by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Nov. 29, 2004.
James Levine is a happy man. Or so it seemed when
I talked to him earlier this month, in his office at Symphony Hall in
Boston. The man who leads the two most venerable institutions in
American music—the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony—looked to
be in good health. He spoke in rapid, enthusiastic, circuitous
paragraphs, his eyes lighting up whenever he touched on a favorite
score. Having just finished rehearsals for Beethoven’s “Eroica”
Symphony and Elliott Carter’s “Symphonia,” he was full of thoughts
about how Beethoven was really the first contemporary composer and how
Carter is really an old master. He was fine-tuning programs for the
following season, lavishing special attention on a series pairing
Beethoven and Schoenberg. He had figured out how to present Beethoven’s
thorny “Grosse Fuge,” which rivals anything by Schoenberg in its
capacity to make audiences fidget. With a grin, he said that he would
play the “Grosse Fuge” twice in the same program, with the violin
concertos of Beethoven and Schoenberg in between. He was hoping to
create a time-warp effect in which Beethoven would be heard as both
past and present. “We can’t make this into a piece from ‘back then,’ ”
he said. “It’s a piece from right here and now.” Resting on his piano
was the freshly printed score of Milton Babbitt’s “Concerti for
Orchestra,” which he will conduct in January. “Come look at this,” he
said, patting the music as if it were a healthy baby.
Levine
is preëminent among American conductors, yet he remains a curiously
contested figure. Some intelligent listeners of my acquaintance are
perpetually dissatisfied with him, although they seldom agree whether
his performances are too predictable or too idiosyncratic, too polished
or too ragged. Fifth-hand rumors of the urban-legend variety swirl
around him. Last spring, the Times quoted
anonymous players who questioned Levine’s ability to give a clear beat
on account of a tremor in his left arm. This kind of chatter inevitably
catches up to any conductor who stays in one place for a long time.
Although I’ve never been among the carpers, I’ve sensed that some of
the zing has gone out of the thirty-three-year-old relationship between
Levine and the Met orchestra. Uncertainty hangs over the entire house.
The Met recently unsettled the music world by announcing that Peter
Gelb, a record-company executive best known for crossover projects,
would be its next general manager.
Small wonder, then, that Levine is happy to be in Boston. I attended his gala début, a
thunderous account of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, and returned for two
other programs. It’s hard for an out-of-towner to generalize from three
concerts, but Levine already seems to have added lustre to the scene.
The orchestra is playing with a tonal beauty and rhythmic bounce that
it long lacked under Seiji Ozawa. A performance of Stravinsky’s “Rite
of Spring,” in particular, had the same visceral precision that marks
the conductor’s best nights at the Met. Levine’s empire of the just-so
is moving north.
Can
an institution be both élitist and populist? If any orchestra can pull
it off, it’s the Boston Symphony, which, since its inception, in 1881,
has carried itself like a grande dame of Back Bay who invites both
fancy and scruffy people to her parties. The Boston audience is simply
different from any other orchestra public in America. In one corner,
Harvard musicologists cite Adorno; in another, sweatshirt-clad Longy
School of Music students complain of insufficient legato; meanwhile,
the sages of Brookline fondly recall Koussevitzky. Joseph Horowitz, in
his forthcoming history of American classical music, notes that
Isabella Stewart Gardner used to wear a Red Sox hatband to Boston
Symphony concerts. Indeed, I saw more than a few Red Sox insignia at
Symphony Hall the night after the World Series ended. As Goethe
predicted in the text of the Mahler Eighth, “The unattainable here
becomes fact.”
Levine thinks that the Boston audience is
primed for something other than the usual cautious programming. “With
Harvard here, with the New England Conservatory, with all the other
schools, the number of people you meet who are warm and passionate and
smart about the subject”—meaning music—“is maybe higher than anywhere
else in the country. It’s not that New York doesn’t have it, but the
community there is larger, more spread out. Boston is somehow just
perfect for me.”
The city has been rewarded with some
gorgeous performances. Schoenberg’s “Five Pieces for Orchestra” sounded
almost unlawfully voluptuous, as Levine emphasized certain D-minor-like
sonorities in the second movement that threaten to stop the Atonal
Express before it leaves the station. Ligeti’s “Lontano,” too, was more
serene and seductive than the composer’s avant-garde reputation might
suggest: again, the conductor pointed up the half-familiar chords that
are strewn about the score—some near-G-minor there, some maybe-D-major
here. In the “Rite,” Stravinsky’s convulsive gestures hung in the air
like violent paintings on a white wall, their energy at once
intensified and organized. The atmosphere was electric throughout:
Levine seemed to be choosing tempos a split second faster than what the
orchestra had been given in rehearsal, so that the music had an
unchecked, hurtling motion.
Because the late-Romantic and
early-twentieth-century repertory was always Ozawa’s specialty, the
orchestra’s strength in that area came as no surprise. Mozart,
Beethoven, and Schubert, by comparison, sounded less stylistically
secure, though still super-refined in the old Boston style. Levine told
me that in the Classical and early-Romantic scores he wanted to work on
clarity of articulation, which can be difficult to obtain with Symphony
Hall’s resonant acoustics. “I really don’t like the ‘coerced blend,’ ’’
he said, referring to the sort of artificially smoothed-over textures
that some conductors favor in Mozart. The “Prague” Symphony,
admittedly, never quite roused itself from a slumber of sweet strings;
the winds were too much at a distance. (Last month, I heard a more
sharply characterized “Prague” from the American Classical Orchestra,
at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, in New York.) The “Eroica,” by
contrast, had real urgency, a disciplined roughness. These days, Levine
is willing to sacrifice ultimate beauty in pursuit of a dramatic
interplay of voices.
Perhaps the fact that the
orchestra essayed Elliott Carter before intermission added to the punch
of its Beethoven. This is one reason that Levine is stressing new music
in Boston: he thinks it will have an invigorating effect on how the
orchestra plays and on how the audience listens. His programming this
fall is riskily biased toward the present. Two-thirds of the works are
from the twentieth century, almost one-third from the past fifty years.
What is more, Levine is avoiding the sort of neo-tonal music that
audiences generally embrace; instead, he is in lockstep with the Old
Guard of American modernism, the likes of Carter, Babbitt, and Charles
Wuorinen, together with postwar European masters like Ligeti and
Lutoslawski. It remains to be seen how the average listener will take
this strict modern diet. I myself wish that Levine would lend an ear to
John Adams and other less curmudgeonly characters, but there is no
point in asking a conductor to advocate music he doesn’t believe in.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Bostonians will be willing to put up
with a fair amount of atonal hurly-burly if it keeps their new star
happy.
To pair Carter’s “Symphonia” with Beethoven’s
“Eroica” was a delightfully brazen gesture. It was also an honorable
acknowledgment of the almost ninety-six-year-old composer, who had yet
to hear his biggest and probably best piece performed by a major
American orchestra. Carter’s vast abstract canvas left me feeling
ambivalent, as his work often does. The outer movements suffer from a
lack of thematic variety; the endless scurrying motion of the writing
leads to premature fatigue. Yet the middle movement, “Adagio
tenebroso,” is deep, dark, powerfully affecting music. For once, Carter
suspends his urge to juggle rhythms and writes spacious, stately
paragraphs. Open fifths abound; ghosts of tonality glide about. (Yep,
that’s an F-minor triad in bar 171.) Like the second movement of the
Beethoven, this is clearly a funeral cortège, though who or what is
being buried is anyone’s guess. The resemblance of the opening muted
trumpet line to Ives’s “Unanswered Question” gave me the idea that Ives
himself, or some other great, old, eccentric, freethinking American,
was being carried to his grave.
As
if in league with Levine’s campaign for endangered American modernists,
New York City Opera recently gave the world première of Wuorinen’s
“Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” It is based on Salman Rushdie’s fable
of imagination and repression in an India-like land; the terse, funny
libretto is by James Fenton. Although Wuorinen has not renounced the
twelve-tone writing with which he made his name, he, too, now deposits
triads in his scores as if they were pillow mints, and even indulges in
pastiches of jazz and blues. Schoenberg once believed that atonal music
could have the same emotional range as tonal music; Wuorinen,
surrendering to psycho-acoustic reality, uses dissonant complexity to
express the terror of war and quasi-tonal passages to express love and
reconciliation. Passages of the latter type are, admittedly, tentative
and fleeting. This comedy growls and thrashes more than it sings and
dances. Still, it’s a robust, extroverted work, and City Opera, which
started its season with a ghastly production of Strauss’s “Daphne,”
served it well. Mark Lamos’s Julie Taymor-ish staging was visually
poetic; Heather Buck, Peter Strummer, Ethan Herschenfeld, and Joel
Sorensen all gave satisfying performances, although they sometimes
struggled to stay aboard the merry-go-round of Wuorinen’s pitch
rotations. To adapt Oscar Levant’s remark about Gershwin, an evening
with Charles Wuorinen is a Charles Wuorinen evening.