Lenox — This past weekend’s series of BSO concerts at Tanglewood was intended to feature the final two of conductor and musical director-designate Andris Nelsons’s appearances with the orchestra this summer, before the group becomes officially his own this autumn.
Let me say, therefore, that in praising Nelsons this week, I have much more foundation to do so; after this, perhaps one only needs to hear him direct Mozart to know the true mettle of this artist.
His performances were to have been preceded by a Friday night offering by the veteran BSO regular Christoph van Dohnanyi. In the end, Dohnanyi had to cancel; and the final Nelsons’s inauguration here in the Berkshires was led by Edward Gardner, director of the English National Opera, who is nearly as young as Nelsons himself.
Unfortunately, Gardner brought none of the musical poeticism to the orchestra which Nelsons showed us, yet again, in his two final performances, a fact which probably speaks less to our disappointment in Gardner than to the high privilege of hearing a keen artist at work in Nelsons. Though Dvorak and Strauss may have given us some insight into a new maestro’s talent, the final test will always be the standard Germanic repertoire, of which Brahms and Beethoven are as good a representation as any.
I nearly thought I had come upon another prodigious find in Edward Gardner after the first half on Friday evening’s concert, and especially the BSO’s marvelous rendition of the early Strauss tone-poem “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” Opus 28.
Before, however, one had to endure the newest installment of the BSO’s “UnderScore Friday” concert series, whose name belies its content: There was nothing about musical scores, or even anything to do with music at all in bassoonist Suzanne Nelsen’s presentation; and if the BSO is looking for a way to be more accessible, it should concentrate on better publicizing the inexpensive student ticket policy, or even its already extant half-priced Friday evening lawn ticket program, rather than resorting to these superficially casual, content-less gestures.
“Till Eulenspiegel,” however, is, along with “Don Juan,” Richard Strauss at his very best; and you would be hard pressed find a more robust, full-bodied performance as we experienced under Gardner on this occasion. On radiant display were the well-known horn introduction to “Till Eulenspiegel’s” lieb motive, the lovely introduction of a kind of second theme in violins and winds —Strauss’ way of augmenting the strings with wind accompaniment is particularly successful here — as is the re-orchestration of our hero’s motif toward the work’s end; no overwriting in Strauss here, and by the end we completely forgot about the underscore presentation.
One had great hopes then for Gardner’s Beethoven 7 after the intermission, though it was certainlyinauspicious to see that neither concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, nor his capable assistant Tamara Smirnova were on hand to lead the orchestra through one of the greatest works of music ever composed. The enchanting introduction to the first movement began well, though the strings lacked the vitality of the Strauss, but the celebrated first two movements of the Beethoven 7 quickly became a musical, if not a technical, disaster. The violins had a reasonably strong sound, but one that was terribly muted, and even steely, and what was worse, with almost no discernable sense of musicality whatsoever.
Indeed, the BSO marched through the opening two-thirds of the symphony as if it were superficial court music which had to be put up with rather than enjoyed. The normally sublime second movement Allegretto, building on a simple ostinato theme, totally devoid of soul, without any sense of musical direction; and the generally swift tempo rendered it a kind of crooked Toscanini interpretation, without singing, and without passion.
How much more surprising than that the third-movement scherzo seemed to bring the orchestra back to life: Gardner’s quick marching continued, but the BSO players had a kind of focus utterly lacking in the first two movements; and one did not mind the swift tempo here. The fourth movement, even more strange to relate, was very nearly a musical triumph, if only we had forgotten our despair over the first two movements. Here, in the finale, the strings seemed really to have come into their own . As the movement Wagner called “the apotheosis of the dance” continued, there seemed to be no limit to the amount of zeal forward drive Gardner could infuse into the orchestra, and in the end he brought what was a lumbering robot of an ensemble into something very passionate, and quite excellent. How this is possible, I don’t pretend to understand.
The Saturday night concert was back in the reliable hands of Maestro Nelsons, who led a sort of inverted program, beginning with Brahms’ Third Symphony in F, Opus 90, before the intermission.
I have for many years considered Brahms 3 my least favorite Brahms symphony finding it overly dark, and less melodious than the other three, but you never would have caught me saying so on Saturday night.
The first movement begins already fraught with a great deal of romantic sentiment, as if we had just, all at once, chosen to take a peak inside some torrid soul without much preparation, and then find ourselves overwhelmed by the passion that resides there. At times one feels one doesn’t have enough time to adjust to the ethos of the piece before being thrown headlong forward.
Yet one rarely hears a performance of this piece that brings one so clearly and effortlessly from first theme, to the transition, to second theme and to the development without losing the listener in romantic murkiness. Perhaps more flexibility would heighten the drama of the piece; but there is so much built-in drama in Brahms 3, it is more important for the conductor to just sing along. And Nelsons gets the orchestra to sing beautifully here; his long, full-bodied phrasing was reminiscent of Karajan.
The second movement andante was so slow it could have come to a complete halt; but I was already so much a part of Nelsons’s world it was not for me to complain. The third movement’s haunting could very well have brought some of us to tears; and the finale, though not as high-octane as one perhaps might want, showcased the lovely rich tone of the BSO strings to such a degree that they pulled the sound from the very depths of their instruments. The mood was languid, poetic, content to wallow in the moment without haste.
Following the intermission we were introduced to a fairly recent “concerto” for Trumpet by Swedish Composer Rolf Martinsson, and realized by the superb trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger. Let me say, first of all, that the piece was extremely well received by the Tanglewood crowd, partly, I think, in response to the superb tone and virtuosity of Mr. Hardenberger, but, for my part, I found it to be rather boring. The piece has no formal architecture, and the trumpet seems nothing more than the efforts of a talented player improvising.
The most appealing material was to be found in the all too infrequent tutti sections, executed with great sonorousness by the BSO strings in a arrangement reminiscent of some of the best of Broadway schmaltz. However, I have no desire to hear the piece again.
Saturday evening’s concert ended with Tchaikovsky’s delightful “Capriccio Italien.” Un-trammeled by a symphonic form that never quite came naturally to him, Tchaikovsky is more in his element here, as in the “Romeo and Juliet”overture, and the three ballets. And there is none of the irksome repetitiveness of all the lovely material we get in the symphonies, just lovely material, all sonorously realized by Nelsons and his excellent band.
To open Sunday’s afternoons BSO concert, the listener was obliged to sit through the second Tanglewood performance of Christopher Rouse’s “Rapture” which might have been more tolerable had Mr. Rouse’s own comments on the piece, as printed in the program booklet, not been so ridiculous. Rouse writes that he “used the word ‘rapture’ to convey a sense of spiritual bliss…” and then asserts, “the work inhabits a world almost entirely devoid of darkness.” This is absurd; from an imitation of Debussy’s “La Mer” in the opening, and the vaguely Japanese garden music that follows without any sense of direction, there is nothing at all reminiscent of ecstasy or happiness.
If the opening took itself much too seriously, you will not find much in the symphonic repertoire that takes itself less seriously than Eduard Lalo’s usually charming “Symphonie Espagnol,” a five-movement concerto for the violin that is typically French in trying to sound Spanish.
I must say that I had high hopes for soloist Joshua Bell after his performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto last summer. Bell had dispensed with most of his extreme body movement, and seemed to think more about the music, and less about pleasing the crowd with his almost indecent solo choreography. At the time I attributed this to Mr. Bell’s recent appointment as music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in London: less fluff and more music.
Though Bell did not revert to his old physical antics on Sunday, his performance was ill-thought out, and badly prepared. Bell certainly found moments of great passion in the first movements lyrical second theme, and fourth movement andante, but even here his virtuosic runs were incredibly sloppy, and his high-notes barely sounded at all. For most of the work, it was less a question of Bell’s musical choices, sometimes natural and good, sometimes inexplicable, than his faltering technique.
The only time Bell managed to project a nice rich tone, apart from the andante 4th movement, was in passages high up on the G string, where, as any violinist knows, the instrument essentially does the work for you. By the 5th movement it seemed as if Bell could only see the finish line; his runs became more sloppy and may perhaps have broken down entirely had the incisive tempo not carried him along to the end. In this movement, marked allegro, Bell’s tone was half the strength of the previous movement, where the dynamic markings actually call for quieter playing. The orchestra, again without its first stand, seemed to be playing in its sleep.
Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe returned after intermission, and so did all the players in the orchestra, for all intents and purposes, for a sumptuous presentation of the Beethoven 5th. After a quick, robust and, as ever, full-bodied opening, one was perhaps surprised to learn that Nelsons had no interest in stretching out the fermatas after the famous opening phrase.
For the second theme Nelsons lead his players into a languid, and mellowed legato, and continued in a beautiful, if at times a tad deliberate manner, throughout the nobly crafted second movement. One might have expected Nelsons to wallow a little more passionately in the horn’s theme here; but it was clearly the Maestro intention not to sacrifice any individual moment to the elegance of the whole.
Nelsons’s 5th ambled lovingly along like a large richly decorated carriage horse in a royal parade, trotting majestically as it gently pulls along the royal personage (here it is Beethoven’s genius). Of course, I might have asked for little more bravado, and changing of tempos, if it were my job to interpret the 5th instead of Nelsons’s, but the beautiful sound and phrasing which Nelsons elicits more than compensates for any number of interpretative differences.
