August 28, 2000

By Andrew L. Pincus

Special to The Eagle

LENOX -- Maybe the gods are trying to tell Tanglewood something.

For the fourth consecutive year, the Boston Symphony Orchestra ended its summer season yesterday with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And for the fourth consecutive year, the performance came up short. Rafael Fruehbeck de Burgos had no greater success than Robert Shaw, Mstislav Rostropovich or James DePreist in making the perennial audience favorite an important musical as well as a ceremonial event.

Perhaps principal guest conductor Bernard Haitink, who was originally scheduled to preside, could have broken the jinx. But Haitink canceled to remain in England (only to substitute for Claudio Abbado with the Berlin Philharmonic this week on a tour of Europe).

Perhaps it's time for the BSO to put the mighty Ninth aside and try something else.

None of this mattered to the audience of nearly 13,000, which cheered long and loud in appreciation. But Fruehbeck bore down hard on the orchestra, making its playing seem caught in a vise. Tension replaced excitement.

There were fewer of the erratic mannerisms that marred the Spanish-born conductor's program Friday night, but those that did crop up were strange indeed. Just when he had begun to achieve a serene flow in the slow movement, he began a series of odd twists and turns that culminated in some truly bizarre business in the cello-double bass recitative that opens the finale.

From there, the music went into push-pull mode all the way to the end.

Beyond sheer volume of sound, even John Oliver's ready, willing and able Tanglewood Festival Chorus couldn't work up much momentum. Music that should well up as a natural force from within came as ideas -- some good, some not so good -- from a conductor's excitable baton.

The soloists, as usual on these occasions, were a mixed lot.

Bass Reinhard Hagen pumped out his opening summons to joy with impressive tone and urgency, but tenor Marcus Haddock went pretty much by the book in his march toward joy. Soprano Christine Brewer offered more lung power than beauty of tone, and mezzo-soprano Nancy Maultsby sounded effective in a part that is doomed by its nature to near-inaudibility.

Traditionally, the Beethoven Ninth is reserved for special occasions. A season's finale qualifies as special, but not if the Ninth is turned into a ritual in a subpar performance. The Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont makes Beethoven's Choral Fantasia its annual farewell, but there students and faculty join in an event that celebrates the festival and participants as well as the day. Is there a lesson here?

Saturday night's all-Richard Strauss program showed how the job should be done, going from early Strauss to late and from the sublime to the banal, all of it with style and polish.

The big noise at the end was the "Symphonia domestica," Strauss' family album of life in his house, complete with squalling baby, dinging alarm clock and other scenes that more modest souls keep hidden from prying ears. The 1903 work received its first Tanglewood performance.

Before that came the exuberant Horn Concerto No. 1, the work of an 18-year-old, and "Four Last Songs," Strauss' final work, completed in his 85th and last year. Andre Previn had matters well in hand on the podium, and hornist James Sommerville and soprano Felicity Lott were admirable as soloists.

As much as possible, Previn's loving ministrations toned down the excesses of the "Domestic Symphony," leaving a residue of gorgeous BSO sound. There were humor, tenderness and sympathy in the performance, too.

So why did the feeling persist that supertitles might help, telling which happy, loving Strauss was doing what at each gripping point in the action?

After the human voice, the horn was the instrument Strauss loved most.

In his first Tanglewood solo appearance, Sommerville, the BSO's principal hornist, seemed to combine the virtues of both instruments in the concerto. Mellow and virtuosic by turns, with the hunting calls ringing out in golden tones, the solo part was enfolded in glowing sounds from the orchestra under Previn. Sommerville's colleagues joined the audience in an enthusiastic ovation.

Now in her 50s, the English Lott lacked the volume to reach the farther reaches of the Shed, and her voice tended to thin out or coarsen as it neared the bottom and top of her range in the first two songs.

But by the time she got to "Beim Schlafengehen" ("Upon Going to Sleep"), she was immersed in the twilight mood of these songs about love that endures until death. The ending, with its larks twittering in the flutes and its echoes of Strauss' "Death and Transfiguration," caught all the resignation of a man who has raised that babbling family and now sees the end.

Previn and the BSO beautifully set the tone of twilight glow, with Tamara Smirnova providing heartfelt violin solos.

On a more mundane note to end the season: Tanglewood seemed to have overcome the cell-phone plague, only to be overtaken by an applause-between-movements plague. There are compositions in which applause between sections is appropriate, but "Four Last Songs" is not one of them. A pair of handcuffs to each of the enthusiasts.

The BSO reported the week's attendance as 33,206, an increase over 28,912 in the eighth week last year. The breakdown: Tuesday, 1,601; Friday, 7,236; open rehearsal, 4,058; Saturday, 7,550, and yesterday, 12,761. Season totals will be released after the jazz festival next weekend.