BSO'S RAVEL MAKES FOR ROUSING START

Author(s):    Richard Dyer, Globe Staff Date: July 13, 2004 Page: C4 Section: Living

LENOX - Tanglewood drew 23,197 people for the first week-end of Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts, featuring three guest conductors (Kurt Masur, Rafael Fruehbeck de Burgos, and Ingo Metzmacher) and a repertory ranging from Mozart to Wynton Marsalis.

After the opening-night reprise of Marsalis's oratorio "All Rise" under Masur on Friday, the orchestra turned to an all-Ravel program led by Fruehbeck. The Spanish maestro is the best thing that has happened to the orchestra during the interim period between Seiji Ozawa's departure as music director and James Levine's arrival this October. Last spring, Fruehbeck led performances of Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe" - traditionally, the orchestra's signature piece - with suprises. Among them, he corrected errors in the individual orchestral parts that have stood unchallenged through decades of performances. Saturday, there was glorious solo playing from the fearless horn and oboe solos at the beginning through the exultant "Danse generale" at the end, with a glistening performance of the famous flute solos by Elizabeth Ostling. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus glowed in its significant, atmospheric and wordless part.

But the performance's most remarkable aspect was how Fruehbeck got the entire orchestra to play with the concentration, rhythmic discipline and freedom, finesse, and abandon of a single virtuoso soloist.

Ravel's complete ballet score isn't the most profound, moving, or even exciting piece ever written, but it may be the most gorgeous.

Pianist Leon Fleisher has been the preeminent interpreter of the Ravel Left-Hand Concerto for decades; he's played it often and recorded it with the orchestra, but Saturday night's performance was his first in the Berkshires since resigning in 1997 as artistic director of the Tanglewood Music Center in protest against Ozawa's reorganization.

A flat tire on the Mass. Pike prevented this writer from hearing Fleisher's performance live, but thanks to the courteous staff in the WCRB-FM broadcasting booth, he was lucky enough to hear it afterward. In his 75th birthday season, Fleisher still commands the work and elucidates its structure. Some of the performance had the authority of tablets of the law, engraved in granite, but it also had moments of sensuous curve and even of swing. Fruehbeck corrected some wrong notes again and provided razor-sharp accompaniment.

On Sunday afternoon, Metzmacher, vastly slimmed since his Symphony Hall concerts of a year ago, led a lively account of Mozart's overture to "The Magic Flute" and collaborated warmly with Emanuel Ax in Mozart's final piano concerto (No. 27). Ax's performance was more notable for beauty of tone and supple dynamics than for emotional range; in the first movement he gave in to a tendency to rush. But his playing was always limber, limpid, and attractive.

The young German conductor led a vigorous but sensitive performance of Shostakovich's First Symphony. He didn't minimize the energy, humor, and bombast but illluminated the chamber-music aspects, meaningfully delivered by cellist Jules Eskin, oboist John Ferrillo, flutist Ostling, and tympanist Timothy Genis, among others. Shostakovich was still a teenager when he composed this work, which quickly made its way into the standard repertory globally - probably the first and last time such a thing's happened.

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