A pilgrimage to the Beethoven shrine: BSO, crowd bid adieu to TanglewoodBy Andrew L. Pincus
Special to The Eagle
LENOX -- The optimism of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony can be hard to swallow in a time of pointless war, political hostilities, Olympic swagger, poverty, hunger and hatred. Brotherhood? Joy? Where?
As the Boston Symphony Orchestra demonstrated yesterday in its Tanglewood farewell, the opposite also is true: In such times, Beethoven's vision is needed more than ever. One of the largest crowds of the season, 10,473 by Tanglewood's reckoning, made the pilgrimage on the hot, humid afternoon to hear the final-day ritual performed for the eighth year in a row.
It isn't as if Beethoven didn't know war and suffering. But he came out of the Age of Enlightenment, when belief in human perfectibility was still possible. Nearly two centuries later, we know better.
Still, joy rang out across the hills in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus' delivery of the final "Ode to Joy." Before that send-off, there had been many other rewards in the performance led by Hans Graf, an Austrian who has a record of repeated successes with the BSO.
Oddly enough, it was a virtue of the performance that the technical imperfections of Beethoven's vision -- the formal awkwardnesses, the dissonances that go nowhere, the timpani outbursts -- came through in startling clarity.
A virtue? Yes, because Graf went to the center of the music, without false theatrics. The first two movements sounded ungainly because they are ungainly: That's what gives them their impact. The third-movement variations, which often seem to wander, enjoyed coherence that deepened their philosophical speculations.
The finale generated terrific momentum through Graf's finely gauged contrasts of tempo and dynamics, and the fired-up playing of the BSO and singing of John Oliver's 160-voice chorus, whose German diction was so clear that every word registered. The pause before the "terror fanfare" (as Wagner called it) that opens the finale was a little too long, but there was terror enough when it sounded.
The soloists -- soprano Measha Brueggergosman, mezzo-soprano Mary Phillips, tenor Gordon Gietz and bass Raymond Aceto -- coped gamely with their difficult parts. Gietz fared best as the conquering hero, but against a chorus like this, they had little chance.
The question of peace and justice, of course, was left unresolved at the end, as was the question of whether the Beethoven Ninth requires this annual airing. The audience's enthusiasm provided one answer.
There was more Beethoven on Saturday night, with Itzhak Perlman as an added enticement to attendance and cheering. Indeed, the audience was on its feet, clapping and yelling, as soon as the popular violinist walked onto the stage to play the Beethoven concerto; the bravos only grew longer and louder at the end.
Between the stampedes to praise, there were flashes of the old Perlman magic in a singing line here, a bit of virtuoso stuff there. But the chief impression left by the performance was the effort that went into it.
Effort goes into any serious performance, whether musical or athletic, of course. The trick, in music at least, is to keep the listener's attention focused on the music -- to be the medium instead of the message. That's what Graf did so effectively.
The message here was Perlman: the familiar face on television, the friend of Israel and the champion of the handicapped, apparently bothered by the evening's humidity. The performance was clear and honest, and sometimes suave. But neither the solo part nor the accompaniment, conducted by Charles Dutoit, opened horizons into Beethoven.
Better things lay ahead. To conclude the program, the black-clad Dutoit followed his previous night's "Firebird" ballet with Stravinsky's own sequel to it, "Petrushka." Dutoit washed the whole thing down with Ravel's "La Valse."
Music out of France like this turns the Swiss-French conductor into a conjurer. Stretching, whirling and squiggling to lead the orchestra through Stravinsky's tricky changes of meter, he put himself into the performance in the best sense.
"Petrushka," heavy on the percussion, sizzled with color, drama and pictorial images -- so much so that when the puppet's ghost appeared at the end, thumbing his nose at one and all, comedy and tragedy mingled.
Flutist Elizabeth Ostling and trumpeter Charles Schlueter were two among many excellent orchestral soloists.
"La Valse" is Ravel's obituary for the dance and all it stood for in 19th-century decadence. The work can be played as an orchestral showpiece, but Dutoit went for the underlying violence. The ending, a howl of anguish, was devastating in impact. Beethoven's 19th-century idealism had a 20th-century answer.
The week's attendance at classical concerts, including a varying number of free tickets, totaled 40,860, an increase over 38,627 last year, the BSO reported. There were 10,001 Monday, 1,218 Wednesday, 6,243 Friday, 3,483 at the open rehearsal, 9,442 Saturday and 10,473 yesterday. Final totals will be announced after next weekend's jazz festival.
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