Is the BSO in free fall?

As one of our occasional forays over to the BSO these days, the partner unit and I caught Beethoven's Missa Solemnis on Saturday night, because we're big fans of Christine Brewer, one of the soloists.

And what can I say but - hoo, boy. This was a disaster for the history books; we were there on a night that will no doubt live in artistic infamy.  There's a looong debate going on over at the Musical Intelligencer right now over just precisely how bad it really was, but there's no denying it was way bad. The sopranos in the chorus got shrieky (under the admittedly constant strain of the piece) and hit a few wrong notes here and there (although again, to be fair, the rest of the chorus stayed pretty focused), the soloists - a star line-up - seemed to be on different stylistic planets (and, standing at the back of the stage, struggled to achieve clear vocal profiles), and the orchestral playing hadn't really been shaped or interpreted at all.  And I mean not at all.  Missa Solemnis has a tendency toward mystical drift, but this one didn't even drift; it just sank.  There was one good violin solo from the concertmaster.  That was it. I almost fell asleep, while my partner fumed.

So how did this Missa miss the mark so badly?  Well, as you may have heard, conductor Kurt Masur (who is 84) backed out of the assignment, citing health issues, at the last minute - indeed, just after rehearsals had begun.  Caught in a bind, BSO management gave the concert over to John Oliver, their long-time chorus master (who had already prepped the chorale).  Oliver has my sympathy, but I can't pretend he pulled the concert together - or even tried to.  Indeed, on Saturday night he did little more than keep time; he offered few, if any, cues to his performers.  Everybody was on their own.  Including the audience.

I don't really blame him, however.  This was a disaster waiting to happen. Masur is only the latest in a line of major talents who have pulled out of BSO engagements (before Masur, maestros Andris Nelsons and Riccardo Chailly canceled, who were of course being considered as replacements for James Levine, who canceled out of everything last spring).  Not all of these no-shows have been aging, over-the-hill maestros, it's true (youngsters can get sick, or have babies) - but given the BSO's predilection for elder statesmen like Masur, it's now beyond obvious that they should always have a back-up plan whenever they hire one.

For John Oliver, God bless him, is just not an orchestral conductor; that much was obvious.  Indeed, it's hard for me to believe that with any real artistic director in place, this could have been allowed to happen.  And to put it bluntly, the BSO does owe its patrons, in the inevitable case of cancellation, something like a best-faith attempt at a fair trade; they at least owe their audience a real orchestral conductor.

What made the evening vaguely alarming was the incipient sense that it represented the BSO in free fall.  I predicted from the beginning that the Levine regime would end badly - but I never guessed it would end this badly, with conductors canceling left and right and the orchestra basically in disarray.  The only hope I have is that this Missa represents rock bottom for the symphony.  Honestly, there's no where to go but up.

Honolulu.

Syracuse.

Louisville.

Philadelphia.

What do all those cities have in common?

The sad answer is that their orchestras have either declared bankruptcy, are in the process of declaring bankruptcy, or are on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.  And we could probably add Detroit to the list, even though their players recently ended a strike by accepting a pay cut, as well as Indianapolis, which is widely believed to be heading in the same direction.

The situation in Philadelphia stands out from the trend, however, as it's one of the storied "Big Five" of American orchestras - its collapse is to classical music what the collapse of the Intiman Theatre is to American theatre.  (Although actually, it's arguable - given the number of civic orchestras in financial danger - that the nation's orchestras are under more financial pressure than the nation's theatres.)

Of course a flashpoint in this ongoing situation remains the question of wages.  I remember two years ago when I wondered at the fairness of the BSO's union pay (entry level, around $128 K, much like that at the Philadelphia), given that the best local artists in other fields could command less than half that salary, I was ridiculed from all sides.  One hyperventilating classical music fan was so offended he actually began a blog to "oppose" me (I think he long since shut that down - one of two short-lived blogs, by the way, that have been devoted entirely to attacking me; another validation - if Harvard's attacks weren't enough - of the power of the ideas expressed in the Hub Review).  At the same time, local Globe second stringer Matthew Guerrieri lectured me, in several heated exchanges, that BSO salaries were actually a result of free-market competition.

Uh-huh.  I was never quite sure how union salaries were supposed to be the result of free market competition (don't they represent the antidote to free-market competition?) - but whaddya want when it comes to economic argument from Matthew Guerrieri, he's a composer! At any rate, over time what has become the sticking point in most of these bankruptcies, including Philadelphia's, is the fact that salaries and benefits at the orchestras do not, actually, result from free-market competition but rather represent a compromise between union demands and the willingness of the symphonies' Boards (that is, the local business communities) to support them.  That's how orchestra salaries are set, all you libertarian classical fans.  Not through the free market (as ticket revenue rarely covers more than two-thirds of costs), but through Board largesse.  In Philadelphia, for example, ticket sales this year brought in $33 million, but the orchestra's costs were $46 million.  Even after a round of emergency fund-raising, the deficit still amounted to $5 million.  And yes, the Philadelphia has an endowment of $140 million, but given an annual deficit rate of $5 million (and nobody thinks the deficit is going to go down),  if the orchestra began to tap that fund, it would be gone in little more than a generation (and at the actual deficit rate of $13 million a year, it will be gone in little more than a decade).

And you know, Board largesse runs strongest when workers' wages are falling against revenues (and thus the wallets of the rich are fatter than usual), so it's hard not to intuit that every time a player in an orchestra like the BSO gets a raise, that increase parallels a pay cut to the respective city's working class, at least in relative terms.  I'm not saying there's causation there (before you write in), but still - that see-saw is the none-too-pretty economic picture of civic orchestras (and for that matter of any arts organization that can't meet its payroll through ticket sales).  You could try to argue, as Matthew Guerrieri did, that there's still a kind of limited competition at work within, say, the oligopoly of the Boards of the "Big Five" - New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland - and oops, I guess not Philadelphia anymore, but maybe L.A. now.  But the point is, even if you want to call that cooperative understanding a "market," it still looks like the bottom just fell out from under it.

Of course there's a strong case to be made that union wages aren't the only thing killing off America's orchestras.  Or even the main thing.  I wouldn't argue that they are.  I'm sure mismanagement, rising real estate costs, etc., have all played a role in the debacle in Philadelphia and elsewhere (and maybe even the leading role).  And it's worth remembering that the Philadelphia isn't really "dead;" it's just in a state of legal limbo in which all its contracts - especially its contracts with its unions - are open for re-negotiation by management.

But here's the rub.  Since the orchestras survive on Board donations, they have to convince America's ruling class that their union wages aren't what is undermining their solvency.  Only America's ruling class doesn't really want to hear that, do they.  And does the working class (for whom unions are now largely a thing of the past) want to hear it either?  Somehow I doubt it.

See this is were things get - how to put it? - culturally sticky.  Because actually, the only people who might be sympathetic to the argument of the orchestra unions are America's artistic classes (people like Matthew Guerrieri!), but for better or worse, they're on the losing side of a libertarian cultural meme that began to build steam with the fall of the Berlin Wall and is now pretty much dominant in our discourse, even among the "educated."  Thus supporters of symphony musicians try to play the game both ways - by simultaneously guilting the Boards into coughing up more cash ("The whole problem is your management incompetence!") while pretending these salaries are the result of the free market.   Although I think many of these types do honestly believe that "value" aligns with remuneration in some vague but deeply true way.  So if you're the very, very best violinist in the whole wide world, in their minds you're bound to make a very good living.

Only it doesn't work that way anymore, largely  because the forces of digitization, the Internet, and globalization are all undoing the foundations of what we used to think of as "value" - which was never really intrinsic to labor or talent, anyhow; it's always only been purely a function of replacement costs.  Somehow the educated retain a touching faith, however, in the idea that value isn't tied to those costs, or to things like geographic location and market barriers.  Seemingly hypnotized by a series of naive economic gurus, they seem to believe that value can still exist in a virtual world in which all boundaries have been erased and everything at last is "free" - in short, an "economy" in which everything is replaceable, and yet somehow everything still retains its value.

Of course what happens instead in such a world is that value aligns more and more with political power (or its factotum, celebrity power).  That's why Arianna Huntington could get so rich off the efforts of people she didn't pay at all; and that's why young people are so desperate to get into the Ivy League - not for the education (please!) but rather for entrée into a class that has the political power to look after its own well-being.  The rest of the nation, of course, isn't so lucky.  Indeed, the great social problem of the millennium is probably not racism, but instead the way that globalization and digitization have undermined the foundations of economic value.  That is what has rendered unions powerless, and what has left the working class in a seemingly permanent economic slide.

But I digress.  The point is that orchestra unions may have thought they were protected from this trend - after all, you can't import a BSO concert from China, can you - but in the end, the trend is catching up with them anyway, if indirectly.  For to a non-unionized populace, especially one equipped with a theory supplied by the chattering class, the perks of a specialty union - whether in the arts or in government - look undeserved and unjustifiable.

This is the atmosphere in which the BSO will be going into its next round of contract negotiations (the current contract expires in August).  Of course the BSO hasn't declared bankruptcy, and I doubt it's in any serious monetary straits.  Still, I also don't get the impression that James Levine's tenure has really done it all that much financial good.  He was very expensive, of course ($1.6 million, last I heard), and he tended to demand extra money for special projects; and while I think audiences stabilized after his controversial first season, he got more lip service than money-love from the Hub.  The ongoing search for his replacement basically represents another question mark hovering over the negotiations - although it's probable that whoever is chosen will be both healthier and cheaper than Levine.  Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more uncertain financial environment for these negotiations.  It's almost enough to make you wish all this was determined by the free market.

Our most interesting living composer takes on the world's greatest playwright.

To my mind, Thomas Adès is the most interesting composer alive, the young talent I'm most certain will find a place in the standard repertoire.  Yet perversely enough, we've heard little of him in Boston; instead, we've been listening to the latest from Carter and Birtwistle (two accomplished elder statesmen of modernism whom I don't find particularly compelling), or pretending that Schoenberg is still shocking. Yes, Opera Boston performed Powder Her Face a few years back, and I vaguely recall the BSO playing the great Asyla and the intriguing Living Toys sometime around the millennium.

But in the meantime, the "savior of British music" (as Adès was once known) has all but taken the rest of the world by storm - and found an American home not in Boston or New York, but L.A. (where he has enjoyed a special relationship with the L.A. Philharmonic for several years). Major operas and commissions have flowed from him, he's been showered with awards, all while building a distinguished recorded catalog as a pianist (he also conducts). It's wrong at this point to describe the 40-year-old composer as "the next big thing." He IS the big thing.

So his arrival on the podium of Symphony Hall last weekend was long overdue. Still, he played to plenty of empty seats. Remember what I said the other day about Boston still being a hick town? Well, that goes double for the BSO crowd.

But Adès himself didn't seem to mind - he seemed thrilled to have finally arrived in America’s greatest concert hall; and at any rate, he had bent his intellectual energy on a program that teased out deep cultural issues in a way that BSO programs rarely do these days. Part of the concert was devoted to his violin concerto Concentric Paths, a small wonder in its own right. But the majority of the program was focused on Shakespeare's The Tempest - in particular the musical response to the Bard's last masterpiece by Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and, yes, Adès himself.

Now Shakespeare posits a strange conundrum for composers, I think. He has always attracted them - and yet have any of them, even the greatest, fully understood him, or been able to express what truly sets him apart from other dramatists? It's a puzzling, and troubling question (and one that, amusingly enough, classical music aficionados rarely seem to be aware exists; they naïvely imagine their art is the most profound one around). But even a masterpiece like Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (wonderful as it is) only conjures the atmosphere of Shakespeare's play, not the depth or contradictions of its text. The irony is that (as the Hub Review has long contended) part of what makes Shakespeare's dramatic thought so complex is that it's structured musically (my guess is that Monteverdi and the madrigal posited the model for Shakespeare's contrapuntal intellectual structures). And yet oddly enough, the classical musical tradition can't seem to match the achievement of the dramatist it probably inspired.

Verdi, for instance, can give us a chillingly grand Iago, but can't really convey the sense (as Shakespeare does) of the conceptual inexplicability of evil. Likewise Mendelssohn expertly conjures the rich fancy of Midsummer, but when it comes to its last-act parody of its own means - or even the opposed musings of the lunatic, the lover, and the poet - Mendelssohn is helpless. But then music is rarely good at deconstructing its own meaning (it's only good at deconstructing other music) - so how could a composer approach the probing self-critique that's central to plays like Hamlet and Henry V?

It was unsurprising, then, that the first two Shakespearean offerings of the evening were essentially variants on scene-painting (which Adès led competently, but not brilliantly). Tchaikovsky concentrated on a soaring love-theme, as if The Tempest were merely a later variant of Romeo and Juliet. Sibelius, meanwhile, was most inspired by the script’s eponymous sea-storm, and created a heaving, crashing soundscape of startling verisimilitude. This was better than the Tchaikovsky, but it was still essentially movie-music – more thematically intriguing was the surprising vigor and rusticity of Sibelius’s music for Ariel and the clowns.

But only Adès seemed to engage with the actual ideas of the play. The Tempest, of course, is not merely a highly rarefied fairy tale; it is a probing, and utterly sober, meditation on the “problem” of power and freedom – neither of which, in Shakespeare’s mind, is an unalloyed good. And you could feel this moral and emotional tension latent in much of the music from Adès’s celebrated 2004 opera (which has yet to play Boston, but which is now widely regarded as the greatest recent achievement in the form).

Indeed, there was a literal tension between high and low in the songs for Ariel, Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand that the composer had chosen to showcase, as well as a sense of mournful unresolvability, which captured much of the intellectual mood of late Shakespeare. I should mention that Adès did not work directly from Shakespeare’s text – he commissioned a libretto by Meredith Oakes, which simplifies the play, and emphasizes the roles of Ferdinand and Miranda. That may sound dismaying, but I was surprised to discover that Oakes had preserved Shakespeare’s underlying themes even in her own variations on his text – in her Tempest, Prospero confronts in his child’s romance yet another conundrum of power, love, and freedom.

Much has been made of the vocal writing for Ariel in the opera – almost all the sprite’s songs float up around high E – that’s at the very top of the “Queen of the Night” aria, for ready reference. It’s almost impossible for a soprano to actually vocalize consonants up there, so quite a bit of Ariel’s songs came off as a kind of abstracted sonar, which only Prospero could comprehend. But this, too – although it violates the sense of prettiness we expect of Ariel - is much in line with Shakespeare’s text, which stresses always that this spirit isn’t human, sounds like a kind of sweet buzzing to everyone but Prospero, and is always yearning to escape to the freedom of, in Oakes’s text, “higher spheres.” (You can’t get much higher than high E.)

And luckily the BSO had soprano Hila Plitmann on hand to superbly carry off these high-altitude acrobatics (she even did so with something like the sweet lightness we’d expect of Ariel). Meanwhile Christopher Maltman made a grounded, commanding Prospero, and Kate Royal a gorgeously thoughtful Miranda. I only had doubts about Toby Spence’s Ferdinand, who didn’t seem quite ardent enough to hold his own in this amazing company.

The other major work by in Adès on offer was his 2005 violin concerto Concentric Paths, a hypnotic piece in three movements which paralleled, appropriately enough, his writing for Ariel. Once again, a “vocal” violin line orbited at the top of the instrument’s range (essayed dazzlingly by Anthony Marwood, for whom the piece was written), while, in later movements, the rest of the orchestra sighed heavily below. What’s fascinating about Concentric Paths is the sense that its tonality is unstable in a curiously post-postmodern way, spiraling through key signatures yet seemingly drawn toward some sort of gravitational tonal center – what you might call a “strange attractor” if you were speaking in terms of chaos theory (which I think in a way Adès is). The audience appeared mystified by this eerily attractive gambit – despite the clean authority of the performance (the composer's conducting came alive for his own stuff).  They slowly warmed, however, to the vocal marvels of The Tempest (there were many singers in the audience, as the concert was a freebie for Tanglewood Festival Chorus members). Let’s hope that Boston only grows more and more familiar in future with this amazing talent.

Voice of the prophet

The BSO - and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus - raised Elijah from the dead last weekend.

Incredibly, this weekend's BSO performances of Mendelssohn's Elijah (above) marked only the third time the orchestra has mounted the work. Actually, maybe that's not so incredible: it's a huge undertaking - and not nearly as interesting as, say, The Trojans or Moses and Aaron, no? (Har de har, that was just my little philistine joke.) What's more, even these performances almost didn't happen: first James Levine was sidelined by ongoing back problems, then tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko withdrew due to a throat infection. But in a pair of miracles that would have done the prophet himself proud, the BSO came up with worthy replacements in both cases: the much-loved Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos picked up Levine's baton, and the Grammy-winning Anthony Dean Griffey stepped into the roles of Obadiah and Ahab.

So the show went on, and proved to be, well, if not revelatory, then still pretty terrific in a satisfyingly old-fashioned way. Needless to say, if Elijah has been neglected over the years by the BSO, it's still utterly familiar (in piecemeal fashion) to anyone who cares about choral music, or, for that matter, most anyone who goes to church: several of its ravishing numbers are staples of the Sunday morning repertoire. Still, it's rare that one gets a chance to hear Mendelssohn's grand tribute to Bach (and great precursor to Wagner, ironically enough) at full size, as it were. Chorally speaking, I'm kind of a secret size queen, I admit, and as the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (all 150 of them) filed onto the Symphony Hall stage, I felt myself getting - well, a little excited. And I wasn't alone (I find again and again that most straight people are secret size queens, too). Not that I don't adore our smaller, professional chorales, like the brilliantly nimble Boston Baroque and Handel and Haydn choruses. But ya know, they're kind of - well, not small or anything, but . . . well . . . hmmmm. Maybe I should stop there.

Anyway, what's wonderful about huge choruses isn't really the size of their sound but its depth. This is a hard quality to explain in the abstract, but as they say, you know it when you hear it. Of course the trouble with such choruses is that to get that depth, you often have to sacrifice clarity - the voices in large groups aren't always uniform in quality, and their diction can get blurry, and even the singing itself can be a little ragged around the edges. (Just you try to get 150 people to start and stop on a dime.) The BSO's secret weapon, however, is John Oliver, founder and long-time director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, who sculpted the chorale's gigantic sound with nearly unbelievable precision. Even though they were singing from memory. In German. We were impressed.

Given the virtuosity of the chorale, the rest of the performance sometimes seemed like almost an afterthought. But it must be said that Frühbeck de Burgos demonstrated once again why he's the BSO's go-to-man in times of crisis - he seems to be able to pull most of the Western repertoire out of his hat at short notice. His Elijah boasted no deep insights or sense of new conception, it's true - but then, you don't really go to the BSO to hear musical ideas; even James Levine doesn't really have any original ideas. You go to the BSO to hear a top-drawer rendition of the conventional wisdom about this or that piece, and in the case of Elijah, that's probably enough. Frühbeck de Burgos clearly knows and understands the work, somehow conveyed a sense of its structure, and drew both sensitive playing from the orchestra as well as palpable dramatic attack throughout the oratorio's two-hour-plus playing time. And simply watching him throw himself into the musical climaxes, sawing the air and literally leaping against the podium, was like watching a maestro capably ride a colossal tiger.

What he didn't get, however, was a similar sense of drama from his soloists, although musically, soprano Christine Brewer and mezzo Stephanie Blythe were exquisite - and actually both were fine dramatically in their stand-alone moments (Brewer made a very moving Widow, and Blythe soared as the Angel). Tenor Anthony Dean Griffey was almost in their league, but not quite - perhaps because he was a last-minute draft, as it were. Griffey certainly has a gorgeously rich timbre, and sang with fluidity and grace - but he wobbled here and there in his sustained notes, and didn't really have the same general sense of clarity that the women displayed. There was lovely work from the secondary soloists, who joined the group for some beautifully blended quartets, and a charming turn from young treble Ryan Williams (last seen in The Turn of the Screw) in the famous "rain" recitative that closes Part I. The only real gap in the performance, however, came, unfortunately, in the role of Elijah himself. Bass-baritone Shenyang certainly had the pipes for the part, but he was stiff and dramatically unconvincing, and seemed to imagine that he was singing - and emoting - all by himself. It's a tribute to the rest of the many moving parts of this performance that a gap in the lead role hardly seemed to slow it down.

Which leads me to return to a point that infuriated a lot of BSO fans when I brought it up the first time - the disparities in pay that are evident on the Symphony Hall stage. The star of Elijah was clearly the Tanglewood Festival Chorus - only its members were paid not a dime for their efforts. Local blogger Matthew Guerreri once scoffed at my raising the question of why BSO unionized players were paid so much more than session players (and, well, just about any other performer of classical music in Boston). In Guerrieri's circular logic (and to be fair, in the opinion of many others), BSO players were hardly overpaid at all, because players in other metropolitan areas were overpaid at precisely the same level. I wonder, though, whether the fact that the instrumentalists onstage at Elijah were looking at salaries of, say, from $130,000-$200,000 a year, while the singers were looking at annual incomes of - well, ZERO - gives him any pause. Of course perhaps the symphony choruses in Chicago and L.A. are likewise expected to donate their time - but is that as it should be? Does Guerrieri agree that their artistry is, at least in the coin of the realm, literally worthless?

I really hope this is my final post on those high BSO salaries . . .

My post regarding the salaries of the BSO's unionized players continues to generate as much misguided comment as my postings on Emily Glassberg Sands. So my apologies for repeating myself, but I felt I had to state once again, quite clearly, the issues at hand.

Many BSO supporters seem a little unclear on economic concepts - even though, in a rather foggy fashion, they imagine their debating points are actually based on economic concepts (I guess because that's the way people with college degrees think they should talk these days). Matthew Guerrieri, for instance, over at Soho the Dog, seems to imagine that the BSO is somehow competing for talent in an open market, with organizations like the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But it's very hard to understand how this could be so, at least in any classical economic sense - even though, yes, the auditions themselves are competitions, and a better-than-average salary would have to be offered to attract applicants. (Guerrieri also imagines there's some sort of valid comparison between annual orchestral salaries and one-shot SAG commercial pay, but never mind about that!)

The difficulty in Guerreri's proposition is that all kinds of problematic conditions exist that prevent us from applying "free market" principles to comparing the salaries of major orchestras. The jobs available at these institutions, for instance, are often de facto life appointments - sometimes there's no opening available for a particular instrument for years (and years) at a time. This makes the wages involved very "sticky," in economic parlance - add to that the fact that many of these jobs are unionized, and you can pretty much throw free-market labor analysis out the window. Then there's the problem that in the end, something like 40% of these wages' cost is covered by donors, not customers.

Given these issues, the very fact that the wages at various major cities match so closely could well be evidence of price collusion, rather than free market equivalence. There is, as I pointed out above, very little labor movement between the major markets - and said markets could well reflect very different lifestyle preferences and costs. And yet somehow the wages match almost exactly? The most likely argument for how this could be so is that the wages are essentially "fixed" by management and donors - due to, yes, appreciation for talent, but also due to a funny mix of civic pride and the sense that to be considered high quality, an orchestra generally has to be as expensive as it is in New York or L.A.

And if we look at our own actual musical market, here in Boston (the one that truly counts), we find anomalies that would seem to back up that "collusion" argument. First, to be blunt, there are freelance musicians available within our own market, whom the BSO deems up to the job, who will do the job for less. Therefore it is quite correct to say, by that pesky dictionary definition, that the unionized BSO players are "overpaid": they get double (or triple) what other people are paid who can do the same job. Of course Matthew and his readers can protest all they like that there are mysterious conditions, like a secret pinch of extra talent, or more expensive instruments, or even "toughness" (as one commenter would have it), that justify that discrepancy; but they've got no proof, and of course I'd be happy to lay a bet that they couldn't tell, from a blind listen, whether or not they were listening to the BSO with freelancers or not. (Indeed, there are one or two reliable freelancers whom I personally prefer to the respective BSO player, who's being paid three times what they are.) And of course, if the freelancers ever got their act together and organized against the BSO, their wages would miraculously rise, while the wages of the unionized players would probably fall - with no change in anybody's talent or ability. Only the political component of the wage determination would have changed.

And that political component is precisely what I've been talking about. I've been struck by the sweet, but seemingly unconscious, snobbery of many of the commenters on this issue (including Guerrieri): it's rather clear that they hold the high cost of the BSO close to their hearts, as proof positive of its value (and therefore the value of their own taste). This, of course, is how much of the world has always run. But it's not an economic argument. And given the wild discrepancies between the wage rates of different performing artists, it's time we gave the political component of our arts spending a long, hard look.

Just one more thought on the BSO . . .

I've gotten a little flak about my post below regarding BSO salaries - why publicize this kind of information in the current economic environment, people want to know - if at all?

My answer goes something like this: remember that controversial post so many moons ago about how people should not donate to the ART, BSO or MFA? That there were other, equally (if not more) worthy cultural organizations in far more dire straits? Well, consider this just one more piece of evidence to bolster that argument.

For while there are, no doubt, some Hub Review readers who make around $150,000-200,000 a year (my estimate of the annual pay, with extra gig money included, of a senior BSO player), I think there are many more of you who do not. So ponder this, underpaid minions - if you donate to the BSO, you are actually giving money to people who make more money than you do.

And why, exactly, would you do that? I'm just sayin'.

James Levine, Guest Conductor

Okay, James Levine fans (and I know your name is legion, and not just at the Globe), quick - how many concerts will Mr. Levine conduct at the BSO this coming season? Here's a clue - the season consists of 29 separate programs (31 if you count two BSO Chamber Players concerts). But if you guessed that Levine was showing up for, say, two-thirds to three quarters of that season, you'd be wrong. By an order of almost 2. Mr. Levine will only be leading 12 (really 11+, as there's overlap between two of the programs) of those 29 (or 31) - a little more than a third, well short of one half. And his appearances are weighted toward the fall - next spring he'll only be in town for the month of February. It's hardly news, of course, that Boston's just one stop on Levine's global circuit, which includes not only his No. 1 job at the Met, but also occasional or regular stops in Vienna, Berlin, Bayreuth, Salzburg and Verbier. But one wonders, really, given this schedule - and his problematic health - just how much attention Boston gets from him outside of his appearances here. Of course Levine's performances are often thrilling (and occasionally not so thrilling, in IMHO), but I couldn't really say that the BSO plays generally better when he's not around - or at least, I couldn't say that it plays consistently better, or that he's forged a new "house style" which other conductors can rely on. And something tells me that consistency will become more problematic as time goes on, particularly this spring, when he'll really be more of a "Guest Conductor" than a "Music Director."

Of the sea, song, and sirens

In the old days, BSO programs aspired to some sort of intellectual coherence - most often, to pairings of the "compare and contrast" variety. These days, however, national origin seems to be enough to shape an evening around, as in this weekend's offering of "French music," featuring Berlioz, Duparc, Debussy, and a new commission from Henri Dutilleux, sung by reigning concert soprano Renée Fleming (at left).

The evening opened with an expertly gauged, if utterly conventional, reading of excerpts from the Berlioz "Roméo et Juliette;" though to be fair, James Levine coaxed some real feeling from the suite's "love scene," and the "Queen Mab scherzo" sometimes shivered with eerie, moonlit fantasy. Still, this seemed like an aperitif before the main course: Fleming.

The diva entered looking glorious in a sea-foam stole over a shimmering, fishtail sheath (someone must have told her La Mer was on the program), and she was generally in fine voice - although perhaps the warm opalescence of her pipes isn't precisely right for Dutilleux, whose precision might be better served by crystal than pearl. Fleming also seemed at times to be laying her own patented stamp on the music rather than responding to the Ligeti-esque textures around her. Still, there was reason for her to feel isolated; like many a mid-century composer - which is essentially what the nonagerian Dutilleux still is - the Frenchman hadn't so much supported her voice as built an environment for it to explore, and her soprano did retain a poignant vulnerability as it rose and fell through the exquisite, alienated soundscape the composer had constructed. Of the short vocal suite he supplied, perhaps the strongest was the opening piece, "L'Temps L'Horloge" (roughly "Time and the Clock"), which hauntingly evoked time itself rippling through the cogs and gears of its own measurement (with the woodwinds following suit), rather than slipping silently by us "like a thief in the night." Less compelling, at least on first hearing, was the burnt-offering setting of "Le Dernier Poeme," the famously minimal verse (by Robert Desnos) in which romantic despair meets the doom of the death camps. Dutilleux hit on an odd but intriguing instrumental choice for the piece: what sounded like a beaten-down accordion accompanied Fleming through her desolate admonition to the War's survivors; but perhaps the vocal line was slightly too spare to fully mine the pathos of the poem.

Fleming was more in her element in the ensuing group of songs by Duparc, achieving something like perfect synchronicity with Levine and the orchestra during the gorgeous "L'Invitation au Voyage," and the more muted rapture of "Extase." Even here, however, she sometimes sounded fragile, and her voice brushed at least once against the top of its register, perhaps leading to a rather constrained reading of "Phidylé," which might have brimmed with more passion.

This hardly mattered to her fans, however (several of whom departed the hall with her); they'd drunk at least intermittently from the golden spring of her voice, and left happy. Too bad they missed the best part of the program: Levine unexpectedly summoned up a brilliant performance of La Mer, which of course is putatively a portrait of the ocean over the course of a single day ("I particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven," Satie once quipped), but is actually - like so much of Debussy - a long meditation on submerged sensual pleasure. Sublimity of this type is a Levine specialty, of course, and he didn't stint on color, or spray - the performance's real pleasure, however, lay in its expertly contrived, but seemingly carefree, polyrhythms, which underpin whatever "structure" La Mer has. Here Levine caught precisely the play of tiny phrases over the deeper sway of the piece, and skillfully drew the orchestra from the rolling surge of dawn to the orgasmic thrash of a mid-day storm. There were perhaps no new soundings of Debussy's ocean here, but it was still exhilarating to hear the evening end with such a splendid splash.

Beethoven smackdown goes to challenger!

You-know-who got a workout this weekend.

You probably didn't notice, but something of a watershed occurred last weekend - and no, I don't mean the Red Sox winning the pennant; I'm talking about something far more important. In a curious, but perhaps fated, coincidence, two of the city's major music organizations - the BSO and the Handel and Haydn Society - found themselves playing the same piece of music at the same time: Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto. It was an important face-off, because many felt it might represent something of a turning point in a polite, but ongoing musical "war" over whether Beethoven is better suited to period or modern instruments. The BSO and other symphonies have long since abandoned Baroque music to the early music movement, and practically ceded Haydn; but Mozart and Beethoven remain sticking points, for financial as well as artistic reasons: if the consensus developed that these two audience draws were best played on period instruments, the BSO would suddenly find the cultural earth moving beneath its feet.

So any BSO spies at Handel and Haydn last weekend would have been dismayed to find (as I think anyone who caught both concerts would have to admit), that H&H left the BSO in the dust. The H&H event was, to be fair, the confluence of a "perfect storm" of musical interest: Grant Llewellyn (at left) who had already demonstrated a passionate mastery of Beethoven in his versions of the First and Second last year, had returned to conduct; the Society had also engaged young South African pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, a brilliant performer, and had even procured a stunningly beautiful fortepiano (in both sound and tone) built in period style by R. J. Regier after Viennese models. (You can see and read about this exquisite instrument here.)

The BSO's forces, of course, were redoubtable, too. The famous Christoph von Dohnänyi, often a favorite of mine, took the baton at Symphony Hall, with the rising young German pianist Lars Vogt (left) at the Steinway. But just moments into the concert, it was evident that the concert was going to be business-as-usual for the BSO. The orchestra sounded far more focused and confident than it had the week before, under Robert Spano; that much I expected. I thought, however, that Dohnänyi, or Vogt, might find some new spark in the Third, especially given the implicit challenge from H&H; but I thought wrong. Vogt crafted a supple, even graceful reading, often with little rushes of plush feeling, while Dohnänyi supplied steady and subtle back-up, but the overall impression was still not so much of musical statement as brand projection: this was a refined version of RCA Victor Beethoven, power music for the power elite.

In contrast, H&H crafted from the same raw material an exciting musical voyage. Bezuidenhout proved a fearless and almost willful performer, exploring the limits of his instrument with a passion, improvising in the cadenza with poetic intelligence, and throwing to the winds any academic concerns about consistent "period" tempo (always a thorn in the early music garden). Rarely have I seen a pianist hold his audience's attention captive - but if Bezuidenhout's fingers hadn't been on the keys, I'd say he had Symphony Hall in the palm of his hand.

His eloquence might have been lost on a lesser instrument, but the Regier fortepiano proved as spectacular as its player. While the sound texture of the period orchestra is by now a fixture on the local scene, the fortepiano is still something of a shock: its reedier tone can sound almost tinny at first blush. The ear unconsciously adjusts to its new aural context, however, and soon unexpected musical vistas emerge. Unlike modern pianos, which are designed to sound much the same up and down their keyboards, fortepianos seem to sport different colors in almost every octave. In particular, the lower reaches of the keyboard are all but revelatory - the fuzzy thud of the average Steinway has here been replaced by a dark forest of different timbres, through which Bezuidenhout darted with ferocious attack. Indeed, when accompanied by the subtly different tones and colors of the period string orchestra, the result was a hypnotic atmosphere of near-counterpoint.


Bezuidenhout wows the crowd on the fortepiano. (Photo by Michael J. Lutch.)

The rest of the concert was almost as thrilling. While over at the BSO, Dohnänyi wrapped the evening with a standard-issue version of the Fifth (rather predictably, the only thing unusual about it was that it was louder than it had to be - the BSO had doubled up on its players), Llewellyn, after being led willingly by Bezuidenhout through the concerto, asserted himself in a spirited rendition of the Seventh. Indeed, I've never understood Wagner's famous description of it as "the apotheosis of dance" till now - under Llewellyn, Handel and Haydn pushed the finale past frenzy and into something like orgasm.

Of course the final accolades have to go to the H&H players themselves, who always exhibit a higher level of musical attention and intelligence than the BSO, if you ask me. The BSO, needless to say, is superb, and each of its players is a superstar; but once you get past the rah-rah, they're-our-musical-Red-Sox aspect of the orchestra, its superbiness is somehow a little dull, and its players sometimes look like an army of idiot savants - waiting patiently for their next cue, but staring at the soloist with marked disinterest. At H&H, meanwhile, the orchestra was clearly riveted by Bezuidenhout - their response was like a mini-drama within the larger one unfolding in the hall. They, like everyone in the audience, knew a home run when they saw one.

The Arnie and Larry Show (continued)

The ongoing Beethoven/Schoenberg smackdown continued this weekend at Symphony Hall, with Larry again bitch-slapping Arnie absolutely silly. Maestro James Levine at least has learned to sweeten the Schoenberg pie – this time out we got to ogle the slimmed-down Deborah Voigt as she valiantly attempted “Erwartung,” (“Expectation”), a seminal Schoenberg “monodrama," as well as Beethoven's “Ah! Perfido”; testy anti-Schoenbergian subscribers were further mollified with the “Coriolan” Overture and the gleaming, but rarely performed, Eighth Symphony.

“Erwartung” proved mildly intriguing, but ultimately tiring; Schoenberg’s stated aim was “to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour,” which gives you a pretty good idea of the piece’s sense of stasis. The text, by Marie Pappenheim, a dermatologist by day but psychoanalytic dilettante by night, has retained its ambiguous allure: a distraught woman, wandering in a dark forest, discovers the corpse of her lover, and seemingly goes mad. But is she lost in anxious hallucination – or has her lover’s desertion broken her mind? Or has she actually murdered the man herself and is now returning to the scene of her crime, unhinged by guilt? “Erwartung” keeps all these possibilities in clever balance, but as a result Schoenberg’s music remains in a floating panic – cross-cut with the kind of tone-poems (moonlight, rustling trees) that would have embarrassed Tchaikovsky. Needless to say, said poetry is more harmonically sophisticated than The Nutcracker; “Erwartung” is atonal, but as it was composed before Schoenberg systematized his music into twelve-tone “rows,” it's still rich in mournful harmonic skill. Little of its experimentation, however, strikes one as shocking today; Schoenberg was, of course, truly seminal, but strangely, he seems to have not so much transformed concert music as indirectly influenced the musical culture at large. All his atonal edginess, for instance, has long since been absorbed into pop culture; the post-melodic shards of “Erwartung” could easily serve as accompaniment to any number of horror movies (as indeed, Penderecki and Ligeti wound up as program music for The Shining).

Given that the work’s power to offend is gone, one is left with the issue that hinders much of Schoenberg, and which he himself attempted to solve with his twelve-tone system; the problem of development. There’s one big shock in “Erwartung” (the discovery of the body), and a rising sense of frenzied recapitulation before the finale, but elsewhere the piece is tedious – because the great gift of tonality (aside from its being a salve to bourgeois ears, of course) is that it allows for rising complexity, conflict and resolution over the course of the piece, while in his atonal fits Schoenberg can only stab at various moods (admittedly, seeing the piece fully staged might distract from this problem; perhaps it’s the concert setting that does in “Erwartung”).

So the piece has many a pitfall - which Deborah Voigt(at left, photo by Evan Richman for the Boston Globe) didn’t so much avoid as simply ignore. The solid, if svelte, Ms. Voigt has little of the madwoman about her naturally (and even less in the glamorous little black number she wore at Symphony), and her gold-tinged soprano, while strong, wasn't always sharp enough to cut through the throngs of instrumentalists around her (again, one longed to hear this piece with the orchestra in the pit – but is there a pit large enough to hold the forces Schoenberg marshals?). She soldiered on, of course, but her heart wasn’t really in it, and her wits remained steadfastly about her – she seemed to be indulging an academic demonstration, and not much more.

Of course, one could argue that was, indeed, precisely the idea – the Beethoven/Schoenberg series is supposed to illuminate its two subjects via inspired juxtaposition. The compare/contrast routine for “Erwantung” and “Ah! Perfido,” however, doesn’t yield much – one is a mad scene and the other a lament, and without much in the way of experimentation on Beethoven’s part. Voigt sang it well (she was much more in her element here), and the orchestra gave her exemplary backup - and of course was brilliant elsewhere, particularly in the Eighth.

But as the Schoenberg/Beethoven “cycle” winds up (or down), we’re bound to ask – what have you learned, Dorothy? I’d have to argue not much, because there’s not much truth in the program’s attempt to short-circuit the conventional wisdom about Larry and Arnie – i.e., that Larry was midwife to Romanticism, while Arnie did its last rites. And despite much local critical huffing and puffing, the BSO’s programming has only seemed to underline rather than overturn that Intro-to-Music thesis. It’s hard to imagine audiences calling back “Erwartung” or Moses and Aaron – instead, they’ll keep demanding “Verklärte Nacht” and Gurrelieder – because in the end, it’s hard to buy the essential argument that somehow Schoenberg transcended Romanticism.

Indeed, sometimes it seems that Schoenberg, for his admirers, exists more as an idea than as an actual composer; his lonely embarkation into twelve-tone rows has to be seen as a successful extension of the romantic ideal - otherwise, romanticism as a script becomes historically limited (at least musically), and Schoenberg never escapes the collapse of nineteenth-century culture into his supposed modernist nirvana. Without Schoenberg, in this reading, Beethoven loses a bit of status, too; he’s no longer the progenitor of an infinite progression of musical innovation, but rather only the instigator of a certain period of music (to which we relate at a certain distance). Levine’s obsession with Schoenberg ties neatly into this cultural imperative - he seems uninterested in the neotonal work that has successfully revived the concert repertoire, but instead remains obsessed with the avant-garde cultural script of his youth. In a way, his Schoenberg seasons have been deeply reactionary (so it’s no wonder Schoenberg has become a middlebrow cause célèbre in the pages of the Globe and elsewhere).

And there’s something else disturbing about Levine and Schoenberg; this composer almost thrashes with frustration, yet Levine treats him with little human passion – only musical passion, which is an entirely different thing. In fact, I’m haunted by the perception that Levine is largely drawn to Schoenberg (and other modernists) simply because he has a sweet tooth for technical challenge – he’s like a gourmand picking musical phrases from a tray, and he’s so superb technically that he can dazzle you into thinking you’ve actually heard the composer’s voice, instead of a stunning simulation of it. Even the BSO’s glossy rendition of the Eighth seemed a bit impersonal; it had speed, not urgency, and a precisely calibrated sense of crescendo rather than true power. It’s strange to think that these two seasons may represent a simulation of Schoenberg rather than the real thing – but it does occur to me that this particular composer may need rescuing not from obscurity, but from his admirers.