MUSIC REVIEW
Tanglewood season ends in grand styleLENOX -- The sun kept clouds and rain at bay yesterday afternoon, and 10,473 people came to Tanglewood to hear the performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that closed the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer season in the Berkshires.
Performing the Ninth at the end of the season is a tradition that has come and gone, but in recent years it has settled in. Management maintains the interest of orchestra and public by engaging conductors who offer their own takes on the work and who represent different schools of interpretation. Hans Graf, music director of the Houston Symphony (and a former music director of the Iraqi National Symphony), is a neoclassicist; his performance was remarkable for balance, precision, clarity, and taste. Perhaps in the finale he imposed on the music a little -- the basses delivered Beethoven's most famous melody in a hokey pianissimo -- but mostly his mission was to represent what the composer put there. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus always excels in the demanding choral part; this time its members sang with notable expressivity over a wide dynamic range.
Bass Raymond Martha Argerich was the soloist on Friday night. The unpredictable goddess of the piano played one of her specialties, Ravel's Concerto in G, and joined her young protege Alexander Gurning in Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos, an airy souffle of a piece the BSO has not whipped up for nearly 20 years. The opening and closing movements present Bach through a haze of smoke from unfiltered Gauloise cigarettes. The venue is not the church but a slightly louche nightclub; the gestures are sometimes lofty, but they are outlined in blinking neon. The middle movement is the composer's tribute to Mozart -- not to his purity but to his roving eye. Argerich and Gurning romped through most of it with daredevil elan, lingering over the smoochy bits, and conductor Charles Dutoit and the orchestra caught every kaleidoscopic mood. One of this writer's treasured youthful memories is of seeing and hearing Poulenc and his friend Jacques Fevrier play this concerto. They looked like a couple of pastry chefs at the unveiling of a masterpiece in marzipan and puff pastry, and they played with a bemused but engaged detachment that Argerich and Gurning did not pursue. Argerich's performance of the Ravel concerto is justly legendary. The power, speed, wit, and chameleonic tonal colorations are amazing, and then, in the opening of the second movement, she breaks your heart with her gorgeous unspooling of Ravel's endless melody over an anchoring but weightless bass line. And paradoxically, this huge, willful talent is almost without ego. Dutoit -- to whom she was married in the late '60s and early '70s -- knows how to provide a framework for her spontaneity, and the BSO's woodwind playing was marvelous. Saturday night, looking newly trim, Itzhak Perlman played the Beethoven Violin Concerto unevenly. He has often been uneven in recent seasons, a state more interesting than his former perfection, which was sometimes merely automatic. The first movement found his tone without its characteristic luster, and he often played out of tune; the finale was spirited, but the cadenza ran off the rails. In the center, however, was a heartfelt performance of the slow movement, all the ornaments and off-the-beat reflections eloquently turned, absolutely in tune, and consistently meaningful.
Dutoit filled out both programs by parading some of his warhorses past the reviewing stand: Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony, Stravinsky's "Petrushka" and "Firebird" Suite, and Ravel's "La Valse." All but the Mozart are also famous BSO pieces that the orchestra played with elegance, character, and fire, and there were generally splendid solos from all the principals, from Linda Toote's piccolo down to Mike Roylance's tuba. Special kudos to bassoonist Richard Svoboda, harpist Ann Hobson Pilot, and pianist Vytas Baksys, not to mention the weekend's composers. Beethoven's message about universal brotherhood and joy may last only 20 minutes, but it means more than months of political oratory. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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