Stormy weather

BSO cancellations, plus the Camerata, Jonathan Biss, Emmanuel Music, and more

By: LLOYD SCHWARTZ

3/28/2007 7:19:09 PM

The BSO has been having terrible luck hanging on to its star soloists. Pianist Martha Argerich cancelled her engagement earlier this month, and then an unspecified illness forced glamorous Metropolitan Opera soprano Karita Mattila to bow out of Beethoven's Fidelio. Not for the first time, the BSO turned to soprano Christine Brewer (in January 2006, without benefit of rehearsal, she replaced Deborah Voigt in Beethoven's Missa solemnis). Rescue is certainly the operative word: Leonore, Beethoven's heroine, disguises herself as a man (named Fidelio—the faithful one) in order to release her husband, Florestan, who's being held as a political prisoner. It's one of the most demanding soprano roles in opera.

Then before the first performance, orchestra manager Ray Wellbaum announced that Brewer was fighting a cold. If you were listening for signs of strain, you might have detected a few in Brewer's highest and loudest notes—though it's a rare soprano who sounds effortless under ideal conditions. Brewer has a brightly focused, heroic voice and passion in her delivery. Her spoken dialogue sounded both understated and believable. Her Florestan, South African tenor Johan Botha, has a thrilling clarion voice, though without much variety of timbre. Florestan has been captive for two years and is on the verge of dementia and starvation. In Sarah Caldwell's 1976 production, Jon Vickers managed to suggest these qualities and yet still fill the hall. He tore your heart out. Botha sounded awfully healthy for a character in such dire circumstances. Still, the orchestra (after a somewhat rough start), the magnificent Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and Levine's understanding of how Beethoven's essentially symphonic structure is the underlying source of drama (the extended celebratory finale contains the glorious insistence of the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies combined) kept me riveted, finally sweeping me away with the sincerity of its optimism that good really can triumph over evil.

Beethoven revised his only opera twice over a period of nine years after its 1805 premiere. You can hear him moving from Mozartian comedy (with echoes of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Zauberflöte) to echt Beethoven. In the comedy, Jaquino, the prison gatekeeper (sung to perfection by the elegant Met tenor Matthew Polenzani), is hopelessly in love with the jailkeeper's daughter (pretty-voiced Scottish soprano Lisa Milne), who has fallen for "Fidelio." Warmly resonant bass Robert Lloyd was the tender-hearted jailkeeper; bass-baritone Albert Dohmen (Bartók's Bluebeard with the BSO last fall) the villainous Don Pizarro; James Morris the right-minded deus ex machina, Don Fernando; and in two superb cameos, as prisoners, we got Boston favorites tenor William Hite and baritone Robert Honeysucker.

The brief but intense Nor'easter two weekends back was bad news not only for the music groups that lost revenue but for the music-going public forced to miss a couple of the best concerts of the season. At the BSO, the week before Fidelio, James Levine returned with a reprise of Mahler's overwhelming Third Symphony, which he last played with the BSO in 2001, seven months before 9/11 and nine months before he was named music director.

His essential conception remains unchanged. He focused on the symphony's thistledown buoyancy and exuberant/alarming volatility, the way both within and among movements Mahler's vision of the world, of the cosmos, keeps evolving from primal awe (a mixture of celebration and fear of the natural world) into a vision of spiritual transcendence. In this rare symphony that ends with a slow movement, Levine lets that music (marked "Slow. Peaceful. Deeply felt.") unfold inch by inch, much more slowly than most conductors. But he never loses the thread, the underlying pulse. Opening night, the performance ran 15 minutes longer than the conclusion time listed in the program, but it never dragged.

You'd have to go back 28 years, to Claudio Abbado's stirring version of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 with the BSO, for the same kind of uplifting, wall-shaking communal experience. Although I continue to be moved by the interpretation, I was even more moved by the beautiful playing—from the very first bars. That opening horn call (James Sommerville), such a danger zone for horn players, was both grand and embracing. James Ferrillo's oboe sang of yearning. Elizabeth Rowe's flute seemed to embody spiritual purity. Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe's violin offered serene consolation. And Thomas Rolfs, playing the off-stage third-movement posthorn solo with such clear, steady, and soulful tone, seemed to be delivering a message from another world.

In the "Misterioso" fourth movement, the mezzo-soprano sings Nietzsche's poem warning us to pay attention, reminding us that deep as pain is, joy is even deeper. In 2001, the singer was Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and I don't think I'll ever hear a deeper performance. I didn't ever want to hear anyone else. But Stephanie Blythe, with her voice more bronze than gold, her pinpoint accuracy and musical urgency, with the added warmth of Lowe's violin and Robert Sheena's English horn and Ferrillo's stabbing oboe outcry, made me glad to hear her. The women of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the American Boychoir chiming like angels (and singing from memory) made memorable, heavenly contributions.

There were only three performances and all of them virtually sold out, but the one Friday afternoon, during the storm, was only sparsely attended. I wish everyone could have heard this.

Joel Cohen's Boston Camerata and Anne Azéma's Ensemble Aziman rewarded the small but intrepid audience for braving the elements and venturing out to the South End's beautiful acoustic marvel, the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Conceived and directed by Azéma, the program, the American premiere of The Night's Tale: A Tournament of Love, was an imaginative and enchanting attempt to give musical life to an important mediæval French text, Jacques Bretel's vivid depiction of a courtly-love tournament circa 1310, Tournoi de Chauvency, for which no specific music is known. Azéma assembled likely vocal and instrumental pieces from that period and invited us to the tournament, and Cohen read passages from Bretel, a few in French but mostly in English.

"Neither for bad weather nor for frost,/Nor for an icy morning , . . /Will I turn my thoughts/From the love I have" was the lonely (and timely) lament by Thibault de Champagne (1201–1253) with which baritone David Newman's courtier began and ended the evening. Azéma was joined by three women and Newman by three men in changing combinations. Even that eloquently sly fiddler Shira Kammen, strolling freely around the others, untrammeled by a score, joined the singing, as did the splendid Tom Zajac (playing sackbut, bagpipes, shawm, psaltery, Jew's harp, and hurdy-gurdy), not to mention Cohen himself. Azéma, with her angelic curly blond mop, was in irresistibly, seductively sweet voice. Good as they are, none of the others approaches her nuanced phrasing and mobile face. She's also a talented stage director, moving groups and soloists around the performing area in elegant reconfigurations. And each tune seems prettier than the last. Those Camerata fans who couldn't make it to the concert will have a chance to hear much of the music on CD later this year.

I've been admiring pianist Jonathan Biss for several years, but always with some reservations. Now, at the ripe old age of 25, he's finally convinced me that he's the real thing. His thoughtful program of Schumann, Webern, and Mozart at the Gardner Museum was both risky and accomplished. He seemed inside the heartbeat of every piece. The major work was Schumann's fantastical Kreisleriana, and he seemed to ride its expressive waves—and gallop away. He's developed an acute sense of phrasing that captures the maximum melodic beauty. When so many younger pianists are going for glitz, it's deeply satisfying to hear someone exploring the music itself.

Emmanuel Music is now in the third year of its Schumann Chamber Series, and the last concert I heard had some real gems: mezzo-soprano Pamela Dellal, first blending exquisitely with soprano Roberta Anderson in Mädchenlieder, a set of charming late duets, and then moving me with the Maria Stuart Lieder, Schumann's even later settings of poems written, in French, by Mary Queen of Scots before her execution. Dellal was also the regal page turner for Triple Helix's scintillating pianist, Lois Shapiro, who with her partners violinist Bayla Keyes and cellist Rhonda Rider was riveting in the high-spirited third and least-played of Schumann's trios.

Violist Roger Tapping has become an instant good citizen of Boston since he moved here after leaving the Takács String Quartet. He's now teaching and performing concerts at three distinguished conservatories (New England, Boston, and Longy). Last month he presented an ambitiously conceived and magnificently executed program at the Boston Conservatory with pianist Judith Gordon, the highlights of which were Rebecca Clark's rhapsodic Sonata (1919), deep in the shadows of Debussy and Fauré; Hindemith's grimly compressed and elegiac Sonata for Solo Viola (1922); and Brahms's ardent and moving E-flat Sonata, Opus 120 No. 2, his own transcription of his late Clarinet Sonata. ("I tease my clarinettist friends," Tapping said, "that they just have the prototype.") Last week he was back in the Bank of America Celebrity Series as a guest of the Prazák String Quartet (the name means "from Prague") in Brahms's Second String Quintet, the highlight of which was his warm harmonizing with violist Josef Kluson of the ingratiating melody of the first movement's second theme.

This was only the Prazák's second Boston appearance, though the quartet has a major European career and a large discography. Its sound is refreshingly more denim than silk or velvet. It opened with Janácek's powerfully obsessive First Quartet, the Kreutzer Sonata (inspired by Tolstoy's tragic short story) and then Dvorák's beloved American Quartet, which ended with the bows bouncing off the strings. It was good to hear these Czech masterpieces played by performers who, as it were, "speak the language"—not the most refined quartet playing but among the most spirited.

The Longwood Symphony Orchestra, "the orchestra of Boston's medical community," delivered an adventurous program under the clear, helpful, unfussy beat of its music director, Jonathan McPhee (who is also Boston Ballet's admirable music director). Beethoven's Coriolan Overture is a rhythmic minefield, but the players proceeded with confidence and a vigorous sense of drama. Debussy's Nocturnes had a firmer center of gravity than it usually gets, with the women of Chorus pro Musica adding increasing urgency in the last movement, Sirènes. In between came a moving performance of Yehudi Wyner's Epilogue, an elegy for his friend and fellow composer Jacob Druckman. The concert closed with two seldom-performed works of Samuel Barber's, the violent Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, from the ballet music for Cave of the Heart, composed for Martha Graham, and Andromache's Farewell, with powerhouse soprano Barbara Quintiliani. I wish the publisher of the score had avoided printing every climactic high note at the bottom of the right-hand page, so that at the most dramatic moments, the desperate Trojan queen, crying out against the execution of her son, has to turn a page. Still, Quintiliani, with her molten tones, was stunning.

What a discriminating audience the Cantata Singers get. The biggest rounds of applause for their gripping Bach B-minor Mass went quite rightly to the outstanding alto soloist Lynn Torgove, to baritone Dana Whiteside, to the marvelous chorus and orchestra (the Sanctus, with its celebratory trumpets and drums, really rocked!), and to music director David Hoose, whose intense sense of Bach's extremities—the yearning for mercy in the opening Kyrie, the yearning for peace in the final "Dona nobis pacem," the weeping "Et incarnatus est," the glazed disbelief of the Crucifixus, the sudden dancing glee at "Et resurrexit"—is the driving force of his conducting. Whiteside simply sang beautifully. But Torgove had a harder row to hoe. The great Agnus Dei—the last solo outcry in the Mass—is usually delivered with cavernous Earth Mother resonance. Torgove has a lighter voice (she started her career as a soprano), but she made the aria work by sounding more humanly vulnerable, even lamb-like. It was an unusual approach, but she not only conveyed the meaning of the words, she also seemed to be living them.

"These good songs really hold up, don't they?" was the rhetorical question Barbara Cook asked the audience at Symphony Hall at her third Celebrity Series concert. She sang 25 of them—by Richard Rodgers (with both Hart and Hammerstein), Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, and especially her old pal Stephen Sondheim—including a handful (like Gershwin's "Nashville Nightingale," Rodgers & Hart's "You're What I Need," and a Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards specialty number called "My Dog Loves Your Dog") that even the most devoted lovers of the classic American songbook had probably never heard before. She titled this program, which debuted last November at Carnegie Hall, "No One Is Alone," after one Sondheim's best songs from Into the Woods. Since the death of her long-time arranger/accompanist, Wally Harper, this was, she said, her sixth concert with Lee Musiker, with Peter Donovan the sympathetic and skillful new bass player.

Cook electrified Broadway—in The Music Man, in Candide, in She Loves Me—with her vocal range and the conviction and rhythmic snap of her phrasing. At 79, her range has narrowed; her voice is huskier, and for a while her identifying silvery gleam seemed to have dwindled to the thinnest filament. (At times she sounded a little like Mae West.) The apex of each musical arc seemed more spoken than sung, though the expressive phrasing ("I got lost—but loook—what I've found") was as nuanced and pointed as ever. The only song that didn't work was the quasi-monologue "I Wish I Could Forget You," from Sondheim's Passion, in which the nuances broke up rather than illuminated the musical line.

Then slowly, about two-thirds of the way through her uninterrupted more-than-90-minute set, her voice began to fill out, open up, and blossom. In Rodgers & Hammerstein's "The Gentleman Is a Dope" and (especially) the almost operatic "This Nearly Was Mine" (written for South Pacific's Ezio Pinza, and with a particularly thoughtful Musiker accompaniment that repeated the three notes of the word "paradise"), in Kern & Hammerstein's endearing "Nobody Else But Me" (Kern's last song, written for a revival of Show Boat), and in exhilarating up-tempo numbers like the Ellington/Don George "I'm Beginning To See the Light," Arlen & Johnny Mercer's "Accent-tchu-ate the Positive," and an urgent Sigmund Romberg/Hammerstein "Lover, Come Back to Me!", it was all singing, all the time. Most amazing of all, she ended the evening, as she usually does, singing without a mike: this time Frankie Laine's poignant assurance "We'll Be Together Again." That small voice seemed to fill and warm every distant corner and crevice of the vast hall. Who'd have guessed that outside it was beginning to snow again.

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