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?

The Levine transition

So James Levine is finally stepping down as music director of the BSO. And everyone's telling me how sad I'm supposed to feel.

But somehow I'm not sad. I suppose I was the first critic to say, three or four years ago, that the BSO-Levine marriage wasn't going to work out - so yes, I feel a bit vindicated in having another of my cultural predictions come true. And I admit some of my skepticism toward Levine's tenure came from my skepticism toward him personally. I won't go into the rumors that have always swirled around him in the gay world (or the new ones that are swirling around him now).  But I will say that at this point the whole "glass closet" phenomenon, which is still prevalent in high culture (particularly classical music culture) only irritates me, and I find those who indulge it a little creepy.

Oh, well. On the artistic side of the equation, for those whose experience of classical music has been centered on the BSO, I can appreciate that after years of tolerating Seiji Ozawa, James Levine must have seemed like a genius.  Levine's work is always subtle and marvelously detailed - he's a brilliant conductor (particularly of opera), even if his ethos is more that of a musical gourmand, I think, than that of a really engaged artist. Still, there's no arguing with the fact that under his baton, the BSO - a famously recalcitrant crowd - sounded better than it had in years.  At the same time, Levine never really "transformed" the orchestra (it often slid back to its old status quo when he wasn't around), and he certainly never crafted a "Boston sound," either.  He was a wonderfully talented opera conductor who flew in every now and then from New York to work his magic. So I really don't see how this announcement changes the essentials of that arrangement.  I don't see why Levine can't fly in and out in the future just as he did in the past (indeed, as a guest conductor, perhaps he can visit almost as often as he actually did for the past few years, discounting all the missed dates).

But here's the key point the BSO management should remember moving forward: the Levine era is OVER.  The surest way to cripple the orchestra over the long term is to create a kind of "shadow" artistic directorship, where the generally-absent Levine is still the 800-pound artistic gorilla in the room.  The BSO needs a strong music director moving forward, and that means very probably limiting Levine's influence to that of any other guest conductor.  Otherwise we'll be facing several more years like the past two.  In other words, it's time to move on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .