Categories and historical timing are funny things. If the show the American Repertory Theater has mounted under the title of Porgy and Bess—sorry, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, a Gershwin-estate-mandated change that I hope they un-mandate, because it’s clunky and irritating and snubs Dubose and Dorothy Heyward—anyway, if this was the show that had opened at the Colonial Theatre in Boston back in 1935, chances are that we would have long since described Porgy and Bess as a musical theater landmark on par with Oklahoma! and West Side Story. But, of course, that’s not what opened in 1935; what opened instead was what has come to be regarded, for better or worse, as the closest thing there is to a Great American Opera (once you disqualify Bernstein’s Mass on technicalities). And that means the experience of the A.R.T’s Porgy and Bess, adapted by director Diane Paulus, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and composer Diedre Murray, is as much about what’s not there as what is.

Especially after Stephen Sondheim, a week before even preview performances opened, sent a smart bomb of a letter to the New York Times taking this particular production’s creators to task for suggesting that the original’s dramatic engine needed something of a tune-up. The chorus of self-satisfied agreement it triggered on the Internet (the comments on the original post of the letter are a good place to start) was orders of magnitude less deft, but did point up how conventional wisdom has shifted in the past twenty-five years. Because when I first got to know and love Porgy and Bess, back in the 80s, the suggestion that it was a flawed masterpiece was hardly controversial. Porgy and Bess can be plenty dramatic, but, like many great operas, it does take a certain amount of effort to pull it off. (I mean, I’m impressed by any production of Simon Boccanegra that can put across exactly what’s going on logistically, let alone emotionally.)

Bess’s character is a good example: Gershwin and Heyward make some interesting choices in the way she’s introduced. She’s around for most of the first scene, but just one of the crowd: for a time, other characters talk about her more than she talks herself. Her first big stretch of singing doesn’t come until the end of the second scene—by that, time, even minor characters have come into more focus than she has. Compare this with, say, Carmen, who makes a delayed entrance with a showstopper of an aria, structurally pocketing all of the built-up first-act energy in one fell swoop. Again, Gershwin and Heyward made an interesting choice, not necessarily a mistaken one, but one that’s going to require some directorial intervention to work. So how much of a purist one is regarding Porgy and Bess is already less a bright line than a matter of degrees.

The brief assigned to Paulus, Parks, and Murray was to make a 21st-century Broadway musical out of Porgy and Bess, and that they have: this Porgy is a tight, polished piece of entertainment. And for all their brazen intentions of reinvention and reimagination, the final product hews reasonably close to the plot of the original, including the original ending (restored after some preview-period experimentation with a happier denouement). Their main tool has been speed—plenty of cuts, most of the recitatives replaced with spoken dialogue (like the 1942 Broadway revival), some smaller characters eliminated (for example, Scipio is gone, as is Peter, along with his entire material-witness subplot). It’s skillful surgery, once you get past the little jolt of confusion (if you’re really used to the original) every time a section of the piece turns up sooner than you expect: the dramatic line is clear, the flow smooth.

This particular production of the adaptation is not quite there yet. There are some great moments: the “Train is at the Station” spiritual at the end of the funeral is fine theater, and the lead-in to “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” gives the first line more dramatic punch than I’ve ever seen in any other production. But some scenes still feel either unsettled or forced, the energy tentative or diffuse. Paulus has a tendency to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks, but sometimes the ideas are so profuse that one loses sight of the wall. But none of those ideas feel particularly radical or confrontational—the production, if anything, seems to be making a point of putting its faith in the vernacular of traditional Broadway staging. If it was a movie, one could talk about its studio sheen.

Where the evening does run into problems (WARNING: musical quibbling ahead, though, after 75 years, Porgy and Bess has earned that line of defense) is where productions of Porgy usually run into problems, in the musical gray area between Broadway and opera. The weekend previous, the Boston Symphony Orchestra had a chance to make the operatic case, presenting a concert performance of the 1935 version of Porgy at Tanglewood, but instead—at least as transmitted over the radio (a late-summer bug having stranded me at home)—the performance catalogued most of the pitfalls that operatic productions can fall into: an overly leisurely pace; squishy, cushioned playing that took the bite out of the score’s syncopations; about half the cast using vocal vibrato of such wobbly dimension as to swallow Gershwin’s delicate, bluesy half-step inflections whole. But the A.R.T.’s Porgy sometimes goes too far in the other direction, at least in the way it uses voices. Murray’s adaptation of the score is smartly curated: all the big numbers are there, but also some of Gershwin’s more daring inventions—the aleatoric praying in the face of the hurricane, the multi-speed layering of Bess’s spiritual, the stylized vendors’ cries—as well as much of his running commentary, preserved in quite extensive underscoring. The orchestrations, by William David Brohn and Christopher Jahnke, are solid and even ingenious (there’s nice use made of the concertina), a punchy substitute for the original’s lushness. But it was mildly disconcerting to hear “Summertime” transposed down (as fine as Nikki Renée Daniels, as Clara, sang it); and it was downright disorienting to hear “My Man’s Gone Now” transposed so far down that Serena’s wails became guttural sobs, buried within the chorus parts rather than soaring over them. (Bryonha Marie Parham’s pacing didn’t help, starting off at a level where the aria should end and then having no place to go.)

Those musical objections didn’t stall the show’s well-crafted dramatic engine; but more damaging to the dramatic balance was the casting of Norm Lewis as Porgy. As an actor, he was superb, presenting a subtle, sharply observant Porgy, both warm and cagey. But as a singer, his light, fine-grained voice simply lacked the heft to give Porgy’s sung moments the gravity they require. As it turns out, no matter how much you streamline it, Porgy and Bess is still an opera in one key respect: the most important dramatic moments are carried by the singing voice, and Gershwin was fully cognizant of what kind of voices he wanted and needed for such conveyance. A jazzier, more conversational production is built into the songs of Sportin’ Life (David Alan Grier, delineating the city slicker-trickster with a few well-chosen strokes), but for Lewis to work such syncopated insinuations and asides into “I Got Plenty o Nuttin’” uncentered the character; it was close to the way Sammy Davis, Jr. might have sung it—and Sammy was a Sportin’ Life, not a Porgy. Gershwin kept Porgy’s lines foursquare for a reason.

The glory of this Porgy is Audra McDonald as Bess. It’s an incandescent performance, completely physically embodied from her first entrance, sustained like a taut wire. One completely senses Bess’s paradoxical fragility and strength, her masks and defenses going up and down, her heightened sensitivity to every shift of the situation. She sings the role both technically securely and in character, the shades of emotion mixed in with the shifts of timbre. It’s Callas-level dedication to both dramatic cogency and musical accomplishment.

And, on the whole, the A.R.T.’s Porgy and Bess is hardly the desecration that some predicted. Even factoring in musical objections, when the show is taken for what it is—a modern, post-Sondheim piece of Broadway engineering—it is, at its best, quite good indeed; and, in McDonald’s Bess, boasts a performance for the pantheon. By the letter of the law, it’s sacrilege; but I guess I prefer opera to be eagerly messed with rather than delicately preserved. Opera is both eternal and eternally fluid, a ritual that only gains power the more you transgress it, the single greatest art ever devised for mixing the sacred with the profane. Without at least a little blasphemy, one risks disrespecting both sets of gods.

It has become a bit of a commonplace to note that Jean-Yves Thibaudet wears concert outfits designed by the once and future punk couturier Vivienne Westwood. But it was not inappropriate to keep in mind the pianist’s appreciation of eccentrically chic attire during his recital at Tanglewood on Thursday, completing a survey of Maurice Ravel’s solo piano music. Tailoring, after all, demands that stylistic provocation remain grounded in craft and discipline—the coat still has to fit, the material still has to drape, the shape still has to flatter. And if Thibaudet’s Wednesday recital (which I reviewed for the Boston Globe here) focused on Ravel’s jeweler-like side, Thursday’s program portrayed Ravel as a master tailor, expertly stitching bolts of pianistic virtuosity.

It was four kinds of fabric, more or less. The opener, the Pavane pour une infante defunte, joined two: transparent music-box delicacy, and Godowsky-like control over multiple musical strands and ideas in distinct layers, even as the strands change registers, hands, even fingers. Jeux d’eau added a third, those quintessentially Ravellian torrents of liquid passagework, fiendishly fine needlepoint that Thibaudet tossed off with unusual style, lightly pedaled and uncannily smooth.

The first of the Valses nobles et sentimentales brought the final material, one that had only briefly appeared in Wednesday’s recital, but became a prominent feature of Thursday’s: extroverted, muscular abandon, high-wire athleticism. The Valses unfolded in almost modular fashion, the various strategies deployed from waltz to waltz like swatches: silkiness in the second, rapids in the fourth, more roller-coaster daring in the seventh, precise strata in the epilogue.

Thibaudet’s facility with each type of cloth was balanced by his cognizance that, in Ravel’s music, the fabric is not the suit itself: the challenges are merely the medium for the design. Again and again Thibaudet employed Ravel’s technical propensities to accent the structure—subtly highlighting an inner layer of melody, breathless speed giving it momentum, flurries of ornamentation cushioning its landing. Seams were not hidden; Thibaudet’s juxtaposed, Classically-delineated sections and phrases actually emphasized the music’s more modernist contours.

The second half brought increasingly ornate patterns. The Sonatine was a more linear quilt, the fabric gradually changing its weave: the opening movement’s airiness settling into deep-toned juxtapositions, the motives arranged into clear stacks, the finale’s running streams tumbling into a white-knuckled ride.

Gaspard de la nuit, on the other hand, Ravel’s most dazzling essay for the instrument, was downright exponential. The delicacy of “Ondine” was layered into multiple dimensions; the myriad layers of “Le gibet” were each distinct and evenly sustained to the point of disquiet. And in “Scarbo,” Thibaudet unleashed unrelenting speed in precipitous storms, fireworks shot off in dangerous proximity.

His encore, Federico Mompou’s “Jeunes filles au jardin,” cut Ravel-like ideas along more conservative lines; in comparison, Ravel’s tailoring seemed far more daring and provocative, a match for Thibaudet’s outfit, a Westwood-stitched, subtly anarchic patchwork of satin and matte. But the quiet, suddenly muted close of “Scarbo” had also, perhaps, revealed the conscientious craftsman, the smallest sartorial detail finished with exquisite care.

This is not for lack of indication; Gershwin has tempo markings all over the place, amply garnished with ritardandi and accelerandi and rubati both explicit and implicit. Here’s what you get on the first four pages alone:

Molto moderato (♩=80)
poco rit.
Moderato assai
tranquillo
poco scherzando
pochissimo rall.
a tempo
poco rall.
tranquillo
deciso
scherzando
Poco agitato

… and so forth. Out of 30 pages (this is in my very old, beat-up edition of the solo piano version) I count 23 that carry at least one indicated alteration of tempo. But the only metronome marking you get is that very first one. (And that seems to have been a late addition—the original manuscript of Ferde Grofé’s orchestration simply marks the beginning as “Slowly.”) Rhapsody in Blue is a piece that asks for near-constant tempo fluctuations, but puts the parameters of those fluctuations almost entirely in the hands of the performer.

It’s also a piece for which, thanks to recording technology, the acquiring of an extra-notational performance tradition has been more or less completely documented. Probably the most obvious alteration has been in the big Andantino melody, this one:

Gershwin’s 1924 recording with the Paul Whiteman orchestra takes all of this at the same tempo (as does, a little more loosely, Gershwin’s piano-roll rendition), which is what’s indicated, and which sounds weird to our ears, because the more common practice now is to double-time the last six bars of that phrase. That’s how Oscar Levant and Eugene Ormandy do it on their 1945 recording. It’s how Bernstein did it. It’s how just about everybody does it these days.

The thing is, in order to do that passage, and that section, without the double-time distortion, you have to hit a pretty precise mark, tempo-wise: it has to be fast enough that the last six bars don’t bog down (the Gershwin/Whiteman recording does plod a bit) but not so fast that the first two bars are trivialized. If you can hit that mark (about ♩=120, I’ve come to think, maybe a shade faster, though 126 seems a little too fast), it’s kind of a structural boon: you can take the next eight pages or so, all the way up through the following Agitato section, at essentially the same tempo. But then you’re more locked in than if you slide into the Andantino with Romantic languor, and then rubato the heck out of those six-bar consequent phrases. The performance practice that’s evolved, in other words, gives the performer more room to maneuver—and more room for error.

The question that I’ve been thinking about is: does such room to maneuver also make the performance more expressive? At about the same time I started wrestling with the varying speeds of Rhapsody in Blue, I read this review of a concert from this summer’s Sick Puppy festivities, and was struck by this description of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte:

I tend toward agreement with one of my seatmates, who described the experience as highly engaging intellectually, but emotionally remote.

I don’t wish to take the reviewer to task—I adore Stockhausen’s music, but I fully understand that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Still, I was intrigued by the phrase “emotionally remote,” since, to me, anyway, Kontakte is, if anything, emotionally in your face pretty much all the way through. (Here’s a recording to sample.) The emotions, though, are not those usually associated with musical expressiveness.

It might be useful to reference Robert Plutchik’s classification of emotions, in particular the way he divides emotions into opposite pairs. Musical expression tends to be those pairs on Plutchik’s N-S-E-W axes: joy and sadness, anger and fear—perusing this summation of recent research into emotional communication in musical performance, the bulk of empirical research has surrounded those types of emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and love. My emotional experience of Kontakte, though, falls mostly onto one of Plutchik’s in-between axes: the tension between anticipation and surprise.

Here’s a typical section of the score to Kontakte:

There’s a bit of leeway in the performers’ staves, but it’s always in the context of those implacable numbers at the top of the score, the music’s running time, broken down to tenth-of-a-second accuracy. It’s both the source of Kontakte‘s emotional effect and the subversion of our accustomed perception of it. To do a Rhapsody-like indulgently-slow-then-double-time move is completely foreign to this context. Any momentary freedom on the part of the performers is immediately yanked back into Kontakte‘s grid by the necessity of synchronization with the electronic component. And that seems to conflict with what we’ve come to accept as communicating musical expressivity. The notion was concisely stated back in 1925 by psychologists Carl Seashore and Milton Metfessel:

This deviation from the exact is, on the whole, the medium for the creation of the beautiful—for the conveying of emotion. That is the secret of the plasticity of art. The exact is cold, restricted, and unemotional; and, however beautiful, in itself soon palls upon us.

Obviously—given my enthusiasm for the exacting emotional world of Kontakte—I don’t buy that. But for all the modernist effort to demonstrate they are, in fact, two different things, the conflation of expressivity and emotionality persists. The more expressive emotions are not false; but mere expressivity is not the end-all of emotional experience. And a sidelong glance into the worlds of politics or nationalism or fundamentalisms of various kinds offers no end of warning signs for exclusively associating emotion with expressiveness.

It’s interesting that, after Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin came around to the greater precision of metronome markings. The only one of his subsequent concert works that doesn’t include them is An American in Paris, and the experience of hearing Walter Damrosch conduct it too slowly apparently converted Gershwin. The Second Rhapsody is diligent with metronome indications, as is the Cuban Overture, as is the Variations on “I Got Rhythm.” And it’s equally interesting that none of those works has ever attained the place in the repertoire of Rhapsody in Blue. It might just be a coincidence—or it might be a measure of the general equating of performer freedom with communicative effectiveness. My own heresy: as much as I love Rhapsody in Blue, I kind of think that the Second Rhapsody is a better piece of music. But, then again, I know that I’m at the margins of the mainstream of perceived musical emotion. I don’t mind—I may not get swept off my feet quite as easily, but the payoff is a view of the world made just a little more lucid.

Cross-posted at Soho the Dog.

A rejected back-to-work proposal brokered by Mayor Rendell’s office in September would have defused a key issue in the walkout: the musicians’ claim that mismanagement has led to a host of fiscal problems that now make it difficult to agree on a new contract.

As spelled out by Mr. Rendell’s chief of staff, David L. Cohen, the plan called for a blue-ribbon panel to review the performance of the orchestra’s management, while the musicians returned to the Academy of Music stage and talks continued on other issues.
….
Unfortunately, the board’s response to the offer only underscored how prickly the issue is. Mr. Kluger hit a note more high-handed than conciliatory, saying the orchestra board will not surrender “its responsibility for evaluating administrative effectiveness to either musicians or any outside third parties.”

(“Bad Play: City Pays for Error by Orchestra Management,”, Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1996)

At least in public, board and musicians are keeping the rhetoric purposefully cooler in 2011, but, indeed, the Orchestra’s Chapter 11 petition reads much like a cautionary tale of administrative effectiveness or lack thereof, paragraph after head-scratching paragraph. Pension obligations have dominated much of the speculation around the orchestra’s move, and, sure enough, paragraph 31 spells it out:

POA’s frozen defined benefit plan for musicians and its active defined benefit plan for staff are underfunded by an estimated $21.8 million. To address the underfunded status of these plans, POA will be required to pay out an average of $2.18 million of cash payments annually from FY 2011 to FY 2020 above and beyond the cash expenses in the main operating budget.

The petition pretty much assumes that the Orchestra is going to pull out of its contributions to the American Federation of Musicians’ pension fund, a move that will trigger an estimated $23 million penalty payment. Perspective: an amount double that penalty payment—$46 million—would be just about enough endowment to cover an extra $2.18 million a year in perpetuity. No organization snaps their fingers and comes up with a $46 million endowment contribution, but remember that the private pension plan was frozen back in 2004—this day of reckoning has been approaching for a while. And I would be intrigued to see more details on the Orchestra’s lease agreement with the Kimmel Center, which more than doubled their annual occupancy costs, even as the Orchestra still owns the old Academy of Music hall (a hall they lease back to the Kimmel Center for the nominal sum of a dollar a year). Like a scaled-down version of the Detroit Symphony and their $54 million in concert-hall debt, a not insignificant chunk of the Philadelphia crisis seems to stem from real estate dealings.

It’s easy—and pessimistically entertaining—to indulge in armchair orchestral management second-guessing. The fact of the matter is, the Philadelphia Orchestra is in a bad spot. Maybe Chapter 11 really is the only way forward. But if the board finds themselves in that corner, it’s a corner they let themselves get backed into, which does get back to the dilemma that Joseph Kluger so moustache-twirlingly articulated back in 1996—the musicians audition; the board doesn’t. The relationship between board and players in Philadelphia has a history of poison—not just the 1996 strike, but the 2001 appointment of Christoph Eschenbach as music director, an appointment the players felt was, to an extent, imposed on them. Given that the players had already voluntarily re-opened their collective bargaining agreement for a package of givebacks to ease the bottom line, the bankruptcy filing is hardly going to improve those relations, especially considering that the prospects of an organization crying poor while sitting on an endowment somewhere between $116 million (according to the petition) and $140 million (according to press reports), restricted or not, are both legally iffy and a P.R. challenge.

One last thought: if there’s one bit of rueful comedy to take from the Orchestra’s Chapter 11 filing, it’s the overall beleaguered tone of the thing, the board’s weariness at regarding this financial sinkhole, day in and day out. It’s at least partially acting, of course, an attempt to paint as bleak a picture as possible for the very particular audience of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. But no orchestra makes money, has really ever made money. Consider this journalistic lede—

Virtually no major opera house or symphony orchestra in the world expects to pay its own way next season or in the forseeable future

—then consider that the assessment comes courtesy of Howard Taubman, writing in The New York Times in 1948. From a financial standpoint, big musical organizations are machines designed to lose money. They’re almost like capitalist performance art. Which, given the free-market ethos that evermore saturates every corner of society, means that the really interesting story is not the fact that the Philadelphia Orchestra—or Louisville, or Honolulu—has filed for bankruptcy, but the fact that the vast majority of American orchestras have not.

I thought of Chang and his travails after the announcement yesterday that James Levine was, indeed, resigning as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Interestingly, no one is quite sure just what this means yet: there was already much talk of Levine reducing his role, so a continued presence as some sort of principal-guest-conductor-type doesn’t seem out of the question—and the September 1st resignation date at least hints at the possibility that Levine will have another summer to put a stamp on Tanglewood. (Or, maybe, it was just the most administratively convenient date.) But irregardless, some sort of end is here, and the odd, long-anticipated precipitousness with which it happened would have resonated with those Yuan Dynasty audiences. Levine and the BSO were both made for each other and, somehow, ill-starred. They could repeatedly summon divine magic—a fierce Moses und Aron, stunningly impeccable Wagner, a Les Troyens for the ages—but, just as repeatedly, their romance ran into near-melodramatic complications, of both health and schedule.

Levine’s leave-taking thus seems a little anxious and inconclusive, reflecting the uncertainty that the possibilities opened up by his departure can outbalance the possibilities lost. Or maybe it’s just the way the story fits all too well in what increasingly feels like the advent of a protracted mean season. In that regard, Chang Boils the Sea really did have the happier ending; as the again-immortal Ch’iung-Lien puts it:

Idly we shall watch the Peaches of Immortality redden on the trees,
For we have cast off this World of Dust and its Boundless Bitter Sea.

Cross-posted at Soho the Dog.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I graduated from Boston University, whose orchestra gave the world premiere of Gunther Schuller’s Tuba Concerto no. 2 last night, with the composer at the podium. I should also mention that I rather enjoyed Gunther Schuller’s Tuba Concerto no. 2, even though the way I’m writing about it is going to sound somewhat equivocal. But I think that’s part and parcel with Schuller’s intentions. A lot of his music over the past decade or so has been like this Concerto: artfully arranged mobiles of intriguing, ambiguous moods, combined with formal evasiveness. Back in 2007, in a review of Schuller’s chamber-sized Four Vignettes, I said that one movement “blurs together softly dissonant sonorities with overlapping and misdirection—brief solo flourishes claiming attention just long enough to change the backdrop.” That would just as neatly apply to the Tuba Concerto.

Schuller wrote the Concerto back in 2008, and its curious nature may explain why it took this long to get a performance. It’s scored for a huge band, but the piece avoids the sort of powerful-blast payoff that such an overstuffed stage usually promises. The mass is deployed as a thick blanket rather than a directed charge. Clusters abound, melodic distinctiveness consistently blurred by neighbors in close quarters. (The string section is almost always a sursurrating, up-to-12-part divisi cushion of stacked seconds.) The result is a perpetual expressionistic calm before the storm, all shadows and fog. The first movement verges on homage, seeming to tease out the noirish implications of the late-Romantic strain in pre-WWII atonality. A scherzo-like second movement gets lost in ratiocination, spiraling in on itself. The Adagio third movement is both the most straightforward and the most mysterious, rocking, parallel dissonance over which the tuba threads a high, lyric line. The finale opens with broad, buzzy smudges of harmony, then a toccata-like burble of sixteenth notes promises a dash to the end—but the music descends back into its rich haze before a brief recapitulation and a tumble-and-bump ending.

What is particularly interesting about the context is the way Schuller seems to makes all the haze a reflection of the tuba itself. It’s a concerto not so much of virtuosity an agility—though there is some of that—but of sound, of bringing out the solo instrument’s inner sonic personality. The tuba has its oom-pah reputation, but listen close, and it turns out to be one of the more intriguing instruments around, its sound both prominent and oddly indistinct, like a great dome whose edges recede ever farther from view. Schuller spotlights that quality by similarly keeping the orchestral edges just out of frame as well; the lowest instruments—clustered double basses, contrabassoon, bass and contrabass clarinets, &c.—predominate, the highest instruments always carry an eerie, distant music-box color. Soloist Mike Roylance, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s prinicipal tubist, was completely in tune with the sound-world of the Concerto, his tone gently but persistently blooming into a pervasive, heavy ring. The part’s difficulty was well-surmounted—high passages were clear and sure, the rumbling fireworks of the finale’s brief cadenza (deliciously scored as a duet with the orchestral tubist, Dwayne Heard) were dispatched with flair. But Schuller’s Concerto isn’t really a traditional solo-vs.-orchestra contest, nor a show-off piece: it is, instead, a kind of deep, measured regard for the instrument in question. Roylance represented in style.

The concert opened with the Prelude to Haydn’s Creation, Chaos in this instance a uneasy, brooding place, hesitantly rising to dramatic force before retreating back into muted confusion. The second half was the Fourth Symphony of Johannes Brahms. This was the second Brahms 4 I heard this month. The last one was in-your-face and bracing; this one was just the opposite, deliberate and restrained to a fault. Schuller seemed to be trying to build tension and drama by keeping tight rein on the tempo; it kind of worked in the first movement, and didn’t work at all in the last three. In order to pull that sort of thing off, the orchestra needs to be convinced to fill in the stretched-out phrases with energy and purpose, but there was no evident rapport between conductor and ensemble; the musicians were merely waiting around for the next beat. Instead of lean and sober, the symphony was just flat.

In 1927, Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau gave the ubiquitous mediation of 21st-century culture an elegant, pre-emptive stiletto. “Watch the trap,” the narrator of their “opera-oratorio” of Oedipus Rex advises the audience, “watch the trap close.” But Oedipus Rex is a trap in itself. The Greek drama is translated into Latin, overlaid with a vernacular play-by-play that gives away every plot point before the singers can even get to them—and both the distance and the intimacy are merely bait. It’s a pageant of alienation, but when it’s done right, the alienation turns out to have been there all along, not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Over the weekend, James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra did Oedipus Rex right, which is to say they pumped it so full of energy that the sheer implacability of the story and Stravinsky’s impersonally monumental music became the end, not the means. From the very opening—the brass tearing into Stravinsky’s fanfares with the fierce punch of a big band—the orchestra was a heavy, burnished steamroller, driving the tale forward with efficiently manufactured grandeur—and about as much mystery as a rollercoaster’s drop. For Cocteau and Stravinsky, it turns out, Oedipus Rex is not history, but a template for the way humanity instinctively courts disaster again, and again, and again.

Creon’s aria, for instance, calling on Oedipus to find the assassin of King Laius (the assassin, of course, being Oedipus himself)—Stravinsky provides a crescendo of desperate joy, the exhortation being more important than the message. When Queen Jocasta enters, the chorus welcomes her with pealing “Glorias”; the narrator interrupts, spelling out the tragedy that is about to unfold; and then the chorus picks up again, right where it left off, with more “Glorias.” The facts are not going to derail the ritual. I kept thinking of Garry Wills’ description of the crowd at a George Wallace rally in the 1960s:

The crowd is being George-Groszed, made itchy with unconfessed lusts; but never in its own eyes, more beautiful…. Their happiness is enough to break the heart. They vomit laughter. Trying to eject the vacuum inside them.

The ritualistic quality of Oedipus Rex has always been much commented upon, but in this performance, it seemed that Stravinsky and Cocteau were indicting ritual itself, its irresistibility, irregardless of its destination. Supposedly, Stravinsky was inspired by Handel’s oratorios, a claim that bears a whiff of Stravinskian misdirection, but perhaps the inspiration was more thematic: all we like sheep have gone astray. It’s telling that the work’s most lyrical moment comes when Oedipus, seeking to turn the crowd against the insinuations of Creon and the oracle Tiresias, does so with a dose of sublime, unctious paranoia.

Oedipus was sung by tenor Russell Thomas, and Thomas was flat-out spectacular, soaring through Stravinsky’s oratory with bright, easy power. Baritone Albert Dohmen was a stony, forceful Creon; bass Raymond Aceto, while not the sepulchral Russian bass that Stravinsky seems to have imagined for the role, gave Tiresias an intriguingly menacing mien, all smooth, fine-spun lines. Even Matthew Plenk, in the small role of the shepherd who witnesses Oedipus’s crime, created an air of luxury casting with his limpid sound. The men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus made formidable, fast-moving fronts of sound. And, walking us through the piece, narrator Frank Langella caught the kinfe-edge of Cocteau’s understatement, a dark, silky spiel.

The one outlier was mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, as Jocasta—her singing was fine, if a little diffuse, but it was upstaged by her acting: DeYoung vamped it up, in a way more suited to, say, one of Verdi’s demonic mezzos than his regal sopranos. The Verdi connection was appropriate, though. Harlow Robinson mentioned the work’s Verdian musical sense in his program notes, and one could make a plausible thematic connection as well: Don Carlo, maybe, with Oedipus standing in for the in-over-his-head Carlo, Creon for the brutally pragmatic Philip, and Tiresias for the Grand Inquisitor. But where Verdi made such archetypal politics into intensely personal drama, Stravinsky and Cocteau took the opposite tack, situating the horror in the inevitability of human folly. Murder, plague, betrayal, incest? Business as usual.

Oedipus was paired with Béla Bártok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, a piece Levine had already programmed twice since his arrival in Boston. No complaints, though: this is just the sort of piece Levine has retooled the BSO to excel in—big, splashy, colorful, individual virtuosity built up into a rich, overwhelming mass—and excel the orchestra did, an hour’s worth of absolutely stunning playing. (This is what it feels like to be in the audience during an orchestra’s golden age.) Levine had written a program note saying how much Bluebeard’s Castle belonged on the first half of a program, and yet we were greeted with an insert that flipped the order: Stravinsky first, Bartók to close. It was probably for the singers’ sake: once the piece began, it became clear that Dohmen, as Bluebeard, and DeYoung, as his bride Judith, were going to go for broke.

Bluebeard’s Castle grim fairy-tale plot is another ritual—seven doors, seven secrets, all leading up to a bad end—and for all its heady, exotic-Romantic perfume, it unfolds as implacably as Oedipus. What sold the schematic of the story was DeYoung’s performance, an absolute tour de force, vocally fearless and dramatically textured with a profusion of detail. This was a Judith more cagey and cunning than most, a force in her own right, her innocence a mask raised and lowered as part of an escalating contest with Bluebeard. DeYoung’s voice bloomed into saturated color, and the sheer expressivity of her face made the concert format a moot point: every door opened, through her eyes, onto a scene more real than scenery ever would have been.

Oedipus and Bluebeard are both such powerfully bleak pieces that it feels a little paradoxical to be so thrillingly entertained by them, but maybe that’s the point, tweaking our collective addiction to spectacle while indulging it at the same time. They are, in fact, epic games—Oedipus a spin of a wheel rigged toward the house, Bluebeard’s seven doors opening like a bloody, esoteric episode of Let’s Make a Deal—and the games, as games always do, stand in for life. Stravinsky and Bártok are just stacking the deck with more grim glee than usual. Like the narrator says, it’s a trap. To paraphrase another incongruously entertaining stew of secrets, paranoia, and self-destruction: Life is a strange game; the only winning move is not to play.

Half a century on, a good deal of the fun—and frustration—of hearing Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître is its inescapable influence: on one level, the piece sounds like a collection of clichés, and then you realize that the reason they’re clichés is because composers have been ripping off the piece for half a century. The sound-world of Le marteau—a pointillistically jumpy, diamond-hard sparkle—became so ingrained in 20th-century new music that it’s easy to forget that somebody had to come up with it first, and that somebody was Boulez, polishing Webern’s fine-spun sparseness to a lethal shine.

Boston Conservatory’s annual compact new-music festival is a mostly-Boulez affair this year, and the first of their four concerts was built around Le marteau, kind of like hanging “Guernica” in the foyer—with no spoonful of tonal sugar to make the serialism go down, it was a chance to hear the music in its own singularly exhilarating light. And Le marteau, once one gets past the déjà vu, is exhilarating stuff. Where other serialists tried to engineer their twelve-note patterns for structural clarity, Boulez went to the other extreme, making the technology so intricate as to be invisible—focusing the attention back on the machine as a whole, and on the fact that the machine is doing things no machine like it ever did before.

If there’s an ensemble better suited to this sort of thing than the Callithumpian Consort, I don’t know of it—given the kind of Moore’s-Law-esque acceleration in musical training, there’s doubtless far more musicians able to navigate Boulez’s tangles than when it was written, but the Consort (reflecting the predilictions of its director, pianist Stephen Drury) combines that ability with a devil-may-care, caution-to-the-wind flair. So this Le marteau—conducted by Jeffrey Means—was not only technically secure, but confident enough that Boulez’s touches of timbral character and narrative came to the fore.

Here’s an example—in Boulez’s non-linear structure, two of the “Commentaires” on the setting of Rene Char’s “Bourreaux de solitude” actually precede the poem’s appearance. Both commentaries anchor their pitched activity on an irregular but insistent beat of non-pitched percussion: a drum, a bongo, tambourine, cowbell, and even triangle. It primes the ear for the similar but more menacing undercurrent of a rattling maraca in the actual setting. The performance was filled with that sort of attention to congruities of texture, as in the deft shifts between vibrato and trill and melodic flurry in the first setting of “Bel édifice et les pressentiments.” In the final, second setting of the same poem, the sudden entrance of a trio of gongs makes their shimmering metallic cushion unexpectedly exotic, a familiar sound reintroduced as new. The same might be said for Le marteau sans maître as a whole.

The concert opened with the first two of Boulez’s Improvisations sur Mallarmé, settings of two poems that the composer later incorporated into his orchestral Pli selon pli. Coming after Le marteau, the Improvisations are, indeed, more improvisatory—the first is built around periods of busy percussion stasis that the singer then kicks into more rapid-fire accompaniment. Improvisation II, on the poem “Une dentelle s’abolit”—A lace abolishes itself—is the more daring, dotted with dropped-in, indefinite silences that make lace out of the music, a texture of threads and spaces. (The performance of Improvisation II—again conducted by Means, and again technically solid—was nonetheless weak in this regard, never quite integrating the silences into the flow of the piece.)

The program’s other work was Jean Barraqué’s 1955 Séquence, a mobile of setting sof poetry by Nietzsche, a dark mirror to Le marteau. Barraqué was Boulez’s classmate and colleague, but took the same atonal-shard vocabulary in a more voluble direction. If Boulez’s terseness is reminiscent of, say, Harold Pinter, Barraqué’s calls to mind Hemingway’s brawny efficiency; where Boulez’s pauses and holding patterns calculate, Barraqué’s seethe. Séquence is fiery and expressionistic, with a film-noir feel, building to an emotional pitch both rich and forsaken. (Means conducted another tight, torrid performance.)

Soprano Jennifer Ashe sang all three works on the program, a feat for which tour de force seems strangely inadequate. Ashe’s voice, silvery and fine-spun, was lithe and lucid from top to sometimes wickedly deep chest-voice bottom, with enough clarity to delineate the precipitous lines and carry them through often busy instrumental traffic. To simply make it through such a trio of scores on one program is testament enough to skill and technique; to do so with style, the illusion of ease, and an intelligent interpretive point of view is kind of mind-boggling. Those wild, leaping, coursing, uncompromising lines have rarely sounded so good.