LENOX -- "Be embraced, ye millions!" Beethoven exults in his "Ode to Joy." Tanglewood embraced thousands, if not millions, in an exultant final-day performance of the Ninth Symphony and its ode yesterday.
On a brilliant late-summer afternoon, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus made the beloved symphony a truly celebratory event, rather than the ritual it has mostly been since the season-ending series began in 1997. The genius behind the triumph was Roger Norrington, returning to the Tanglewood podium for the first time since 1993 and a bout with cancer.
Norrington was one of two Englishmen with "sir" before their names who rang down the curtain. On Saturday night, Neville Marriner preceded him to the podium.
They made an interesting pair: Marriner of the old school, gentlemanly and urbane, and Norrington of an even older -- yet newer -- school, the authentic-performance movement. Its recent search for a 19th-century Beethoven style held the key to Norrington's success.
He reseated the BSO in the classical manner, with the violin sections divided and, at the back of the stage, the basses ranked to the left and the brasses to the right. He also followed Beethoven's tempo markings more closely than most modern performances -- last year's by the Israel Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, for example -- do.
But rather than deliver unto us Beethoven Lite as his 1990s Ninth did, Norrington came up with Beethoven Fresh. Endless details leaped out of the fleet tempos and light textures.
Had anyone, for example, ever heard the trumpet fanfares pop out like that during the march in the "Ode to Joy"? (Trumpets were prominent throughout.) Had anyone every heard such light to illuminate the depths of the string writing in the slow movement? Such explosive timpani thwacks, with olden sticks, in the scherzo?
Sir Roger was a man on a spring. He leaped, crouched, waggled and shot out cues like arrows. He would look away from his musicians and then pounce, catlike, for a sudden entrance or accent.
He made the soloists come onstage with him at the beginning, and he barely paused for latecomers to be seated between the first two movements. He didn't linger over contemplative passages, nor did he make the customary speedup in the middle section of the scherzo. If anything, cancer concentrated his energies instead of sapping them.
All of this translated into immensely exciting playing and singing.
Although the BSO, accustomed to the traditional weighty approach, only approximated early-music crispness, the performance, paradoxically, took on added emotional freight from the lighter values.
When bass-baritone Nathan Berg summoned the multitudes to joy, joy was real. When the other soloists -- soprano Christine Brewer, mezzo-soprano Jill Grove and tenor Stanford Olsen -- joined in, they functioned as an ensemble rather than star-quality voices.
When John Oliver's choristers, singing from memory as usual, added their 120 voices, the momentum only grew. The ovations at the end were as explosive as those trumpet summonses and timpani thwacks.
Elgar's "Enigma" Variations, by contrast, is one of those old-fashioned, heart-on-sleeve pieces that anybody can love but no one can write today without seeming sentimental and yucky.
"Nimrod," with its somber interlude in the middle, is the quiet center and great moment. But the other portraits of Elgar's friends, from the tender to the boisterous, go beyond Victorian pieties to make up a rich gallery.
It may be that no one can conduct this distinctively English music like an Englishman. Marriner's performance will not be remembered for the clarity or unity of the playing, but the outcome had something better: geniality that transcended the occasional roughness and the chill of a wet evening.
"Nimrod" swelled with dignity, but the "Dorabella" variation followed with whisperings of affection, and the dog in "G.R.S." dragged itself clumsily out of the river. Allusions to Beethoven told of love of music and life, as did the performance.
The young cellist Claudio Bohórquez made his BSO debut under Marriner in the Schumann concerto: not an easy assignment, though a frequent debut vehicle because it is not of masterpiece rank. Schumann was experimenting here with form, and the result is somewhat disjointed.
Bohórquez, of Uruguayan and Peruvian parentage but born and living in Germany, received a big ovation from the audience and orchestra, but the performance always seemed about two sizes too small for the music.
He had the necessary lyrical gift and technical equipment. What was missing was force of personality or temperament -- call it fire. In a solo encore, a sprightly account of the courante from Bach's first suite for cello seemed more his natural element.
Speaking of sprightly, the program opened with a skip and a jump in Rossini's "Italian Woman in Algiers" Overture, which Marriner and the BSO performed as if Rossini were part of their everyday diet.
Be embraced, ye millions!
Attendance for the week totaled 29,536, a decline from 33,316 last year. There were 1,616 Thursday, 7,413 Friday, 3,384 at the open rehearsal, 4,853 Saturday and 12,270 yesterday. Season totals will be announced after the jazz festival next weekend.
