BSO celebrates the French to open quasquicentennial season

Boston Symphony Orchestra (bso.org)
Friday, September 30, 2005
James Levine, conductor
Simon Preston, organ

BERLIOZ, Le Corsaire Overture
DEBUSSY, Jeux
MILHAUD, Le Boeuf sur le toit
SAINT-SAENS, Symphony No. 3, Organ

September 30, 2005 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

As the BSO is playing, there is a certain quality these days, a quality whose label eludes you, but which is a “brute fact” - something so real as you listen to them, it were madness to deny it. It is a kind of spring in their musical step. They like playing for Jim Levine; and you can hear that they like playing for him.

There’s no word for this quality, or no word is quite the right word; try to find the right word, and your search will leave you unsatisfied until you’ve poured out a verbal torrent, which will yet fall short of the full truth. But to hear the BSO this season, it appears that James Levine is the right man, at the right time. There is musical greatness to be repossessed here in Boston, and the game is afoot.

James Levine, conducting
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Photo: Michael Lutch.

Though none of the music on this all-French program is new either to the conductor or to the BSO, Levine selected it as new territory for the partnership.

Berlioz is renowned for substantial, inimitable works (such as the Requiem - no other Requiem could be like Berlioz’s, nor should it try - or Romeo & Juliet). Yet it may be in a few gems like the Le Corsaire Overture that we see the Dauphinois closest to his musical roots: both his fervent admiration for Beethoven (and it is worth noting that Berlioz found this admiration a positive, inspirational force, and not a negative restraint), and his ‘journeyman’ days, when he studied the crafts of composition and orchestration by real-time observation, in the seats of the Opera. No one could be much happier than I that the first notes to sound out in Symphony Hall, for the festive 125th anniversary of the musical pride of Boston, belonged to Berlioz.

The program was rewarding, first of all sonically, and also as a charming mobile of ties and balances. For a hundred years after his death, Beethoven was the elephant in the French salon. Both Berlioz and Saint-Saëns embraced the invitation inherent in Beethoven’s music (Gounod’s response to the first Paris performance of Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony was, Voilà le Beethoven français!)

Debussy’s ballet, and Milhaud’s jeu d’esprit (which wound up as a ballet) set Beethoven’s example aside in markedly different ways. Against Beethoven’s sharp definition, whether in terms of the momentary musical texture, or the drive and formal outline of the whole piece, Debussy pursued a music of fluidity, shading, and a kind of timelessness. Jeux is not a ballet about playing tennis, but about three people who don’t quite get around to playing tennis; in a sense, it is a curiously apt balletic counterpart to the near-action of Pelléas et Mélisande.

The Milhaud is good, clean fun - Ivesian in refreshing ways, especially in the occasional (and, perhaps, surprisingly delicate) friction of two keys, and the playful manner in which different strands of melody are made to collide one with another. Where Debussy pursued a different kind of gravity in art, Milhaud (at least in Le Boeuf sur le toit) used ‘light music’ as objets trouvés: his sources through the course of this brief, buoyant piece include some 24 tunes by 14 different composers, mostly of popular Brazilian melodies.

When Jeux was staged by Diagilev’s Russian Seasons, Debussy was at the last so exasperated with Nijinsky’s choreography, that he published a letter on the day of the premiere, distancing himself from the staging. Milhaud thought that Le Boeuf might make for a soundtrack to a silent movie; but it was taken up as a ballet novelty by Cocteau, who drew up a scenario having nothing to do with Brazil, but making Dada slapstick out of Prohibition in New York. (I am not making this up.)

The voice of the renovated organ in Symphony Hall, and the harmony of intonation between the pipes and the orchestra, were surpassing sweet. The Saint-Saëns makes for an unusual social occasion in music, as the organist is an honored guest, but not really a soloist. The absence of a harp in the Saint-Saëns almost makes me doubt that it is French, but there are shimmering piano arpeggios in the second movement chorale which are a clever trick upon the ear.

Where the English horn has an important role in Jeux and the Saint-Saëns, there is ironically no English horn in the Berlioz overture on this program - where it was Berlioz of course who pioneered its use.

At a press conference earlier in the day, mention was made of a new program to foster absorption of the new (and at times bewildering) music which plays such a key role in, I do not say Levine’s vision for the BSO, but Levine’s firm commitment to the BSO’s traditional championship of new music. Since the comprehension of these new commissions and premieres depends on familiarity, on repeat hearings, for even the musically literate audience (and who of us understood everything the Beethoven Fifth Symphony has to say, on our first hearing?) - people who attend a concert featuring new music, and who wish to hear it again, will be eligible to buy a ticket to a subsequent program at half price. This is so eminently sensible, so elegant in its simplicity, that it is a wonder this system was not in place years before.

Also at this conference, one colleague sought to draw Levine out on Debussy’s Jeux. Following the Maestro’s reply, there arose a separate question from another member of the press, a question whose sudden shift of focus caught Levine so short, it seemed, that he needed the question repeated: Do you like heavy metal music?

A musical question, to be sure. And yet (even in our robustly continuity-resistant era), as a non-sequitur, this was undeniably a corker. With characteristic grace, though, Levine found speech, betraying not the least hint if the query had at all disoriented him.

In fact, I had cause for gratitude to that question, for as a result, my own (admittedly trivial) inquiry showed forth in sublime relief.

“I’d like to combine the two questions, of heavy metal, and Jeux,” I opened.

“Is the sarrusophone such a rarity, that the contrabassoon is customary as a substitution?”

I may have misread the Maestro, but in the reassured monosyllable of his reply, Yes, I thought I detected perhaps just a hint of sublime relief on his own part.

. . . Come to think of it, there is a mild irony in this instrumental substitution for Debussy, on a concert which opened with Berlioz - for it was Berlioz who is reported to have cried, “It’s a piccolo, you wretch!” one evening at the Opera, when the passage was played on the ordinary flute (which in this case would mean that the notes sounded in the wrong octave). But it is an irony which I am sure Levine would appreciate; and when he led the magnificent revival of Les Troyens in the Berlioz bicentenary year, all four harps - count ‘em - were present in the Metropolitan Opera pit. And there, Gentle Reader, we leave the matter to rest.