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Reviews of Lance's Tanglewood Festival Chorus Performances |
 
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MUSIC Gatti's BSO debut is worth the wait
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 2/9/2002
He turns out to be a serious, exciting, interventionist conductor, who sweeps all before him, including legitimate disagreements. He lives and works in the moment, and does not spare himself or the orchestra in any way. The results are both stimulating and exhausting to listen to, and they are the kind of thing that drives an audience wild. There was a thunderous standing ovation for his all-Brahms program, an ovation in which some of the players participated - and some did not. In a video shown at the New England Conservatory Wednesday night, the eminent composer and new-music conductor Ralph Shapey inveighed against conductors who are only interested in the melody; this is an accusation that has been made against Seiji Ozawa by Gunther Schuller. It is not a criticism that can be leveled at Gatti, who is fascinated by the teeming inner life of music, the tensions and resolutions among ideas, harmonies, rhythms, meters, and orchestral colors. The result is three-dimensional music making, with an operatic intensity and volatility of emotion. He opened with the Haydn Variations in a performance remarkable for differentiation of characterization among the variations, while keeping the structure of the theme always evident. The very first phrases produced unusual contrasts of dynamics and also of texture and balance. He didn't vary the tempos as much as usual because he is interested in the way different meters pulse through the same space. And the warmth, depth, and perspective of the sound was something special. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus filed on for the ''Schicksalslied'' (''Song of Destiny''), a wonderful piece the BSO hasn't programmed in Symphony Hall since 1934. Gatti's eloquent hands often seemed to be moving through an element denser than air - music maybe; one thought of underwater ballet. The Fourth Symphony was full of observation and brimmed with passion, but it also sometimes seemed played for effect rather than idea. Gatti pushed the end of the first movement into a nasty overdrive that left the music behind, and the brass collapsed under the strain. The heartfelt directness that marked Elizabeth Ostling's flute variation in the finale was not often heard elsewhere in a performance full of exciting manipulations. But long before Gatti arrived at the tragic climax, there was nowhere left for him to go.
This story ran on page F3 of the Boston Globe on 2/9/2002.
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© Copyright 2002 Boston Globe Electronic Publishing Inc. |
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he charismatic Italian conductor Daniele Gatti made a delayed but spectacular Boston Symphony Orchestra debut Thursday night. He was supposed to arrive in 1999 but was knocked out by a medical problem. In the intervening years his reputation has continued to grow, so his arrival was eagerly anticipated.