tradition of instrumental soloists branching out into conducting. Early in the century, Serge Koussevitzky, a double bass virtuoso, did it. Among violinists in recent times, there are the examples of Yehudi Menuhin and Perlman's friend Pinchas Zukerman.

Among recent pianists, Christoph Eschenbach and Vladimir Ashkenazy made the jump. It's only in the last generation or two that the specialist conductor -- the man (usually) who commands others and does nothing else -- has developed.

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Perlman caught the bug about five years ago when he began conducting the student orchestra in the precollege training program run on Long Island by his wife, Toby. Capitalizing on his popularity as a soloist, he began making the rounds of major orchestras, including those of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and the Israel Philharmonic. The career blossomed further last January with his appointment as principal guest conductor of the Detroit Symphony. Through all this, he has insisted that his first allegiance remained to the violin.

That was the situation when Perlman mounted the BSO podium on his crutches and settled himself on a waiting chair, allaying the Shed audience's concerns by gesturing to show that he was OK.

But first, seated at the front of the violin section, he played the double role of soloist and conductor in Beethoven's two Romances for violin and orchestra. Intermittent technical problems, of the kind that have marred Perlman's concerto appearances in recent years, cropped up again. What remained in the rudimentary conducting and bland playing was a faint suavity of approach: the smile of the Cheshire cat, all smile with nothing behind it.

Mozart's lightweight Symphony No. 29 fared better. Conductor and orchestra made the appropriate gestures and worked up moments of spark.

But the same, mostly dutiful traversal of the notes, without tension or continuity, could have been provided by a chamber orchestra without a conductor.

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A performance of Brahms' Symphony No. 4 skimmed off the top half of the music and left behind the richness of detail and sound and the tragic sweep that Brahms poured into it.

Perlman showed that he knows how the music should go and could throw the appropriate cues. The first two movements were fairly straightforward in conception, even if ideas didn't connect and balances were off. (The second movement's broad second theme in the violas and cellos, for example, was barely audible beneath the embellishments of the violins.)

Then in the last two movements, Perlman resorted to exaggerations of tempo, dynamics and phrase in an attempt to whip up the missing drama.

The result was no drama at all.

Perlman was a great violinist (and probably still could be if he wanted) and he remains a great humanitarian and example of courage. But there are two ways of looking at this concert. Either it was a cynical ploy to pull in the crowds, or it was an overly generous indulgence of a favorite artist. Either way, despite the roar of the crowd, the program was so far below BSO standards that it came off looking anything but pretty.

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Paradoxically, a far more successful debut was made yesterday by a relatively unknown specialist conductor, BSO assistant conductor Federico Cortese. And he did it with an unusual pairing of late-romantic composers -- Verdi, who wrote no symphonies, and Brahms, who wrote no operas.

The transcendent occasion on the chilly afternoon was Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 with the great Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire as soloist. This was Brahms with all the power and poetry but none of the pounding and posturing. Freire is simply a master of the style, offering the distilled essence of romanticism.

As in his triumph with the second Chopin concerto last summer, Freire had the command necessary for the splashy passages yet also the gentleness for the introspective andante. That movement, in fact, became an enchanted moment within an enchanted hour as Martha Babcock's rapt cello answered and was answered by the piano's ruminations.

Under Cortese, the orchestra rose to the challenge, providing a rich but focused sound and worthy support -- also opposition when necessary -- for the soloist. Cortese stayed right with him during a brief memory lapse in the finale.

To open the program, Cortese, who is Italian, offered the overture to Verdi's "Sicilian Vespers" and the Stabat Mater and Te Deum from his "Four Sacred Pieces," his only music composed after "Falstaff." The overture received a blood-and-thunder performance, meshing its many moods into a dramatic whole.

In the sacred pieces, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, prepared by its director, John Oliver, delivered impressively under Cortese's firm command. The singing, clear and deeply felt, was especially effective in the double choruses of the Te Deum. Both pieces, with the BSO's assistance, built surely to fine, quasi-operatic climaxes. This was the work of a real conductor.

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The BSO reported the week's attendance as 33,808, an increase over 26,034 in the seventh week last year. The breakdown: Wednesday, 1,360; Thursday, 1,698; Friday, 4,568; open rehearsal, 3,613; Saturday, 13,151, and yesterday, 9,418.