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LENOX, Mass. -- Just think -- a Boston Symphony concert led by newly returned music director James Levine, with chorus and six world-class singers. Who would miss it? Yet the Tanglewood audience on Friday night didn't even fill all the seats, much less cover every inch of the lawn. The problem? The single work on the program was Arnold Schoenberg's "Gurrelieder." Despite the enormous historical importance of this composer, he still has a popular reputation as harsh, boring, ugly and incomprehensible. Schoenberg wrote this dramatic cantata from poems of a contemporary Danish writer beginning in 1900. He used the late Romantic language of his contemporaries, but stretched out the composition over years until shortly before its premiere in 1913. In the meantime, he was developing the music without a key; atonality revolutionized the course of history. "Gurrelieder" became something of an anachronism in the composer's output.
The text strikes the modern listener as overblown romantic rhetoric (King Waldemar and his beautiful mistress Tove), strained comic relief (Klaus the Jester) or puzzling symbolism (the Hunt of the Summer Wind). But this poetry inspired the young Schoenberg to give us music of a strange, compelling beauty. It is the last flowering of musical Romanticism, before it went in a different direction opened in part by the man who composed it. Levine led his forces with carefully rehearsed discipline. All the choirs of the mammoth orchestra -- strings, brass, winds, percussion -- were in ideal balance. And they played with complete conviction, even when the music strikes today's audience as over-the-top (like the four harps whooshing their scales early on). The dynamics ranged from chamber-like sonorities to the loudest sounds ever heard in 1913. Yet Levine, like all talented conductors, never let the loud passages become strident. The six soloists -- Johan Botha, Matthew Polenzani and Waldemar Kmentt (tenors), Eike Wilm Schulte (baritone), Christine Brewer (soprano) and Waltraud Meier (mezzo-soprano) -- were all admirable. Brewer and Botha were often drowned out by the orchestra; Meier wins the prize for a seamless voice with power to spare. The huge male chorus (and the women when called upon) sang superbly, especially in the "Wild Hunt" section. By the time, the final chorus to the sun rang out, the music of "Gurrelieder" was anything but ugly or boring. At the beginning of the concert, the assembled forces played the fourth movement of the Brahms German Requiem in honor of singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who sang the Wood Dove in February's performances in Boston and who died on July 3. James Hennerty is a freelance writer from Albany and a regular contributor to the Times Union. Music review: BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Program: Schoenberg's "Gurrelieder"
When: Friday
Where: The Shed, Tanglewood Festival, Lenox, Mass.
The crowd: About three-quarters full
Continues: Through Aug. 14
Info: (413) 637-5165 or http://www.bso.org
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review