Conductor Federico Cortese with (L-R) Neil Ferreira, Bardolfo; Melissa Parks, Mistress Quickly; Maria Todaro, Meg Page; Caitlin Lynch, Alice Ford; Louis Otey -kneeling, Sir John Falstaff with H&H Chorus (Michael J. Lutch photo)

Yesterday’s performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge was one of the most exciting musical events I’ve attended in years. All parts of this operatic performance were scintillating, but the most astounding aspect was the accomplishment of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras under Federico Cortese’s direction. The BYSO, established under the umbrella of the Boston University College of Fine Arts, has served to train young orchestra players in the greater Boston area since 1958.

Confession at the outset: most Italian opera fails to interest me much, and I recognize this as a critical failing, so let no one upbraid me for not being an expert. But Falstaff is a resplendent exception which I love without reservation. Falstaff is a masterpiece among masterpieces, and fascinating testimony to a great composer’s ability to compose better and better the older he gets. As one who had spent his life writing for the opera theater and mastering perfectly its every necessity, Verdi was able to finish writing his last and, in the opinion of many, greatest work when he was 80 years old. Apart from the very early and unsuccessful Giorno di regno (King for a day, 1840), Falstaff, premiered in 1893, is Verdi’s only comic opera. (I recall reading somewhere that the leader of the cello section at the premiere was a young man named Arturo Toscanini.) Falstaff precisely matches music to drama, and its libretto, by Arrigo Boito, himself a veteran operatic composer, has brought out the humor, the pathos, the humanity, and the extraordinary characterization that radiates from Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor with amazing poetic accuracy; all of these catalyzed Verdi’s musical imagination to a degree that even the composer himself might not have predicted, considering that he had wanted to retire permanently from operatic composition after Otello in 1887 but finally agreed to write Falstaff after his wife and Boito nagged him into it.

Caitlin Lynch, Alice Ford; Maria Todaro, Meg Page; Louis Otey, Falstaff; Anya Matanovi, Nannetta (Michael J. Lutch photo)

The score of Falstaff is marked by such rapid tempo and textural lightness throughout that only those with excellent vocal technique and long experience should attempt to sing it.  The demands on the voice are not those of endurance, as in Wagner, nor of vocal range and volume, as in grand opera or Rossini, but of effortless precision and clarity. The orchestra matches these demands with its own extremes of technical virtuosity and precise texture. Verdi’s orchestral writing in this opera is mostly gossamer-light, with never an unnecessary note, and only as many instruments as the music itself demands, whether in pianississimo textures or the loudest tutti, and much of it proceeding at dizzying speed, especially in Act II. There are no big high-C arias in Falstaff, nor indeed any set pieces longer than a short song, because the whole quicksilver dramatic development is matched by the musical setting at every instant, with dozens of abrupt changes of tempo and texture.

I mention all this because Sunday’s performance was extraordinary in every way. The singers are all young but seasoned operatic professionals. The orchestra, which Federico Cortese directed with total concentration, comprised two groups, the Sinfonietta and the Camerata, from the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras, the first playing Act I and the first scene of Act II, and the second the remainder of the opera.  My amazement at the excellence of this ensemble never faltered. Their precise, unified, spirited, fearless, wonderfully musical playing would have done credit to any opera orchestra in the world, maybe even the Met or the Vienna State Opera.  In all my years growing up in greater Boston I never heard a student orchestra play even half as well as this one.  Nothing ever dragged or stumbled, and I frequently saw how attentive the players were to Cortese’s precise beat. Above all, the entire company, singers and orchestra alike, showed a perfect understanding of what was going on and what everything was supposed to sound like. I should have been prepared for this, because of what I was told about the same orchestra’s dazzling performance of Verdi’s Macbeth last year, which I didn’t hear.

Louis Otey, Falstaff and Jeremy Milner, Pistola (Michael J. Lutch photo)

Sanders Theatre has fine but sometimes complex acoustics and isn’t ideally suited to an operatic staging. This performance was semi-staged, with costumes and a few props, and it succeeded perfectly without scenery. Having the orchestra on stage meant that adjusting balances could be problematic, but I was able to hear almost everything, and the supertitles projected above the stage worked out very well except in simultaneous dialogue (this problem may never be fully solved anywhere). Hats off to the first-rate cast of singers: Louis Otey (Sir John Falstaff), Edward Parks (Ford), Caitlin Lynch (Alice Ford), Steve Sanders (Fenton), Anya Matanovi? (Nannetta), Maria Todaro (Meg Page), Melissa Parks (Mistress Quickly), Peter Tantsits (Dr. Caius), Neil Ferreira (Bardolfo), and Jeremy Milner (Pistola).  These artists are busy all over the world, from the Met and City Center to Santa Fe and La Scala and Shanghai, and obviously enjoyed working with an orchestra of not-yet professionals in a strangely-shaped hall.

Here are only a few details about the orchestra, though I could mention many more. At the beginning of Act III, while the chilled and dripping Falstaff snarls in anger at the hostile world, there is a gloomy low-register melody in trombone octaves. The score calls for a bass trombone at the bottom of this, but its low notes clearly demand a contrabass instrument, of the hard-to-find Italian type called a cimbasso. I didn’t hear those notes and I don’t think they were even there, but in truth I didn’t miss them, and to have had a tuba play them might have been too ponderous. The horn section, five players sharing four parts, sounded rich and confident throughout, especially in widely-spaced textures (two octaves and a fifth apart at one point), and in several places where there is a musical pun, when “horns” signify cuckoldry (“e lo cornifico”). And I especially liked what Verdi does with the lonely piccolo in soft textures; none of the usual top-register shrieks for this ottavino, which was clearly and precisely heard at unexpected but telling moments. The part for a single harp, in the fairy music in III/2, was shared and sometimes doubled with a second harp in this performance, and the added volume was welcome. But the nigh-flawless playing of the strings was perhaps the most remarkable part of the orchestral performance; even in Allegro presto and agitato, the notes flying like trapezes over the entire range, they never fell behind by a microsecond, retaining their full expressiveness throughout.

Falling on hard times, Boston may have lost one of its good opera companies; but this Falstaff, by rejoinder, was wonderful reaffirmation of what can happen in opera here with a carefully assembled and expertly trained group of enthusiastic young people can do to keep opera alive.  The Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras deserve our heartiest congratulations and thanks.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony. His website is here.

Jennifer Ashe, soprano, and Karolina Rojahn, piano, gave us Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, op. 15, fifteen poems from the 31 short, erotically charged texts of Stefan George. This is one of Schoenberg’s tipping-point works, from 1908-1909, when he was moving from contrapuntally dense tonal chromaticism to harmonically complex post-tonal chromaticism. It was a gradual process, and there are plenty of triadic references in these short pieces, but they do not belong to any key nor even any succession of keys; they are suspended in tonal space, so to speak. The individual songs are shaped autonomously, with short melodic or harmonic motives, and a number of them are characterized by Bogenform or arch form, with the same prominent (or sometimes concealed) motive at the end as at the beginning of the song. I was sitting right there in the hall with the score before me, and I could not have imagined a better performance; it was expertly conceived, finely expressive, and beautifully executed. The balance between piano and voice was just right; the vocal color and intonation flawless; and overall mature and intelligent, in a way that Schoenberg himself always hoped for and seldom got. “Today I realize that I cannot be understood, and am content to make do with respect,” he wrote to a colleague in the 1920s. This performance was fully respectful and fully understanding of the music, which inevitably meant that it sounded well.

Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, op. 10, which followed, is an even more difficult work. The gradual process I mentioned above was continued to the point where, in the fourth movement, tonality breaks down altogether for long stretches, where Schoenberg, again using George’s text in the part for added soprano, “feels the air of another planet.” The nominal key is F-sharp minor, but the chromaticism constantly pushes the tonal envelope, with occasional triadic rescue points. The scherzo movement contains the famous quote of “Ach, du lieber Augustin” that provoked the original audience to guffaws; in the light of the century that followed the premiere, we can regard it as a sardonic commentary on the collapse of civilization, just as the original Augustin must have felt while waking up, hung over, in a wagon full of plague victims. Even after the tonal wall is breached entirely, in the fourth movement, Schoenberg felt compelled to bring back a dissonant but strong F-sharp minor at the very end.

This wasn’t a pitch-perfect performance of what is an immensely complex work; but it was close to it nearly all the time. One can certainly blame Schoenberg for some of the intonational infelicities; a string player himself, he ought not to have written G, G sharp, and G flat all in the same measure, nor A sharp and B flat at the same time between second violin and cello. (Maybe there really was no way around this.) But very little of the tuning problem bothered me when I heard such an intelligent, expressive, and well-considered rendition as these expert performers gave: Gabriela Diaz and Shaw Pong Liu, violins; Mark Berger, viola; Benjamin Schwartz, cello; and Aliana de la Guardia, soprano (in the last two movements). One can barely imagine the effort that went into this excellent collaboration; when Schoenberg’s First String Quartet was first performed, which is nearly twice as long but rather less chromatically crabbed, the Rosé Quartet needed forty rehearsals.

This was a concert that ought to be repeated many times in different venues. The younger generation needs to hear more of this music and more often. The Ludovico group proved that that same generation is fully capable of realizing Schoenberg’s music on his terms and with full comprehension. I’ve been listening to these songs, and to this string quartet, since before any of these young musicians were born, and I never heard performances better than these. Hats off to them.

See related article here.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony. His website is here.

Ludovic Morlot, conductor with Richard Goode (Stu Rosner photo)

Thursday’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concert, under the able direction of Ludovic Morlot, featured exactly the style of programming I most admire: a smart blend of classic and modern and avoidance of tired warhorses. The closest to a warhorse on this program was Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, a favorite of the Charles Munch years, that is short, witty, and brilliant — a knockout piece perfectly suited for a concert opener. It has Italianate splendor as well as French clarity and a few comic moments, including a chromatic laugh near the end when the meter changes from fast 6/8 to lumbering 2/4 without change in tempo. (One minor carping point: the tambourine, which was just right in the introduction, was too loud at the end.)

Ludovic Morlot has my endorsement all the way. He is an energetic conductor who pays scrupulous attention to the score and projects all the energy needed without showing off — a marked contrast to the antic, overwrought cavorting of last week’s visitor, Myung-Whan Chung. Morlot showed a spacious, expressive beat in the Berlioz that projected pulse and energy rather than metric location, and the orchestra obvious liked it; later in the program, in the Carter Flute Concerto especially, his beat was steady, precise, and exactly placed, which was certainly needed in the difficult rhythms that dominated this brittle piece.

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, KV 503, the largest-proportioned of his late concerti, dates from December 1786, at the same time as the “Prague” Symphony in D major, KV 504. This concerto has the same proportions as the more famous 21st concerto in the same key, KV 467 (the so-called “Elvira Madigan” concerto), but it also has more lyricism and less drama. The lyricism is also wrought in the harmony, which is notable for its easy alternation between major and minor modes in the first and third movements. It was a delight to see and hear Richard Goode so much enjoying his own effortless performance. There are several outstanding Mozart pianists today — Barenboim, Levin, Uchida, Perahia are names that spring instantly to mind — but none better than this laid-back master whose tone and shape reveal him as a spiritual descendant of Schnabel. I liked his first-movement cadenza, and I liked his second-movement melodic ornamentations. The orchestra, with slightly reduced strings, provided all the right support, especially when one is aware that the horns, trumpets, and timpani, strong and assertive in KV 467, are restrained in this work, a reassuring, authoritative presence.

I didn’t hear the Carter Flute Concerto at its Boston premiere last year. This new performance is a tribute to one of America’s greatest masters less than a month before his 103rd birthday. Flute concerti are rare enough in any era, and the past century has produced few that are memorable, but this one is surely a significant addition to the repertory. In some thirteen continuous minutes, it has the earmarks of three movements in one. The “first movement” features sharply accented, fragmented gestures punctuated with plenty of percussion (woodblocks, xylophone) that underline the solo flute’s efforts to make itself heard — a genuine struggle that alternates with complex but clear harmonies in the divided strings. The soloist here often engages in a clever dialogue with the orchestral flute in weaving melodic lines — Pan and Echo together. The “slow movement” featured long, expressive notes in the flute supported by divided strings and punctuated by plucked basses and occasional vibraphone — the breathing space was needed, but the audience seemed not to like it, because there was too much coughing. The “finale” is very short and crisp, with combative outbursts in the brass that might have come from Act II scene 2 in Berg’s Wozzeck (a work that Carter admires), but the flute emerged triumphant. Elizabeth Rowe played the solo fearlessly and with expressive warmth. Morlot conducted with perfect precision, and I could see his 4/4 beat at every instant even when he had to use his left hand to indicate an offbeat cue. They should record this interesting and lively work.

Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin is called a pantomime and is based on a seduction scenario as gaudy and wild as any from the early twentieth century, as morally dubious as Oscar Wilde’s Salome; and although it is usually referred to as a ballet, it has none of the set pieces or ensembles that one finds in the Diaghilev repertory. For all that, just as The Wooden Prince, heard earlier this fall, can be thought of as Bartók’s “Firebird,” The Miraculous Mandarin is his “Rite of Spring” and shows an obviously explosive kinship with Stravinsky’s work. The Suite amounts to about two-thirds of the original pantomime score. No other work by Bartók is as aggressive and strident, and it is remarkable that his imagination and skill were able to achieve such a fine massiveness of sound with an orchestral wind section only half the size of Stravinsky’s blockbuster orchestra. This massiveness is evident from the start, where the strings play furiously and are dominant in the first pages, until the full winds are able to shout out the upper textures. (I missed the sound of the organ pedal in reinforcement of the bass line, as the score directs, and perhaps it was omitted.) The “decoy games” specified in the score are outlined by spectacular solos for clarinets, and these players got well-deserved bows. So did the members of the brass section, who projected all the volume and intensity required; it was reassuring to hear them handle these roles so well when last week, in the Tchaikovsky Sixth, they were forced to play far too loud for the needs of the music. Hats off to Ludovic Morlot for his understanding of just what this brilliant score needed for maximum forcefulness and effectiveness.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony. His website is here.

Mark DeVoto ca. 2000

I write from Cambridge, that other Cambridge, in the U.K., where I’m visiting my just-married daughter and her husband. The program listing for the Boston Symphony for the 2011-2012 season has just arrived and I’ve looked it over carefully, remembering my chants of praise and rants of condemnation in these pages last month when I reviewed the BSO’s programming history in some detail. I am very pleased to see that the Boston Symphony, no doubt telepathically and accidentally, has adopted some of my suggestions. The coming season has some excellent though hardly unexpected choices, and some fine surprises in which all of us should take pleasure.

In these BMInt articles, I argued for more Haydn symphonies, especially those not previously heard at the BSO. In November we will get both ends of the Haydn spectrum: Nos. 1 and 100, and while No. 1 is unusual, No. 100, the “Military,” is certainly one of his or anybody’s best. If it seems a bit odd to pair these works with excerpts from Die Meistersinger, it’s good to hear something besides the overture from that incomparable opera. As for Mozart, he gets two evenings for Opening Night, in which Anne-Sophie Mutter will play and conduct five violin concertos, and in November his superb 25th Piano Concerto, K. 503, shares a well-balanced program with the Elliott Carter Flute Concerto, Berlioz’s Roman Carnival, and Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite; I call that inspired programming.

In my BMInt list of suggestions, I pointed out with some peevishness that the BSO has never performed Bartok’s Wooden Prince or Debussy’ Khamma. Score one for peevishness: both of these excellent ballet pieces will be heard next season, Wooden Prince in October (with Dvorak’s Cello Concerto) and Khamma in January (with Prokofiev’s Three Oranges and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and may we never get tired of either). Wooden Prince can be regarded as Bartok’s Firebird in ambience, proportion, and breadth of orchestral color – but we will also be getting the complete Firebird ballet in April. Debussy’s Khamma is a thrilling predecessor of Jeux, full of rich and mysterious harmony, and Charles Koechlin did an expert job of orchestrating it when Debussy was too ill to do it himself. This performance means that the BSO will at long last have performed every one of Debussy’s major orchestral works.

Among the old masters who I argued should be allowed to rest a little in BSO programs, there are some good proportions: of Brahms we will have two full evenings, including the German Requiem, and from Tchaikovsky we will get only one work, but it is surely his greatest, the Pathetique. I would be willing, myself, to forgo Sibelius’s Second Symphony, but I don’t know when the BSO last played it. It’s been a while since I last heard the BSO play Ein Heldenleben – I think it was with Michael Tilson Thomas about ten years ago – but I’d be willing to wait a little longer. I distinctly remember when Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony was on the menu, in 1959 or 1960 with Izler Solomon conducting, and that may well be the most recent performance; my opinion of this piece has risen ever higher over the years, even though it is too long and too thickly orchestrated.

John Harbison’s symphony cycle continues into its second year, with his Fourth at the end of November, Fifth a week later, and the new Sixth Symphony (a BSO commission) in January. The December program includes Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Jonathan Biss, who superbly played the “Emperor” here just a few weeks ago. I look forward with pleasure to several new works: Turnage’s From the Wreckage, Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto, as well as the Harbison.

Last, I applaud the decision to program Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite but plead earnestly that the Prelude and Danse du rouet from the 1911 ballet version should be included as well; one can discern in it how much Ravel was dazzled by Firebird when he heard it the year before. On that same program is Stravinsky’s Concerto for piano and winds, another item we don’t hear that often; it is Stravinsky’s reaching into Bach and jazz and Les noces-like primitivism all at the same time. And Shostakovich’s Fifth, an uneven but undeniably fine work.

I don’t need to comment on the rest of what looks like a fine and well-varied season shaping up next year. Many, indeed, most of the conductors will be entirely new to me, but that prospect doesn’t bother me at all. The Boston Symphony will, I’m sure, treat them very well.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

To be the successful director of a major orchestra one has to earn and preserve respect — from the orchestra players first and foremost every day, but also from other musicians, from living composers, and of course from the Board of Trustees — and audiences. But in my opinion, audiences count least among this assembly, because the respect (and sometimes the disrespect) is usually there in the first place whether it is deserved or not. Conductors mostly don’t seem to see it this way. Too often, I think, conductors are of a mind that they must give the audiences what they think they want, every time; not often enough do conductors feel that it’s their job to serve the musical public as a whole, to educate as well as delight their audiences. James Levine is an outstanding educator in this regard; at the same time, he gives the audiences what they want to hear far more often than he gives them what they don’t want to hear.

The next conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra will get no sympathy from me if he/she insists on programming that is overloaded with warhorses. All of the BSO’s permanent conductors from the 1930s have served the warhorse repertory loyally, but especially Koussevitzky and Munch served the interests of contemporary orchestral composers, and especially local composers (Walter Piston, for example, had no less than eight of his works given their first performance by the BSO during the Koussevitzky-Munch years); the same was somewhat less true of Ozawa, who regularly introduced works to Boston were first heard elsewhere (I think of Messiaen’s Saint Francis of Assisi), but who often stuck to the shopworn in his programs. Leinsdorf and Steinberg were both relatively uninterested in unusual programming, with a small number of distinguished exceptions (Leinsdorf directed the first Boston performances of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which they brilliantly recorded); warhorses were the rule with them.

What do I mean by warhorses? I mean orchestral works that everybody knows and loves, but that are performed more frequently than we need to hear them in order to learn them and love them. There are many warhorses that I will happily listen to many times over — any of the symphonies of Beethoven, for instance, or the last three Mozart, or the last two Dvorák, or Firebird or The Planets or Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra any of dozens of works that you or I or anyone else could easily name, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear them every day, and certainly not all of them every year. There are also plenty of warhorses that are works of lesser quality by great composers, but that are nevertheless very popular, and it is especially these that I want to propose be given a long rest on BSO programs — Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth Symphonies and First Piano Concerto, for instance. Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony is one of the very best of all time, of course; how long has it been since we heard his First Symphony (“Winter Dreams”) or his Second Symphony, the “Little Russian”? You may madly adore the Brahms Violin Concerto; I’d rather hear one of his piano concertos any day. I’d far rather hear Copland’s Billy the Kid than his Rodeo. And I’ve sounded off before in these pages about Vaughan Williams’s Tallis and Lark and Fifth Symphony and other overplayed bores.

So, some of my own ideas about future Boston Symphony programming. (Directors and patrons of other orchestras around here, please take note; you’re welcome to as many of my ideas as you wish.) What I propose for the Boston Symphony is that every other weekly program for the season — or possibly even more often — include not more than one warhorse, and that the remainder of the program be made up of excellent but less well-known works by the best-known composers, or excellent works by less well-known composers.

Here are five sample programs of the type I’d like to see and hear. Many of these pieces are seldom heard anywhere today. I freely admit that I’ve listed a small number of venerable warhorses, but no real clunkers. If there is a preponderance of Romantic era, that’s OK; most music for full orchestra falls into that category. I’ve been examining the BSO’s database for numbers and dates of BSO performances since the orchestra’s founding, and my information given with these titles should be correct. (I have deliberately excluded any works by living composers, for the plain and simple reason that many that I might suggest are by friends of mine.)

I invite anybody to comment either on these suggested programs or on my observations above, and at another time I’ll suggest some more programs.

PROGRAM NO. 1

Haydn: Symphony no. 47 (never heard at the BSO)
Stravinsky: Fireworks (ten times, last heard 2003)
Stravinsky: Zvyezdoliki (five times, last in 1972)
Busoni: Piano Concerto (never)

PROGRAM NO. 2

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no. 1 (twenty-two times, last in 1982)
Borodin: Symphony no. 2 (thirty-seven times, last in 1972)
Copland: Organ Symphony (six times, last in 1964)

PROGRAM NO. 3 (Schubert)

Rosamunde, entr’acte #1 (twenty times, last in 1937)
Rosamunde, entr’acte #2 (twice, both in 1889)
Overture to Des Teufels Lustschloss, D 84 (never)
Symphony no. 8 in C major, D 944 (“Great”) (236 times, last in 2009)

PROGRAM NO. 4

Schubert: Symphony no. 3 (thirty-seven times, last in 2002)
Wagner: Five Poems of Mathilde Wesendonk (ten times, last in 2004)
Dvorák: Polednice (“The Noon Witch”) (never)
Weber: Konzertstück for piano and orchestra (twenty-two times, last in 1978)

PROGRAM NO. 5 (French)

Debussy: Fantaisie for piano and orchestra (two times, both in 1920)
Debussy: Gigues (twelve times, last in 1992)
Debussy: Danses sacrée et profane (three times, last in 2009)
Chabrier: Overture to Gwendoline (twenty-five times, last in 1924)

PROGRAM NO. 6 (American)Griffes: The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan (14 x, last 1976)
MacDowell: Piano Concerto no. 2 (38 x, last 2004
Creston: Symphony no. 2 (27 x, 1945, 1953, 1956)

PROGRAM NO. 7

Beethoven: Overture to Ruins of Athens (4 x, last 1887)
(OR: Incidental Music to Ruins of Athens, 4 x, last 1992)
Bartók: Rumanian Folk Dances (10 x, last 1994)
Goldmark: Symphony, Rustic Wedding (37 x, last 1910)

PROGRAM NO. 8

Haydn: Symphony no. 63 in C major (“La Roxelane”) (never)
Chopin: Krakowiak for piano and orchestra (never)
Berwald: Sinfonie singulière (once, TMC Orchestra, 1965)

PROGRAM NO. 9

Schubert: Overture to Die Zwillingsbrüder, D 647 (never)
Schumann: Konzertstück for 4 horns and orchestra (5 x, last 1994)
Nielsen: Symphony no. 6 (“Sinfonia semplice”) (5 x, all 1965)

PROGRAM NO. 10

Duparc: Lénore (2 x, 1896)
Debussy: La plus que lente (once, 1998)
Franck: Les djinns (6 x, last 1951)
Massenet: Scènes alsaciennes (twice, both 1883)

Some will note here some titles already mentioned in the earlier Comments.  I heard a first-rate MacDowell Second Concerto by the Boston Civic with Virginia Eskin a couple of years ago.  I’m glad that Goldmark’s Rustic Wedding was mentioned even before I listed it here.  It may be a crowd-pleaser, but it also has some subtle and very interesting structural aspects, especially its cyclic treatment when the post-Schubert cyclic-symphony era had already been in full swing for thirty years.

Griffes’s Pleasure Dome is one of the unquestionably great works of American Impressionism; it was premiered by the BSO under Monteux, and hats off to Seiji Ozawa for recording it.  The Creston Second Symphony has been called “real trash” because of the populist appeal of its dancelike second movement, but I think it deserves a genuine re-evaluation.  Creston today is almost entirely forgotten, but in the 1950s he was the second most-performed American composer of symphonic music (after Copland I think).

I have taken a lot of ribbing from friends for my enthusiasm for the Berwald Sinfonie singulière, but those who take the trouble to hear it are usually convinced of the value of this singular work from 1845 (his other symphonies are pretty good too).  Berwald has his mannerisms, and his influence from Mendelssohn and perhaps Berlioz are apparent, but his technique and originality are undeniable; he is the most significant Scandinavian composer before Grieg and I would be happy to hear this work instead of a couple of Sibelius.

Duparc’s Lénore, a single-movement symphonic poem, is a Franco-Wagnerian gem, much more interesting than the sprawling four-movement symphony by Joachim Raff based on the same poem by Bürger.  I have conducted Massenet’s Scènes alsaciennes and they are a delight in four movements, richly melodic (including a choral protestant which turns out to be Wachet auf), beautifully scored, with fine instrumental soli, and wrought in harmony of impeccable taste.  Debussy praised his former teacher for his peculiarly French gift for writing music purely to give pleasure.  Those who are turned off by Manon and Thaïs will find something different here.

Beethoven’s complete Ruins of Athens music could be substituted on my No. 1 program because its Chorus of Dervishes, which sounds more like Rimsky-Korsakov than Beethoven, is sensational; the men’s chorus would be used also with the Busoni and Stravinsky’s Zvyezdoliki (in whose Boston premiere in 1962 I played a minor role).

PROGRAM NO. 11

Debussy: Trois poèmes de François Villon (never)

Ravel: Deux mélodies hébraïques (never)
Stravinsky: Scherzo fantastique (12 x, last 2009)
Stravinsky: Agon (9 x, last 1965)

PROGRAM NO. 12

Debussy: Khamma, ballet (never)
Liszt: From the cradle to the grave (never)
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 2 in C minor (“Little Russian”) (43 x)

PROGRAM NO. 13

Stravinsky: Scherzo à la russe (7 x, last 1970)
Stravinsky: Symphony in three movements (35 x, last 2001)
Bartók: The Wooden Prince (never)

PROGRAM NO. 14

Martucci: Notturno (never)
Lambert: The Rio Grande (5 x, last 1934)
Holst: Egdon Heath (never)
Weiner: Hungarian Folkdance Suite (never)

PROGRAM NO. 15

Schumann: Overture to Genoveva (never)
Liszt: Totentanz (20 x, last 1987)
Mahler: Symphony no. 1 in D major (1893 version) (never)

There are a few sleepers in this collection.  The BSO has taken justified pride in promoting French music, but it’s preposterous to neglect some of these important works by Debussy even if they are not of the same popularity as Faune or La mer.  I remember that La boîte à joujoux got its BSO premiere only in the 1992, under Knussen.  Not many have heard of Martucci, who was a pre-Puccini Italian Wagner, but his Notturno is a lovely short piece, and I wonder if anybody has heard of Léo Weiner, whose Hungarian Folkdance Suite is an orchestral spectacular that would be a hit on any program.  The second version of Mahler’s First, for a Brahms-sized orchestra and including the “Blumine” movement, should be commended to any good orchestra; one of the most polished and sensitive performances I ever heard by any student orchestra was of this work in the summer of 1967 at Harvard, conducted by Joel Lazar.  I was present in 1957 when Munch conducted the Boston premiere of Stravinsky’s Agon.  It shared the program with Rameau’s Dardanus and Bruckner’s Seventh (!), which suffered because so much of the rehearsal had been given to the new work.  Agon made the BSO programs only once more, in 1965.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

The title of the program at The Harvard Musical Association was “In Search of New Worlds.”  It ranged all over the place, from the teen-age Sergei Rachmaninoff to Samuel Barber at the latest (op. 11 String Quartet of 1936).  The Barber was in one sense the most ambitious work on the program, with the most drama and the widest-ranging assembly of gestures and styles.  The nominal key of the quartet is B minor, which makes the second movement, the famous Molto adagio in B flat minor, the more disturbing in its tonality.  We all know this lovely Adagio, but I’ve never heard it performed at a more glacially slow pace, for maximum expressiveness.  The Barber was preceded by a single movement called Night by Ernest Bloch, from the 1920s; its wandering chromaticism was wrought in plodding quarter-notes.  The Rachmaninoff Quartet no. 1 in F Major, an unfinished work (the first and last movements would probably have been in F major if they had been composed), was full of expressive and naive charm, and to my surprise it was the most successful piece on the first half of the program.

After the intermission came Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet of 1914, all of them short and gnarly, with complex dissonance; the first with mechanically-repeated overlapping ostinato fragments, the second with a recurring buzz chord alternating with a loosely singing melody, and the third a hymnlike study, almost completely atonal, with abundant ponticello and harmonics.  Like Acts II and III of The Nightingale, these pieces show Stravinsky exploring chromatic harmony that goes beyond the stormy surf of The Rite of Spring.

The lengthy program concluded with Dvorák’s beloved Quartet op. 96 in F major, the so-called “American,” composed in 1893.  It is full of pentatonic melody, which means also that much of its harmony is organized around the two triads possible in pentatony, relative major and minor.  It’s a good work, not as great as the “New World” Symphony, but it doesn’t try to be.

All these performances were excellent.  I hope to hear this fine group again, and would love to hear them in a program of (say) a Haydn, a Beethoven, and Berg’s opus 3.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Conductor Roberto Abbado with Peter Serkin (Michael J. Lutch photo)

In the scramble to find substitute conductors for James Levine’s suddenly canceled appearances, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for this week’s series, brought in Roberto Abbado, who has visited several times before. He has an assured and direct style on the podium, often restrained and controlled, but just as often flailing and overenthusiastic. We saw quite a bit of both on Thursday night, March 11.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 93 in D Major opened the program. This wonderfully melodious work was composed in England in 1791, the first of the six symphonies he wrote for Johann Peter Salomon’s London concerts. Haydn’s orchestra did not yet include clarinets, but otherwise, with paired woodwinds, horns, trumpets and timpani with strings, was of the size used in his “Paris” symphonies of five years earlier. Abbado paid close attention to dynamics, especially in the first movement, where the piano phrases came out more as ppp, and that may have resulted from an effort to subdue the unusually large string complement (10-10-8-8-3, probably too big for this style, even in Symphony Hall). Abbado shaped the melodic phrasing with elegance, shifting easily between beating full measures in 1 and quarter-notes in 3.

He was right to start the slow movement, which begins with a solo string quartet, with the left hand alone, reserving his stick effectively for the tutti which followed. Some writers have suggested that this slow movement is in theme-and-variation form, but I don’t see it that way; shorter than a typical variation form, it’s really an abbreviated rondo, in which the returning main theme includes a varied accompaniment. What everyone remembers about this movement is the unashamedly comic ending, with its expectant short pianissimo gestures between upper winds and strings, and abrupt fortissimo bassoon solo; never was an authentic cadence more rudely prepared by a subdominant.

The minuet and Presto finale were clearly articulated and well received. I heard, too, where Schubert might have got some inspiration for the minuet of his own Fourth Symphony, composed in 1816, even though Mozart was his more usual model.

Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto is his last completed work — almost completed, that is, except for the final seventeen bars for which the orchestration had been sketched the day before the composer went into the hospital for the last time in September 1945. This cheerful, abundantly diatonic work has a distinct folk-music flavor, with modal harmony that reminds one of Bartók’s own Rumanian Folk Dances. In terms of piano sound, it is less craggy and brittle than the two heavy-hitters that preceded it; Bartók had performed the earlier concerti in Europe before he fled to the United States, and he had in mind that his wife Ditta would be able to perform the Third Concerto after his death. It was a pleasure to hear Peter Serkin play this work in Boston, forty-four years after recording it (RCA Stereo LSC-2929) — when he was twenty! —with the Chicago Symphony under Ozawa.

The characteristic passagework in this concerto, especially in the first and third movements, features the piano with the two hands in parallel, doubling each other in octaves, thirds, sixths, even parallel seconds, and combinations of these; such writing makes the piano a melodic instrument, and its contribution to the counterpoint results from dialogue with the orchestra rather than from its own internal texture.

The string warble in the opening measures of the first movement, just before the piano entrance, is like the beginning of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and the same figure reappears in the “Out of Doors” music in the second movement, but played by the piano. That episode separates the chorale-like outer sections of the movement, the chorale in the piano at the beginning, and in the winds at the end. The boisterously rhythmic passage for the piano at the start of the third movement will remind some of the similar bouncing at the beginning of the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. It soon comes to an insistent cadence on E echoed by an equally insistent timpani solo. This is followed by a fugato — unusual for Bartók — first in the piano and then taken up by the strings. As the movement develops, there is more bravura, just enough for a bright, octave-filled finish.

The concert concluded with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I was disappointed by the performance overall. Everything was too hurried. Abbado pushed the orchestra considerably beyond what ought to be more natural tempi for the piece, especially in the first movement and the finale, and opportunities were repeatedly missed to project the high drama that this great and path-breaking work so often offers. Too often, the high velocity made for ragged playing. Dynamics were regularly exaggerated; the horns in the third movement should be ff, and the point doesn’t need to be made fff. The transition from the scherzo to the finale is one of the most extraordinary expectant moments in the history of music, and there is surely no need to rush it; still less is there a need to begin the Allegro that follows at such breakneck speed that the strings have to fight to articulate their sixteenth notes. The Recapitulation in the finale went even faster than the Exposition! (Nevertheless the Presto Coda had a tempo that seemed just right.) Notwithstanding this carping, I found some fine points to admire. In the finale, Beethoven doesn’t mark a transition from ff to p at the beginning of the Development, but he ought to have, and Abbado wisely and skillfully directed a sudden moderate decrescendo that worked nicely. The dynamics in the slow movement were good, too, even if the Andante con moto was more like an Allegretto; this is a piece in which the song-like melody needs to breathe. There are still lessons to be learned from old Klemperer: it’s good to take time to smell the flowers.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Milton Babbitt died yesterday in Princeton, age 94. He singlehandedly placed the theory of serial music on a solid footing, with a degree of comprehension of basic principles and possibilities that certainly went beyond what Schoenberg himself understood. Above all, he realized the basic principles of twelve-tone technique, and its extension to different parameters in musical architecture, in a significant body of his own compositions; but his works remain masterpieces in beautiful sound entirely independently of the abstract basis with which they were conceived. He was the first composer in America to validate the electronic medium as an essential adjunct to serial operations, and in works like Vision and Prayer and Philomel he brought this combination to amazing heights of expressivity. He was my teacher, and the beloved teacher of generations of American composers. No composer or theorist alive today has escaped his influence.

I remember Milton for all these things, but especially for his unforgettable friendship and valuable advice, and his amazing knowledge of music far beyond his own specialties. He was on the scene in all branches of American music ever since the 1930s, and he knew everybody. I remember how he could discuss Schütz as a theorist with the same ease as he discussed Schoenberg as a political figure. About twenty years ago there was a conference at Harvard in connection with the establishment of an endowed chair, and Milton was one of the invited speakers. At a dinner in Lehman Hall, Milton and Sylvia invited me to join them. We listened with delight to a cocktail pianist thirty feet away who was playing through all the old favorites, and Milton and Sylvia sang right along with him, not missing a word.

Sylvia died six years ago, and now Milton too is gone, and an era comes to an end. We say farewell to a dear friend, knowing that his achievement will always live, because it is part of us.

Martin Brody was present for the premiere performance of Touching Bottom, one of several Shakespeare pieces he has written; in this case, he explained it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream as perceived by Bottom through ass’s ears, but the musical pun in the title went far beyond Mendelssohn’s bassoon and ophicleide in the opening measures, with subterranean textures of ultra-low instruments massed together. (I kept wondering if Brody remembered Donald Sur’s Tango of 1983 composed entirely for orchestra of low instruments.) But the main body of the piece was wrought in lush upper- and middle-register harmony and rich instrumental color, with inverted ninth chords like Ravel’s, and unexpected soli for alto flute and piccolo trumpet. One hoped to hear this piece again many times.

Arthur Berger, who died eight years ago, was influenced throughout his career by Stravinsky’s works. He is perhaps better known for his works of the 1940s and 50s, in a well-wrought tonal neoclassicism, than for his later atonal style such as in the Septet for flute, clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and piano. The hard-edged gestures, with clinging, repeated harmonies, echoed the later style not of Webern but of Stravinsky of the Movements for piano and orchestra —— not a bad model at that, although Stravinsky would not have included the inside-the-piano manipulations that Berger used very effectively. The three short movements of Berger’s Septet revealed a nice unity, such as the link between the last note of the first movement and the beginning of the second, with the same note.

George Rochberg’s Chamber Symphony, with three each of woodwind, brass, and strings, works very effectively, in four movements. It uses melodic motives that are perceptible and that really develop, despite the atonality. (I have always admired Rochberg’s abstract atonality in works like Contra tempus et mortem, La bocca della verità, and this symphony, more than I do his parodistic works that plunder the libraries of nineteenth-century tonality, although those are better known.) Some of my colleagues find this kind of 1950s music too dated, but I don’t agree; it was lively, rhythmic, and harmonically rich. What Rochberg called “Marcia” I would have called “Humoresque.” I thought of the spirit of David Van Vactor’s twelve-tone music of the 1950s, and even of Erwin Schulhoff’s practical works of the 1920s and 30s, and I liked this one too.

After the intermission, the already-scheduled performance of Milton Babbitt’s The Crowded Air served as a sad acknowledgment of his death at age 94 the day before. Babbitt was my beloved teacher and friend for nearly half a century, but I had not heard this short but poignant work before. It was for four woodwinds, four strings, piano, guitar, and percussion, in 3/4 meter, contrapuntally complex and densely textured at every minute. The crowded air, one surmised, was also the crowded radio band, as though one were constantly turning the dial to different sounds.

George Perle, who died two years ago at 93, was also my beloved friend and my colleague in forty-five years of Alban Berg research. We would exchange trade secrets about composing as often as we would reveal Geheimnisse about Berg, and there were many of those. Perle’s Serenade no. 2 is for a medium-sized group, not your usual chamber ensemble: piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, tenor saxophone, violin, viola, cello, and percussion that includes three timpani. Five movements, and all of them delightful in the serenade manner, with some elegant soli, light and thin, and long melodies, especially for the muted solo violin. The saxophone veered between Charlie Parker-like flowing melodies and short sharp barks, and there was a dialogue with the trumpet as well. And there was even an echo of Wozzeck, Act I, scene 3, the woodwind-celesta chords when Marie is “sunken in thought,” in the spread-out harmony of the slow third movement. This is a lovable work and it was lovingly played.

Wayne Peterson, a Californian born in 1927, is not as well known here as the Northeast masters that filled the rest of the program, notwithstanding that he won the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1992. That award was surrounded by controversy. The composer judges on the Pulitzer committee resigned en masse after their unanimous recommendation to award the prize to Ralph Shapey was summarily overturned by the larger Pulitzer board in favor of Peterson. If this was unwelcome publicity for him, it certainly served to get his work better known, and that is all to the good. The final work on this program, Peterson’s Transformations, for the full ensemble, including harp and two percussion, was absolutely impressive. I could not tell what was being transformed —— it wasn’t the harmonic environment of Berg’s Kammerkonzert which seemed like a possible distant ancestor —— but the overall texture, in virtuosic bursts that grew and faded and grew again, was brilliant and completely convincing. Nothing insular or esoteric about this work; it spoke to everyone and everything and it deserves wide hearing.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project once again shows itself at the forefront of new music activities not only on Boston, but in America generally. Its loyal service to American composers deserves all our praise and our thanks.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

While awaiting the completion of it’s Renzo Piano addition, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has temporarily moved its concert series to the Massachusetts College of Art a block away. Sunday’s program at the Pozen Auditorium filled the medium sized hall- an approximately 400 seat rectangular box with an interesting plaster frieze and a warm acoustic. Jeremy Denk chose a program in two solid halves: György Ligeti’s two books of études, and Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.

I don’t know them from looking at the score, but I doubt that the thirteen Ligeti études are as successful when played together as a bunch as they would be played selectively. There are too many that are too similar in sound and intent: many are cast in the mold of moto perpetuo (this is true of Chopin’s études as well, but it’s not something you object to), with melodic notes poked out sfz here and there, and too many range too quickly and too frequently from the bottom of the piano to the top, or vice versa. But as individuals they are often terrific as well as terrifying. Denk explained that No. 1, “Désordre,” with the right hand on white keys and the left on black, introduces gradually increasing perturbations of the texture from togetherness to chaos, first in octaves in each hand, then with chordal bunches, and a moto perpetuo of rippling single notes in between. In No. 4, “Fanfares,” I was fascinated by the eight-note ostinato scales, like C-D-E-F-G-A-Bflat-B, all in an amazing sotto voce. For No. 5, “Arc-en-ciel,” Denk spoke of Bill Evans’s piano style, which seemed farfetched to me, nor did I hear any rainbow; I heard more of Poulenc’s sound, but above all Denk’s superb control of ultra-pianissimo. I was puzzled by the title of No. 8, “Fém,” though I remembered that this word, without the accent, is Norwegian for “five,” which could explain why so much of the texture is in layers of parallel fifths. Nor was I able to figure out, just from hearing the piece, why No. 10 was called “Der Zauberlehrling,” the title of Goethe’s tale about the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but it is full of furious repeated notes, and ends with a nice bang very similar to Debussy’s Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk. No. 11, “En Suspens,” is not full of suspense but of tonal suspensions, which came through with a fine sotto voce dialogue. No. 13, “L’escalier du diable,” is for a club-footed devil climbing irregular steps in upward chromatic scale segments, over and over again. This étude seemed like the biggest of the set; it seemed to summarize some of the exotic techniques that had gone on before, but it was also like an addendum to the traditional group of twelve that Chopin, Liszt, Alkan, and Debussy chose. And yet with all this pianistic spectacle, which Jeremy Denk brought out heroically and fearlessly, one still has the impression that Ligeti himself was not a pianist. I kept making mental comparisons to today’s composers who are pianists: William Bolcom’s first book of études (recorded by the composer on Advance Records) and Twelve New Etudes (recorded by Marc-André Hamelin; Pulitzer Prize, 1988) and to Marc-André Hamelin’s own Twelve Études in all the minor keys (recorded by the composer last year).

J. S. Bach’s Aria with Thirty Variations, known as the “Goldberg” Variations, is such an overpowering masterpiece of design and technique and drama and lyricism all rolled into one, that it is easy to forget that Bach wrote very few works in variation form. There are the early chorale partitas for organ, written when Bach was just a teenager; the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch for organ, a late work; two magnificent essays in continuous variations, the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor for organ and the Chaconne in D minor from the second Partita for unaccompanied violin; and there are a very few free ostinato movements here and there, like the opening chorus of Cantata 78. I think that’s about it for Bach’s variations. But the Goldberg Variations dwarf every other example of variation form before Bach or after him until the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, and they are also probably the most technically difficult keyboard work written by anybody before Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata.

There’s not much that I could say about Jeremy Denk’s performance beyond every possible word of praise. I especially appreciated the different underlining of the canonic voices in the repeated halves of the variations — always enough, never too much; the loving cantabile that dominated the expressive variations like the three in minor mode; the overall abundance of confident delight in everything. As one who grew up with Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording — it’s still available and still amazing — I was especially happy to compare this performance of today with Gould’s of half a century ago. Gould’s is more aggressive and more variable in mood; Denk’s, less boisterous but not a whit less forceful and bold, and with the widest range of expression. I hope that Jeremy Denk makes a CD of this work. His performance was certainly the most interesting I ever heard in person and I won’t forget it.

Jeremy Denk maintains a blog here. I’m glad that he has this kind of contrast with his performing time; and he shows himself to be an able and discerning writer as well as a top-rank performer.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3 for orchestra was new to me, which is ridiculous, because I already knew Suites 1, 2, and 4 but not 3, and 3 is said to be the most popular. It’s a major discovery. I loved the piece even when it was sometimes too long, too loud, or too orchestrally fussy, but those moments, which one expects from time to time in Tchaikovsky, were rare, and the high points are very high indeed. The opening “Elegy” has wonderfully rich diatonic harmony in G major that made me think of similar passages for G-major strings, like the slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, and an Elgar piece whose name I can’t remember at the moment, or even Henry F. Gilbert’s Suite for chamber orchestra of 1927 (there’s an attractive piece by a local composer that’s waiting for local revival — a piece quite possibly influenced by this Tchaikovsky). The “Valse mélancolique” that followed began with a marvel of low-register orchestration, with melody in three unison flutes (repeated later in violins, still later in violins and flutes in octaves). I think Ravel thought of this score when writing the mysterious beginning of La valse. Then there was a “Presto” Scherzo with treacherous offbeat pizzicati, perfectly executed by the imperturbable Boston Symphony strings; this Scherzo with its alternating bursts of winds and strings is a harbinger of the March in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, is one of his greatest achievements. The fourth movement of the Suite, a “Theme and Variations,” is something I’ll have to study closely. Like Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, this was a very assorted set with different meters, widely different textures, and different styles. There was one elaborately canonic variation (Var. 5) for strings doubled at unison by winds, others (Vars. 7 and 8) with modal harmony reminiscent of the Orthodox church, another with a comical cadenza for solo violin (Var. 10), and a final joyfully noisy polonaise.

A parenthetical note: I’ve been looking closely at Frank Epstein’s Cymbalisms: A Complete Guide for the Orchestral Cymbal Player (2007) which carefully describes some twenty-two different techniques for playing these traditional instruments. Last night he was able to demonstrate at least eight of these in person, with two pairs of hand cymbals and suspended cymbal with soft mallets. In the Trio section of the Tchaikovsky Scherzo the pianissimo sizzle stroke was fascinating throughout numerous repetitions. After I had seen the book, watching the techniques in action was like experiencing a master class.

Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale, on Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the Chinese emperor, has a split personality: its first act was completed in 1909, before Firebird, and Acts II and III written in 1914, after The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s style and technique underwent the most drastic imaginable changes during the intervening five years. On top of that, The Nightingale puts three acts into just 45 minutes, with elaborate sets and costumes, which makes it an expensive production under any circumstances, and thus seldom performed. The Song of the Nightingale, on the other hand, is a so-called “symphonic poem” arranged in 1917 for a slightly smaller orchestra and made up entirely of material from the last two acts of the opera. It is the only large-scale work of Stravinsky that essentially expands his chromatic harmonic language beyond that of The Rite of Spring until he took up serial techniques in the 1950s. It might very well have been this piece, and a smaller set of Japanese Lyrics for voice and chamber ensemble (1913) that caused Stravinsky’s friend Debussy to write, to another friend, “Stravinsky is leaning dangerously close to Schoenberg.”

The Boston Symphony performs The Song of the Nightingale approximately once every twenty-five years, and this was the first time I had ever heard this vivid work live, though still remembering the unbeatable recording by the Chicago Symphony with Fritz Reiner from my college days. There’s nothing symphonic about it; it’s really a series of short episodes, with the Nightingale’s coloratura soprano soli replaced by flute (admirably performed by Elizabeth Rowe), and the Fisherman’s song by a solo trumpet. In between are a number of orchestral recitatives and Chinese passages (including a March in D-sharp major and minor at the same time), represented by pentatonic (black-key) harmony rendered rich and exquisitely pungent by the addition of clusters and polychords. There is wonderful orchestral color throughout; one of my favorite textures has pentatonic scales in flute and two clarinets, with solo piano arpeggiating over and under them, and the whole supported from below by a low trumpet playing a different pentatonic scale.

The program ended with Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy for large orchestra, composed in 1908. Scriabin, still the outstanding musical mystic, remains an enigmatic composer even after a century, and no more so than in his big orchestral works. These are overflowing in imaginative harmony and color, but like Richard Strauss’s slightly earlier works that they sometimes resemble, they lack real formal contrast; they are always big, and they don’t breathe. Stravinsky, who took pains to avoid acknowledging his considerable debt to Scriabin’s harmonic language in works like Fireworks and Firebird, referred to Poem of Ecstasy as a “severe case of musical emphysema” — but then, he disliked Scriabin personally as well. Scriabin was, by all testimony, an extraordinary pianist; he can be forgiven for winning only the second prize at the Moscow Conservatory in 1892 when Rachmaninoff won first prize. His earliest works are very close to Chopin in style; his last works display a visionary Russian kind of atonality that is utterly original for its time, and even Stravinsky admitted that the world lost much when Scriabin died prematurely in 1915 — like Berg twenty years later, he was chopped down by a septicemia that today might have been easily treatable with penicillin.

Harlow Robinson’s program notes cite a few lines from a long prose poem that Scriabin wrote in 1904 as a philosophical (it is dangerous to use this word in connection with Scriabin) preamble to Poem of Ecstasy, but I don’t recommend the text, whose humidly erotic message seems only embarrassingly sentimental today. As for the music itself, it is full of contrasting bombast, subtlety, and perfume all at once, like an enormous meal with too many courses; but it has a fascinating harmonic language, and undeniable power in its massed sound. It was good to hear it; I had heard it four years ago in New York, directed by Muti, and it made a big impact that I’m sure can never be captured on recordings. Poem of Ecstasy is too long, but it certainly has its moments.

Hats off to Lorin Maazel for his fearless memory and unruffled control. The orchestra gave him all they had, and it was the best.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Jenny Olivia Johnson, resident composer at Wellesley, was represented by Dollar Beers (Redondo Beach ’96), composed 2006, for soprano, flute, violin, cello, piano, percussion and electronics, with text by the composer. It featured attractive repeating harmonies on an irregularly descending B-flat, A-flat, G-flat ostinato bass, rising to a loud climax and fading back slowly to a quiet ending. This was the most luminous and least noisy work on the program. The singer, Lucy McVeigh, was completely inaudible in the live acoustics of Distler Hall, but this was doubtless by intention, the text being provided in a program insert.

Two works by Chen Yi followed. Her Suite for Cello and Chamber Winds, with percussion, was in four movements, four woodwinds and three brass. David Russell is a professor at Wellesley and an outstanding cellist, but he was mostly overpowered by the winds in this suite except when he was playing elaborate unaccompanied cadenzas. The second movement, “Echoes of the Set Bells,” had a low open fifth that was nicely resonant, formed by low bassoon and muted trombone in an effective pairing. “Flower Drums in Dance,” the fourth movement, was a fast toccata with sextuplet repeated notes; Gil Rose beat this movement mostly in single downbeats.

The suite was followed by Sparkle, for piano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, contrabass, and two percussion. Chen Yi’s favored ostinato style in this work included many trills and measured tremolos, some fine woodwind arpeggios and warbles in a Ravel-like manner, and bent pitches, with the piccolo in glissando. There were some attention-catching dialogues, too, such as one between claves and marimba on the one hand, and clarinet and flute on the other.

After the intermission, we heard a third work by Chen Yi, Wu Yu, in two movements, for flute, clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and percussion. The composer explained that the title relates to a ceremonial prayer for rain, and spoke of the heterophonic style in the first movement, with all six players going in many varied and multi-rhythmic layers without pause for five minutes or more; the harmony was solidly pentatonic on D, E, F-sharp, A and B, gravitating toward A major but with many chromatic tones thrown in here and there. This heterophony is not much like Debussy’s in the middle of the first movement of La mer for instance, but is more typically Asian in origin even though designed for Western instruments. The second movement, according to the composer, reflects the drumming style of the countryside of northern China but it sounded more like heavy industry; like the composer’s other works on the program, it was dominated by relentless fast repeated notes, and the percussionist working overtime on drums, cowbells, and metal sheets.

Judith Weir’s Tiger under the Table, in two movements, concluded the program. This was for the full chamber ensemble, identical in size to the core group of Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances except for the absence of a harmonium. I never understood the significance of the title and there were no program notes, but I certainly liked the assortment of sounds, from the snapped contrabass and staccato bassoon at the beginning, to the loud bursts of polychords and smears that kept interrupting throughout. The composer might have denied that the first movement, “Energico, was in G minor, but I found it inescapable.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Bach’s E-flat major Trio Sonata, BWV 525, succeeds very well in an arrangement for oboe, violin, and continuo, though many of us know it better as the first of the six sonatas for organ, written by Bach for the education of his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, around 1727. Organists love these sonatas for their challenging difficulty — they exercise the total independence of hands and feet — but especially for their first-rate musical interest, because all six are delightful and superbly structured. (In my in-progress book on melody, I discuss the ophidian theme of the second movement of this sonata; in just two measures it changes direction nineteen times.) The violinist in this confident performance was young Yuki Beppu, born in Tokyo in 1997 and resident in the USA since 1999; a student in the prep department at NEC, she has played in many local events, and we certainly look forward to more. Continuo was provided by Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello (he played in all three works on the program), and Michael Beattie, harpsichord.

Stravinsky’s austere, even ascetic Cantata of 1952, for soprano, tenor, SSAA chorus and five instruments, has always been a puzzle to many. As the first major work he composed after completing his 18th-century Hogarth opera, The Rake’s Progress, it represents the beginning of a new stylistic direction in his evolution as a central figure in twentieth-century music. Various writers have commented on Stravinsky’s tentative experimentation with proto-serial techniques in the Cantata, applying them to demonstrably tonal melodic lines, but these abstractions are hardly audible, and even hard to discern visually when they are marked in the score. During a decade of living only a mile apart in Hollywood, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, who had quarreled in the 1920s about their radically different aesthetics and compositional techniques, avoided meeting each other. Yet following Schoenberg’s death in 1951, Stravinsky, at almost age seventy, sought a new understanding of the twelve-tone founder and his technique, and soon came to embrace it wholeheartedly for the rest of his own active career in a remarkable succession of new works.

The harmonic language of the Cantata is diatonic but complex; in the midst of a palpably C-major background you can hear C major and F major triads mashed together in dissonant counterpoint, or E-minor seventh chords with D-minor triads plunked on top, with one or another melodic line combining and adding one chromatic tone. This kind of harmony was part and parcel of Stravinsky’s language ever since l’Histoire du soldat of 1918 or the Octet for winds of 1922, and spread out over a spacious orchestral canvas in works like the Symphony in Three Movements of 1945, and many masterpieces in between. In the Cantata the sound is rich but upper-register centered, with two flutes, two oboes (the second mostly doubling English horn), and female chorus, with only a solo cello supporting the bottom, and the dense counterpoint is often hard to disentangle. Four choral refrains of the Lyke-Wake Dirge bring forth a quasi-medieval sound that moves from a strong C major to a vague D major. In between the refrains come two canonic arias (Ricercari) and a duet, all three in an elaborate counterpoint of voices and instruments that requires repeated hearings, not to mention a knowledge of 15th-century English, for good comprehension. Some of the melodic figures in the tenor aria closely resemble what Stravinsky later developed more thoroughly in Agon, his Balanchine ballet of 1957; and the spare sound of a C-E flat minor third or minor tenth, widely spaced in different registers in the duet (Westron Wind), is like a trademark in Stravinsky’s sacred music, from his Symphony of Psalms (1930) and Pater noster (1932) to his Latin Mass of 1944-48.

The Winsor performance of the Cantata was excellent in all respects, with vocal soloists Roberta Anderson and Frank Kelley, and fourteen members of the Young Women’s Chorus of the Handel and Haydn Society, Lisa Graham, director; the flutists were Bianca Garcia and Vanessa Holroyd, and Jennifer Slowik provided the English horn; no conductor was needed. There was one prominent emendation of the text, in the tenor aria, “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day”: “the Jews” in the original “The Jews on me they made great suit” and “Before Pilate the Jews me brought” was changed to “the priests.” Neither the original text nor its fashionable bowdlerization bothers me any more. Stravinsky, who in the 1930s gave in to fashionable anti-Semitism when it meshed with his performing career, became a philo-Semite in his last years, dedicating his late cantata Abraham and Isaac (1963, Hebrew text from Genesis) to the Israeli nation and comfortably shmoozing with President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a native Russian.

The concert ended with Bach’s Cantata no. 157, “Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn,” with solo tenor and bass voices, originally a funeral cantata from 1726 but adapted the next year for the Feast of Purification of Mary (Candlemas). Henrici’s text and the lively counterpoint of the opening duet both come from Genesis 32:26, where Jacob wrestles with the angel: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (KJV). The tenor aria with oboe obbligato that follows, “Ich halte meinen Jesum feste,” is said to be one of the most difficult vocal soli in the entire cantata repertory, but Frank Kelley sang it with easy expression. Sumner Thompson, baritone, then sang an aria with arioso expanding on the same text, with obbligati of solo violin (Gabriela Diaz) and flute (Bianca Garcia). The cantata ends with a chorale, “Meinen Jesum lass ich nicht” (I will not let go of my Jesus) which I had known from a set of organ variations on the same melody by Johann Gottfried Walther, Bach’s cousin. Michael Beattie and Rafael Popper-Keizer provided a firm continuo, with the addition of Susan Hagen’s double bass. If a full choral sound was lacking in the absence of tenor and bass sections, that didn’t matter much, because the Young Women’s Chorus soared at every moment where needed.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

The brass component was in fact just one, trombonist Ronald Barron, who retired from the Boston Symphony’s first chair two years ago, after 33 years. He was the agile and expressive soloist in a jazzy piece, Charles Small’s We’ve Got Rhythm, for trombone and four percussionists (xylophone, vibraphone, timpani, and trap set). It was enjoyable though fragmented here and there, and the trombone line seemed to jump around too much; I wanted the A-minor tango section to go on longer. It was preceded by a multimedia piece, Scott Stinson’s Rus’ for one percussionist, with electronics and video. The video component included a mixture of icons of Russian saints and battle heroes, photographs of the last imperial family, and war scenes; I couldn’t tell how well it was integrated with the audio tape, which was so loud it drowned out nearly all of the live percussion. The instruments surrounded the soloist, Richard Chwastiak, who did his best to make himself heard.

The first half of the program concluded with XI by Qu Xiao-Song. Frank Epstein conducted the ensemble of six percussionists who were arrayed at the sides and rear of the stage. This work had some well-grouped and interesting sounds, as when all four marimbas (ranging from alto down to contrabass, I thought) played soft tremoli on notes spaced octaves apart, while the players hummed in the background. At other times I heard marimba chords spaced in a pentatonic scale and the unusual sound of antique cymbals struck and placed on the drumhead of a single timpano, while the player operated the pedal to raise the drum pitch. The antique cymbals were also made to sound a high sinusoidal shriek by being bowed with a double-bass bow, but I’ve heard this effect before. There was a black bowl-like object, too; I think it was a Korean gong, and it made a delicate metallic sound when struck lightly with a wooden stick. The entire piece was a successful blend of Eastern and Western percussion.

Gunther Schuller’s Symbiosis led off after the intermission. Boston’s most beloved senior composer, 85 years old this year, wrote Symbiosis in 1957 for piano, violin, and one percussionist playing chiefly drums and cymbals of various sizes. In five movements, this work showed Schuller’s youthful interest in post-Webern fragmentation and gestures, but also his absorption in jazz fluency, which made for a subtle and agreeable dialogue. In the third piece, the pianist took up the guïro (notched gourd) while the violinist rattled maracas before both players settled down with their normal instruments. The excellent performers were Emilia Burlingham, violin, Christopher Lim, piano, and Victoria Aschheim, percussion.

The final work on the program was also by far the most massive, Tutuguri VI (Kreuze) for six percussionists by the German composer Wolfgang Rihm. The program notes mentioned the work’s origin as six pieces extracted from a ballet after Antonin Artaud. It was about thirty-five minutes long, and I remained focused on every second. The six players, ranged around the sides and rear of the stage as before, were each equipped with a bass drum (ranging in size from small to very large), a set of snare drums, a set of tomtoms, and a conga drum; individually distributed was an assortment of woodblocks, gavels, tamtams and gongs. The six pieces were run together as a series of episodes, first the bass drums, then the snares, then the tomtoms, et cetera, with an amazing dialogue between the individual instruments, which one could see visually at the same time as feeling it viscerally. With the snares, the dialogue was of rolls versus measured paradiddles versus sharply-struck flams and single notes, passed back and forth between the players, unbroken for several intense minutes. I couldn’t tell whether the few intervals of almost-silence were breaks between the pieces because they were punctuated by soft gestures as well; what was important was how dramatic these apparent pauses were. Every so often there was a unison of all six players, sometimes with a rhythmic pattern that repeated, but most often there would be a group of four of the players apparently together and interrupted by the remaining two. I would never have thought that I would remain interested in such a long and so mercilessly loud work as this, but I was happy to be so surprised, even without any pitches at all. Well, not quite; at one point all the players began to sing an upward glissando, growing in volume to a shout. I felt this was Rihm’s tribute to the sirens in Varèse’s Ionisation, the granddaddy of all percussion-ensemble pieces. Frank Epstein conducted, and from what I could tell it was mostly 4/4 and sometimes 5/4, which makes perfect sense when so much unison playing was involved.

Hats off to the NEC Percussion Ensemble that brought forward this difficult and exciting program: Victoria Aschheim, Joe Becker, Richard Chwastiak, Derek Dreyer, Jacob Garcia, Ethan Pani, Caleb Ping, and pianist Malcolm Campbell.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

The program featured shorter pieces — anthems and commemorative concert music — on the first half, with Joseph Jongen’s beautiful Mass setting on the second. It began with Marcel Dupré’s Poème héroïque, op. 33, for organ, brass and field drum, composed in 1935 to celebrate the rebuilding of the Verdun Cathedral. Dupré is known everywhere as one of the great French organists, Widor’s successor as organist at St.-Sulpice in Paris from 1934 to 1971, who could play Bach’s organ works from memory and who published one of the best editions of all of them. This sober and often subtle tribute to the dead of the Great War balances chorale-like triadic harmony with military tattoos and marziale gallop rhythms, but there was an elegiac tone in the solo trumpet melody and the chant-like middle section in which the organ’s string stops had a particularly haunting sound.

The Jubilate Deo (1972) by Sir William Walton is a lightweight but pleasant setting of Psalm 100 in the translation from the Book of Common Prayer, chorus and brass. “Be ye sure that the Lord he is God” had one droll touch: the trumpet solo was muted. Virgil Thomson’s “When I survey the bright celestial sphere,” composed 1964 on a text by the seventeenth-century British poet William Habington, is an example of Thomson’s pure-triad style like nineteenth-century American hymnody, with a choppy prosody in irregular meters that completely overrides the verse structure. The accompanying counterpoint offsetting this simplistic choral writing was effective in Scott Wheeler’s brass arrangement (two horns, two trumpets, trombone), but in the entire piece I did not hear even a single note that was not in the C major scale.

Morning Music by Daniel Pinkham (1923-2006), for brass quintet and organ, dates from 1995. Its five short pieces, Reveille, Song, Sports, Reflection, and March were a tribute to the centenary of Paul Hindemith and his Morgenmusik (1932) but were also a reminder of how Pinkham, beloved composer, harpsichordist, teacher and choirmaster, a longtime resident of Cambridge and a friend to so many, is no longer with us. I thought I heard a chord from Gershwin’s An American in Paris but I may have only been imagining it.

The setting of Psalm 90 by William Mathias (1934-1992), a Welsh composer, made particularly effective use of contrasting groups, often with antiphonal brass and organ, and with choral harmony mostly in parallel triads over an organ pedal or with a solo trumpet or trombone. The opening lines of Psalm text (“Lord, though hast been our dwelling place in all generations…”) are repeated at the end.

The highlight of the first half of the program was certainly Lili Boulanger’s brilliant Psaume XXIV. The first woman ever to win the Grand Prix de Rome for composers, Lili was the superbly talented younger sister of Nadia Boulanger, who devoted much of her long career to promoting Lili’s works. (Full disclosure: I am president of the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, established by Nadia in 1939 to provide modest but vital financial support for young musicians at the beginning of their professional careers.) Lili’s setting of Psalm 24 (“The earth is the Lord’s”), in which a mostly unison chorus duels with brass fanfares in stark open fifths, has harmonic richness, sonic splendor, and fine vitality effectively compressed into a little more than three minutes. A paean to the glory of God, it was composed in 1916 when the composer was twenty-three years old and only two years before her tragic death from tuberculosis.

Like César Franck, Joseph Jongen (1873-1953) was an outstanding Catholic organist and masterful composer born in Liège in Belgium, but unlike his fifty-years-older predecessor Jongen made his career in his native land. Organists have long admired and performed his shorter pieces, and his grand Symphonie concertante for organ and orchestra has occasionally been performed with notable success in America, but little more of his extensive output in vocal and instrumental music is remembered today. Jongen’s Mass, op. 130, is a late work (1945) and an important one. Saturday’s excellent performance was eloquent testimony to the need to keep this fine music alive.

The G-minor Kyrie shows from its very first bars Jongen’s command of an expressive harmonic idiom that is clearly influenced by Franck but also by his Impressionist contemporaries. I think there was a chant melody at the foundation but I couldn’t identify it. The Gloria gave more room for contrasting the different groups: chorus, brass, organ, sometimes blended and sometimes antiphonal, with the chorus usually in unison where there was harmony in the instruments, and vice versa. Several of us who heard them remarked on how well all of these forces combined with each other and faced off against each other when called for. (Does anyone agree with me that the chorus came very close to singing the “Gloria” melody from “Angels we have heard on high” in Jongen’s “Glorificamus te”?) The Gloria is well structure tonally, from B-flat major at the beginning and end to G-flat and a variety of other keys in the middle.

Jongen gave the Credo, the longest section of the Mass Ordinary, a carefully conservative treatment beginning in D major, with well-distributed instrumental passages to offset the choral, and some appropriate literalisms: the melody descended at “descendit de caelis” and ascended at “Et resurrexit,” but this is consistent with a long tradition of Catholic and Protestant music alike. “Sub Pontio Pilato” had whole-tone harmony; “et vitam venturi saeculi” restored a bright D major.

The Sanctus and Benedictus featured an abundance of expressive 12/8 meter, and I was reminded of the similar passages in Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. In the “Pleni sunt coeli” there was a spate of imitative counterpoint, otherwise unusual in this work. There was a Mendelssohn-like ambience in the quintet of solo voices, contrasting with soft organ in the Benedictus, but “Hosanna in excelsis” brought forth the full fortissimo ensemble. The quiet Agnus Dei began with the trombones in a stately E minor sonority and I wondered if Jongen knew Bruckner’s Mass setting in the same key, also with wind accompaniment.

The entire Jongen Mass lasts about half an hour. It could certainly be used liturgically but it also is eminently practical for concert performance. I hope this fine work will get many more hearings. Those who heard it last week, especially in such a fine performance, will certainly remember it.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Memorial Day weekend brought forth a fine festival of local talent, including composer Gregory Biss, whose ruminative, half-tonal, half-atonal String Quartet No. 2 got a very good performance by the visiting Sorelle Quartet from NEC (Jeffrey Dyrda and Ethan Wood, violins, Valentina Shohdy, viola, and Kacy Clopton, cello; despite the name, the group contains no sisters). Saturday night featured an authentic artists’ cabaret, with an exhibition of local painters, and some home-grown music. Gregory Biss played his own piano rag called Lupin and also accompanied baritone David Orrell, who sang Satie’s “La Diva de l’Empire,” a ragtime song, in English translation. Your correspondent, sporting a top-hat, made his professional debut as a solo singer in Schoenberg’s “Der genügsame Liebhaber” (1901, and entirely tonal), also in translation, as “The Contented Suitor.” Most of those who heard this didn’t realize that Schoenberg had it in him, but it was sidesplitting.

The climax, on Sunday, was Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on two pianos, played by Gregory Biss and Roberto Pace; both of these fine pianists regularly teach at Summerkeys in Lubec. The Arts Center’s theater doesn’t easily seat more than about 100, but it was full. After an intermission, they played the whole thing again, about 33 minutes. What is most remarkable about hearing this familiar masterpiece on two pianos is how much of the orchestral texture is left out in favor of a strongly rhythmic and harmonic core; this results in a special vitality, not to say textural crudity, that reinforces one’s understanding of the brilliant original. Robert Craft has mentioned that Stravinsky worked on the four-hand score at the same time as he prepared the full orchestral score that goes up to 34 staves per page. This accounts for some of the strange differences between the two scores that I have remarked elsewhere in these pages  here.

On Friday, 18 June, the Arts Center, taking advantage of the two pianos still on stage, was host to an outstanding concert by Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt, a married duo-piano team that has been playing professionally for 25 years and more. Steigerwalt is a professor of music at Mount Holyoke College and his wife has taught there also, as well as privately, while simultaneously earning a law degree (by the time this appears she will most likely have been newly sworn in as a member of the Massachusetts Bar at the State House on Beacon Hill). Their program could hardly have been more beautifully chosen or more flawlessly executed. It began with Debussy’s En blanc et noir (1915), a suite of three pieces not often heard but unquestionably one of his greatest works. The first piece, which begins with clattering anti-parallel C major harmony, is one of Debussy’s late reconsiderations of sonata form; the second, a scary war piece that depicts the Kaiser’s army with Ein’ feste Burg in distorted harmony (might it have been this that inspired Stravinsky’s comparably mangled chorale in l’Histoire du soldat of two years later?), but allows the French at least a partial triumph, marked “joyeux.” Stravinsky, himself the dedicatee of the third piece, remarked in later years how Debussy’s remarkable pianism “directed the thought of the composer,” as indeed it did; one of the striking things about En blanc et noir is how the two instruments seldom dialogue with each other but most often merge into a single enormous super-piano that isn’t even orchestral.

Only seldom does one hear Schumann’s Andante and Variations, op. 46, a work whose original version (for two pianos, two cellos, and horn) is rarely heard indeed. In this shorter version, for two pianos alone, Schumann’s self-quotation of Frauenliebe und-Leben is left out, but the amiability remains. Of Schumann’s other works in variation form, the “Abegg” Variations, op. 1, are an extreme rarity, and the often-heard Symphonic Studies in the Form of Variations, op. 13, are wonderfully pianistic but mostly stray far and wide from the theme; his recently-discovered set of variations on the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, published by Henle, are still a curiosity. These op. 46 Variations, from 1843, are especially noteworthy for their rich and complex harmony, which nevertheless keeps the original B-flat major well in hearing range even in the minore variation which allows more tonal freedom.

But one can say exactly the same thing about the Variations on a Theme of Paganini by Witold Lutoslawski, which followed on the program: the thematic basis is always perceptible. These are of surpassing pianistic brilliance, often with gritty harmony that Stravinsky might have cringed at (though Bartók would surely have loved it). Gary Steigerwalt mentioned that the Variations date from 1941 during the German occupation of Poland, when Lutoslawski and his fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik often played two pianos in cabaret-like surroundings. If Paganini might have been flattered by the success of his own 24th Caprice, Liszt and Brahms, transported to 1941, might have chuckled at the barely-concealed reminiscences of some of their own textures on the same theme — and even Rachmaninoff, whose immortal Rhapsody is probably the best-known collection of variations on Paganini’s immortal melody.

After the intermission we heard three pieces for piano four hands by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, pieces that were entirely new to me but that reassured me once again about the strength of her gifts and even more for her accomplishment. These beautiful pieces were perfectly proportioned and built with elegant melodic lines of unfailing strength. They formed fine company for Felix Mendelssohn’s Andante and Allegro assai vivace that followed. The Andante, we learned, is a recently-rediscovered introduction to the Allegro that has been known ever since its first publication in the 19th century. The piece as a whole is a somewhat sprawling sonata form with a certain pianistic kinship to the very familiar Introduction and Rondo capriccioso for solo piano, and much of the same infectious pianistic brilliance, a good workout for able four-hand enthusiasts.

Ravel’s La valse (1919) in the composer’s own two-piano transcription concluded the program. Like the orchestral original, this version has some problems of textural thickness that are hard to pin down, textures that are like an opposite pole to the outstanding delicacy — even fragility — of the Valses nobles et sentimentales of 1911. It’s a question of drama, really. La valse is a narrative form, a harsh portrait of overwrought and declining Viennese civilization, and it succeeds as well in the transcription as in the original. The Muller-Steigerwalt team played it with perfectly controlled abandon, as a fitting wrap-up to a scintillating evening.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

A spectrum of moods ranges through the five pieces, first with a vibrant chorus (“Rintrah roars & shakes his fires”) in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Argument,” beginning with low strings and percussion and a steady 7/8 beat. “And on the barren heath / Sing the honey bees” brought forth a chromatic buzz of sul ponticello strings, and of course we were reminded of “And there came all manner of flies” in Handel’s Israel in Egypt. “Then the perilous path was planted” returned to the strong rhythms of the beginning, first in 8/8, then back to 7/8 again, heading for the ending when strings, drums, and glockenspiel are all in rhythmic unison.

In the second movement, “Fragment,” the vocal quartet, one line at a time solo by solo, introduces “the lineaments of gratified desire” in dialogue with a solo string quartet. A drone on open-string G and D establishes a refrain that recurs in later movements of the cantata, as well as a nominal tonic key for the whole work. This appears more strongly in the elegant G major chorus, “The Birds,” that follows, with men and women in alternating quatrains, until the fifth verse, “Come, on wings of joy we’ll fly,” with men and women together. The vielle-like drone on G and D then battles with scary tam-tam rolls in “Auguries of Innocence,” with tenor solo, nicely sung by Sudeep Agarwala; after the last line, “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour,” the drone supports the warm sound of glockenspiel and vibraphone together. One senses the approach of more bell-like sounds, and in the final chorus, a robust fugue that even the composer refers to as “Handelian,” tubular bells support the sound of rejoicing: “For everything that lives is Holy.” This peroration isn’t the last word, however; a solo string quartet, G major with carefully-placed interior dissonances, confirms the drone and the key of the whole work.

The strange compulsions of the mystic Blake texts kept reminding me of another powerful Blake composer, William Bolcom, whose Eighth Symphony, with chorus, was premiered in Boston last year. Child’s new work is transparent and proportioned where Bolcom’s is massive and difficult to penetrate psychologically. Even so, I felt that Song of Liberty was a bit too short; I wanted to hear more, and thought that it might profit by the addition of three or four minutes of music that would make further use of the solo voices. But whether the composer decides to add more or not, I will still recommend this handsome work as a challenge to choruses anywhere, as a bracing and inspired setting of inspiring texts, and one that is not excessively difficult or impractical to perform.

After the intermission came a longer work, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem, a significant and well-known antiwar elegy composed in 1935 mostly on texts from Walt Whitman, Psalms, Old Testament prophets, and the Ordinary of the Mass. I came to this big piece with major prejudices. I have always liked Vaughan Williams’s songs and hymns and organ music but not much else by him; I find his symphonies ponderous and stuffy, and above all he suffers from a poor structural sense of harmonic progression, with a tendency to stick close to tonic triads and sevenths too much of the time. As long as I’m airing my prejudices, I may as well admit that I find the Greensleeves Fantasia amiable, the Tallis Fantasia a terrible bore, and The Lark Ascending almost as silly as Vivaldi’s Seasons. Hearing Dona nobis pacem for the second or third time on Sunday, I found a few of these prejudices fortified. And yet I was genuinely moved by moments that had not struck me before: Part 4, the “Dirge for Two Veterans” (text from Whitman’s Drum Taps) which seems to echo Mahler’s “Revelge,” had a subtle and penetrating ostinato that really works well, with drumbeats I felt more strongly than in Part 2 that really talks about drums. The harmony of the Dirge is subtle, too: A minor and C major in afree dialogue occasionally with D major harmony overlapping both, and again one thought of Mahler who would hardly have been an influence on Vaughan Williams. I think, too, that the really first-rate quality of the performance persuaded me that I should learn to appreciate this work more, although afterward a friend suggested that it would be even more compelling in Royal Albert Hall with a chorus of two hundred. I was also glad to see four pages of helpful program notes by Ahmed E. Ismail. Dona nobis pacem is a period piece and was already somewhat faded seventeen years after the Great War, while Britten’s War Requiem (1962) is a piece more of our own time. But as long as the message is needed — and it certainly is needed still — we should hear such music.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Stravinsky’s Sonata for two pianos (1944) is of smaller proportions than the Concerto for two pianos soli (1931-35) that Stravinsky played frequently on tour during the 1930s with his son Soulima. The Sonata is simultaneously lyrical and austere, with a spare diatonic tonality much of the time, and elaborate counterpoint at other times. The sonata-form first movement begins with a widely-spaced harmony of dominant seventh in the upper parts and tonic triad in the lower, with a strange but characteristically Stravinskyan sound. The second movement, a theme with four variations very divergent in style, sometimes clattering, sometimes chorale-like, includes a boom-chick ostinato pattern much like what Stravinsky had written 22 years earlier in his short opera Mavra. The third movement, Allegretto, is like a foretaste of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, composed at almost the same time, not to mention Poulenc’s Sonata on this same program — more about that below.

Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest pianists of all time, is slowly being reexamined for the depth of his achievement as a composer, after a century of destructive popularity of his Second Concerto and other works whose originality, in their own time, has always been obscured by the abundance of backward-looking romanticism — he was one of the greatest of Chopin players and was steeped in Tchaikovsky like no other composer. But the Second Suite for two pianos is a good illustration of Rachmaninoff’s strong formal architecture, enriched by a harmonic mastery that any of his contemporaries might have envied (and some certainly did). Like others of his works, the large formal scale in this Suite sometimes sprawls, but the textural thickness and abundance of rapidly-noodling inner parts are a more serious problem. These are more than compensated by the melodic freedom, which soars and sings, and by the well-wrought tonal scheme which adds an element of drama in the fast movements and lyrical expressiveness in the slow. From where I was sitting, it was hard to hear all of these at once, when the muddied middle-register sound seemed to overpower both the upper and lower. I couldn’t fault the players, but I would have been happy to hear this big piece played less forcefully and in a smaller, more intimate hall. Nevertheless, the Presto waltz and the Presto tarantella were sweeping and incisive, and the Andantino romance was poignant.

Before the intermission we heard Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini — the same theme as in variations by Schumann, Liszt, Brahms. and Rachmaninoff in the immortal Rhapsody. Lutoslawski’s witty piece combines the strong A-minor harmony of Paganini’s original with melodic snatches from Liszt’s variations (and probably Rachmaninoff’s too) and splendidly acerbic, crunchy dissonances splattered here and there like snowballs, all over a strongly rhythmic background. I have heard this piece played successfully at slower tempo, but the momentum and zing of this performance were infectious.

Poulenc’s early Sonata for piano four hands (1918) is a delightful example of his rowdy enfant terrible style when Les Six were first discovering each other’s music. The Sonata for two pianos is much more serious; it dates from 1953, when Les Six had all gone their separate and distinctive ways, and Poulenc was already an old master. The first movement is marked by a clangorous and sometimes atonal harmony that gradually stabilizes into a ripe tonal lyricism like the Poulenc of the 1920s and 30s or his later chamber music — a characteristic harmonic language sometimes like neoclassical Stravinsky and Prokofiev together and leavened with Mozart, but with an upper melodic line that is unmistakably Chopin-like in its sweep. It is in the third movement, Andante lirico: lentement, that this kind of music develops into an eloquent and even amorous song; it was good to hear it at reduced dynamic where the texture was full but every note sounded clearly. The fourth movement, Allegro giocoso, reminded this listener of the stark C-minor sound of Stravinsky’s Concerto for piano and winds, and one wonders if Poulenc had heard Stravinsky’s later two-piano music as well. (Poulenc did play two pianos in concert from time to time, including his own Concerto in D minor of 1932, one of his best works.)

Diamond Watch: Double Play is a double-punning title, for Harbison’s new piece honoring Professor Peter Diamond of the Department of Economics at MIT. Diamond is a passionate fan of the Boston Red Sox, and the program booklet noted that he threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park only 10 days earlier. In brief remarks at the beginning of the concert, the composer mentioned wryly that his new piece was the third example of variation form to be heard on the program. The twelve variations, which were “played without substantial pauses,” included major-minor ninths and tenths in various wide registers (“Low and inside,” “High and outside”), a waltz with wonderfully smeared parallel thirds in both pianos, and an ostinato with a steady jazz beat, with snatches of “Take me out to the ball game” constantly fading in and out. This happy work is a valuable contribution to the not-very-large two-piano literature and one foresees for it a wide popularity, alongside Vittorio Rieti’s Second Avenue Waltzes and Milhaud’s Le bal martiniquais, and even Harbison’s own brief David’s Fascinating Rhythm Method (after Gershwin), which wrapped up the program.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

The program on April 10 began with Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1950), which are late-middle Copland, the composer exploring a lean, spare style with thin, widely-spaced piano textures in some of the songs and a thicker, more Romantic sound in others; they have always been ranked among his most admired works written after Appalachian Spring. The texts are sensitive but very far from delicate. Some keys, like E-flat major, return from time to time, from the first song, “Nature, the gentlest mother,” to “The world feels dusty” which is almost a sarabande, and “Heart, we will forget him.” All kinds of remarkable, subtle sounds are found in these transparent settings, like the G and A five octaves apart at the end of “Dear March, come in!” I was struck, too, by what is likely a chance connection in “There came a wind like a bugle.” My friend George Perle, who died last year, composed a memorably scary setting of this same text in 1978, much more violent than Copland’s, and I noticed that both composers wrote middle-register trills, chasing away the “green chill upon the heat.” Sarah Pelletier had a rich, strong sound throughout; Lois Shapiro’s accompaniment was always precise and clear, as vigorous or discreet as need be but never subdued.

The full trio and Pelletier gave a good first account of Simple Grace, with text by Joan of Arc as cited by Mark Twain, part of an oratorio-in-progress by Howard Frazin. Joan is giving testimony before the ecclesiastical court. Whole-tone harmony in “I came from God; I have nothing more to do here” yields to upper-register parallel triads, a state of purity rather like Satie’s Socrate, in “If I be not in a state of Grace.” This short and attractive excerpt makes this listener look forward to the complete work — perhaps in a staged version?

Charles Ives’s Trio (1904-1911) is the chamber-music counterpart of his First Sonata for piano, with flashes of blazing inspiration side by side with episodes of internal contradiction. The first movement is short, with long stretches of C pedal points in the piano and thickly dissonant harmony above. It is followed by a second movement, TSIAJ (This Scherzo Is A Joke), in which everything seems to be slung together: “Jingle Bells,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” football songs that I couldn’t recognize, snatches (maybe) from the “Hawthorne” movement of Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, whole-tone thirds from the echo ensemble in the Fourth Symphony, and (more definitely) ostinati from his Over the Pavements. I’ve heard this movement played much faster, and was grateful to hear it this way, when I could discern more of what was going on. It is in the long (nearly 14 minutes), slow third movement that Ives’s most eloquent and essential voice comes out most effectively. The program notes describe it as a “lyrical rondo,” and the recurring themes included melodies with successive and stacked fifths, wildly dissonant but surreptitiously Brahms-like chordal textures, echoes of the E-flat major harmony in “The Alcotts” of the “Concord” Sonata, and bell-like major-minor triads spaced in the high and middle registers. At the end, cello and violin alternate in a soaring dialogue with Thomas Hastings’s famous “Rock of ages, cleft for me” (1831), and this is one of the finest moments Ives ever wrote. I remember when this was played in 1974, at the American Musicological Society’s annual meeting during the Ives centennial year, and the audience of my fellow musicologists laughed; they should have known better.

Paul Schoenfield’s Café Music (1987), a boisterous escapade in three movements, in which a klezmer band is reborn without its wind instruments, concluded the concert. I had expected to hear William Bolcom’s Second Violin Sonata, a personal favorite of mine, but the Schoenfield was certainly an acceptable trade, and the audience loved it.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Mira Wang, Jan Vogler, John Harbison, Carlos Kalmar and Martha Babcock (Michael J. Lutch photo)

Harbison’s new concerto begins with a dialogue between major and minor thirds played against each other in the solo instruments. Such cross-relations — chromatic differences, like between C and Csharp, across or between different parts — are “unnecessarily pejorative in implication — they are often beautiful,” as the composer’s program note reads. (I couldn’t agree more, and anyone who has questions should listen to British church music from Tallis to Purcell, or look at m. 14 of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion.) The dialogue of major versus minor becomes insistent from time to time as the broadly sweeping solo instruments move over wide melodic areas. But the effect of these cross-relational “misunderstandings” is to reinforce the tonal stability of the triads to which they belong. I remembered how Debussy does the same kind of thing in his Etude no. 4 (Sixths), and even William Walton, as a basic structural element of his Viola Concerto. Both soli kept up a busy back-and-forth concertante, like a vigorous argument while they smiled at each other.

Before the concert, Harbison spoke of the “liking of a chord and wanting to make it normative,” and part of his search included the “blue third” that “isn’t on the keyboard but it’s the common ground of folk music” around the world. He remembered the blue third, with mixed major and minor, as a basic ingredient of his youthful experience as a jazz pianist; of late he has been practicing to recover some of those long-dormant skills and remarked about the “thickened melodic line, fanned out to six lines” from a single voice — “It’s fun to write because one can color every chord.” This texture may have been elusive in the second movement of the concerto, an expressive Notturno with a certain Schoenbergian lilt and a generally discreet accompaniment, but it was certainly apparent in the bright finale. The brightest part of the tonality was the open-string sound of plenty of A minor, as in Brahms’s Double Concerto, and the wide-ranging melodic lines in both soli that also had the spirit of 19th-century Viennese Lieder. But at the end, when the two soli play the same melody together, two octaves apart, the sound was like Ravel’s String Quartet and its double-octave second theme in A minor. A delicate burst of percussion in the final measures was followed by col legno strokes — with the wooden part of the bow — in both the solo instruments. Col legno usually doesn’t work in solo strings, and one needs a full string section to get good sound; but here the gesture was a salute, and just right.

The front of the Symphony Hall stage had been extended with extra platform space to accommodate the Mahler Seventh Symphony, which was the second half of the program. The Harbison orchestra seemed diminished by the extra space around it. Still, some of the time the orchestra seemed too large for the soloists, and I found myself wondering whether the composer might at some point have thought it advantageous to cut down the number of strings; I remember the last work of Walter Piston (Harbison’s teacher and mine), a Concerto for string quartet, winds and percussion, where the instrumental balance and contrast were both at a maximum.

Carlos Kalmar, visiting from Oregon, had to learn Harbison’s score in a hurry when he took over from an ailing James Levine, and he can be congratulated for his good work. Kalmar’s conducting is precise and elegant; a large gesture got a large response, his small gestures were carefully followed, his left hand was fully independent, and his accents were clean every time. Like most younger conductors, he bends his knees too much, but this is a small complaint; I have seen too many guests at the BSO relying on histrionics far more egregious than this. But at further performances he should make sure the trumpet doesn’t play so loud — the brass in general needs to save their muscles for the Mahler.

As for Mahler’s Seventh, it is one of his most refractory symphonies; in my opinion only the Eighth is more difficult, and only the Third is longer (the Seventh weighs in at about 78 minutes). It seems at once a jumble of Mahler’s own previous styles; the first movement, a gigantic march, is a mixture of Kondukt (dead march) like the beginning of the Fifth Symphony, and with faster march themes very close to the first movements of the Second and Sixth Symphonies. One feels as though one has heard this before, and yet… There are extraordinary sounds, dominated by the imperious and imperial Tenorhorn, with its massive, round, heavy sound in the high register. I couldn’t see from where I was sitting, and I wanted to know whether the instrument was a euphonium (tenor tuba), which is played with a cup mouthpiece, or a Wagner tuba (Waldhorntuba), which uses a horn mouthpiece. The solo was full of a vibrato that was not quite French, but amply frightening. For the rest of the very long movement, especially in the faster sections, Mahler’s counterpoint becomes dissonant to the point of grotesque; but this is one of his outstanding characteristics even from his First Symphony, and nearly to the point of atonality in Das Lied von der Erde where it is even sensuous.

The three middle movements of the Seventh are the most appealing and the most successful. The second and fourth movements are night pieces, Nachtmusik as Mahler called them, featuring dialogues of horns (minor third echoing major third) in the second movement and quasi-serenade dialogues of oboe, horn, mandolin and guitar in the fourth. (The mandolin appears again even more effectively as a Chinese instrument in Der Abschied, the final song in Das Lied von der Erde.) The calm F major of the fourth movement has aural images from the famous Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony, and also from the similar sections in the same key in the second movement of the Fourth Symphony; these are songlike in the spirit of Schubert, but they also, typical for Mahler, seem to have an appoggiatura on nearly every downbeat. Both the second and fourth movements are shorter than the first and fifth but still they are quite long; the third movement, a scherzo marked Schattenhaft (ghostly), is shorter still, and nicht schnell but very fleet, with plenty of triplet eighths in 3/4.

To those not well acquainted with Mahler’s other works, the Rondo finale of the Seventh must seem close to madness. Not even the Burleske movement of the Ninth has such a wild assortment of seemingly inconsistent orchestral styles. There are two main rondo themes, a brass chorale like the one in the rondo of the Fifth Symphony (and similar to the beginning of the first scene in Wagner’s Meistersinger), and a 3/2 passage of two half notes and four eighths. But Mahler’s tempi change so continuously, hardly pausing for breath, and the tonality jumps from key to key just as frequently, that the voyage is of extreme storminess throughout. After so many years I am still not used to these violent changes of mood and shifts in continuity, but after last night’s performance of the Seventh, and especially after its finale, I have a better idea of some of Berg’s influences in the equally frenzied Marsch of his Three Pieces for orchestra, op. 6. (To be fair, in Mahler’s 590 measures there are 80 different tempo indications, as opposed to 75 in Berg’s 174 measures.) Carlos Kalmar made a point of exaggerating the differences in tempo, which is the more problematic because Mahler never left metronome indications for a guide.

One needs to hear this music many times before it can fully make sense. But whatever the perceptual difficulty, there was no doubt about the fine playing by the Boston Symphony, and Carlos Kalmar was an outstanding guide along a treacherous emotional pathway. I can remember when the BSO played Mahler’s Third Symphony for the first time in 1962, directed by Richard Burgin (Charles Munch was not at home in much of Mahler’s music), and how baffled were so many of the audience. With Mahler and the BSO, things turned around in 1966, when Erich Leinsdorf recorded the Sixth Symphony, a really outstanding performance. Last night’s performance of the Seventh, no matter how psychically disturbing, is another trophy on that distinguished shelf.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

The replacement was in fact two works, and they were a serious surprise: Sibelius’s Finlandia and Valse triste. Finlandia is one of the most popular, indeed shameless, pieces of concert bombast of all time; I remember when Roger Sessions, hearing it on a program at Princeton in 1961, called it “the price of admission.” I was astounded to learn, from Robert Kirzinger’s pre-concert talk, that it had not been played by the Boston Symphony in 60 years. The Valse triste, a strangely subtle and lovely piece, was last played by the BSO in 1912 — just eight years after it was composed. Jayce Ogren led these pieces for all they were worth, indeed, holding back the soft strings in the Valse triste to the point of pppp quasi niente when his stick didn’t move at all, and this was effectively contrasted against the Mahler-like Ländler G major spirit of the faster sections. Four solo violins glowed pianissimo at the end. The Valse triste is certainly deserving of occasional revival, but I for one will be happy to wait another 60 years to hear Finlandia in Symphony Hall again.

Many in the audience would have remembered the premiere five years ago of Peter Lieberson’s beautiful Neruda Songs when they were sung by his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, only a year before her death. Last night’s premiere of a sequel, five Songs of Love and Sorrow, also on texts by Neruda, was a moving tribute to the memory of the love they shared. The text setting is crystalline throughout, the declamation wide-ranging but always comprehensible, the accompaniment richly supportive and never overpowering.

Baritone Gerald Finley and conductor Jayce Ogren (Michael J. Lutch photo).

Gerald Finley, baritone, was an ideal communicator, with an obvious and full understanding of the expressive text. What is most moving about the whole cycle is the fine sensitivity of the chromatic tonal harmony, reminiscent of Austro-German Impressionism (yes, there was such a thing, though it was influenced by the French variety) by composers that are mostly forgotten today — I thought particularly of Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony that inspired Alban Berg, and the operas of Franz Schreker. The beginning of the first Neruda song, “Des las estrellas que admiré…” featured Martha Babcock’s solo cello oscillating back and forth, much like the D minor oscillating fifths in Mahler’s second song, “Autumn loneliness,” in Das Lied von der Erde, and if I’m not mistaken, a variant of this beginning reappeared at the front of Lieberson’s fourth song, “Tal vez no ser es ser sin que tú seas…” — a fine cyclic connection. The oscillating fourths or fifths actually seemed like a leitmotif in the whole cycle, in which the divided strings (sometimes with harp) often predominate in the texture — indeed, I felt that from time to time there was rather too much doubling, and that a more differentiated wind sound would have been welcome. Sometimes there was a wind gesture that stood out, like the clarinets’ parallel thirds, mariachi-style, in the second song, or the horn thirds in the fourth song. The end of the last song, on G, with piano, flute, English horn, and octaves in the strings, was especially effective, reminding one of how tonality, like love, is all-powerful and unifying no matter how varied and chromatically intense. It’s true that a friend of mine, a fellow composer and a very good one, expressed some disappointment in these songs, because he had long admired the gritty atonal environment of Lieberson’s first Piano Concerto, premiered by the Boston Symphony nearly 30 years ago. But the fact is that many of us today are at home in different idioms, tonal and atonal and a spectrum in between, when the individual compositional personality remains consistent. I hope to hear these songs recorded on the same CD as their handsome predecessor. Orchestral songs on Spanish texts are rare enough — Granados’s tonadillas and de Falla’s El amor brujo are good examples — and these very different new songs are splendid additions to that repertory.

After the intermission came Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C major, D 944, of 1825, composed when he was 28 years old, and the one symphony of his full maturity that he completed (the famous B minor symphony in two movements, D 759, is only the best of half a dozen unfinished Schubert symphonies). The very first Boston Symphony concert I ever attended, in 1954, had this work on the program (conducted by Charles Munch), and it changed my life. Jayce Ogren did his best with it last night, and there’s no doubt that the orchestra brought it off well, but on their own terms and not the conductor’s. Most of the time the players weren’t watching him — even though they undoubtedly knew the music well, they had many thousands of high-speed notes to keep track of. Ogren did succeed in a few manneristic moments, including a long, disturbing ritardando before the first-movement recapitulation and an accelerando before the Più vivo in the coda — neither of which is called for in the score. The second movement, Andante con moto, generally went extremely well, with beautiful expression, especially in the solo winds — though I object to the slower tempo, a habit of almost every conductor, in the Neapolitan section right after the fff climax. The Scherzo also was handled with all the requisite brightness and brisk tempo, including the Ländler that forms the expansive Trio section. But in the finale Ogren failed to override the orchestra’s comfortable Allegro moderato, which is what it sounded like — he certainly tried to push the tempo in the codetta of the exposition and again before the coda, but the orchestra refused to follow. Schumann, who rescued the manuscript of this symphony from oblivion, dubbed it the “Symphony of Heavenly Length,” and nowhere does that appellation apply more forcefully than in the brilliant finale, which Schubert marked Allegro vivace; it is 1154 bars long (1538 bars long if you take the exposition repeat, which nobody ever does). It is absolutely essential to maintain a breakneck speed in this movement, and one conductor who succeeded was George Szell in the older Cleveland recording, made at a time when the Cleveland Orchestra was the best in the world; at a metronome marking of 108-112 to the measure, Szell’s finale weighs in at about ten and a half minutes of amazing energy. Last night’s performance was at a sedate Toscanini-like tempo, more like thirteen minutes. The fortissimo was there, but not the fire and fury.

I would suggest that Jayce Ogren’s conducting style can be blamed for what I missed in the Schubert. He puts forth an unseemly amount of what I think of as a midwestern technique of beating time, with too much mirroring with the left hand, too much conducting with the head, too much knee-bending and moving from side to side, one foot to the other. This makes for a kind of dance on the podium, though it often looks like vertical swimming; there’s no question that audiences like this visual display and expect to see it. But I think it interferes with good communication to the orchestra, detracting from independent motion of the hands, and especially that the large beat makes it difficult to keep precise time in very fast tempo. To Ogren’s credit, I liked when he sometimes beat time with his left hand, using the baton for a different kind of visual control on the right of the orchestra; but when the beat is so high, wide, and handsome, and mirrored left and right, everything looks like a downbeat. (It was said of Fritz Reiner that a fly could sit on the end of his baton for an entire concert and not be shaken off; that is an extreme of another kind, of course.) I also give Ogren top credit for keeping his gestural exaggeration very much in the background in the Lieberson songs; he was admirably concentrated on providing the right kind of support for the singer and on closely observing every detail of a complex score that he had had to learn very quickly.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Lukas met with us occasionally for individual lessons, but the heart and soul of his teaching was in the class with all of us. From the first, he was dissatisfied with our knowledge of the classical repertory and continually prodded us to know and analyze the masterworks. He insisted that whenever possible we should follow the score as we listened, and I have followed that injunction faithfully in all the years since. Thus it was that I got to hear for the first time some of the late Mozart and Beethoven quartets, the Hammerklavier Sonata, Stravinsky’s Mass and Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Lukas inscribed my copy of the score: “Merry Christmas, Mark, and good luck to you and your music”), and much else. He was particularly interested in the idea of different kinds of music going on at the same time, and he chose some memorable examples: the three on-stage orchestras in Don Giovanni, the shattering choral interruptions in the Saint Matthew Passion; the organ grinder versus the music box in Petrushka. He had us compose exercises for class in which two different kinds of melodies would duel against each other. I remember writing a piece in 4/4 overlapping with 6/8 in unequal barlines, played by the available instruments in class: flute (Lita Dubman), oboe (Jacques Hétu), violin (Bob Baksa), and trombone (Michael Horvit); about the best that could be said for this miscellaneous piece was that it satisfied the conditions of the assignment.

The first weekend of the Tanglewood season was a Bach festival conducted by Charles Munch. This was when I got to hear Lukas’s superb piano playing for the first time. On Saturday evening, he played five Bach concerti, an unforgettably sparkling occasion, especially the great D minor and the Fifth Brandenburg, as well as the D minor Concerto for three pianos (the other pianists were Seymour Lipkin and Ralph Berkowitz).

One Saturday morning, there was an open rehearsal of Copland’s newly-arranged orchestral suite from The Tender Land, Copland conducting. Lukas borrowed Copland’s autograph score — not a photocopy — for us to look at during the rehearsal, and led all seven of us in front of the roped-off section in the Shed so that we could be close to the orchestra. I have a vivid memory of watching the score carefully during the square-dance music, and I saw that the off-beats in the snare drum part were being heavily accented. I pointed out that the accents weren’t indicated in the score, whereupon to my shocked amazement Lukas took out his red ballpoint pen and wrote the accents into Copland’s autograph. I mention this for the benefit of documentary experts who may be puzzled to find an alien hand in the composer’s manuscript, though every musicologist knows that such things happen all the time.

Lukas himself conducted the Boston Symphony at one concert, with his own recently-completed Symphony of Chorales, a piece I liked but have never heard since; I don’t know even if it has been published or recorded. He also talked about a piece he was working on, a concerto for improvising instruments and orchestra; I don’t know if he finished it, but he had a group that he founded in California, the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble (clarinet, cello, piano and percussion), and this group eventually created the improvised interludes in Time Cycle as well as the partly aleatoric Echoi for which Lukas wrote precisely-notated but freely-assembled fragments.

In December of that year Lukas played first piano (the other three were played by Copland, Samuel Barber, and Roger Sessions) in a performance at Town Hall of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, with Stravinsky conducting. Several of us Tanglewood alumni were there, and I had a fourth-row seat. Afterwards we hurried backstage to greet our master. (Standing on the narrow platform outside the green room, I almost knocked someone off the stairs; only years later did I realize that the tall gentleman had been Rudolf Serkin.) A recording appeared later; Lukas, playing first, was clearly the best pianist. This was brought home even more in the 1977 recording of Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety, in which Lukas’s vivid performance with the Israel Philharmonic is faithfully captured.

I saw him only once or twice until he returned to Boston once a week to teach at Boston University, and then we spoke more often. We talked about old friends, and at one point I served on a panel at Boston University honoring his 80th birthday in 2002. Over the decades I didn’t hear nearly as much of Lukas’s music as I wanted to, but I have been very reassured by the number of new recordings that have appeared just recently, including Griffelkin which I heard in Jordan Hall in concert performance. [See the BMInt review here.] (I remembered all the way back to 1959 when Lukas casually remarked that he had included a quote from his earlier opera, The Jumping Frog, in this larger piece. I saw a performance of The Jumping Frog, too, at the Boston University Theater.) I was essentially unsympathetic to the improvisational premises of Echoi even while I admired the performance, knowing how deeply Lukas was involved in improvisation. (I can’t explain this prejudice, especially when I love jazz improvisation.) Echoi is exciting but I still tend to think of it as over-the-top, and too rapt with avant-garde tendencies when this listener, at least, is so resolutely conservative. I felt the same way about Phorion (Greek, “stolen goods”; 1967) although I was delighted with Lukas’s description of it as resulting from a vision, or a dream, in which the notes of Bach’s E-major Partita for solo violin were being continually “washed ashore.”

Where I never had any doubts at all about the direction, and the success, of Lukas’s art was in Time Cycle in 1961, four songs for soprano and orchestra on texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, with improvised interludes by the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. This work was justly recognized even at the time as a first-rate achievement. I heard Lukas conduct Time Cycle with the BSO in Symphony Hall and a year later at Tanglewood, with Adele Addison, who commissioned it. The orchestral proportions were perfect, the vocal writing both graceful and grateful, and the overall imagination of the highest order. There were some technical devices that were radical enough in 1961: notes fingered by a full section of strings but neither plucked nor bowed (virtually inaudible when just one player does it, but clear enough and subtly quiet within an entire section); pressure accents in tied notes for the woodwinds; and most startling, the striking of the hours, from one to midnight, whispered aloud by members of the orchestra in the final song (from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; Mahler uses the same text in the fourth movement of his Third Symphony, but without the announcement of the hours). In that deeply expressive song, two flutes and two solo violins are situated far back on stage, in the corners, playing an ineffably sad refrain, until, simultaneous with the 12th and final hour, the widely-spaced strings strike and sustain a dominant seventh chord to the end, an amazing sound in this apocalyptic context. Time Cycle is a genuine international masterpiece, as fine a musical work as the second half of the 20th century has produced. It was honored with a New York Critics Circle Award in 1961. My copy of the re-mastered recording on CD of Time Cycle has 158 portrait photographs of Leonard Bernstein, who conducted the premiere, but no pictures of Lukas.

See related review here.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Daniel Stepner, baroque violin, Eliot Fisk, guitar, and John Gibbons, harpsichord, were the artists in this amiable program, which sounded well in the moderate-sized Remis Auditorium at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The ensemble had a well-formed intimacy of sound but also a reassuring informality as the performers talked about the music they played rather than relying on printed program notes. The chamber setting also was appropriate to instrumentation flexibility, entirely in keeping with Baroque practice, where music written for one instrument might be easily and effectively played on another.

The performers explained that although only one of the five composers was a native Spaniard, two of the others lived and worked in Spain. Another, J. S. Bach, was represented by his famous “Ciaconna” from the D minor Partita for solo violin (BWV 1004 — that number got left off the program somehow), in Eliot Fisk’s powerful transcription for guitar; the chaconne form, it was pointed out, derived from a fast dance that originated in Spanish America and was transplanted back to Europe, where it was widely adopted at a slower tempo. This was the third Bach Chaconne I had heard in less than a year, after Brahms’s arrangement for piano, left hand alone, played by Leon Fleisher in New York last June, and Thomas Zehetmair’s performance of the original violin version at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Washington’s birthday; all of these were strong reminders that the instrumentation hardly mattered in bringing off the enormous and amazing architecture of the piece.

The Fandango that began the concert was by Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), who spent more than 20 years at the court in Madrid; but it had a startling resemblance to a more famous Fandango for harpsichord by Antonio Soler (1729-1783). Both works are long, repetitive ostinato pieces relentlessly and irresistibly emphasizing D-minor tonic and dominant harmony, over and over, with very occasional diversions into the relative major. Even though Boccherini’s was an arrangement, there was plenty of opportunity for virtuosic improvisation, with wide skips in the violin over and across the strings (the baroque violin uses a shorter and de-curved bow), and a big cadenza for solo guitar.

The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), a contemporary of Bach, wrote prolifically in many genres, including opera and sacred music, but remains best known today for his more than 500 one-movement sonatas for harpsichord and other solo keyboard instruments, works which gave stability and renown to the bipartite sonata form. We heard a short Sonata for violin and harpsichord in G major, in four movements, and after the intermission, four of the most famous harpsichord sonatas, from Scarlatti’s first publication of Essercizi per il gravicembalo, published in 1738 (in London of all places). Scarlatti’s exploration of the short sonata form pushed significant boundaries in the days before Haydn and Mozart expanded it and took it into the orchestra, and Scarlatti certainly approached Bach in his imaginative roving tonality and chromatic harmony. These sonatas were remarkable also for their athletic technique, requiring frequent crossing of the left hand over the right for single notes, and back again. There was a moment of delightful camaraderie with the audience when John Gibbons explained how he had first learned the D major Sonata on the piano decades ago, and decided to re-learn it with Scarlatti’s specific instructions for crossed hands on the harpsichord, a difficult proposition when playing parallel thirds because even on the separate manuals the two hands are closely positioned one above the other. In the end he decided not to finish playing this one, lest his fingers entirely confuse each other, and I was reminded of the place in Schumann’s C major Fantasy for piano where the crossed hands, on collision course in opposite directions, actually are notated to play four notes in succession with both hands (LH 1234 and RH 5432). Gibbons concluded with the famous Sonata in G minor, known as the “Cat’s Fugue,” so called because, according to legend, Scarlatti’s cat walked along the keyboard, striking the rising notes G, B flat, E flat, F sharp, B flat and C sharp.

Antonio Soler, a monk at the Escorial, was not quite as prolific a composer as Scarlatti (who in fact was his teacher), though he wrote 120 sonatas in addition to the famous Fandango; his principal output was in sacred music, including 28 settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah for Holy Week (other composers who used these texts include Thomas Tallis, François Couperin, and Igor Stravinsky). One of these settings, dating from 1763 and originally for soprano, violin, and fortepiano, was effectively arranged by our group; sometimes the violin, and at other times the guitar, took over the soprano line. This expressive piece was in F minor, an unusually somber key for guitar or for violin.

The Roman Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713), the oldest composer represented on the program, never got to Spain but was happy to write a celebrated set of variations on “La Folia,” a famous Spanish ground-bass melody widely adopted for dancing. (Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, for piano, refer to this work.) Corelli’s variations, originally for violin and continuo, here were effectively adapted to the trio ensemble. Some of the variations were without the violin, others involved a stichomythy of violin and guitar alternating one bar at a time. Mostly the variations were in 3/4 meter, the traditional pace of the dance, while some broadened out expressively to 4/4. As in the Fandango that began the concert, there was a lot of opportunity for bursts of virtuosity, including some rasgueado strumming that reminded one of flamenco style. I lost count of how many variations there were, but in the excitement of the ensemble, that didn’t matter.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

The program began with For Toru, for flute and string quintet (including double bass), written in 1997 in memory of Toru Takemitsu, Japan’s most distinguished composer of 20th century. This elegiac piece featured some dense but colorful chordal harmony, episodes of a steady pulse, and a lot of bent pitches such as a shakuhachi player would have relished. There were glissandi and microtones in the strings, too, and it was interesting to watch the players as they coped with slow vibrato in a microtonal context. The flute solo, beautifully played by Kathleen Boyd, included a motif of three upward whole steps — almost a tribute to the chorale in Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, and that too might honor Takemitsu.

Two movements from Foss’s Echoi, a 12-minute excerpt of a much larger work in four movements (1964), followed. I had last heard this piece live in Oregon in 1967, when I also heard him lecture about it. He wrote it for his own Improvisation Chamber Ensemble (piano, clarinet, cello, and percussion) with a view to exploiting their instrumental skills to the full and even beyond, and it is an exciting adventure when heard in its entirety. The closest that these movements came to actual improvisation was in the choice of different fragments indicated in the score and separately cued as required by the conductor. Director Theodore Antoniou cued with his right hand, while clutching his baton around its shaft with his left; there was no mistaking those careful gestures.

The Elegy for Anne Frank (1989) for piano and small group — solo strings, horn, trombone, and percussion — was a deeply gripping piece. It consisted of several episodes separated by recitation from Anne Frank’s diary. The episodes were alternately lyrically tonal and dramatically graphic, expressing Anne’s hope for a better world even while the Nazis goose-stepped outside the secret Annexe. At one moment one heard upper-register piano like a stylized music-box; at another, whole-tone harmony and harsh dissonances in string clusters (some of the players simultaneously singing), low-register brass, a threatening beat on the bass drum. The dramatic reading was well executed by Carly Waldman.

Following the intermission, the Boston University Chamber Singers, directed by Ann Howard Jones, presented (with piano accompaniment) two movements, from the original nine, of Foss’s earliest large-scale work, The Prairie, first performed in 1944. This cantata, on an expansive text by Carl Sandburg, reveals influence from Aaron Copland’s open-spaces style, but well assimilated with a good deal of original color. It was a pity not to hear the entire piece, but the interested listener can find a recent CD by the Providence Singers and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Andrew Clark, the first complete recording of The Prairie in many years. Introducing the next work on the program, Ann Jones said that Foss’s Behold, I build an house had been commissioned for and presented by Boston University in connection with the opening of the Marsh Chapel in 1952. The chorus handled the complex harmony of this piece with expert precision and clarity.

It was hard to keep track of nineteen different short Epigrams played in rapid succession, but one was aware of a striking diversity of styles and spirit, some seriously somber, some irrepressibly gay, some dense and percussive, some spare and linear, and all making the most of a simultaneously solemn and optimistic occasion. (Yes, of course I heard the Scarlatti quotes, and bits of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto — a favorite of Foss’s.) It was apparent, too, from the composers’ individual comments on their Epigrams that Lukas Foss had made a powerful impress on their studies and on their lives. The performances may have had a few problems, especially in quickly shifting gears from piece to piece, but there was no doubt about the former students’ abilities and their commitment, and their pleasure in honoring the memory of a friend. The 19 composers, in order, were John H. Wallace, Panagiotis Liaropoulos, Ronald G. Vigue, Po-Chun Wang, Gon Hwang, Michalis Economou, Mauricio Pauly, Julian Wachner, Margaret McAllister, Jakov Jakoulov, Apostolos Paraskevas, Ramon P. Castillo, Ivana Lisak, Jeremy Van Buskirk, Paul Vash, Pedro Malpic, Jorge Grossmann, Matt Van Brink, and Mark Berger.

See related article here.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, music harmony.

Chopin’s style was influenced by those he adored most — Bach and Mozart — and by Polish folk music, but in every sense is uniquely his own,  Its classical refinement resulted in a higher proportion of excellence and a lower proportion of inferior work than in the case of any other great composer.  Though he could not match them in output, Chopin had a melodic gift as great as Mozart’s or Schubert’s.  Of all the major composers his arena was the most limited: except for 6 solos with orchestra, some chamber music and some songs, his entire corpus consists of about 250 pieces for solo piano.  These works form the core of the Romantic piano repertory and include much of the most poetically subtle music of all time.  The unparalleled originality of Chopin’s harmonic language influenced a centuryful of composers from Schumann and Wagner to Rachmaninoff and Debussy and continues to be felt today.

Chopin said that he didn’t understand Beethoven, but on the evidence of his successful struggles with the sonata form, he understood enough.  The process of “symphonic” development by relentless application of repeated motives suited the Austro-German tradition, but it didn’t suit Chopin.  It sufficed him to devise his own approach to narrative structure that is perfectly original, idiosyncratic, and valid.  He achieved triumphs in the larger genres fully as well as in the miniatures for which he was most famous in his own time.  The vivid pianism of his youthful concertos (he wrote both at age 19) completely overcomes their orchestral weaknesses.  The improvisatory qualities of the scherzos and ballades define a visionary world that no later composer could approximate; the sui generis forms of the F minor Fantasy, the Barcarolle, and the Polonaise-Fantaisie, mighty monuments from Chopin’s last years, show that he was at the height of his powers when he died of tuberculosis at 39.  We are still learning from his example, singing his nocturnes, and dancing with his 56 mazurkas.  Happy 200th Birthday, Fryderyk Chopin, beloved master and greatest of composers for the piano.