Experience and empathy of a profound order prevailed in a seascape as majestic as it was elusive. I cannot remember a performance, live or recorded, that reached so far and wide as did this paradigmatic performance of La Mer. Ancient Greek historian and biographer Plutarch said “all things are subject to motion.” This could not have been more obvious than in the uncountable moving parts of the French Impressionist’s celebrated orchestral tone poem as revealed so incomparably by conductor and orchestra.

If you were there at Symphony Hall you may have also found it nearly impossible to take your eyes off one of the most admired conductors of our time, especially when it comes to the French repertoire. He is a sight to behold, a choreographer extraordinaire. You have to see with your own eyes what he does to believe it! A gentilhomme, Maître Dutoit, right from the start of the concert, exchanged pleasantries with Principal Cellist Jules Eskin and others who were flanking his pathway to the podium. From that moment on, a rare relaxed and refreshing air emanated from an orchestra that has been obliged to play under an unusual number of batons during this current season.

The BSO could not have made a greater sound than it did in La Mer. From the staggered bowing of the first violins on a pianissimo high harmonic sustained during the last movement, “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea,” to its massed, monumental climactic close, an orchestral euphoria reigned. The gentilhomme in Dutoit yet again shone through as he deferred to the orchestra, stepping back from the podium and inviting soloists and all to stand to acknowledge ovations from what I would like to believe was a genuinely astounded Boston audience.

A slower global motion rolled on throughout Tout un monde lointain. Thirty-one-year-old  Capuçon, on his 1701 Matteo Goffriller cello — an instrument that surprised with its capacity for a good deal of power if not with its played-down brightness, a kind of  mellowed brilliance — spun out the soul-searching circles of Dutilleux. Capuçon effusively seized the striving and the unattainable state that is everywhere expressed in the five-movement concerto-like work (dating from 1970). His ardent playing drew upon a solid technique, even at the highest possible point on the fingerboard. Sometimes the fleet passages were too fast to discern, and so a touch less enticing. Like distant atmospheres and lustrous stellar objects, the orchestral commentaries were captured through the fine esthetically tuned telescopic lens of the BSO and Dutoit.

Curious was the programming of a throwback such as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme suite — its nine movements made up the first half of the concert — with the likes of the two French composers. I could have done without the Strauss, even its crazy flutes and clarinets, odd percussion sounds, and extended solo work by Eskin and Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, all of whom kept me occupied with their stylistic takes on a time capsule staking its now questionably relevant claims. Not all went perfectly: imbalances of brass over strings over piano, a prominent high oboe fluff, and a weird upward blurt from the trumpet in the opening of “The Fencing Master.” These were insignificant in an emotionless exercise of old quasi-courtly meddling.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net

File Image (Lynn Goldsmith photo)

Lise de la Salle’s Boston recital debut last night at Jordan Hall, presented by Celebrity Series, began with a genius at the keyboard expounding on Ravel’s Miroirs. Admittedly, her performance had me in tears, those that come with an awakening in life. Spasms of mirth, of sentimentality, and of nobility inherent in the Frenchman’s score were everywhere evident and at times rendered forth in the boldest, most remarkable power I have yet to encounter. The 23-year old de la Salle — yes! — delivered an incomparable message of piano passion and personality.

Surprisingly and disappointingly, that same passion and personality that she brought to the Ravel she also brought, and relentlessly so, to a selection of Debussy’s preludes. Ravel and Debussy are two completely different creatures. Naturalist and pundit on ancient Greek lore, Debussy could not withstand the overt, nearly romanticized deportment the young pianist was intent upon in redefining this composer’s character.

During intermission I found, not surprisingly, that I was not alone in my assessment of the first half of Lise de la Salle’s unveiling. At least for a few more concert-goers, elation also had turned to consternation. After her audacious performance of Beethoven’s Les Adieux, I began wondering what she would bring to the opening movement of the “Moonlight Sonata.” Romanticized it was not, modernized, yes: faster, more impersonalized and declarative, without cantabile.

Obviously, far too much power prevailed throughout the evening. (Is this the New Age, and am I falling behind?) Velocities to extremes were also in play, most startling so in de la Salle’s delivery of Debussy’s Feux d’artifice and Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest. In her first encore, the third movement from Bach’s Italian Concerto, scale passages morphed into glissandos. His sequential passages whizzed by, making the whole sound as if it could have been the perfect soundtrack to a cartoon. Two other encores followed: a Chopin nocturne and a Schumann Kinderszenen selection.

Truthfully, I like to root for the young, even more so for those who dare to take chances, go out on a limb in search of freshness, new life. In an interview that aired quite a few years ago, Broadway man Stephen Sondheim disclosed a few words for the wise, “I try to write music that is fresh yet inevitable.” So, I wonder, how do ratcheted power and velocity apply to this syllogism?

For Noctuelles and Une barque sûr l’ocean, de la Salle opted for tempos slower than most, or, given her prodigious piano agility, maybe it just seemed to me to be so. Ravel’s tempos, assez vif (rather fast) and plus lent (slower) for Alborado del gracioso felt fiery flamenco, leaving me breathless. And in this Spanish vista came the climax of the entire suite — with piano power, passion, and personality; all from hands smaller than you might expect! Les oiseaux tristes — unspeakable enrapture from the opening simple and quiet two-note calls to the sudden shock of a flock of fiercely chattering birds. Lise de la Salle neutralized the chimings in La vallée des cloches to close Miroirs on a middle ground, an ingenious move.

Last-minute changes on the program, the first, a reordering of the six Debussy preludes that made its way into an insert, the second, de la Salle herself announcing that the “Moonlight” would follow rather than precede Les Adieux. As you watch Lise de la Salle sitting at the keyboard, you cannot miss fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, back, and face enveloped in a creative surge. Could the creative urge be that which also dictated the shifts?

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net

At times, there were passages in the Beethoven that felt as though a bit more (lightness in the fifth movement, Presto) —sometimes a bit less (leaning on each and every note in the first movement’s fugue, Adagio ma non troppo e molto expressivo) —  could have still further heightened Beethoven’s late work’s thickly populated scheme. Besides that, all of the rest of their heady program, that included some of the most mature works around, made Jordan Hall a special space — the place to be. No doubt that for most, Zaïde has left its ineradicable footprint in Boston and the string quartet scene as a whole.

Zaïde also left its tracks with violinists Charlotte Juilliard and Pauline Fritsch flanked left and right respectively, leaving cellist Juliette Salmona and violist Sarah Chenaf between  them. Did the Mozart quartet suggest this? Recall that the composer’s Prussian quartets demand more cello participation while at the same time asking the viola to dip below in order to cover the bass lines usually taken up by the cello. But then why keep this arrangement for the Wolf and Beethoven? With Frisch’s violin facing away from us, certainly nothing at all was lost, power, nuance, and otherwise. But neither was experiencing this arrangement any trifling matter, so seemingly simple a reconfiguration it is.

In Hugo Wolf’s Serenade in G for String Quartet (Sérénade italienne), Zaïde could very well have been posing as that entire orchestra which we have heard in many of performances of the work. The quartet was composed in 1887 and later orchestrated in 1892. Zaïde inhabited the serenade with bigness and robustness, color gradations reaching from open, extroverted sunlight to delineated, introverted shadows.

Surrounding the lighter, shorter serenade were Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23 in F Major, K.590 and Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131. If Zaïde’s Mozart mined jewels well beneath its surfaces, their Beethoven plotted scenarios well into the human interior. Just how could Zaïde’s jeunes françaises have pulled all of this off? Wouldn’t it be something to go behind the scenes of their concertizing to uncover more about their abundantly evident remarkable powers of persuasion?

The program brochure reads: “Since 2003 New England Conservatory and the ProQuartet-European Center for Chamber Music (ProQuartet-CEMC) have collaborated in a unique exchange program for exceptional young chamber ensembles.” “Exceptional,” “young” are both spot on, yet just begin to tell the emerging story of Quatuor Zaïde. Hopefully the four will retrace their steps in frequent future returns to Boston. Encore!

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

According to Steven Ledbetter, the distinguished annotator and BMInt reviewer, well known to Boston concert-goers, “It is not clear precisely why Mozart found the composition of these string quartets troublesome…it is known that… K. 589 made use of material that he had written and then discarded almost a decade earlier. Perhaps he found his natural flow of musical ideas disrupted by his temporary feelings of self-doubt and required the artificial impetus of pre-existent material in order to get himself started.”

Listening to the Quartet in B-flat in this perspective reinforced my own sense that this quartet is one of Mozart’s most wondrous: cut-ins, harmonic parallelisms, abundant textures, polyrhythms, expanded cello writing, and meatier interior movements. The Boston Artists Ensemble (BAE) never appeared reluctant “to speak the truth” — what was in their hearts and spirited bows. Expression, at once formal and personal, was pure joy to experience.

While they obviously knew what and when and how they were to sound a note, I felt something in the moment often taking place, a good dose of expressive improv, if you will. And with that, we all know, comes danger — the kind that makes a live performance alive. Certain missed tunings and fluffs there were, but very few and almost all of them in that “danger zone.” Mozart played out this way, this human way, is quite a remarkable way for professionals of this high caliber.

Before performing Bartók, BAE members talked about and demonstrated the quartet’s themes, math, Golden Mean, arch form, dissonance, “Bartók plucking,” and counterpoint, all for the good; I was able to glean more about their thinking of the Hungarian’s art-and-folk music. There is not a single doubt, judging both from their comments and performance, that the gifted and experienced members of BAE had one big passion going for the 20th century highly idiomatic String Quartet No. 4.

But their passion was too much for me. Forte markings in the score became fortissimo. The light and feathery second movement with mutes on the strings became too viscerally charged for any kind of relief that the composer surely had in mind. More passion from the cello in the third movement further illustrated BAE’s outwardly passionate urges. Ultimately, areas of repose and climax became increasingly difficult to delineate mentally, much less emotionally. Yet, that they took their position on this music is a big plus, just as it was with the Mozart.

I like their taking positions, though I might not go along with them. Why not catch these fine musicians with a big dash of daring and decide for yourself? Their next concerts are in March and April, which you can find at their website here.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston,  was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier  Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net

Currently serving as Ensemble-in-Residence at The Boston Conservatory, the Ludovico Ensemble surprised both with its high professionalism among performers as much as with its questionable programming. Jolivet’s Suite en concert pour flûte et percussion (1965-66) and Salkind-Pearl’s In (2011) could have not been farther apart in terms of craftsmanship and musicality.

The program opened with a seven-minute composition entitled Yellow Pale Blue (2011) written for the Ludovico Ensemble. Marti Epstein, who teaches at the Berklee College of Music, created light, lilting lullaby-like surfaces that gently rocked between silent resting points. The alto flute led the way with an up-and-down patterned melodic movement in steady pulses, the four percussionists quietly “shadowing and underlining.” Jessi Rosinki’s lovely alto flutings came with a softness altogether fitting for “the color I see when I hear the sound of the alto flute.”

Jolivet’s Suite en concert pour flûte et percussion is the kind of piece that on first hearing might be challenging, certainly not for its emotional content, which is everywhere in evidence, or for its complete craftsmanship, but rather for its intensely concentrated intricacies which Jolivet deploys throughout the four movements totaling some 16 minutes. Perhaps, too, his voice, which is less distinctive than that of another member of his La Jeune France — Messiaen — might have had us listening more intently than usual. The Suite has become standard repertory for university and conservatory ensembles.

Ludovico’s Thursday night performance  was the first I have heard live of Jolivet’s masterful piece for flute and four percussionists. Rosinki and the four percussionists, Jeffrey Means, Bill Solomon, Nicholas Tolle, and Mike Williams, could have inspired solely through their intense concentration and commitment—phenomenal discipline—but there was much, much more to their live reenactment of the ever-inviting sounds and structures of Suite en concert.

The non-showy, dedicated Ludovico percussionists synced and soloed with exceptional  might and finesse. Mysterious rumblings in sotto voce resounded in the second movement marked Stabile. The thrilling third movement, Hardiment, wound up with upbeat after upbeat, building to an explosive downbeat climatic close. When Jolivet turned to regular pulsations, the four percussionists always knew what to do, imbuing the Frenchman’s music with mystery; conjuring an incantation out of intellectual stuff.

Rosinki’s flutes, one an alto, beautified the Suite, gave it an elegance and  a sense of perfection, showing phenomenal discipline. The melodic writing of Jolivet, though intricate, cries out for architectural forging and dynamic thrust. Rhythmic motives in the lower register need emphatic chiff and bite.

Percussion has an infinite number of instruments, or sounds, something Mischa Salkind-Pearl seems to have had in mind for the first performance of his piece, In, a 25-minute obsession with sound that went nowhere.

Round after round of applause came from a very strong turnout — mostly students. Rosinski deservedly took extra bows. It was perfectly clear to me that all of this prolonged enthusiasm was meant for all of the Ludovico performers. And rightly so.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Hakan Hardenberger, Mark Anthony Turnage, and Marcelo Lehninger (Stu Rosner photo)

Boston Symphony Orchestra Assistant Conductor Marcelo Lehninger stepped in for Andris Nelsons for the orchestra’s series of concerts beginning Thursday, January 5th.  See the BMInt article here.

The youthful Brazilian with boyish face and heaps of get-up-and-go rounded up quite a show of appreciation–even the usually restrained members of the orchestra smiled, tapped bows and applauded at the concert’s end. It truly was an upbeat evening at Symphony; an evening of renewal featuring Swedish trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger.

Coming onstage in a very stylish coat of tails carrying three trumpets in hand, Hakan Hardenberger, who has been described as “the greatest orchestral trumpet soloist today,” blew the house down.  Beginning with the trumpet’s lower and mellower sibling, the flugelhorn, Hardenberger created a sound I cannot ever remember having experienced. It was as if Miles Davis had reappeared transmuted in a most elegant echo, a warm, promising, haunt—a Wow!

English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage specifically composed his concerto From the Wreckage (2004-05) for the Swedish trumpeter. Robert Kirzinger’s program notes quoting Hardenberger went straight to the point, that for trumpet: “There is no Brahms concerto, there is no Beethoven concerto to play. So to look for substance…I need to look for today’s composers.”

Wondrously rekindling the old-style concerto set-up, Turnage turned the traditional three-movement form into a three-part composition, each employing a different trumpet: flugelhorn, trumpet and piccolo trumpet. It was this last, the smaller sibling, on which Hardenberger soared to the high E known to coloraturas, a clear edgeless almost toy-like note on which  Turnage’s poetic piece disappeared into the night.

It was on the trumpet that Hardenberger at times came eerily close to imitating the human voice, a soprano, perhaps, with no vibrato and absolutely pure tones. Together, Hardenberger and Turnage created a fifteen-minute journey in this American premiere suggesting any number of metaphors. Urbane, elusive, atmospheric, darkly ecstatic, and impassioned, From the Wreckage undoubtedly renovates the concerto scene.

Appearing quite informal (no tie or jacket), as though he had just left his studio, where he very well may have been composing up a storm, Mark-Anthony Turnage, along with Hakan Hardenberger, graciously and happily accepted well-earned kudos. Marcelo Lehninger and the BSO were applauded as well by all, including both soloist and composer. As well it should have been: it was, indeed, a celebratory moment at Symphony.

Also Sprach Zarathustra of Richard Strauss may be viewed in the light of the composer’s own words about himself: “…I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer!” Yet one might take his epic tone poem, most often recognized as the theme to 2001-A Space Odyssey, as coming from “a truly great composer in Western music” (Paul Thomason in the BSO program notes). Or, maybe, what makes this music speak is its youthfulness.

Strauss had barely completed his Nietzsche inspired survey of mankind when he turned 32. Under Assistant Conductor Lehninger and an apparently extremely happy, augmented BSO, this old Strauss re-tread leapt forward into another life. Teeming with unfettered enthusiasm and altruism, Also Sprach Zarathustra came alive, virtuosic as it can ever get, young in spirit, yet from the experienced hands of a world class orchestra—a truly renewing performance.

One notable English conductor commented on the opener, Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 in G, saying that it is “some of the most complete music.” One of the most venerated American conductors of all time can be seen here in a clip on YouTube standing before the orchestra, arms at his side, following the orchestra, his face changing expression time and again as the fourth movement shape shifts, changes moods. Perfunctory, predictable, and precise could describe the BSO rendition of one of Haydn’s most popular symphonies. By refining the last chord of the first movement’s exposition—that is, making it softer, a sort of apology—Lehninger lessened surprise, taking away any suddenness at this stopping point. Taking a slower speed in the passage that leads to another sudden stopping point (toward the end of the Finale), then suddenly dashing “home” did not thrill.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

How the world has changed. Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Professor of Music at MIT, has been directing Galak Tika since he founded it 18 years ago. There is also Rambax MIT, an ensemble dedicated to learning the art of sabar, a drum of Senegal, West Africa. Both these world music ensembles join MIT’s traditional Western offerings, its Symphony Orchestra, Wind Ensemble, and others totaling at least eight performance opportunities in all at the Institute.

Visually, the instruments of the MIT Gamelan Galak Tika and its members in traditional attire onstage at Kresge Auditorium astonished. You can take a look by going to here.  A drummer seated on the floor tapped his drum, the 20-plus ensemble members lifted their hammers, and the large percussion orchestra consisting of metallophones, hand drums with cymbals, and gongs began its performance of  Penyembrama, a Balinese way of welcoming.

Metallic flair and perambulatory percussive rhythms exploded. Gamelan Galak Tika’s clangorous pealing surprised me. I had become accustomed to rounder, full-throated sounds of the gamelan that David Lewiston recorded in Bali in 1966 and released on Nonesuch Record’s Explorer Series. Yet it was a sheer joy to see and hear MIT students deftly following the music’s ever-shifting rhythmic structure. It was fascinating to watch them striking out a melody on the metallic bars, a hammer in one hand, the other hand shadowing every strike to prevent the bar ringing through to the next sound.

Taruna Jaya, modified and embellished by master drummer Gdé Manik (1912-1984), is well known especially for its having become a “test” piece for gamelan clubs. It featured the dancer Shoko Yamamuro who was a complete knock-out in her depiction of an old story about youth’s ways. Fan in hand, regally costumed, eyes in a relentless maniacal gaze, she would abruptly strike one pose after another, each time with a restrained movement such as extending a palm upward, or turning the head sideways. Near the end of the dance, her intensely erotic beckoning to the mostly indifferent drummer bemused, leaving some of us to wonder if this was part of the original traditional dance.

Maintaining its mission “to develop new works in collaboration with Balinese and American artists,” Ziporyn finally was able to hook up with the master minimalist and composer of the seminal In C (1964). Dressed up in a colorful and patchy pajama-looking outfit, his long flowing white beard looking a little like Santa’s, Riley first took to MIT’s pipe organ. Some 20 minutes of drone and a cultural exchange of parallel harmonies ascending à la French mystical organ to riffs from American vernacular to an array of scales we used to call “exotic.” His work, The Bull (2008), still has some of the flavor of his early works, but instead of that smooth and slow trance-state evolution, this music was sectional, resulting in my attention going on and off again. Three other improvisations with Riley on piano, his son Gyan on guitar, and Ziporyn on clarinets were combined together into a half hour, three-movement improvisation. First came that drone again and this time with a Dorian type scale dubbed a “white-note scale” in referring to the piano’s keys. Doodling about came next. To end with, Riley laid down an ostinato over which they all created a somewhat multilingual barn dance.

The world premiere of the commissioned work, White Space Conflict, performed by Gyan Riley on guitar, Terry Riley on M-Audio keyboard, and the Gamelan Galak Tika, went another half hour with that minimalist and new-age predilection for hearing the waves going out and hearing the waves coming in. The strong turnout that pretty near filled Kresge largely seemed impressed. A bit more interesting to me was how the title came about. It seems that they were corresponding via Drop Box, which alerted them to some kind computer glitch which the program labeled as a “white space conflict.”

Overall, brilliant moments alternated with dulling ones. The event was definitely worth catching, Terry Riley being the guru of multicultural amalgamations through a genre he inaugurated and that later would become known as “minimalism.”

Beyond belief was that MIT would choose to play pre-recorded music before the concert and during intermission. It had seemingly nothing to do with the show and, instead, droned and boomed on under the din of rising voices.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Aviv, recently having recorded the three string quartets of Erwin Schulhoff on the Naxos label, opened with his String Quartet No. 1 composed in 1924. Born in Prague of Jewish-German parents in 1894, the anti-fascist pro-peace composer-pianist died in a concentration camp in 1942. Aviv stoutly announced the sweeping, barreling unisons of the opening Presto movement. Allegro giocoso alla slovacca perking with folk tunes and syncopated dance rhythms contained an attractive innocence all conveyed adroitly by Aviv.

The closing Andante molto sostenuto consisted of little more than two successive and prolonged textures noticeably repetitive in nature: recurring cries from isolated angular crescendos answered by a continuous weeping summoned through the interval of a minor third, plucked slowly on the cello (tears) and bowed on the viola, as in a rippling undercurrent. The very softest passages of Quartet No. 1 were mostly inaudible.

Hearing live for the first time this seldom played string quartet of a 30-year old Schulhoff writing in the post-World War I era awakened images of a time gone by, a county, a musician, another human remembered.

After Aviv’s performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 6 in F minor Op. 80, there was little doubt in the minds of listeners during the quartet’s Wellesley debut as to the its impressively wide range of accomplishments. However, in the Mendelssohn, as well as in Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 3 in F minor Op. 30, Aviv’s ambitiousness became evident. Its eagerness to inject life into each of these works became obvious. An overall restlessness, or anxiousness, pervaded. Their dependency on so detailed expressiveness detracted from the compositions’ moods, harmonic fabric, and momentum.

Nor was the space favorable to their performance. Easily 400 were in attendance, suggesting that the acoustics of the large open space would be positively affected, in particular, by a reduction in resonance. That might have been the case, at least to some extent, yet from my vantage point in the 5^th row from the back of the chapel, cello pizzicatos frequently boomed tympani-like while high violin notes often rang out glockenspiel-like. Fortissimo passages rasped with the quartet’s bearing down on their bows.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

The Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Music presented Sergey Schepkin in its Faculty Recital Series on Thursday evening December 8th at its Tsai Performance Center. The concert was free and open to the public. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Schepkin studied at that city’s conservatory. Upon moving to the US in 1990, he became a student of Russell Sherman. During the current season, Schepkin is Visiting Associate Professor at Boston University and will be performing in Boston, other venues in the US, and Japan. His second recording of The Goldberg Variations was recently released under the King International Japan label.

During the hour-plus performance time, Schepkin literally rarely ever moved his body, head, or shoulders. It was the movement of his hands and, more specifically, that of his fingers that did the speaking. Except for a few slight pauses sprinkled here and there, his fingers never even left the keys. Throughout, his right foot on the damper pedal moved imperceptivity.

In the Bach Goldberg Variations, both hands are called upon to move in every conceivable way, in all kinds of directions: close together, far apart, in parallel motion, contrary motion, left and right hands crossing over and under each other. Observing Sergey Schepkin’s hands on the keyboard clearly informed the ear especially of Bach’s contrapuntal patterning and his melodic modeling. Resting the eyes, using ears only — no watching or looking around — also was a means of following the unbounded play of tempered sound from the master composer. This non-visual appreciation was due to Schepkin’s own technically and musically driven choices for such an ingenious musical composition.

Through the entire Goldberg Variations Schepkin showed remarkable insight through his tracing of Bach’s uncountable tonal patterns, his following Bach’s linear intricacies, and his understanding of the surprising harmonic implications of even the sparsest of his textures — all the while uncovering more than a few subtleties that for this listener had previously lain dormant. Detail by detail formed sections, sections to pieces, pieces to a single whole, this last realized by Schepkin’s virtually joining one variation to another.

Bar by bar the intensely chromatic Variation 25: Adagio grew more intriguing under his hands. An uncommon and touching humility in his rendering of the Aria da Capo, which closes the behemoth set, brought new meaning to it, as though Bach might have been saying, “Well, that is what I was able to do. Now, here again is the Goldberg theme, where we started.” Here, I believe it is fair to mention a few slips, including two particularly noticeable re-starts (which made Sergey Schepkin all the more human).

And by the way, Schepkin taking unusually deep bows and receiving three splendid bouquets of flowers, thankfully concluded his program with that Aria da Capo, and no encore.

For the first half of his recital, Schepkin programmed Six Piano Pieces, op. 118 (1893) by Johannes Brahms. In last of the six, Intermezzo in E-flat Minor (Andante, largo e mesto), Schepkin gave into its isolation and yearning, its piercing suspensions and tender resolutions, its bold interior statement. In the outer sections of the Ballade in G Minor (Allegro energico) his concretized phrasing and superb dynamics charged the electrical current from Brahms’s written score just right. As for the rest of the pieces, I thought there was either too much contrast or a penchant for overstatement.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Years ago, I invited my next door neighbor to hear one of the major proponents of Third Stream, Ran Blake. After a few bars into a familiar standard out of Tin Pan Alley, pianist Blake surprised us with a sharply crunched cluster of keys from out of the blue. “I get it,” said my friend, new to this kind music. “That’s Third Stream.”

Somewhat in the same vein, all eleven pieces on the “Mahler in Chinatown” program were tied to Mahler in such a way that on exiting Jordan Hall, Marcel Duchamps’s L.H.O.O.Q. came to mind. (L.H.O.O.Q. is one of the most well known spoofs on a high icon of art; Duchamps drew a moustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa and gave it a title not printable here, but readily available on another website.) Replacing the Mona Lisa with the music of Gustav Mahler, NEC collaborators continued the Conservatory’s festival, “Mahler Unleashed: 100 Years Later, His Time Is Now,” in a quasi-Dadaist mode.

Mahler’s music with a moustache?

Serving as the pillars of the intermission-less hour-and-half show, three of Mahler’s best known and most enjoyed songs from Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) were interspersed among the eleven pieces. Singing in English, jazz vocalists fuzzed “On Youth,” “On Beauty,” and “Drunk in Spring.” Conductor Charles Peltz and his chamber orchestra huddled in a rear corner of the stage in darkness; the music stands provided the only light. Barefooted and casually attired, the three soloists rekindled Mahler’s vocal lines, choosing cool jazz inflection carrying little vibrato. They also “danced,” near non-existent and naïve choreography disappointing to 21st-century expectations.  But Peltz and his chamber orchestra of NEC students handled Arnold Schoenberg’s arrangements to a T, casting over the hall a Mahler spell, admirably colorful and desirably expressive.

It was with a certain amount of apprehension that I anticipated a mustachioed Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, an all-time favorite of mine. The promised piano improvisation from a gum-chewing Jason Moran could hardly be heard. The harmony preceding the final reprise of that ever-so soulfully yearning melody took a “new” turn: the orchestra put a fermata over the chord and held on to it forever as though to recognize a piano cadenza that was not to be.

A trio of students and faculty billed its entry, “I’ll Be Seeing You…taken from Symphony No. 3, last movement.” Beginning and ending in silence, as so many current works are framed, the trio played the “ambiguous relationship between the symphony and the popular song. Mahler through a shattered 20th-century lens.” The soft and softer-still sounds over a short span may have hinted at more than the mi-re-re-do-ti-do that both compositions have in common for their opening moves. I very clearly heard these tones in the accordion, but instead of the notes being sounded linearly, they piled on top of each other — un objet trouvé in the middle of the unknown?

Faculty member Anthony Coleman led an ensemble of fourteen instruments who call themselves “Survivor’s Breakfast.” Together, Coleman and the performers “recomposed” the third movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony by reducing it to three obvious sections resulting in a low brow Klezmer simulation that degraded Mahler — but not like Duchamp — causing me to wonder what purpose lay behind it all.

Take Mahler out of Mahler. Do you still have Mahler? Are the sounds that faculty member Bruce Brubaker selectively extracted from the Ninth Symphony enough? While I did find shadows of darkness and lightness by turns, his minimalized piano quartet unsettlingly entitled Bruce Brubakers’s Mahler’s Ninth Symphony settled on too little rhythmic momentum. The student performance did not help, being strident too much of the time.

The “re-composition” of “St. Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn lent itself to some fun and a one-time journey that would be fairly entertaining. Vocals, mandolin, violin, cello, MIDI marimba, and percussion re-colored Mahler’s frisky song.

Setting the trajectory for “Mahler in Chinatown,” eight trombones situated in the balcony led off with an Ode to Joy that was far from just being mustachioed. A crescendo of indeterminate utterances would finally break open into brief but powerful strains of Beethoven’s easily recognizable harmonies. Following this, an accelerando of utterances mimicking each other put a Picabia goatee on a near faceless Beethoven. Then Ran Blake improvised Mahler noir. Focusing on harmony and different musical genres, he blurred them mostly through a hefty use of the damper pedal. Mahler noir made the most sense when imagined as a soundtrack for a Hollywood movie.

The immense stature of Gustav Mahler’s music only diminished the vast majority of the various re-compositions, deconstructions, and improvisations delivered by NEC students and faculty.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

All works on tonight’s program were performed by the “Harvard University ‘Hydra’ Speaker-Orchestra” with Elainie Lillios, playing her own work, and Hans Tutschku, taking the console for his piece along with those of Gilles Gobeil and Stephen David Beck.

Stumbling Dance, writes its composer Elainie Lillios, “imitates life’s occasionally tumultuous progress—starting, stopping, lurching forward, and tumbling backwards.” Superbly timed zaps with an undercurrent of finely registered shaking culminated with the realistic recreation of a marble rolling towards us, making for a tightly and attractively constructed opening. The use of three major crescendos to delineate her overall scheme further intensified Lillios’ music. While making some structural sense, these crescendos substantively relied on insufficient material, though the third and longest took on minimalist techniques that did have some real building power.

Composer Gilles Gobeil writes of his work, “With Ombres, espaces, silences… (Shadow, Spaces, Rests…) I wished to revisit early polyphonic music” and in “the History of Christianity’s fascinating phenomenon — the hermits, or ‘Desert Fathers’.” Through a good portion of this vast, surrealistic canvas, those butterflies we feel in our stomachs surged and subsided over long stretches of time. The distant human voices, first appearing as Gregorian chant and later as early Western polyphony, alternated with weird cries from shadowy creatures. Wind, thunder, rain, footsteps, and other referential material deepened an already profound mystical vision of a world beyond. Hans Tutschku’s deeply affecting performance also demonstrated the “Hydra’s” distinctive capabilities of sound diffusion. I wish Beck’s remarkably evocative work were not quite so long.

The shortest work on the program, Unhinged, by Stephen David Beck, pursues “the interior of sounds, that being the micro-fluctuations of waveforms, transients and noise…an old elevator door slamming shut” being the 5-second audio sample on which the entire piece is composed. Glissandos and crescendos of squeaking doors are far too commonplace in electroacoustic music, and machinegun-like reports aimed directly at my ear from the right side of the one-time sanctuary space came as an assault.

The twenty-one minute electroacoustic work, Zwei Räume (Two spaces) composed and performed by Hans Tutschku on his “Hydra” featuring three rings of eight loudspeakers (small, mid-size, and large), was a display nothing short of brilliant and brilliance—the concept of diffusion made ever-so clearly, convincingly, and creatively. Tininess, dryness, crispiness, leanness, and spaciousness splayed through the rings of loudspeakers in a transfixing continuum.

Imaginative solutions to centering the composition, such as with a soprano, chime or other timbre remaining stationary in frequency rather than in duration, also freed the highly varied sounds to move not only spatially (around the room), but temporally (musical movement). Inventor, composer, performer Tutschku received truly appreciative rounds of applause from a highly informed audience.

The Reception and Composition Competition Awards Ceremony followed in the Goethe-Institut Boston. The winners are first place, Andrew Babcock; second place, Martin Bédard and third place Adam Basanta.

The festival was made possible by the Goethe-Institut Boston, the Cultural Services of the French Consulate Boston, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and was supported by the Elysée Treaty Fund for Franco-German Cultural Events in Third Countries.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Harvard Professor Hans Tutschku, key festival organizer and composer, welcomed a larger audience on a comic note by reading one of the sentences from the last page of the Sound and Space brochure, which went something like this: “H ansT utschkuha sb eenwo rkinga sc ompositionp rofessor nd director oft hee…” The printing error, placing spaces in different places, seemed coincidental with the emphasis given space throughoutSound in Space Festival. I could not help but recall John Cage giving the Harvard Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 1988-89, in which the avant-garde composer randomized words of American writers, namely Thoreau. Tutschku made a crazy sentence sound as if it were some kind of new German dialect.

Then the “Harvard University ‘Hydra’ Speaker-Orchestra” was once in again in place when the lights went out in Fenway Center and the sounds began, this time with Finalist Concert2. Anagoge by Andres Babock, Villusions by Simone D’Ambrosio, and La Lechuga by Ana Dall’Ara-Majek, all began to sound much alike, generic electroacoustic compositions relying too much on similar sounds, but more especially obvious crescendos and diminuendos, harsh unsurprising slashes, groans and drones we’ve already heard, all too many times. Putting these three on the same program bore their generic quality out all the more. While I could admire their utter sincerity and seriousness of purpose and their evolving craft in a sphere into which too few dare to tread, much more discretion, fewer bombardments, and less insistence on what seems to be  “electroacoustic  tempo” would have helped to create lasting power and meaning. Anagoge had clarity going for it. Villusions had some nice timbres akin to bells and rain. La Lechuga was corny and altogether too loud — time for ear plugs.

About the finalists in the 2011 Sound and Space Electroacoustic Music competition open to students enrolled in North American universities:

Andrew Babcock, currently working towards his PhD in composition at the University of Florida in Gainesville, has worked in New York City as a composer and sound designer for television, radio and film. Hi words have been feature internationally and at festival such as Sonorities, ICMC, NYCEMF and SEAMUS.

Adam Basanta, composer and media artist, is currently an MA candidate at Concordia University. His work has been presented at concerts, conferences and festivals in North and South America, Europe, Asia and the UK. He has been awarded a SOCAN prize three times, the Metamorphoses Acousmatic Biennale, 2010, Belgium, VII International Contest of Elctoracoustic Minatures 2009, Spain.

Martin Bédard is currently a lecture and a PhD student in electroacoustic composition at Université de Montréal. He also teaches at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal. His works have been presented in more than fifty national and international events and festivals, and he is winner or finalist of eleven international competitions, including “Award of Distinction” from Ars Electronica 2010.

Simone D’Ambrosio, born in Prato, Italy, is currently pursuing electroacoustic composition at Université de Montréal. In 2008, he completed an experimental course in music and new technologies at the Conservatory of Florence, “L. Cherubini.” A drummer, his music explores various styles from the Florentine scene to pure rock, to electronic grooves.

Ana Dall’Ara-Majek, harpist and composer, studied in France at Pantin’s Conservatory and University of Paris VIII and currently is studying composition “mixte” at Université de Montréal (Maîtrise and Doctorate) and was awarded the Sacern national scholarship in France. She is co-founder of the KM Pantin in France, association she leads to promote electroacoustic creations.

Chester Udell is a candidate for the PhD at the University of Florida in music composition. His outside studies are in electrical engineering. Honors include first prize in SEAMUS/ASCAP student commission competition and nominee for the Prix Destellos. His music can be heard on the SEAMUS and Summit labels.

The winner will be announced Saturday night at a reception at the Goethe-Institut Boston.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

He began by saying, since “everything was covered in Thursday’s workshop” led by Hans Tutschku, and so he had been wondering what to do for his presentation. He decided on a recounting of the history of the electronic movement that began in the twentieth century. But there was more to his recalling the milestones beginning with Pierre Henri in Paris and Musique Concrète in the 1940s. Interjecting his philosophical bent, his own experience with perception, and his ruminations on the subject, Teruggi allowed us a glimpse into his world of music-making.

“Monophony,” he said, “did not exist until stereophony came along,” meaning composers such as Pierre Henri were already working with space. He pointed out three uses of space: “space within the sound, around the sound, and imaginary space.” He went on to express his belief that “Monophony will always capture space” despite the growing understanding of stereo as being the “mirror of our ears.”

In the ‘60s came four-track and in the ‘90s, eight-track with small machines. “That’s one story. Next story, performance.” With this music’s popularity growing in the ‘70s, bigger halls were needed for the audiences which, in turn, demanded more that the two speakers producing stereophony. He noted that the front (the stage area) of concert halls being resonant and the back being dry compromised performances of electroacoustic music. “Boom-boom-boom-boom-tic-tic-tic-tic,” he shot off vocally, illustrating the effect in exaggerated fashion.

With these big spaces needing multiple sound sources, there evolved an array of small- to large-sized loudspeakers, the objective being to imitate the symphonic orchestra. This is when the concept “performance” entered the world of electrically produced sound.

“Performance enhances the composition.” Unlike a piano performance, for example, coming from the “front” of a space, multi-sourced sounds coming from all possible directions — front, back, laterally, diagonally and so on — are dramatically affected by the size and other features of a given space. Such compromises are addressed through performance, particularly the placement of loudspeakers and employment of “faders” controlled by the performer. Recall that faders allow expression, articulation and projection of sound.

Where Tutschku understands the movement of sound through multi-sources as diffusion, Teruggi argues for projection. Whether it be diffusion or projection, adaptation lies at the root of electroacoustic performance. In addition, “spectral adjustments of the various speakers,” Teruggi says, can generate “big soloists and small soloists.”

Teruggi also spoke about perception, how we are in the present while simultaneously in the past and future. As I recall, this mindset would come from French philosopher Henri Bergson. With unfamiliar sounds comes a shorter present-past-future, and that is one reason listeners wind up with “I don’t get it, I don’t like it.” Reference, Teruggi reminded us, playing the huge role it does in our recognition and understanding, also factors into creating and performing electroacoustic music.

Cutting edge composer Teruggi’s ruminations on today’s consumer society, inferior quality of MP3s, and decline of interest in concert music surprised me for their being so old-fashioned in substance as well as in argument.

Had the two-hour-plus lecture, I thought, been modeled on Tutschku’s master class with the lesser experienced student competition finalists working in tandem with experienced composers, a lot more could have been gleaned about the art of electroacoustic interpretation. For some fifteen or so minutes Teruggi did perform some passages from his own powerful and affective compositions for the purpose of illustrating diffusion — or projection— as Daniel Teruggi would have it.

Final leg of the Festival:
Saturday, November 19, 2011
4:00 PM    Panel Discussion with invited composers
6:00 PM    Curated concert of important electroacoustic works from North America
7:30 PM    Bus to Goethe-Institut Boston, 170 Beacon Street, Boston
8:00 PM    Reception and Composition Competition Awards Ceremony in Goethe-Institut

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

This was not the case some fifty years later. It was another matter altogether with the “Harvard University ‘Hydra’ Speaker-Orchestra” comprising at least three rings of eight speakers (large, midsize and small) “specially placed and adjusted to fit the space [where] a new and live dramatic spatial sound choreography can be interpreted.”

When the lights went out in Fenway Center the sounds began. Concertino for Twisted Metal, composed by one of the six finalists of the Sound in Space competition, Chester Udell, featured “an ensemble of samples I had recorded from Tokyo’s famous Tsukji fish market and an ‘acousmatic soloist,’ comprised of scraping twisted metal scraps on resonant surfaces.” Udell maneuvered faders on the console to move the metallic Concertino away from “the front,” or traditional focus of listening, by engaging various rings of speakers to voice his ensemble of samples with the result that this “diffusion” enveloped the audience.

“The sound of a common wine glass encapsulates both its banal everyday use as well as the inherent musicality of everyday objects” figures in A glass is not a glass by finalist Adam Basanta. Single objects tinkled and crackled left and right, forward and back. As with Udell’s Concertino, Basanta’s A glass … developed musical structures hearkening originally from the environment. Sectioned areas and climaxes further tied this electroacoustic music to more traditional means of creating continuity, resulting in an electrochemistry of the new and old (though perhaps still not enough of the old references, if you will), that helped me find my way through most of these pieces.

Champs de foilles by another competition finalist, Martin Bédard, a commissioned work for the Quebec City 400^th anniversary celebrations, “is an homage to the history and unique character of Quebec City” where listeners “will recognize themselves in the work and be able to identify with it.” No single objects here, but immense masses and multi-layered textures swept around the room filling—fulfilling—Hans Tutshcku’s master class observation: this piece with “distinct sections and no silence definitely calls for diffusion.” At the console, Bédard performed his piece, diffusing the sounds both laterally and from front to back. I also noted that the greatest amplitude coming especially as climaxes did, in fact, also follow the expert guidance from Hans Tutschku in the earlier master class: the notion of what decibel level amplified music should not exceed. For Tutschku, “Activities have certain plausible energies. I am not a fan of a big, loud thing coming out of nowhere. I am not a big fan of wearing ear plugs — I don’t wear sunglasses to the movies.” Champs de foilles impressed by its striking power in both the acoustical and emotional realms. I was reminded of soundtracks from today’s action movies. Such a reference was helpful to me in connecting with the piece.

At the urging of Harvard Professor and composer Hans Tutschku, a key organizer of the festival, the composers drew graphs of their pieces for the purpose of achieving the most effective diffusion of their compositions. With a graph (there are as yet, we are told, no standardized ways of notating electroacoustic music) composers can practice interpreting their pieces employing the Hydra Speaker-Orchestra just as pianists would practice a Chopin piano piece, and that is through expression. In the electroacoustic world, space (diffusion) and amplitude are the means toward that end.

There’s another round of three finalists on Friday night’s program. It will be interesting to hear their three pieces and then see to whom the judges award First Prize.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

While it might not have been the most entertaining time, it certainly was one of the most interesting if not illuminating — even surprising — times that I can recall ever listening to loudspeakers making music. They did that, and more. This was not a “workshop,” I thought as I listened, but a master class. For nearly two hours, Harvard University Professor Hans Tutschku guided three young budding composers through their compositions working not at a piano with its keys, as Lang Lang did several weeks ago at Sanders Theatre, but at a console with its numerous faders.

Over the past year, Sound in Space held a competition for composers enrolled in U. S. institutions; it drew some forty-five submissions. The six finalists, three from the University of Montreal, two from the University of Florida, and one from Concordia University, were given this opportunity to participate in workshops and to present — perform — their music in concert..

Thursday afternoon, three of these finalists, Chester Udell, Adam Basanta, and Martin Bédard, alternately sat at the console placed in the center of a space that was formerly the sanctuary of a church. As with Lang Lang’s master class, Tutschku would take to the console to demonstrate how, by his moving its many faders, he could interpret a finalist’s composition. Akin to a conductor, Tutschku directed “carloads” of speakers set up all about the space. This he called his “orchestra.”

In existence for six years, the “Harvard University ‘Hydra’ Speaker-Orchestra” has already attained international prominence through its presence in concerts, especially abroad, Germany and France in particular. However, this speaker orchestra and its performance capabilities remains new to U.S. audiences. “With a large number of speakers (at least 32-40) specially placed and adjusted to fit the space, a new and live dramatic spatial sound choreography can be interpreted for each concert hall.” It becomes clearer that Sound and Space’s festival of electroacoustic music “places its main emphasis on the question of interpretation.”

Believe it or not, what held true for the superstar Lang Lang at his piano master class seemed to be not all that different at Tutschku’s so-called “workshop.” Expecting to be confused over one technological matter after another or one philosophical and esthetic dogma after another, I was surprised to find quite the opposite: a masterful and completely understandable demonstration given by composer and Harvard Professor Tutschku. Truly, it was a master class in interpretation that was unbelievably instructive and fascinating all at once. We learned through our ears!

There is another master class scheduled for 4:00, Friday, November 18 in the same new space, 77 St. Stephen Street in Boston. If you are not at work — or if you can escape for a few hours — I urge you to attend. Anyone who is the least bit curious about how a console with a host of faders and some thirty-two loudspeakers can make music will find answers that will illuminate, if not surprise — a welcome surprise. Attending any part of this festival, I predict, will further illustrate how the distance between this way of making music today and the traditional ways of making music over centuries will prove to be narrower than one would at first imagine.

Here is the remaining schedule:
Friday, November 18, 2011
4:00 PM Interpretation Workshop 2
7:30 PM Competition Finalists Concert 2
9:00 PM Portrait Concert – Ludger Brümmer

Saturday, November 19, 2011
4:00 PM Panel Discussion with invited composers
6:00 PM Curated concert of important electroacoustic works from North America
7:30 PM Bus to Goethe-Institut Boston, 170 Beacon Street, Boston
8:00 PM Reception and Composition Competition Awards Ceremony in Goethe-Institut

The festival is made possible by the Goethe-Institut Boston, the Cultural Services of the French Consulate Boston, Harvard University, and Northeastern University and is supported by the Elysée Treaty Fund for Franco-German Cultural Events in Third Countries.

Frederico Cortese, conductor of the Boston Youth Symphony, bounded onto the stage looking a bit overawed and bowed to his unusual audience. No sooner had he turned to his orchestra and raised his arms to give the signal to start, when, suddenly, came a shout from somewhere in the hall, “Maestro, I’m late, don’t start yet. I got stuck on the M-B-T-A!” A bearded Cossack in full gear charged the stage and, sizing up Cortese’s tuxedo with tails, exclaimed in a big, bold voice with a quirky kind of Russian accent, “You look very handsome. You look like a penguin. You should be in Happy Feet!”

Next, he asked all of us in the audience which instrument in the orchestra would most sound like a bird. Before we could answer, he pointed to the double bass which played four very low lumbering notes. The young audience laughed chanting, “No!” And when it came to choosing the right sound for the wolf, more preschoolers and elementary students than could be believed called back with, “French Horn!” When each character had been assigned its musical instrument for Sergei Prokoviev’s musical tale for children, he asked, “Are you ready?” A resounding “Yes!” of treble voices filled the hall.

Stephen Lang, the narrator (the Cossack), is well-known through a long record of successes and awards, starring as Colonel Miles Quaritch in Cameron’s Avatar and, most recently, as Commander Nathaniel Taylor in FOX’s adventure drama series Terra Nova. Between his own natural deep and resonant bass voice used for the narrative sections of the production and his endearing posturing as the Russian, he captured every bit of the excitement and drama of Peter and the Wolf. But more than that, Lang made the afternoon completely entertaining — fun, if you will.

When the wolf appeared at the edge of the forest with its yellow eyes and teeth, Lang ad-libbed, “And if you don’t brush your teeth, they will be yellow, too.” Then, in another moment, he had us all howling away like a wolf. When the wolf swallowed the duck whole, one youngster in the balcony voiced a “Yuk!” her father replying, “Duck dinner.”  Never once would Stephen Lang let go of the audience, finding one way or another to draw us in to a story with music dating back to 1938.

His description of the Boston Youth Symphony and Frederic Cortese: “Magnificent!”

Cortese took slower tempos than most conductors, Peter’s theme sounding on a more easygoing than happy-go-lucky note. The soloists depicted their characters with a refined touch. The wolf, though, stood out in unparalleled ferociousness through the three horns first growling on low softer harmonies then howling with jarring crescendos one after the other. The orchestra impressed soundly.

“Did you enjoy that?” he said. Another “Yes!” even bigger than before came from the young listeners. “Play a wild and crazy dance for three minutes. I want to mingle for three minutes.” Concurring, Cortese thrust a larger Boston Youth Symphony into the fiercely wild, extremely intense close of Béla Bartók’s ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin. Meanwhile, row after row, the Cossack shook hands with the children and their parents.

Back on stage with three youngsters, one held in his arms, the other two being led hand-in-hand, the Cossack had Cortese turn over the baton. A boy and girl each took turns at conducting the high-speed, high-volume Miraculous Mandarin music — under the conductor’s expert guidance. “ONE, TWO,” he roared, and off they went. Everybody loved it! The boy bowed and the girl curtsied recognizing the limitless enthusiasm of the Saturday afternoon crowd yelling out bravos, screaming, clapping their hands, and stomping their feet.

Together, the BSO and the BYS “are committed to fostering the future of classical music. The goal of this dynamic and interactive series is to serve younger generations of classical music listeners by performing children-friendly concerts that engage, entice, and educate young audience members.”

That surely did happen. After the concert, I was introduced to Alex of elementary school age. I asked what he had thought of the afternoon.

“Great!” he replied. And what part did he like the most? “All of it,” he beamed.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Two Andantes entitled Dedication to Franz Liszt, composed in 1998 by a fellow Ukrainian and contemporary of Suk, Valentin Silvestrov, allowed for a short respite from the real world of Liszt through Suk’s ultra-faint, minimalist misting. (Sylvestrov has said, “I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists.”)

In the four programmed pieces of Franz Liszt, Suk celebrated each with his own observably unbounded dedication. In the end, though, more about the pianist, himself, became known than did the psychological, literary and musical quest of Liszt’s compositions themselves. Controlled abandon and deliberate phrasing were some of the means to which the pianist turned. One might believe that such an approach as this might be the perfect antidote for iciness and edginess in the darker side of the Hungarian Romantic pianist-composer’s music. Interestingly, Suk’s pedaling injected a warm and rounded tone.

“Funérailles” from the Harmonies Poétiques et Réligieuses began the evening’s homage in striking fashion, the opening bass register tolling of bells followed by well-directed dirges, both pointedly metrical. The forming, then dissolving dance references in Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in c-sharp minor also stood out as welcome as sunshine briefly peeking through a cloud-filled sky.

As to the taking and giving back of time —rubato— that is fundamental to the style, if not an integral interpretative means of that era, Suk seems to have worked out a plan for guiding the ebb and flow of melody as a foreseeable, calculable experience. In the Thalberg Fantaisie, Suk’s right hand lagged a tad behind the left, allowing the melody to float above the accompanying bass notes and chords. Soon, the unwavering lag could not stand the test of time, revealing itself as a tool, rather than as a natural expressiveness or sense of the free and spontaneous. Impetuousness, though, Suk conveyed often; scale work and arpeggios alike whizzed by the ear so fast that the very meaning of the music changed, if not evolved, into blurriness.

High register bells, softer arpeggios and extended harmonies of “Les cloches de Genève” from the Années de pèlerinage, the ninth piece from the first suite (Switzerland), resounded in a loveliness of ringing. As with the rest of the program, in the “Fantasia quasi Sonata: Après une lecture du Dante” from the Années de pèlerinage, second book (Italy), there were sudden, sometimes searing shifts to surprise. In contrast, there were booming, roaring surfaces spun out to overwhelm. Tenderness appeared, as well, but no dreaming.

As I said in the beginning of this review, I was chiefly aware of Suk as a pianist in possession of extensive piano technique, unlimited power and, apparently, extraordinary endurance. The eighteen-minute Dante sonata is formidable in its demands. Mykola Suk’s undeniable piano passion filled Seully Hall — he could hardly wait for the applause to end so that he could sit down at the keyboard and begin playing immediately, without a breath or a moment of thought. Hell and heaven, terror, dread, strange cries and the rest of the tone poem of Liszt shadowed the Hall more symbolically than realistically.

Two encores of Liszt works ended the homage :  Transcendental Etude no. 10 in f minor and Hungarian Rhapsody no. 3.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Pianist Lang Lang took one curtain call after another at Symphony Hall to tremendous applause and adulation on Sunday afternoon, October 30. After the final piece on the program, three young admirers walked down center aisle to present the piano star with bouquets of colorful flowers. As he headed for the wings, Lang Lang placed one of the bouquets on the piano and applauded it. Was it for that little toy dog that he won as consolation prize when he was seven, the dog he kept on his piano, first hating it, then coming to love it after days upon days of practicing? The 29-year-old concert pianist told this story at a master class at Sanders Theatre the day before, in answer to a question about the facing failure in his life.

Instructive and entertaining, the master class was unbeatable, one of the most awe-inspiring experiences discovering so many secrets of piano performance in but just one afternoon.  Remember the Young People’s Concerts with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic? Saturday’s session was at the very least equal to any one of those fabulously engrossing encounters witnessed decades ago, before TV. See my BMInt report here.

After this weekend of Lang Lang, how many more voices will continue to be added to an already enthusiastic chorus of admirers of this pianist extraordinaire, now very probably numbering in the millions? In his introduction, President Gary Dunning of The Celebrity Series of Boston, which put on this concert, noted, “He’s not a stranger to Boston — if he’s a stranger to anyone.” (Lang Lang’s appearance was sponsored by Eleanor and Frank Pao.)

Even past three-o’clock, fans were still taking their seats, so it was not altogether quiet for the start of the Praeludium from J. S. Bach’s Partita No.1 in B-flat Major BWV 825. Nor did it really quiet down throughout the Bach, making it a bit difficult to get wrapped up in Lang Lang’s individualistic performance. I was not truly able to succumb to his playing until the third movement, Corrente, and that was still somewhat problematic, with a seaside-like whoosh of shuffling, adjusting, coughing, and the like beginning to subside all about the hall.

In the early movements, especially in the Praeludium, all too obvious, even intrusive, deliveries of contrapuntal imitations disrupted flow ringing out, as if to quiet down that Symphony Hall surf sound. However, in both Minuets I and II and the Gigue, the last movements, it seemed to me that Lang Lang, himself, settled in. The Gigue in particular, under his fingers, fanned out into a crescendo and decrescendo during the first section. The shape was unusual, spare, brilliant. No more was needed.

The first movement of the Schubert Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960 lasted twenty minutes and also showed a penchant for the obvious. But in the slow movement, Andante sostenuto, Lang Lang drew upon remarkably hushed pianism springing a haunting remoteness, a Romantic prolongation of introspection, rumination that strangely transported. The outer sections were intense, not for their fierceness, but like the white heat of burning coals: they don’t look hot, but don’t dare touch them! The final movements of the Schubert found clear articulation, if not a bit of an overreach.

After intermission, Lang Lang’s playing of the Chopin 12 Etudes Op. 25 astounded. What he said about rubato in Saturday’s master class — “when you take time away you must give it back” — became a virtuosic maze of centering under his extraordinary hands. Fierceness and tenderness and pianistic action figured in on an astonishing multitude of levels. Power and delicacy probably reached at least quadruple forte and quadruple piano. Incomparable!

And there was more: two Liszt encores, a suave and ear-melting Romance in e minor and a virtuosic beast of a blockbuster, La Campanella, over which the audience went wild.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Three Harvard students, all prize-winners in a range of competitions, all mostly receptive to Lang Lang, took the stage to perform. Afterwards, the audience was invited to ask questions. Did anything change? Were there lessons learned? You bet! Transformations of all kinds in the performances could be as clearly heard as they were fully appreciated by all throughout the hall. First, Lang Lang sat behind a music stand following the score. He then talked, conducted, gestured, sang, tapped out accents with his foot, traded seats with the Harvard pianists to play a passage — all this with remarkable candidness and boundless enthusiasm. Everything from emotion and expression to breathing, relaxing, phrasing, and fingering came into play. He had us learning and laughing.

First up was pianist Tania Rivers-Moore ’15 with Beethoven’s Sonata in E major, Op.109, first and second movements. “Wonderful touch,” he said, “for Beethoven, more tension is needed … more darkness … the struggling sound. … Like at home, do you have a good bass system? Then they worked on re-sounding bass notes together.

Second up was George Xiaoyuan Fu ’13 with Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7 in B flat, Op 83, second and third movements. During his playing, Lang Lang put a thumb up, and with a big smile, mouthed the words “He’s good!”  After the fast last treacherous movement, Precipitato, came “That was amazing! Wow! I played this last year. What’s your major?” Fu answered, “Economics,” to which Lang responded, “How did that happen? . . .“You might want to start this movement a bit slower so that when you come to the last pages with the intense rhythms, ‘Hip-hop classical,’ you can go faster to make a spectacular close.”

Third up was Allen Yueh ’13, majoring in Applied Mathmatics, with Liszt’s Sonata in b minor, S. 178. During his performance, the Master Pianist commented, “You know, next week is Halloween, … and this piece has a lot to do with it. You have a lot of good ideas, but some of these don’t work.” He related the story of how Sviatoslav Richter would make the opening two notes as scary as could be, “walk slowly onstage…take only a slight bow…sit down at the piano for thirty seconds, and all this will get the audience wondering about what’s going on. … Then, you play the first two octaves and they will be as scary as you will ever imagine.”

Q & A. followed:

Member of audience: Who are your favorite composers and do you, yourself, compose?

Lang Lang: Bach to Bartok…I don’t compose but I can create a ringtone.

How does synergy play out, given you are Chinese and the music you play requires a very different kind and amount of energy?

Music is a language…there are different languages…different cultures…you must understand the culture to play the music. I am always learning and will never learn it all in my lifetime.

What was your biggest failure and how did find inspiration to go on?

When I was seven, I finished third, receiving the consolation prize in a competition, which was a dog. Not a real one, a toy. I hated that dog, because the word ‘consolation’ was right there on it. But then, I began putting the toy dog on my piano, practicing away every day with it in sight, liking it more day by day.

The Celebrity Series of Boston will present Lang Lang at Symphony Hall, Boston on Sunday, October 30, 3 pm, in a concert sponsored by Eleanor and Frank Pao.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Composer Patrick Greene was on hand to introduce his piece, his setting of the poem Ferncliff by Hugh Ogden. Greene’s setting , he told us, was a thoughtful salute to the poet and professor with whom he studied during a semester at Trinity College. What was presented on the program was “an excerpted piano reduction of a much larger work for full choir and orchestra commissioned by the Trinity College Department of Music.”

The poem begins “When I was young I knew an older woman” and continues, relating memories, as did the five-minute excerpt performed by soprano Erin Merceruio and pianist Nicholas Place. Here, certainly displayed with true musicality, were the young composer’s memories of melodic narrative and dramatic feel. If too much vibrato interfered with Merceruio’s diction, Place’s piano caught the composer’s stylistic reminiscences to a tee.

Joseph M. Colombo’s Angles and Axes, scored for horn and viola, ventured out with long and sustained tones blown against graph-like glissandi and higher velocity motives bowed with full thrust. The composer wrote, “Both movements deal with music through the concepts of gesture and the build up [sic] and release of energy.” I would urge Colombo, currently pursuing a Master’s [sic] degree at the San Francisco Conservatory, to put aside shop talk and perhaps check on details in his description of his work.

Megan Riccio, horn, and Deborah Apple, viola, gestured, built up, and released energy convincingly while at the same time becoming the center of attention, so engaged and vibrant—sometimes brightly, sometimes darkly—was their playing. Amidst the perpetual and other forms of motion generated by Colombo, silence also came into play, and when it did, there could be heard the ubiquitous mechanical, 60-cycle hum imposed upon the otherwise impressive new performance space at the conservatory.

An incomplete performance of Violin Sonata No. 1 by Matthew Barnson was next on the intermission-less, one-hour concert. Due to challenging speeds and techniques, one of the movements (sections?) was omitted. Moments of originality surfaced in the slower tempos through textural and timbral ideas. The 32-year-old composer and string player lists a considerable number of awards and honors as well as composition teachers, among them, Christopher Rouse and Augusta Read Thomas.

The opening of the sonata lifted upward through welcome lightness and atmosphere. Kenneth Siu-hang Mok and Joseph Turbessi on violin and piano respectively very nicely colorized an already appealing score. Later, though, the violin’s tuning and bowing affected Barnson’s discerning writing. Program notes about the composition’s movements or sections would have helped. As the reader can see, I have been vague when it comes to such.

In introducing his music, In Absentia, Andrew Paul Jackson gave a warm welcome, calling the fifty or so of us in the audience, “Friends.” We sat in several long rows of seats that took up no more than a fourth of the spacious high-ceilinged room leaving the performers in an island-like “surround-space” the likes of which I have never quite experienced before.

This situation, though, would be modified as an ensemble of six instrumentalists and one vocalist assembled before its conductor, Matt Sharrock (a graduate of Boston Conservatory in percussion.) A big blast issued forth from the horn quite often with the guitar occasionally peeking through the traditional instrumentation, producing a maze of sound that at times interacted with and at other times backed soprano Merceruio. Everyone in the ensemble dedicated themselves to Jackson’s setting of the poem, “To My Widow, On Her 90^th Birthday” by Gretl Satorius: Emily Wilson, flute, Amy Gollins, oboe, Megan Riccio, horn, Andy Hanson-Dvoracek, guitar, Deborah Apple, viola, and Nicholas Place, piano.

All in all, the event was a short, welcoming, friendly, and youthful work-in-progress.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

It very could well have been called a hero’s welcome. It was obvious that the BCMS audience immediately recognized his total engagement in performing one of Schumann’s favorite chamber pieces, Fantasiestücke, Opus 73. Under his astute purview, these three fantasy movements achieved unexpected depth, not in a dream-like way but rather by way of remarkable understanding. Phrase by phrase, Hakhnazaryan moved forward in a thoroughly tangible, clean interpretation with an understanding born of a distinct youthfulness in the music with which this young cellist identified in a most “direct” manner. In Lebhaft, leicht (lively, light), as the second movement is marked, Hakhnazaryan zipped, never looking back, always looking forward, maybe a moment here or there to reflect. Surely from my vantage point he never once flirted with Romantic daydreaming. His sound had degrees of richness, fineness, muteness and flair—the complete bundle! In this heroic show Narek was abetted, supported and partnered by the attentive and dramatic playing of pianist Mihae Lee. Celebrating her birthday last night, Mihae contributed her experience of many performances of the Schumann with BCMS founder, Ron Thomas.

Violinist Jennifer Frautschi, Hakhnazaryan, and pianist Mihae Lee had teamed up for Mozart’s Piano Trio in B-flat major, K. 502 to open the program for Boston Chamber Music Society’s twenty-ninth consecutive season. Their impeccable playing of the trio, though, could not conceal a certain flatness in expression.

Roger Tapping’s viola was another highlight of the program. A most natural singing overlaid a concentration on syntax—an “I have arrived” feeling coupled with a sense of “I get it.” His is an enlightening musicality. He figured prominently in Four Poems for Mezzo, Viola, and Piano, Op. 15 (1905) by the American composer Charles Loeffler. Though a bit too slow and spacious, Loeffler’s songs on French poems nevertheless show deep affection for French Impressionist harmonies. An American contemporary of Loeffler also influenced by French Impressionism was Charles Griffes, who was keen enough to remove a good deal of the perfumery that Loeffler delighted in.

Featured in the Four Poems, guest mezzo-soprano Krista River summoned timbres matching those of Tapping’s viola. It was a pure sonic treat. Perhaps the steady quarter-note rhythms of Loeffler’s composition were in fact the underlying cause for the single-note emphasis that dominated much of River’s singing. As a result, melodic shaping laden with such note-by-note accenting was questionable.

Yet another performer who caught my ear was violinist Ida Levin who, like Tapping, instinctively found deep personal connotations in Sophia Gubaidulina’s youthful Piano Quintet of 1957. Levin, along with Tapping and Hakhnazaryan, fired up the BCSM quintet in a rip-roaring performance. Disparate attitudes as to the enunciation and influences of the Russian score surfaced; I detected shades of Prokofiev in her 30-minute work. Yet, where Prokofiev’s mind is quicksilver, Gubaidulina’s early quintet played on extended textures—if at times naively so, this to be expected.

Hats off to Boston Chamber Music Society on its 29^th consecutive season!

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Yo Yo Ma with guest conductor Juanjo Mena (Stu-Rosner photo)

The talk in the lobbies during intermission at Symphony Hall Thursday, October 13, was all about a full house that spontaneously rose to its collective feet with an unbridled show of enthusiasm and appreciation. When, someone asked, was the last time that ever happened? Together, Yo-Yo Ma, Juanjo Mena and the Boston Symphony Orchestra rocketed the packed hall toward musical planets beyond most musical telescopes through the power of Dvorák’s remarkably astonishing Cello Concerto in B minor. Ecstatic might be the best way to convey the charged ovation from the sea of standing music lovers.

The 45-minute concerto was the complete focus of the opening half of this singular concert. No overtures or other shorter works prefaced the Dvorák as is usually the case with concerto programming. It is hard to believe that the Czech composer wrote his cello masterpiece in only a few months, for it is a magnificent vehicle of expression containing just about every technique that could challenge (velocity, myriad positions on the fingerboard, quadruple stops) and more (lyrical lines, memorable themes, juxtaposition of temperaments). The discovery—if not re-discovery—of this work was also a topic at intermission. It was as if Dvorák and Ma were destined to complement each other. Yo-Yo Ma possesses incomparable technique, at once natural and insightful, through which his generous gifts expose a beauty of the rarest kind. Ma deferred to Mena with Mena in turn deferring to Ma, both then seizing opportunities to defer to the orchestra.

Ma’s singing sound went straight to the heart when, head back, eyes closed, body tilted, he brought vividly to life the concerto’s outwardly simple yet inwardly potent melodies. In the tenderest of moments, orchestra soloists, conductor Mena, and cellist Ma would delicately suspend time through a rallentando, then come back together precisely on the beat. The uncanny communication necessary to pull this off so poignantly had the full house holding its collective breath.

As in the first half of the program, just one composition, Bartók’s The Wooden Prince, took up the hour after intermission. Many of Bartók’s compositions are commonly known, but not this one-act ballet, first performed in 1917. According to the BSO concert booklet “the first performance in the United States of any music from The Wooden Prince may have been the performance of October 25, 1968, when Eugene Ormandy led the Philadelphia Orchestra in a seventeen-minute suite from the full score. These are the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances.”

It took some time to become immersed in the oddly maniacal, often strangely comical ballet about a prince falling in love. Cheers were slow to come, but then sure and steady following an utterly stunning performance from the orchestra under guest conductor Juanjo Mena who, at the behest of the enthralled concert-goers, summoned individual instrumentalists to stand. Wiping sweat from his brow, Mena himself took one final bow with a gesture that said “whew, I’m whipped!”

Dramatic tempo shifts contrasting with subtle rubato; ribbons of black notes, like centipedes in the written score, moving at nearly the speed of light; atmospheric textures and Hungarian-influenced dance rhythms; massive blocks of color and sound and bare single tones; all sorts of things inhabit the score—a nightmare in a worst-case scenario, a mind-blowing trip in a best-case scenario. Mena and the BSO deserve unreserved praise for pulling off a thrilling feat of orchestral mania.

In his first concert directing the BSO, Mena may very well have been much more than the proverbial dark horse in this season’s showcase of conductors as they search for someone to assume the helm. The Spaniard’s sheer physical size, coupled with his altogether alluring podium presence, did not escape the Thursday evening multitude. (At one point in his conducting did I see Mena assume a quasi-Flamenco pose?)

This concert brings good news to the many critics of BSO programming. The same program, not to be missed, will be repeated on Friday afternoon, Saturday and Tuesday evenings.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Following its tradition, BP chose to present the popular—Jean Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D—and the lesser known—Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4, “The Inextinguishable.” This same concert will be repeated Saturday at Jordan Hall then again at Sanders Theater Sunday. It would be interesting to compare performances at the two different venues, for one reason in particular, to see just how the higher decibel and densely textured passages heard in the Nielson would come across.

BP’s glossy booklet is yet another fine touch. Program annotator Pamela Feo has it right about Sibelius capturing “a quintessentially Finnish sound” writing “he believed strongly in depicting the essence of a cultural sound rather than using direct quotations of folk music elements,” or in the composer’s words which she quotes, making “music less realistically but more truthfully.”

The Swan of Tuonela opened the program on an extinguishable note, as it were, with the central figure, the swan, doomed to death. The swan as depicted on the English horn played by Peggy Pearson veered from the elegiac to a somewhat more personal tone.  For the oft- repeated ascending cello line, Rafael Popper-Keizer emphasized the stable, resting tones, rather than those having tension and wanting to climb to tug on heartstrings (he did do this, the latter, once). Overall, soloists and strings of the Philharmonic induced observable atmosphere and elegy.

But no wonder conductor Zander wanted Ilya Kaler to return for a second straight season. The Russian-born violinist took hold of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and never let go, running with it in an exciting, deeply moving and oftentimes breathtakingly brilliant stance. As Zander pointed out in his brief introduction—Zander’s “pep talks,” as I think of them, this one unusually short (and for me all the more effective) — “there is purpose in every note he plays.”

How true! To see is to hear. Kaler engaged us visually almost entirely through the movements of his bowing arm which became kind of a pipe or cable channeling information to a machine which, in turn, emitted music of a very, very  high order. BP’s accompaniment steered clear of covering his playing. Livelier passages particularly excelled though details that make or break slow movements did neither in the Canzonetta, Andante. Certain winds could have given more shape to musical strands, but BP’s accelerando to the violin cadenza in the first movement, Allegro moderato, was a hair-raiser. Shortly into his solo there came a beautiful harmonic high whistle followed by a rest, at which time, Kaler glanced out at the audience inviting us into his world, so to speak. Chuckles were heard. He then continued.

Between first and second movements came applause with some audience members actually coming to their feet as a result of Zander’s earlier encouragement. What should one make of that?

Keys were the center of attention for Zander’s 20-minute-plus introduction to the Nielson symphony. Viewing the score I would have to say that the opening is not in two keys as Zander explained it—to fuss over a minor detail. The music does not sound bi-tonal for one, and for another, the lower C actually belongs in very traditional ways to the D harmony above it. All the tones constitute a single chord functioning in a single key.

In the orchestra’s tour-de-force, Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4, “The Inextinguishable,” two sets of tympani battled away from either side of the Sanders stage. Both concluded with shots that may have exceeded the score’s triple forte marking. These were deafening shots with the orchestra peering through the smoke!

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Orchestral brilliance did indeed mark the Thursday evening concert on October 6^th with three pieces upsizing post-classical proportions, one from 1902, another from 1921 and the latest from 1945. It was the 1921 Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 that came across as the most up-to-date. The Russian composer’s populated score recognizes a shift from landscapes and seascapes to expressiveness more akin to, say, a Fritz Lang Metropolis. The Frenchman, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, injected a pristine Ravel-like splendorous plane over the concerto. Seeming to adopt metrical structures in Boulezian arresting meticulousness at breakneck speed, Bavouzet’s Prokofiev was nothing short of an electric extravaganza. Spontaneous Hurrahs! counterpointing the applause in Symphony Hall provided more than ample proof.

Describing a single detail emblematic of his “modernized” delivery of the concerto may shed some light. Just before the close of the second movement, Theme (Andantino) and Variations, comes a dissonant harmony that unravels smoothly, logically to its consonant destination. Rather than concentrating on unraveling the progression, Bavouze instead seized upon the dissonance, making it the very point, and causing in that very instant an unexpected reaction—another one of many volts that electrified. The charged Boston Symphony Orchestra itself was no less his equal, perfectly illuminating the popular piano concerto in brightness and braininess.

The ever-so-familiar 1902 Symphony No. 2 in D, Opus 43 of Jan Sibelius at once beholds dramatically a scenic countryside and outspokenly identifies Finland’s national pride.  The newly appointed Assistant Conductor, Sean Newhouse, along with the BSO orchestra of Romantic era size, showed an unquestionable presence throughout the expansive symphonic statement from an obviously enthused and motivated Finn. Unlike the Prokofiev on the program, the Sibelius could only yield somewhat to updating, something which Newhouse and the entire orchestral cast naturally wrestled from the century-old work and that to magnificent, cinemascope result: the thrill of brilliant brass, the nobility of rich strings, the allure of vibrant winds, and spectacle of dramatic percussion.

These two performances on the same program created an unusual pair of listening situations. In the Prokofiev of the ’20s, Bavouzet and Newhouse thrust listeners forward in time, with no time to settle in. Quite the contrast, the Sibelius of the turn-of-the-century prolonged time, would give listeners the chance to sit back, observe, and absorb.

Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, from Peter Grimes (1945), which opened the all-20^th-century concert and was also marked by BSO brilliance, though, neither thrust nor prolonged. The Englishman’s stationary tones, some of them pedal points, droned this way and that. Certainly unusually clever variants they were but had, too often, a halting, tentative effect on the way Britten’s highly crafted instrumental events from his popular opera unfolded over time. The starkly textured, Dawn, the first of the set of sea pieces, did draw me in.  The unison strings high up on the fingerboards shrieked and alternated with brass harmonies that developed into longer and longer phrases that finally reached climax. The densely orchestrated Storm (Presto con fuoco) interfered with any projection of dynamic time.

Stationary, thrust, prolonged time in brilliant color with three oldies but goodies—this was a BSO spin that succeeded.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.

Unassuming and with no shortage of gentility begins somewhat to describe this most remarkable pianist, whose tonal colors cover the full spectrum yet are imbued more often than not with warm, vibrant earth tones. Every once in a while in the Robert Schumann pieces he played could be heard in astonishing puddles of sound emanating from the middle low register of the keyboard. They spoke mounds.

The abundant melodies in Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Op. 15 and Kreisleriana, Op. 16 and Chopin’s music all talked more than they sang. Wetness and mushiness were totally absent; a little legato lessened all of that, a certain dryness prevailing — and that coming with articulation uncommon for performances of the music of these two beloved Romantics, composers of the some of the greatest piano music ever written. This last thought comes to mind only because I just could not stop thinking throughout the afternoon’s concert about how there are so many meaningful notes to play, to hear, to grasp that Goode had me leaning on every single one of those thousands if not millions of little dots designating this or that key on the piano. Not a single note gets any less attention than any other in Richard Goode’s scheme of things.  But trying to get closer to the real thing, it must be said that this kind of attention that he gives the music separates him from so very many others who play Schumann and Chopin and are exceptional themselves.

This experience on Sunday afternoon, October 2, seemed somewhat like a dream. Here I was, looking out that big, completely windowed wall behind Goode and seeing a seascape out of Debussy’s La Mer, when, like an illusionist, Goode turned my gaze totally upon his musical conjuring of some of the most subtle dialogues I’d never heard before. As I said, he’s a talker at the keyboard and tells stories that keep you hanging on every word, or note, as it were. Personages of all sorts emerged in Schumann’s dialectical Florestan-Eusebius compositional world. Scenes shifted, as they do in the best movies, you are here and before you know you are there. I do not believe there was a single moment during the entire program that I did not understand what this or that note or move meant or why it belonged as it did.

I did observe quite often in the clearest of ways how Goode drew interior voices into dramatic discourse. “Rolling” was a word that kept recurring; that is how the notes he played sounded coming off his fingertips.  For his Chopin — Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 55, No. 2 (1843), Scherzo No. 3 in c-sharp minor, Op. 39 (1839), Waltz in A-flat, Op. 64, No. 3 Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op. 64, No. 2, Waltz in F Major, Op. 34, No. 3 and Ballade No. 3 in A-flat Major, Op. 47 (1840-1) — emotion of a very different sort sprang from this artist’s complete sense of piano being an adventure in colored articulation. Moods seem not to be high on his endgame. I heard dance moves and gestures through his marvelous left hand and right hand rubato playing, wondering if, in fact, each of his hands were in a pas-de-deux this time in sync, the next time not, and a third kind — a polyphony of rubatos, if you will.

Two encores, one of Chopin and one of Bach brought this ever-so-artful and personal outing to a close. Richard Goode’s foray into the infinitesimal in articulation, spectrum of color, and the millisecond in time adds up to an incomparable art of pianism.

David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chairman of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in  Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. www.notescape.net.