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Reviews of Lance's Tanglewood Festival Chorus Performances |
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MUSIC REVIEW BSO is in its element in Tanglewood openers
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 7/7/2003
Now that he is no longer music director of the New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur is free to return to the BSO and Tanglewood, where he enjoyed great success in the early years of his American career. For opening night he chose an all-Russian program at some remove from a traditional gala: Prokofiev's ''Alexander Nevsky'' cantata and Mussorgsky's ''Pictures at an Exhibition'' in a 1954 orchestration by Sergei Gorchakov that Masur believes is a viable alternative to the famous 1922 version that Ravel prepared for Serge Koussevitzky. Prokofiev's cantata is developed from the score he wrote for Sergei Eisenstein's movie ''Alexander Nevsky,'' which told the story of a historic Russian victory over an invading German force. Filmed in 1938, ''Nevsky'' is propaganda raised to the level of art; the music, which is the source of and prototype for countless subsequent film scores, is strong, exciting, and emotional, often using sophisticated means to create primal effects. That's the kind of performance Masur, the BSO, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus brought to it. The result was primitive, epic, and bardic, but it was achieved by attention to detail. The chorus, singing from memory, poured out thrilling sound. Somewhat less successful was Denyce Graves in the lament of the Russian maiden. This can be sung as if emerging from the vast, consoling voice of Mother Russia, or in the voice of a frightened young girl -- Graves tried to do it both ways, to somewhat schizophrenic effect, not always anchored by rhythmic stability. To be fair, the richness of her low notes was awesome. Some of the Gorchakov orchestration seems merely to substitute one color or effect for another -- the trumpet takes over the solo Ravel scored for saxophone in ''The Old Castle,'' the saxophone (imaginative Ken Radnofsky) takes the famous whining trumpet solo that represents the beggar. ''The Ballet of Unhatched Chicks'' and ''Catacombs'' have even more of an effect in Gorchakov than they do in Ravel; at other points we may miss Ravel's brilliant colors, but Gorchakov reminds us that many of the drawings Mussorgsky translated into music are in black and white. And Gorchakov, unlike Ravel, had access to Mussorgsky's original version, before Rimsky-Korsakov edited out the ''wrong'' notes. Masur has been the most powerful advocate for the Gorchakov score, and he made another strong case for it. James DePreist, laureate music director of the Oregon Symphony and nephew of the great contralto Marian Anderson, led off yesterday with a piece written for the Oregon Symphony 25 years ago by the Czech-American composer Tomas Svoboda: ''Overture of the Season,'' rhythmically invigorating outdoorsy music obviously by a compatriot of Dvorak's. Beethoven's Triple Concerto is difficult to bring off in an outdoor venue. Celebrity soloists can sometimes do it by sheer force of personality, as Ida Haendel, Mischa Maisky, and Martha Argerich did last summer at Saratoga; Tanglewood's choice was a famous chamber music trio, Jaime Laredo (violin), Sharon Robinson (cello), and Joseph Kalichstein (piano). They were attuned to one another in countless subtle ways, which was rewarding to hear, but they did not always project with equal energy; Robinson reached out the farthest. Rachmaninoff's luscious Second Symphony closed the program, crowned by a supplely spun clarinet solo in the slow movement by William R. Hudgins. DePreist retained most of the traditional cuts but delivered an emotional wallop by playing the work for musical values and never straying outside the boundaries of good taste. The Boston Symphony Orchestra
This story ran on page B7 of the Boston Globe on 7/7/2003.
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© Copyright 2003 New York Times Company |
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ENOX -- Perfect weather greeted the opening concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at its summer home in the Berkshire Hills, and, despite disappointing advance sales, more than 17,000 people showed up to enjoy the open rehearsal, two concerts, the bright blue sky, and the greensward at Tanglewood.