Boston Symphony Orchestra
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano; James Levine, conductor
Music of Carter, Berlioz, and Ravel
Symphony Hall, Boston
January 29, 2010
Full-on modernist essay? Check. Carefully selected re-run? Check. Show-offy warhorse? Check. Two-and-a-half-hour concert? Check. Having missed almost the entire first half of the season due to back surgery, James Levine returned to the Boston Symphony Orchestra podium this week with a program of near-stereotypical Levine ingredients, as if to conjure the illusion that he had never left.
The modernism came courtesy of Elliott Carter: his 2003 piano concerto Dialogues, with the plays-everything French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the keyboard. It was a bit of making up for lost concerts for Levine, who would have conducted the piece during the 2008 Tanglewood Carterpalooza if not for emergency kidney surgery. (It also was no doubt a bit of a warm-up for the American premiere of Carter’s Flute Concerto on next week’s concerts.) Dialogues shows just how much room for interpretive initiative there is in Carter’s unruly musical conversation pieces. Robert Sheena gave the plaintive English horn part that kicks off the roundtable—and periodically returns to offer commentary—a bit of an insistent edge, a shading that played nicely off of Aimard’s tone, crisp and clean but with a hint of Glenn-Gould-ish melancholy lurking in a softened phrase here, a limpidly voiced chord there. (Aimard was also particularly good with Carter’s signature scorrevole passagework, an ominously even buzz of notes.) The orchestra was in fine fettle as well; Levine’s penchant for making every shape just a little bit bigger and more extroverted reaped rewards, Carter’s music taking on an expressive, almost expressionistic sheen.
Berlioz’s Harold in Italy was the re-run, and something of a do-over; when BSO principal violist Steven Ansell and Levine tried the piece last summer, a fortissimo Tanglewood rainstorm left much of the proceedings in silent-movie territory. Here, the pilgrims’ march could cast its opiate spell unmolested, its minimalist stasis delicately implacable. The rest was just over-the-top enough to do Berlioz justice, saturated color, rhythmically tight, loud climaxes. Ansell laid down a silky-smooth line; if he seemed more a sardonic Byron than a brooding Byronic—he seemed to be enjoying the brigands’ orgy in the finale immensely—it suited the performance as well as the piece, Berlioz’s Italian sojourn blown up to mythical, big-screen proportions.
Having served Franco-American (Carter) and Franco-Italian (Berlioz), Franco-German opened the second half: Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written for Paul Wittgenstein and painting the composer’s Gallicisms in darkly rippling, Wagnerian colors. (Aimard was again the soloist.) Then more Ravel to finish: the second suite from Daphnis et Chloé, a ballet the BSO has programmed several times in recent seasons and also recorded. Both pieces were, in these performances, collections of striking moments that didn’t add up to a really compelling whole. The moments were almost enough—the volcanic opening crescendo in the Concerto was a visceral thrill, and the rip-snorting precision in Daphnis‘s “Danse generale” was certainly not something to take for granted. But the pieces were the most alive in their centers—the slow section of the Concerto, the “Pantomime” in Daphnis—the places where the music is supposed to be episodic, sequential tableaux of contrasting textures. I wonder if Levine’s straightforward vigor, which is a boon in other parts of the repertoire (clearing up the murk of Debussy interpretation, for example), isn’t as well-suited to Ravel’s ambiguous glamour, revealing the trick’s secret by shortchanging the misdirection that makes the trick work. I kept thinking of Lisel Mueller’s poem “Monet Refuses the Operation,” which imagines the painter scolding his doctor for thinking his vision needs repair. “I tell you it has taken me all my life / to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,” Monet insists, “to soften and blur and finally banish / the edges you regret I don’t see”.
Claude Monet, Ice Floes, 1893 (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Matthew Guerrieri
Matthew Guerrieri is a composer, pianist, and writer whose music has been called ”gorgeous” by the New York Times. He writes regularly on music for the Boston Globe, and his articles have also appeared in Vanity Fair, NewMusicBox, Playbill, and Slate magazines. ...
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