Yes, Virginia, the BSO can still sound great - Esa-Pekka Salonen proves it

Salonen in action with Philharmonia.

I confess that after Missa Solemnis a few weeks back, followed by a good-but-not-great "German Requiem," I felt like giving up on the BSO. I also didn't feel much like writing about it; as with the A.R.T. and other entrenched artistic institutions, talking about their performances honestly always leads to an email-box full of outraged blowback from their silly partisans. But I wanted to catch Esa-Pekka Salonen's concert this weekend, first because I wanted to hear this conductor (at left) live, and second, because he is one of those classical music globe-trotters currently under consideration to take James Levine's vacant spot at the podium.

And judging from the performance last night, we'd be very lucky to lure Salonen here.  He has all of Levine's technical chops, that was clear from a program that included Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Stravinsky full score for The Firebird, and Salonen's own Violin Concerto - only he's so much better than Levine in so many ways!

Chief among these may be that he simply showed up for his concert.  (This also gives him a big leg up over other recent "auditioners"!)  Salonen has also already led a major metropolitan orchestra (the L.A. Philharmonic) to global prominence - his base is now the Philharmonia Orchestra in London; so he has a proven track record in cultural leadership.  And at 53, he is younger than Levine - and not just physically healthier, but actually intellectually younger; with Salonen, we wouldn't be stuck in some mid-twentieth-century debate over Schoenberg and Beethoven.  Up on the podium, Salonen also gives the sense of a more open and experimental presence (it helps that he's kind of cute, and looks a decade younger than his age). Moreover, Salonen simply conveys a sense of personality.  Let's be honest - even though I know this hurts - Levine was always a vacancy on stage, because his actual life was utterly closeted; what we got instead was his devotion to technical musical perfection, which was hardly the same thing.  In a way, Levine was a monument to a live unlived (and unloved, except at one remove);  in contrast Salonen seems quite alive, emotionally, politically, and sexually; with him, you feel the BSO might suddenly gain a conducting figurehead with a presence, a profile, like Handel and Haydn and Boston Baroque have always had.

It also probably helps that Salonen is more open to the modes of pop music - in something of the manner of Thomas Adès - than most classical music globe-trotters.  That was the impression left, anyway, by his Violin Concerto, which didn't, I admit,  entirely blow me away, although it certainly has its moments.  Its opening movement ("Mirage") is a kind of millennial variant on Ligeti - gorgeous with deep notes of dread - overlaid with frenzied figures from Glass; its following sections ("Pulse I" and "Pulse II") leaned even more heavily on Glass - buffed with a subtler version of that pop phenomenon's zen-pop sheen; its finale ("Adieu") proved a bit more interesting, and seems intended as a literal metaphor (as the entire piece does, in fact) for Salonen's departure from the modernist strictures of his youth.  It's a big, solid piece that wowed the BSO audience (as it was designed to wow the crowds at Disney Hall), but it's pretty derivative, and in the end Salonen seems to lack the intellectual rigor of Adès (another major presence at the L.A. Philharmonic, btw).  The Violin Concerto ends with a famously "surprising" chord that's out of the harmonic sequence provided so far; Salonen has said this represents the idea that something "new" is just around the corner.  Only why isn't the Concerto itself that "something new"?  (That is basically what's wrong with it.)

A Bakst design for The Firebird.

Okay, so he's not a great composer; his connection with the young peoples, though, is what the BSO management currently craves - and let's face it, they've always had more money than brains - and I think he has more integrity than, say, Diane Paulus, who represents the low end of this kind of thinking.

And - AND - he's just a terrific conductor (at least of Ravel and Stravinsky!).  The opening movement of Tombeau was sublime; the piece did lose a little rhythmic loft as it progressed - I think Salonen's tempi sometimes tend toward the contemplative; and perhaps the meaning of the finale was somewhat unfocused.  This was still a superb performance, though.  The BSO is a famously recalcitrant set of musicians - they generally only play well for people they want to play well for.  Clearly they want to play for Salonen, and it showed.

If anything, Stravinsky's complete music for The Firebird was even more ravishing.  I admit I'm a little fonder of the 1919 suite in the concert hall; without the actual ballet going on (which I wish the Boston Ballet would do!), the original score always seems to me a bit wandering, and half-abstracted.  Still, it's good to hear it again in full, and Salonen seemed to approach it with a sense of perspective grounded in an awareness of the career for which it proved a springboard.  And somehow the conductor found a structural sense to the piece's harmonics, too, despite its narrative discourse, and his sense of atmosphere and texture proved unsurpassed (texture may be his greatest talent, in fact, which is key to the mixed atmosphere of savagery and magical awe that defines The Firebird).  I admit I've never seen this piece fail - it's quite possibly the greatest ballet score in existence - but this performance was still a dazzler.

I should mention, too, that this very program was one of the better ones I remember from the BSO's recent history.  There were subtly pleasing thematic affinities here.  Ravel's elegy to Couperin paralleled mournful notes struck in Salonen's own farewell to modernism in his Violin Concerto - which tapped here and there into twentieth-century modes that grew from Stravinsky.  Beyond these historical connections there were sometimes pleasing sympathies - or oppositions - in tone and color; so I left thinking Salonen might lead the BSO out of its whole "greatest hits - plus Tan Dun!" mentality, too.  Sigh.  I'm not sure, really, why he would come to Boston - I mean, he's already done this before, hasn't he?  But we can dream, can't we?

So which is it . . .

Today the Globe continues its on-going promotion of the BSO with a front-page article about how the Symphony is dropping ticket prices for the under-40 crowd to just $20 (this after a huge write-up on the BSO in the Sunday Arts section two weekends ago). Now, I don't want to get snarky about this, because of course I support making classical music accessible to everyone (except old poor people, that is).

But I have to ask - isn't the BSO actually the least stressed arts organization in town? (With the possible exception of the MFA?) After all, it's got the largest endowment of any American orchestra (once assessed at $300 million, but probably worth somewhat less now, like everyone's). It would seem that their money troubles should be last on the list of local arts sob stories. Of course one could argue that the Globe is forced to write constantly about the BSO because that's the only local classical musical organization its subscribers have ever heard of; they're essentially "the Red Sox of classical music," as a friend of mine once put it. Or is the salient issue the rather large amount of advertising the BSO buys in the Globe? (Trust me, the current correspondence between advertising pages and critical attention will only grow - and it will ripple right through the pseudo-blogs like The Exhibitionist and HubArts, that cling to the Globe like pilot fish to a dying shark - and therefore evince the same bizarre double taste, for the Kinks and late European modernism!).

Okay, the world was ever thus, I know. But I do wish our local paper of record could keep its story straight. For years, the word from the Globe has been that James Levine's opera-queen-moderne programming was Exciting and Important because it was drawing in younger listeners (with the likes of Schoenberg and Elliott Carter!). Only now, apparently, not so much. Indeed, the Globe's coverage of Levine's tenure has long been, well, kind of schizophrenic - pretty much relentless praise of very expensive, who-asked-for-this epics like The Trojans and Moses and Aaron (which were really only programmed because they were rarities Levine hadn't conducted very often), combined with a continuous stream of lesser news items about cuts in staffing (even on stage!) and struggling subscription rates. Of course, it was quite easy to square this circle, even though the Globe never did it - the BSO had bought a ridiculously expensive New York brand in an attempt to look "world class," and the price tag kept going up, even as the paying public's interest in said brand's 1960's-era musical taste steadily declined.

On the plus side, yes, the orchestra began playing with much greater sensitivity and coherence; under Levine, they often sound superb. (His rehearsals are long and demanding, and it shows.) It may look like carping to wonder whether this is "enough," but, given his price tag, it must be pointed out that Levine didn't really build a "Boston sound" here; he merely gave Boston's power brokers some New York cachet. Levine clearly saw the BSO as an adjunct of his brand, a kind of franchise built on the same exquisite musicianship that he brought to the Met. Under Levine, the BSO's goal has been something like a dinner at the most expensive eatery in New York, and the Globe's critics have been more than content to simply describe the many scrumptious sauces the maestro has dished up.

Meanwhile, for me, the news has been elsewhere for awhile now, because to be frank, there's a certain underlying vacuum in intellectual originality at the BSO. For is music really only about the superbness of its execution? To be blunt, despite all the blather about "new music," Levine seems frozen in a certain period; at the BSO, the political and intellectual ferments of the 80's and 90's don't seem to have really happened. Indeed, oddly enough, much of the early music I hear locally actually sounds more timely than what I hear at the BSO. This is, to be fair, partly because the rarefied late-modern repertory Levine has tried to favor simply hasn't reached any kind of cultural critical mass; there's really nothing new to say or think about Moses and Aaron, for instance, because it's never going to be done often enough to build a sense of dialogue with the culture.

Hence there's simply a livelier conversation going on outside the walls of Symphony Hall than there is inside; Opera Boston often programs more interesting fare than Levine does, Handel and Haydn regularly brings in specialists with more original takes on Beethoven and Mozart, the Boston Philharmonic is usually more rousing, local choral groups are far more adventurous than the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and Celebrity Series often pulls in bigger stars. Hell, these days even the Ballet has more intellectual content. Outside the BSO, I find himself thinking, and laughing, and gasping in surprise; inside the BSO, I often find myself impressed, but that's it. And let's be honest: if you want to hear cutting-edge Mozart, or the latest interpretations of Bach or Handel or Haydn, or the very newest new music, you don't go to the BSO. And that covers a lot of "classical music." The Symphony still does the late Romantic and early modern repertory better than anyone; and therefore they have a nice big endowment to keep up that commitment. Meanwhile the other groups cited above are dealing with at least the BSO's level of money trouble. So if the Globe wants to preserve a living classical tradition in this city, it has to begin to look beyond the doors of Symphony Hall.

The long goodbye

Rarely does art slide from the sublime to the ridiculous as quickly as it did this weekend at Symphony Hall. The challenging program included Berg's Violin Concerto and Mahler's gigantic Ninth Symphony, and featured the "return," as it were, of James Levine, who hadn't led the orchestra since opening night. Both Berg and Mahler are among Levine's favorite composers, so I expected fireworks, at least technically, and at first, indeed, the evening succeeded brilliantly. The Berg soloist, Christian Tetzlaff (at left), proved perfectly suited to the demands of the tremulously sensitive concerto, with an impeccable attack that lightly cut the pathos of the piece and imbued it with a luminous clarity. The concerto is famously the only twelve-tone work to have "crossed over" into the standard repertoire, but this is partly because its "tone row" embraces several major and minor chords, so the piece never devolves into harmonic chaos, but flutters through a restless tonalism. To many, the Concerto is a requiem - for the sudden death of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius's daughter, Manon, to be precise - but it's rather more a poem of neurasthenic romance, as clotted as a chapter from Proust with melancholic quotes and references, which a performer can indicate but never, perhaps, fully illuminate. Still, Tetzlaff more than kept the fever dream afloat - and the orchestra never sounded better, supporting but not occluding the soloist with a lush, yet precise musical pointillism.

The second half of the concert, Mahler's elephantine Ninth (the composer, at left), began even more spectacularly. I may have never heard the BSO play more thrillingly than it did in the first movement (nor have I ever seen Levine so emotionally committed to a performance). It occurred to me that this sprawling symphony is far more operatic than I'd ever imagined, and that Levine had found a kind of turbo-charged vocalise in the life-and-death battle of the first movement's conflicting themes. If the evening had ended there, the concert might have been one for the history books. But alas, the Ninth's ars is famously longa, with a final movement that lingers almost interminably, and as the evening stretched past two and a half hours, the rude beast of the Symphony crowd's philistinism began to stir. Levine didn't help matters by more than indulging Mahler's instructions ("very slow and held back"), gradually ratcheting the orchestra down to the edge of audibility even as the composer wandered down new, and not entirely compelling, thematic byways. Some patrons had already left between the second and third movements, but as the fourth ground on, the bluehairs began to just get up and walk out. There was prominent coughing in the hall, and the college kids in front of me began to fight the giggles (it didn't help that Levine was all but clawing the air). At the final, dy-y-ying coda, the maestro slumped down on his stool as if he, too, had just passed on, and suddenly I thought things might get really ugly; the crowd seemed to be holding back its laughter. In his Globe review, Jeremy Eichler had opined that "At the very end, you couldn't tell exactly where the music stopped and the silence began," but I'm afraid the audience on Friday made that decision post haste: a kind of angry applause started in the balcony, even as the orchestra hesitated to lower its instruments and Levine held his dying-swan pose. Finally, however, he stirred, obviously disgruntled. But by then I was already on my feet and headed out the door.

But where the philistines wrong? Perhaps, this time, no; sometimes composers do themselves no favors in their notes, and more forward motion might have better held the fourth movement together (not to mention the audience's attention). I, too, was glad to get out of there - and was almost amused by the BSO crowd's balls. I've never seen a theatre crowd get that pissed, even though quite a few had a right to. Why are music fans so much more - um - forthright? It's a point worth pondering.

Of music, history, and music history

A violinist plays for Russian troops during WWII.

There's an inherent problem in assessing performance when experiencing works of genius for the first time - otherwise, I'd be doing handsprings over the recent BSO performances of Shostakovich's Second Cello Concerto and Bruckner's Ninth under the baton of Marek Janowski. Local reaction to the concerts was somewhat muted, however, and this was my first exposure to either work live - so, contrary to my reputation, I'll be a little hesitant in my assessment, and simply say (here goes) that the concert was the most exciting I've seen from the BSO in a very long time. And in some ways whether it was the BSO and Janowski, or Shostakovich and Bruckner, that lit my fire is incidental to a deeper issue: the symphony's stance toward music that is engaged with history.

For as the Globe's Jeremy Eichler pointed out, James Levine has "steered clear" of Shostakovich and Bruckner, even though both are deeply embedded in the global saga of the last century or so. Bruckner, of course, played second fiddle only to Wagner on Hitler's hit list (that's the big guy himself paying his respects to the composer, at left), while Shostakovich served as both Stalin's darling and whipping boy - below he's on the cover of Time during WWII, goading the Russians on with radio addresses and the Leningrad Symphony.

Ever the apologist, Eichler merely comments, "More power to [Levine] for sticking to the works he believes in." I'm more intrigued, however, by what this omission in the maestro's taste might mean. As I've said before, Levine often strikes me as a kind of musical gourmand addicted to the succulence of technical difficulty; he sometimes seems to be picking out modernist challenges like candy from a tray. You can make an Apollonian case for this kind of thing, I suppose, but then when you encounter music that's not merely inwardly-facing but engaged with the world, the former style's brilliance can suddenly seem very hollow. It's hard for me, therefore, to imagine preferring the arcana of Schoenberg or Carter to the gripping sorrow of Shostakovich, and of course the concert world is slowly coming to the same conclusion: the great Russian has become a concert hall staple, and Bruckner is finally emerging from the shadow cast by you-know-who's admiration.

But while both may be great, Bruckner (left) is by far the weirder. Immense, yet truncated (the composer never finished its fourth movement), the Ninth Symphony pushes chromaticism way past its Wagnerian sources, and into uncharted harmonic space, before climaxing in one of the most famously dissonant "crashes" in the repertoire. Occasionally the development of one musical idea suddenly "stops," the symphony observes a moment of silence, and then resumes with an entirely new theme. Add to this the fact that the scherzo is slower than the trio, and that we never get back to our "home key," and you have a very strange musical beast indeed - yet one that is almost insistently compelling, and lit by sudden flashes of nearly ecstatic enlightenment. It's easy to see how the orgiast in Hitler would have responded to the pounding bacchanal in Bruckner, but somehow I managed to appreciate the composer's half-mad glory without leaping into a goose-step. And while the Globe faulted conductor Janowski for not "welding" the piece into a "structurally cohesive whole," to my mind the jagged architecture of the performance was instead an interpretation, a decision, not a failing. At any rate, if it was a mess, it was a thrilling one.

By way of contrast, the Shostakovich (the composer at left, at about the time of the Second Concerto), was all controlled melancholia - but with a sardonic, disorderly edge. Cellist Truls Mørk ably essayed the central melodic lines, but it was generally the orchestral accompaniment that proved most haunting. Here Shostakovich draws from folk song - he even includes a vulgar little ditty called "Come buy my pretzels" - but gives the material an almost savagely ironic spin. Heedlessly happy, and imbued with a lightly cruel energy, the tunes keep returning, even after repeated sighs from the cello, which is itself occasionally silenced by a sudden thwack from the timpani. It's hard to fight the impression that this amounts to a harrowing vision of a Russia gone mad, especially when Shostakovich recapitulates his themes with startling ferocity - in the final conflagration, the pretzel song has become overpowering, and dances this time to the crack of a whip. The concerto ends with a truly eerie effect: quietly, as if at a great distance, the percussion defiantly taps out its little tune - unstoppable, for better or worse.

In many hands all this would have been a meaningless sequence of exquisite effects - but somehow guest conductor Janowski imbued them with what amounted to metaphor. But what is this alchemy, precisely - how were Shostakovich and Janowski able to encapsulate a social comment (much less a whole critique) within a sound? Such effects suggest a sensibility that goes beyond the musical, and encompasses at least the literary and historical - and thus may almost by definition elude James Levine (hence, perhaps, his avoidance of these composers?). But something tells me the music of Shostakovich, hewn as it is from some of the darkest experiences of the twentieth century, will last much longer than the intellectual noodlings of the L.A.-era Schoenberg. If only the BSO had a conductor who could embrace it.

The Garden of Sonic Recapitulation

Sometime in the early nineties, renowned landscape architect Charles Jencks began what would become his most famous project - the "Garden of Cosmic Speculation" (above, in his private park in Dumfries, Scotland), an attempt to embed in landscape the theories of late-twentieth century math and physics. It was an intriguing challenge: how to emulate the great gardens of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, which not only reflected but actually promulgated the thought of their day (see Stoppard's Arcadia for a witty, perhaps Jencks-inspired contemplation of this theme)? The architect was also enough of a critic to persuasively insist that this was hardly some academic in-joke; instead, he saw the garden as a response to the vacuum at the heart of current arts practice - he was attempting to produce a park devoted to our last theology, and only consensus: our ongoing investigation of the cosmos.

And on the surface, Jencks met with resounding success - his ever-evolving fantasy has become a minor tourist attraction, even though it's open only one day a year ("Black Hole Terrace," above). And no wonder: its thirty acres do distill something of the calmly bizarre romance of chaos and complexity; this is pastoral imbued not with the sylvan, nor the sublime, but instead the strange - or rather, the strangeness that lurks within the pastoral (nature, after all, is built of fractals). Still, it must be said that Jencks sometimes stumbles into mere illustration, as in his chinoiserie bridges devoted to quarks, and whether or not his garden is actually organized according to the theories he holds dear remains a subject of some debate.

Cambridge-based composer Michael Gandolfi is faced with something of the same conundrum in his own Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a kind of companion suite to Jencks's fantasia, which this weekend was given a partial local premiere (four of its eleven movements) by the BSO, under the baton of Robert Spano (an avid support of the composer's work). Gandolfi seems to want his piece to serve as both a walking tour of the Garden (you can choose whatever parts you want to "visit" in performance), and also as a musical embodiment of it - his "Fractal Terrace," for example, "grows" by busily filling in its melodic line with tinier variations of itself (you can hear it here - a fractal "leaf" above left).

Still, all the smarts in the world can't quite make up for a lack of original spark, and Gandolfi's "garden" doesn't so much speculate as recapitulate the work of other composers. Each movement offered a different, pleasing pastiche - a light splicing of Glass and Carter, a sweetened Ligeti, a gentler Stravinsky - but somehow Gandolfi's own voice never came clear. The problem was only underlined by the amusing "Universal Cascade" (its corresponding Jencks landscape is below), which opened with a bang almost as loud as the Big One, and then, while drifting through a Ligeti-derived vacuum, encountered various musical paradigms like passing nebulae (the piece ended with a blast of sci-fi cacophony). The movement, like all of Gandolfi's Garden, was lively and witty - but where was the Gandolfi part?



Still, Garden got the most focused performance of the evening's program, which seemed to pop from one aesthetic state to another like an errant subatomic particle. Spano followed Garden with Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, String Orchestra and Timpani, a piece with which it has few affinities, I'd say, aside from the fact that they're both somewhat abstract curiosities. It was my first exposure to the Concerto, although I'm generally a huge fan of Poulenc's gorgeous textures, and was intrigued by the unusual juxtaposition of organ, timpani, and strings. Alas, much of the writing for organ (this was Poulenc's first composition for the instrument) sounded like something the Phantom of the Opera might dream up for a Mass, and the thoughtful-but-clinical approach of organist Simon Preston didn't help matters. Perhaps sensing Preston's isolation, Spano coordinated little in the way of call-and-response between his separate players - although the piece did catch fire in the overlay of strings and organ, when Poulenc conjured a severe vision of ecstasy through simple harmonic means (essentially dense configurations of major chords).

Spano's last choice for the program, the Tchaikovsky Pathétique, was another surprise: this warhorse is usually a guilty pleasure, but in this ascetic program it felt like an especially creamy dessert. After the precision of Garden, and in its disconnected ways, the Poulenc, the conductor unexpectedly stumbled in the famously melodramatic first movement: his tempi shifted willfully, and the orchestra's sound, though appropriately grand, felt fuzzy and out of sync. Things got better in the ensuing waltz/scherzo, and better still in the propulsive third-movement march; Spano seemed at his best when driving a single mode home, and the orchestra responded with passion - so much so that the audience burst into applause at the climax, all thoughts gone of the concluding Adagio. But then it was the exciting high point, after all, in what had been an uneven musical landscape.

The sound of money

James Levine reacts to his paycheck.

Ever wonder why it costs over $100 to get a decent seat at the Boston Symphony? Here's why - (according to Alex Beam over at the Globe):

"The BSO paid James Levine $1.6 million, according to its most recent 990; James Taylor, $774,000; Keith Lockhart, $740,000. Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe is the BSO's top-paid player, pulling down $353,000, according to the form filed in 2005.

Mothers -- do let your sons grow up to be timpanists! The BSO pays someone almost $200,000 to bang on those skins."

Meanwhile they're cutting the Pops in half at New Year's and laying off the non-artistic staff. Hmmmm . . .

I've got a little (wish) list

Below are a few of my most fervent wishes (and the reasons why) for the coming year.


Imagine if you'd just seen this part. . .

1) How about just paying for what you get at the ART?

Veterans of this theater know that their shows only heat up in the last 15 minutes. So how about a "15-minute" subscription? Tickets would be a fraction of full price, but would only allow you to see the last fifteen minutes of the production (i.e., the good part). Since many audience members leave at intermission (if you're lucky, and management is feeling confident, there is an intermission), there should be plenty of empty seats available.



Is this really a keeper?

2) Could the contemporary art become just temporary?

The ICA has begun its much-ballyhooed permanent collection precisely the wrong way - by showcasing only artists it has shown before. This cuts out such reigning visual masters as Richter, Freud and Marden, as well as more controversial conceptual stars like Barney and Koons; oddly, the best artists at the ICA are only on view in their current show, "Super Vision," but not their permanent collection, which showcases such minor lights as Laylah Ali and Taylor Davis. True, there is some first-rate work in the permanent collection, from Paul Chan, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Boris Mikhailov, as well as a solid, if basically picturesque, piece from Cornelia Parker and some okay pix from Nan Goldin. But the museum has essentially set its sights too low; the wall text accompanying the collection even mentions the high cost of collecting as a factor in its choices. The implication seems to be that these works are from artists the ICA has launched whose prices haven't gone up too much - a pretty lame M.O. if you ask me. Save your pennies for something worth saving, please.



And suddenly the ICA looks fantastic . . .

3) Can we make the "new MFA" just go away?

Okay, it's possible, according to Stephen Hawking (and he's really smart). Malcolm Rogers could disappear into a wormhole, and pop out into some alternative universe where museums are already seen as amusement parks. And he could take the plans for the Foster addition with him, where it could house an indoor roller coaster. We'd want to keep the $400 million donated to build the damn thing in this universe, of course - we could use it to cure cancer. Or AIDS. Or egomania.



Faster, Carmen, kill, kill!

4) Somebody make sure Jorma Elo takes his Ritalin this spring!

Hyperactivity ruined last year's "Carmen" - please, Boston Ballet, don't let it happen again!



Yeah, right, we'll believe you when we see you!

5) And nobody in New York or L.A. hire Victor Garber, okay?

The Broadway types that Nicky Martin tries to lure to the Huntington have so often proven unreliable (Andrea Martin, Brooks Ashmanskas), that we don't really believe they're coming anymore until the curtain actually rises. Victor Garber is scheduled to lead Coward's Present Laughter (itself a replacement for Streamers) at the end of the Huntington's season. Garber's perfect for the role - the question is, will he make it?



6) If we say Schoenberg's better than Beethoven, will you stop?

Not that the ongoing Schoenberg/Beethoven bitch slapdown at the BSO would ever lead one to that conclusion - instead, the series is proving (surprise!) exactly the opposite. But maybe if audiences continue to cheer wildly (as they did at Moses and Aaron, even though some players admitted privately they couldn't always follow the beat), Levine will declare victory (I've changed music history, now gimme a Snickers!) and end this huge waste of his organization's resources.