August 27, 2000

By Andrew L. Pincus

Special to The Eagle

LENOX -- We live in an age that whittles heroes down to fit on a video screen. So why not miniaturize the hero who stalks through Mahler's First Symphony?

That obviously was not conductor Rafael Fruehbeck de Burgos' intent at Tanglewood on Friday night. Indeed, his strivings for effect seemed calculated to redeem a symphony that had been worn down by too many heroics over the years. But when the eight hornists stood at the end to blare out their triumphal calls, the battle seemed lost.

"Titan," Mahler subtitled his maiden symphony, after the philosophical novel of the same name by Jean Paul. Though Mahler later dropped the title, the idea of the romantic hero, striding through nature and conquering the forces in his path, remains.

The hero, of course, is none other than the composer himself.

The Spanish-born Fruehbeck, now director of the Berlin Radio Orchestra, had plenty of ideas about tempo, dynamics and the like. Some of them worked. Making his Tanglewood debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he achieved some supremely quiet playing in places where other conductors only pretend to be quiet. He also put a nice, leisurely gait into the country dances that offset Mahler's stormy and mordant effects.

But in the end, the constant tinkering -- now racing, now pulling back or shutting down, beyond anything called for in the music -- seemed merely fussy. It took the mystery out of the opening invocation of nature. It played the funeral march straight, not as parody. It understated music whose whole nature is the big romantic gesture.

The BSO didn't even sound good. As on other occasions this summer, blend was not a priority; the playing was tight, without any give.

Earlier, Joshua Bell gave the crowd a hero, bringing it to its feet with his pyrotechnics in Sibelius' Violin Concerto. Indeed, he got through one of the world's most difficult concertos with only telltale signs of stress.

Besides being one of the best of a younger generation of violinists, Bell got onto the star track with his role in the movie "The Red Violin." His violin wasn't red in the Sibelius work, but it did sizzle.

The slow movement was full of passion, the finale furious with energy.

Still, there's a quality of loneliness -- of Nordic isolation and brooding anti-heroism -- that Bell only suggested in this music, composed just 15 years after the full-blown romanticism of the Mahler symphony.

The performance was not greatly helped by the Fruehbeck-led accompaniment, which muttered when Bell was playing but broke into shouting and racing when he fell silent. Good intentions sometimes are not enough.

The season's final Prelude Concert offered an a cappella sampling of Aaron Copland's choral music as a coda to the Copland centennial celebration.

John Oliver led his always responsive Tanglewood Festival Chorus in a work from the composer's student years, Four Motets, and a Copland classic, "In the Beginning." In between came composer-in-residence Elliott Carter's "Emblems."

Four Motets, based on prayers, is mostly conventional in gesture, with only hints of the Copland to come. "In the Beginning," however, capitalizes on the drama inherent in a setting of the creation story from Genesis. "Emblems" is early Carter, directly expressive in its setting, for a male chorus with piano, of a poem by Allen Tate invoking long-dead ancestors in the American South.

The performances were constantly fresh in their range of dynamics and expression; Oliver can get the clarity and intimacy of a chamber chorus out of his full 120-voice ensemble. Mezzo-soprano Makiko Narumi deployed a big, attractive, but not always focused, voice as the soloist in "In the Beginning." Pianist Frank Corliss ably assisted in the Carter.