Zander's grandeur

The Boston Philharmonic

Last weekend's season opener from Ben Zander's Boston Philharmonic proved full of surprises (even its press reception was a bit shocking) - and thus it provided a pretty good sense of both the orchestra's core strength and its unusual range.

It's true that everything on the program came from the period with which the Philharmonic is closely identified - the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when orchestral size was approaching its zenith, and romantic (and post-romantic) musical gestures were correspondingly titanic.  And all, btw, came from Northern Europe (that is if you count Russia as part of Northern Europe).  Beyond that superficial similarity, however, the choices were strikingly divergent.  Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela is an elegiac tone poem, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto an expansive, dancing rapture; and Neilsen's Fourth Symphony ("The Inextinguishable") a super-sized allegory of war.

Yet in all three categories, the Philharmonic came through with colors flying.  Some tend to think of Zander as a grand rhetorician, but his Sibelius belied that stereotype; subtly rendered, the piece's eponymous swan (given exquisite voice by Peggy Pearson on English horn) floated with just the right edge of romantic dread through a mist of shimmering strings, occasionally broken by mournful solos from star cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer.

Then the orchestra seemed to slip easily into the lively passions of the Tchaikovsky concerto.  Violinist Ilya Kaler. the soloist, is little known in these parts; his only previous local appearance - that I can think of - was with the Philharmonic itself last season. Zander asked him to return immediately, and it was soon obvious why.  The Russian Kaler has a kind of lightly muscular - perhaps the better word is wiry - sound that taps into a folk idiom we sometimes forget often underpins Tchaikovsky.  His is not a particularly singing line, but he brought the Concerto's romping third movement to a wickedly dancing conclusion.  (You can judge for yourself from a video of the young Kaler performing the same piece, below.)  I was surprised to discover that the Globe's Jeremy Eichler described this interpretation - which he saw in the first concert of the run (I saw the last) - as far too slow; unless the violinist suddenly speeded up his tempo, I find that claim bizarre.  Eichler also took time out to describe Kaler as "ursine."  Nice!  I've often felt the Globe's lead critic doesn't much care for music with hair on its chest - but I guess I just do!


A younger Ilya Kaler plays Tchaikovsky. Jeremy Eichler thinks this is waay too slow.

The concert concluded with Carl Nielsen's Fourth Symphony ("The Inextinguishable"), which my companion aptly described as "Zander-bait." The Nielsen Fourth is big, and loud, and has a soaring theme - the human spirit in time of war (it was composed during the dark years of the First World War, which Nielsen himself watched from the neutral precincts of Denmark). I confess I'm often slightly amused by this kind of thing - classical fans who smile at obvious program music (and Nielsen himself professed to hate it) always seem to go gaga if the composer changes his program from "the dying swan" to "the human spirit." And I wasn't completely convinced by the Fourth (admittedly, this is my first time through it live); it's over-complicated tonally without ever getting really interesting, and I feel there's a good deal of high-minded filler in it, too (of the "Will Mankind prevail??? Noooo - YES!!!" variety).

Still, you can't deny the Fourth is often effective in its idealistic passion - the opening movement sounds like a frenzied Brahms slowly cracking up, and there's a famous duel for timpani in the finale that shakes you like the artillery then blowing Europe apart; the soaring coda at the last moment is truly moving, too. And Zander, always a great shaper of large forces, kept the orchestra gloriously coherent throughout - with particular praise due to those convulsive timpanists, Edward Meltzer and Hans Morrison. Sometimes you can leave a concert unconvinced but still admiring, and that's how I left Zander's Nielsen that evening.

The Boston Philharmonic in a previous performance at Jordan Hall.

Nazis seemed to be haunting the Hub Review last weekend - after sitting through Good at BU, I then caught Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony at Jordan Hall, with Benjamin Zander's Boston Philharmonic. Not that Bruckner was a Nazi, of course (he died in 1896); but the great symphonist now lives in their long shadow - he was, in fact, probably the favorite composer of Adolph Hitler. Yeah, ole Uncle Adolph had an even bigger jones for Bruckner than Wagner; indeed, when German radio stations heard of Hitler's suicide, they spontaneously played the Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony in mourning.  (Yes - mourning.) So while Wagner may have composed Siegfried's funeral music, Bruckner actually composed Hitler's funeral music.

Der Führer's admiration for the composer may have been sourced in something like identification; it would have been easy for Hitler to imagine Bruckner as his musical twin. Both were Austrians, both were slightly batty Catholics with a disturbing reverence for "purity," and both were determined to create enormous empires - in Bruckner's case, of course, merely of sound. It's important to remember that, and to remember that there's not a trace of anti-Semitism to be found in Bruckner - just a weird sense of Bavarian pastorale gone slightly mad, with attendant pretensions to death, transcendence, damnation, resurrection - the whole neurotically overblown late-nineteenth-century kit and caboodle. But to be honest, what makes Bruckner always sound bonkers to me is a yin-yangish tension in his music between vast, elaborate architectures and a kind of naïve, even crude, simplicity.  It's as if while stylistically his whole symphonic end-game was growing ever more florid, his childish obsessions were at the same time banging through its highly-wrought surface.

Don't get me wrong - I like Bruckner (at left, in a portrait that captures something of that introverted childishness); but I like him with his inner crazy intact; in a word, I don't think Hitler was wrong about him (even if, unlike Wagner, he was probably harmless). But I didn't feel much that was really crazy going on in Benjamin Zander's highly accomplished version of the Eighth Symphony last weekend. The performance got a gushing review in the Globe, and for at least one good reason - the orchestra (particularly the horn section, which had quite the Wagnerian workout) sounded more coherent and polished than they have in the recent past. Indeed, rarely have I heard the Boston Philharmonic sound better - although, as always, they were playing a piece that requires huge forces in a space too small for them (Jordan Hall), which inevitably resulted in some balance and volume problems.  Still, this was a detailed and persuasive rendition of a ginormous challenge.

And you can't deny that Zander (at right, in a typical pose) knows how to calibrate grand gestures - indeed, he all but lives for grand gestures, and their attendant sense of uplift.  But while he's essentially after grandiloquence, he doesn't want it to look vulgar - and so he shaped the Eighth superbly (if a bit sedately - it ran well over its usual 80 minutes), attending with almost too much solicitude to the usual programmatic pitstops - childhood joy, innocence lost, suffering, death, and sudden transcendence (with, of course, a shift from minor to major at the very last minute, like an unexpected goal at the World Cup).

Most of the critics seem to have been thrilled that Zander kept Bruckner under such elevated control - that the famous drive of the finale was here so methodical, that the symphony unfolded, as the Globe approvingly put it, like an algorithm.  But I couldn't help feeling that in Zander's "best-of-what's-been-thought-and-said" version something that Bruckner said had been left out - this was the Eighth as rhetoric rather than rapture.  In other words, there are more things in this composer's musical heaven and earth than "uplift," and maybe vulgarity ain't always a bad thing.

The perfect Wagnerite

Wagner is a composer whose influence is everywhere, but whose actual works, at least in Boston, are - well, not so much in evidence. The BSO performs them fairly regularly in concert, of course, but I can't think of the last time anyone has attempted a fully-staged Wagner opera in the Hub. The reasons why are obvious. The later ones make demands that are just too daunting for local producers - the orchestra would stretch any pit in town to its limit, and of course the stagings are not only immensely long and complex (the Met's recently retired Das Rheingold, above) but often require huge choruses, live horses, or magical special effects. And to be blunt, sopranos and tenors with the power to cut through a late Wagner orchestration aren't exactly thick on the ground.

This, perhaps, explains the excitement stirred by the appearance of Linda Watson (left) with the Boston Philharmonic last weekend, in a program devoted entirely to Wagner. Watson sang Brünnhilde's Immolation Scene as well as Isolde's "Liebestod," ("Love-death"), and the Philharmonic essayed the popular preludes to both Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as well as what you might call Götterdämmerung's Greatest Hits - "Dawn" along with Siegfried's "Rhine Journey," "Death," and "Funeral March."

The evening was therefore a kind of Wagnerite wet dream - and a palpable thrill of electricity ran through the crowd upon the appearance of Watson. Imperious, draped in black, and sporting not just long Aryan locks but a stereotypical German profile, the soprano might have been sent by central casting - although actually, she's the genuine article, with a long list of Wagner credits that culminates in Brünnhildes at both Bayreuth and the Met. Once she began to sing, the reason for that résumé was immediately clear; even though she was working with Wagnerian forces cheek-by-jowl on stage (as opposed to down in the pit), Watson's voice more than held its own. The soprano has a clarion top, and there's a weight and burnished sheen to her voice that stretches unbroken almost to its bottom (only here did she have trouble being heard). For Wagner, it's all but perfect - although frankly, there's not much in the way of individual color to it, and Watson's performances were so dignified as to verge on the sedate. Admittedly, we don't expect a full dramatic performance in a concert setting - still, both Isolde and Brünnhilde are experiencing transfiguration amidst destruction, neither of which seemed to leave Watson particularly ruffled. (An amateur recording of Watson in a performance of Isolde is below; for a sense of how far the role can really go, at bottom is one of the great Isoldes of our day, Waltraud Meier, in an almost scarily intense performance.)


Linda Watson as Isolde at Deutsche Oper am Rhein in 2003.

While the diva did her thing, the Boston Philharmonic did its - intermittently. The opening prelude to Die Meistersinger was bright and energetically clipped, just as it should be, but after that, as conductor Benjamin Zander slowed his rhythms for the ensuing deaths and funerals, his interpretations still seemed somehow metronomic. A rising, but mysterious, suspension is central to Tristan - and a similar sense of decline infuses Götterdämmerung, but rather than summon gathering, inchoate moods, Zander seemed to be shifting, albeit at a funereal pace, from one spot to another in the score. As a result, the orchestra sounded far less focused than it did in their recent Dvořák Seventh, even though there were sudden bursts of brilliant playing in Siegfried's Funeral Music and in particular the overwhelming rise of the Rhine (and final coda) after the Immolation Scene. At these moments the terrible grandeur that is Wagner did, indeed, echo in Boston as it rarely does.


Now that's an Isolde: Waltraud Meier not so much sings as transcends the "Liebestod" in Munich in 1998.

Fireworks sans fire

Feng Ning and friend.

Last weekend, for the first time in 25 years, the Boston Philharmonic programmed the famously demanding Brahms Violin Concerto - because, conductor Benjamin Zander let it be known, he had finally found "the man for the job" (according to the Globe's Jeremy Eichler) in the young Chinese sensation Feng Ning.

Well, Mr. Ning is certainly "the man" for just about any job on the violin - like so many Chinese prodigies these days (Lang Lang, Yuja Wang), he has an almost unbelievable level of technique. And he needs it all in the Brahms, which is widely believed the most difficult of violin concertos - as the canard goes, the piece was not written for the violin, but against it.

But Eichler went on to praise Ning's "warm singing tone" - which is a bit bizarre, because brilliant as Ning is, his playing is mostly flash with little passion. Or is it even flash? There's something a little blank about Ning's stage presence, and while his playing seemed fevered - indeed at times devoted to a relentless rubato - beneath the sparks dancing on its surface it felt oddly dutiful (meanwhile, rather than shaping his usual grand gestures, Zander seemed to be constantly lifting, then pressing, his foot to the pedal too). Ning only opened up into real feeling in the themes of the lovely second movement (perhaps inspired by the opening passages from the woodwinds, here tenderly essayed by oboist Peggy Pearson). My partner's comment was that "he plays like a competition winner" (and he's won just about every one there is): that is, technically brilliant, and driven to dazzle, but not deeply musical.

But I can't say Ning left me cold; the encore brought a note of surprising poignance to the performance. The young violinist chose an arrangement for violin of Francisco Tarrega’s familiar guitar piece “Recuerdos de la Alhambra" - but this time its famously lush textures, pushed far up into the violin's range, sounded hauntingly lonely and sad. The final notes seemed to trail after Ning like a melancholy question mark.

Zander had paired the Brahms with another large-scale set-piece, Dvořák's rarely-heard Symphony No. 7 (yes, two symphonies before he went to the New World). The piece has a reputation as "one of the greatest symphonies you've never heard," and Zander proved the saying true with one of his trademarked barn-storming performances. This conductor loves the colossal, of course, and has a special talent for grand clashes, and you get all that in spades in the Dvořák Seventh. The symphony is an affecting paean to the political struggles of the composer's homeland - it's shot through with both pride and foreboding, and features the usual (for Dvořák) cornucopia of memorable tunes, and even a mad kind of waltz in its middle.

Zander (who's rather like the David Lean of local conductors) handled all this with both a gripping sense of command and a nearly-brimming sense of emotion, and the players, who clearly adore their conductor in his high mode, responded with almost overwhelmingly energy. The symphony's final peroration sounded something like an orchestral shout of triumph. It was hard to imagine a more compelling version of a piece that deserves far more attention than it receives.

Of Bartók, Brahms and Beethoven

For its final concert of the season, the Boston Philharmonic offered a curious pairing: a well-loved warhorse (Brahms's first symphony) rubbed shoulders with a prickly piece of modernism - Bartók's Second Violin Concerto, essayed by the virtuosic Japanese violinist Kyoko Takezawa (at left). It was hard to see precisely how these two pieces might illuminate each other, aside from their rather melancholy historical juxtaposition - in his much-delayed first symphony, the late Romantic Brahms raised, then put to rest, Beethoven's classicist ghost; while in the Second Violin Concerto, Bartók sent Romanticism careening into Modernism, against which it basically splintered. Not everyone would agree with that back-of-a-napkin summation, of course - and it was even harder to parse in this particular concert, given that the audience-pleasing Brahms wrapped up the program rather than beginning it. And perhaps not everyone would agree with my gut feeling that the Brahms succeeded, while the Bartók didn't - indeed, I'm hard pressed to explain precisely why I feel that way.

Certainly Ms. Takewaza is a force to be reckoned with, and could hold her own against the BSO or any other major orchestra (why she seems locked in a second-tier touring situation is probably a function of the classical-music political machine, which, well-oiled as it is, is careful to remain invisible to most concertgoers). Takewaza's sound is not particularly large, but it's clean, lean, and startlingly agile, and her attack can be ferocious. She clearly knew the Second through and through, although her Bartók was rather more a "classic" modernist than a late, late, late Romantic; the pensiveness of the music came through, and its sudden flashes of doom - but perhaps not its episodic lyricism; the music was driven by force rather than fire. And Ms. Takewaza appeared manifestly unhappy on the Jordan Hall stage - her personal pensiveness, in fact, offered an intriguingly meta comment on the music's. She seemed to have little connection with conductor Benjamin Zander, even though the orchestra provided her detailed, thoughtful support - the string section in particular followed her with something like a haunting shimmer. Still, one reason to catch a Boston Philharmonic concert is to see the interplay between Zander and his players, and here there was a curious void where often there's intense connection.

Said connection, however, was back with the Brahms - which offers the kind of big, rhetorical gestures at which Zander (right) excels. The orchestra played with enthusiasm, and while there was little in the way of interpretive innovation on display, the piece sounded glorious, and Zander did conjure some complexity in the famous last movement. Here principal horn player Kevin Owen brought an affecting, dying fall to the call which seems to summon Beethoven's ghost, and the ensuing theme - so close to the motifs of Ludwig van that some wags have dubbed the piece "Beethoven's Tenth" - rose in the strings and winds with just the right mix of warmth and sympathy: a reminder not only of Beethoven but also of what the Boston Philharmonic does best.