We {heart} Schoenberg

The BSO makes even the ‘hard’ parts appealing

By: LLOYD SCHWARTZ

2/28/2006 2:58:31 PM

At an evening at the Goethe Institut co-sponsored by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, two of Schoenberg’s children, Lawrence Schoenberg and Nuria Schoenberg Nono (widow of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono), offered a loving, humanizing portrait of their father. Lawrence mentioned that one orchestra refused to use his father’s name advertising a concert that included his famous orchestration of Brahms’s G-minor Piano Quartet for fear it would hurt attendance. BSO maestro James Levine hopes to remove this stigma with his year-long series of Beethoven-and-Schoenberg programs. An “all-Schoenberg” evening — three works from three different periods (probably the first time an entire BSO concert has been devoted to multiple works of Schoenberg) — had one of the BSO’s smallest audiences. Even the following week’s evening-length Gurrelieder, that anomalous, gorgeous, heroic quasi song cycle, with a starry cast, had some vacant seats. But those who came seemed to enjoy even the “hard” parts, Schoenberg’s earliest masterpiece of free tonality (Lawrence said his father hated the term “atonality”), Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909), and his earliest 12-tone-system masterpiece, Variations for Orchestra (1928).

According to Michael Steinberg’s note, Schoenberg wrote to Richard Strauss explaining that the Five Pieces are about “sonority and atmosphere… no architecture, no structure. Only a kaleidoscopic changing of colors, rhythms, and moods.” Like soundtracks for five surrealistic films, these brief tone poems are called “Premonitions,” “The Past,” “Summer Morning by a Lake (Colors),” “Peripeteia” (the Greek word for a sudden reversal), and “The Obbligato Recitative.” Levine led the piece at his first BSO subscription concert as music director, in October 2004. He is now fulfilling his promise to repeat difficult works so that both the orchestra and the audience can get to know them better. And the performance this time was more mercurial, and more beautiful. Levine caught the Keystone Kops comedy behind the ominous “Premonitions,” the way “The Past” moves from charming to insistent, the alarming sudden shifts between violence and quietude in “Peripeteia,” and the urgency of the final peroration.

The Variations are harder to “get” (I still have trouble locating the theme that gets varied nine times) yet not hard to listen to. The last BSO performance was in 1980, but the orchestra gave us gossamer delicacy and the play of wit, as when a marching band (Variation III) bumps into a waltz, with subtle tambourine (IV). You might not leave humming the tunes, but you still end up being seduced. Both of these “difficult” pieces had more moment-to-moment character than Levine’s Beethoven did the week before.

The evening closed with the earliest and longest piece, the lush Late Romantic one-movement symphonic tone poem Pelleas und Melisande (1903), a non-vocal depiction of Maeterlinck’s star-crossed lovers, who had already mesmerized Fauré and Debussy. (The latter’s great, moody opera premiered the year before). Here there really are tunes to hum, but the large effect is both dramatic (Schoenberg follows the story of the distracted, “lost” Melisande and her ill-fated affair with her royal rescuer’s younger stepbrother) and broodingly rhapsodic. Levine led this with passionate restraint and gathering momentum.

Love and death mingle again in Gurrelieder, the monumental work Schoenberg composed in 1901 but didn’t finish orchestrating until a decade later, after he had already moved into the outer limits of tonality. Gurrelieder has passages of increasingly adventurous, colorful modernity but ends with an ecstatic chorus in C major!

This Danish legend was turned into a poem by Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–1885) and translated in 1899 into the German text that Schoenberg used. King Waldemar loves his little Tove (“dove”), and he builds her a love nest named “Gurre” (Danish for “cooing”). Schoenberg’s Waldemar and Tove alternate love songs (no duets) that include premonitions of death. Suddenly, a Wood Dove appears to report that Tove has been murdered by Waldemar’s jealous queen. Waldemar curses God, and in death he and his retainers are condemned to an eternal wild hunt. Ultimately, Tove is absorbed — reborn — into the singing, tingling, teeming natural world.

Tristan und Isolde infiltrates the score, of course, but so does a lot more Wagner. Gurrelieder begins with delicious “forest murmurs” right out of Siegfried. Klaus-Narr, Waldemar’s Fool, echoes Wagner’s comic characters in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. We also hear the lavishness of Richard Strauss. The wild ride harks back to the bizarre choral passages from Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, another anomalous work, both oratorio and opera — and neither.

Gurrelieder requires huge orchestral and choral forces and six stellar soloists. The BSO has done it only twice before, both times under Seiji Ozawa. At Tanglewood in 1974 (it’s a perfect piece for outdoors), Phyllis Curtin as Tove, James McCracken as Waldemar, George London as the Speaker who foresees the wild wind blowing the spring in, and Lili Chookasian as the Wood Dove all helped to make this Ozawa’s single greatest conducting achievement — a success he couldn’t repeat five years later in Symphony Hall. Gunther Schuller conducted a fondly remembered version at the New England Conservatory in 1977, with Michael Steinberg as the Speaker.

Now we can add James Levine’s Gurrelieder to the list of the BSO’s historic triumphs, two and a half riveting hours. It was one of the orchestra’s most resplendent ensemble efforts, combining enormous power and passion with exquisite refinement. Some of the blazing climaxes overwhelmed not only the soloists but also the entire men’s chorus. But for sheer visceral power and unstoppable momentum, it was not a high price to pay.

The soloists, coming mainly from Levine’s other place of employment, the Metropolitan Opera, were a superbly compatible group, though they never had to sing together. As Waldemar, the biggest and most treacherous role, South African tenor Johan Botha sang with both power and vocal finesse. His passion for Tove and his trembling rage at God were eloquent and moving. Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, a sensation in the final scene from Salome in 2004, was a warm-voiced and loving Tove, though a bit score-bound, and the luscious roundness of her tone — her greatest vocal asset — couldn’t always cut through the big orchestra. Her final spectacular high note, though, shook the rafters. American tenor Paul Groves had to strain to hit some of the Fool’s high notes, but he created a vivid character. German bass-baritone Albert Dohmen, in the small part of the startled Peasant who observes Waldemar’s wild ride, sang with such rich resonance, I can’t wait to hear him in this weekend’s BSO Beethoven Ninth. And the elegant veteran Austrian tenor Waldemar Kmennt (probably known best for his Mozart) was both musical and appropriately deranged in his recitation depicting spring’s unruly awakening. This is Schoenberg’s first use of the technique of sprech-gesang (“speak-sing”), which he developed out of the 19th-century Viennese theatrical tradition of speaking in pitches.

And what can one say about Lorraine Hunt Lieberson? The Wood Dove’s monologue has the most beautiful and tragic music in the piece, and she entered it fully. Her voice was strong, penetrating, and radiant. The aria repeats virtually the same phrase four times: “I have flown far, looked for grief, and found plenty.” The first night, she colored each phrase differently, emphasized a different phrase with each repetition. On the second night, she provided even greater continuity to the entire aria, and the inexorable conclusion was all the more devastating, a profound lament for the loss of all beauty in the world, and more beautiful than anyone could imagine.

Copyright © 2006 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group