Tanglewood concert reviews

Saturday, 26 January 2008 performance reviewed by Karl Henning

Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Opus 38

Ben Heppner, tenor (Gerontius)
Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano (The Angel)
Gerald Finley, bass-baritone (The Priest and The Angel of the Agony)
Tanglewood Festival Chorus (Jn Oliver, conductor)
The Boston Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis, guest conductor

“The greatest work of sacred music that we have between the Verdi Requiem and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms,” is Michael Steinberg’s encapsulation of Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. Such a remark necessarily shows itself as hyperbole; and immediately suggests the self-imposed boundaries of the concert halls in the West – there is in that assessment little love for, say, Rakhmaninov’s All-Night Vigil (Vespers), for starters – but if taken simply as a commendation of the grandeur and quality of Elgar’s achievement, Steinberg’s encomium displays an affection which is not at all misplaced.

Other than in its land of origin, Gerontius is much less widely known than either the Verdi or the Stravinsky. Yet it is a score into which Elgar poured “my own heart’s blood.” The poem by John Henry Cardinal Newman was of a special and personal importance to Elgar (the composer and his wife Alice often read it together). To this listener’s ears, Gerontius is perhaps Elgar’s most successful large-scale score, unfolding in waves of unfailing grace, and many passages of disarming delicacy. At the end of the manuscript, Elgar wrote an inscription from John Ruskin’s “Sesame and Lilies”: This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved and hated, like another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.

Ben Heppner was in fine voice, and his performance was sweetly modulated to the character of Gerontius throughout. It was necessarily a less dramatic delivery than Ben is oft famed for; but then, Gerontius is neither Wagner’s Tristan nor Berlioz’s Dido. Sarah Connolly sang nicely, yet her voice was perhaps a shade ‘dusky’ for the role of the Angel. From purely sonic considerations, though, Connolly and Heppner made a most agreeable pairing. Gerald Finley did a splendid job, albeit in two very minor roles; his Litany in Part II, as The Angel of the Agony, was steadfast and thrilling. Although serving as ‘the background’, the truly stand-out performers on Saturday were the orchestra, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. The Chorus sang with such energy, with such focus and yet such ease, that the oratorio seemed a firm cornerstone of their annual repertory – there was no hint that this was only the second set of performances ever undertaken in Boston, and that a quarter century has passed since the first.

There is a famous scolding in the history of performances of Gerontius. In preparing a performance, Sir John Barbirolli needed to chide the tenors and basses for playing it a bit too nice in the Demons’ Chorus: “You’re not bank clerks on a Sunday outing, you’re souls sizzling in hell.” Yet part of it, I think, is the way Elgar wrote the piece; they do seem ‘tidier’ demons than those whom Berlioz has hectoring Faust in his descent to Hades. This is not at all to wish that Elgar had composed the oratorio at all otherwise than he did, of course; and if Elgar’s demons express themselves partly in expert counterpart, perhaps it is something of a pun upon Gradus ad Parnassum, the classic Fux primer.

In conclusion, let us consider a rhetorical question. It is Sir Colin Davis who conducted this magnificent piece here in Boston both in December of 1982, and today. If it is not Sir Colin Davis who comes back to bring it to us again a third time, who will it be?

Nov. 17, 2007 concert reviewed by Karl Henning.

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Saturday, 17 November 2007
James Sommerville, horn
James Levine, conducting

Haydn, Symphony No. 104 in D, London
Elliott Carter, Horn Concerto (2006), world premiere
Mahler, Symphony No. 1 in D

What a wonderful and rare occasion is the world premiere of a piece, and in the presence of the composer, who will be marking his ninety-ninth birthday in a scant few weeks. Every now and then you read an indulgent piece of music journalism which bemoans the alleged “death” of classical music; Saturday night in Symphony Hall, on the contrary, was an energetic and vital celebration of an art not only still in practice, but in full stride.

James Levine’s reading of Haydn’s final symphony was a good improvement on a performance a few seasons back by a guest conductor (that performance was certainly competent and congenial, but little more). The finale was perhaps a bit more driven on Saturday than may quite have suited the score; and that is possibly the most pronounced quibble with an interpretation which skirts the description mannered.

Overall, it was fresh, lively music-making. Levine omitted the repeat of the first-movement exposition, which I might not have commented on, only later in the Mahler, he observed the corresponding repeat; and it seemed to me a bit odd to give the later composer the preferential treatment in this question (not a great deal of time was shaved off the concert, by striking that repeat in the Haydn, for instance).

Carter’s new Horn Concerto runs about 12 minutes by the clock, and so must probably be considered (relatively speaking) a minor work; but the soloist finds a lot of living in that brief time, and James Sommerville’s labors (which he carried with becoming lightness) were easily the equivalent of many another composer’s major concerto. While at work on the piece, Carter himself was surprised at how easily Sommerville read some rapid figuration in some of the sketches.

The Concerto is lissome and beguiling, and was very warmly received. I drew at least one puzzled stare when I called for an encore, but I was in earnest; the piece was short enough, and I’ve been to other concerts where a relatively brief new work was given a second time immediately, especially on the audience’s demand. The piece is nimble, and takes several rapid turns of texture and character entirely in keeping with Carter’s style; like most of his music, I feel that I want another listen or two to get a better grasp of things, but one thing I liked immediately and which lingers in memory was a lovely duet between the tuba and the soloist.

The composer is said currently to be working on a flute concerto. Carter came out on stage at the Concerto’s end to receive warm applause from the whole audience. At the intermission, when I chanced upon the composer and congratulated him on a delightful piece, his face beamed with pleasure as he replied, “They played just beautifully.”

James Levine is entirely in his element with Mahler, as both last week’s luminous account of the Ninth, and this week’s First Symphony amply demonstrate. Levine and the BSO paced the whole symphony very well, indeed, and the series of brass climaxes in the fourth movement were expertly shaped. I looked across the aisle at one point in a lyrical passage of the fourth movement, and saw Elliott Carter, his eyes closed in calm concentration. His right hand motioned gently, describing a short arc reflecting the musical line.

Mahler’s music is so much of its time and place in turn-of-the-century Vienna, and Carter is so vividly associated with music of a cast so entirely different to Mahler’s, that it was perhaps only as I saw this living master seated in the Hall during the Mahler, that it occurred to me that these two composers’ lives overlapped by a sliver of time; that in fact Carter was born in New York City in December of a year that Mahler conducted performances of the Metropolitan Opera.

Nov. 10, 2007 concert reviewed by Karl Henning

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Saturday, 10 November 2007
Christian Tetzlaff, violin
James Levine, conducting

Berg, Violin Concerto
Mahler, Symphony No. 9

The two pieces on this rich program share the distinction of being the last score completed by their respective composers, both of whom departed this life at the untimely age of 50. They are further entwined biographically. Gustav Mahler’s widow Alma subsequently married the architect Walter Gropius, whom Alma bore a daughter, Manon. At the time that Louis Krasner had commissioned Berg to compose the Violin Concerto, Alma had been married to the Prague-born poet and writer Franz Werfel some six years.

At first Berg sought to evade Krasner’s request for a concerto, saying that the world of Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps was not his. However, Berg did guardedly accept the commission; and when the shocking news reached him of the 18-year-old Manon’s death by polio, he conceived of writing the Concerto as a sort of Requiem, “to the memory of an angel.”

Berg died without ever hearing the Concerto performed, of course. Krasner played the premiere in April of 1936 at a festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Barcelona. Anton Webern was to conduct, but he was still in such an emotional state with his friend’s recent decease (they were fellow composition students of Schoenberg’s), that at the last minute (and with minimal opportunity to study the score) Hermann Scherchen stepped in to conduct in Webern’s stead.

It was only last November that Christian Tetzlaff played both the Schoenberg and Beethoven concertos in a tour de force program, so when I learned that he was playing the Berg Concerto this season, no question remained. The performance of both soloist and orchestra was exquisite; one shivers at even the memory of the ghostly trade-off of the Es ist genug chorale phrases, the BSO winds sounding a sort of apotheosis of a village church harmonium. The crowd in Symphony Hall applauded Tetzlaff enthusiastically, and he responded by playing the Andante from the Bach A Minor Sonata for an encore, an after-performance which in turn held the audience spellbound.

Deryck Cooke seems already to have proposed the Tchaikovsky Pathétique as a formal model for Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The third movement of the Mahler is a vigorous Rondo of a character which would normally serve as the finale to a symphony (which might equally be said of the somewhat overconfident March of the Pathétique’s third movement); and both symphonies end with poignant slow movements which, because they close the symphony in place of a cheery Allegro, cast something of a somber hue over the whole work.

But where Tchaikovsky’s finale leaves an impassioned, wracked-with-tears impression, the luminous pianissimo at the close of Mahler’s final complete symphony shimmered in Symphony Hall with an otherworldly serenity. It was a magical close to a completely engaging, full-blooded performance which truly marks a milestone in the orchestra’s partnership with James Levine.

One delightful artifact in the program notes, is the reprint of a letter which Aaron Copland wrote to the editor of the New York Times in April, 1925, defending Mahler’s music. Before the concert, I read with delight Copland’s remark that Mahler “was never more Mahler than when he was copying Mozart.” But it was not until the orchestra began playing the second movement, that I felt the force and musical truth of Copland’s pithy observation.