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(Concert Review) BSO plays contemporary music
7.18.05
TANGLEWOOD
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
James Levine, conductor
Peter Serkin, pianist
Sunday, July 17
Harbison, Darkbloom: Overture for an imagined opera (2005)
Wuorinen, Fourth Piano Concerto (2003)
Varese, Ameriques
Gershwin, An American in Paris
With the echoes of a triumphant evening of Wagner played by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra still resonating throughout the Shed a half-day later, music director James Levine took the stage again, this time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for a concert of modern and contemporary music.
The juxtaposition of the Wagner the night before this program was telling, and undoubtedly part of Levine's considerable genius. The music, especially at its most clamorous, at once was informed by Wagner as much as it actually pulled Wagner into the 20th, if not the 21st, century.
The first half of Sunday's program featured two contemporary pieces, both commissions for the BSO. The Harbison piece, a 10-minute excerpt from an opera that was never completed, was full of sheer beauty and surprise, with lots of chimes, one of which was answered at the very end by someone's cellphone.
Someone's cellphone also offered a coda to the Wuorinen, a half-hour long concerto featuring virtuosic, stuttering playing by Peter Serkin, full of hyperactive piano lines with orchestral sections punctuating the jittery trills. Wuorinen reconceives the timbres of the orchestra, eliciting jazz-tinged horns, ringing, resonant percussion with chimes and bells, very much evoking the sound of the modern city in the technological age. Wuorinen's up-to-date soundtrack is very much the musical counterpart to the novels of Ian McEwan, boasting the same combination of traditional storytelling values and vocabulary combined with or applied to the reality of contemporary violence, science, and poetry.
In an acknowledgment of the day's miserable heat and humidity, James Levine, whose conducting over the course of the weekend remained subtle -- he totally speaks through the music, and not through gestures -- surprised the audience by taking the stage after intermission in a short-sleeved polo shirt, before launching into Edgard Varese's 25-minute Ameriques, an astonishing piece of modernism that seemed to be the audience favorite (until the Gershwin, that is). Blocks of sound collided with each other, sirens kept blasting, as a delicate flute melody kept persisting before geting dashed by the noise. This piece also had its Wagnerian dynamics -- at times it suggested a horror-movie soundtrack.
In context with the Gershwin, however, the Varese came off strongest. The Gershwin, similar in intent (a portrait of a city) and composed within a year of each other, was ear candy next to the Varese, although Levine and the BSO to their credit took the piece at a brisk pace, emphasizing dynamic contrasts, syncopated rhythms, finding something modern and perhaps even dark in this otherwise light, sunny piece, which was as baldly sunny and optimistic as the Wagner from the night before was dark and brooding -- and each were equally narrative.
In all, it was a fascinating program, part of a fascinating weekend of virtuoso playing and Levine's genius at its apex.
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