Met Opera 管で完璧な指揮を見せたJ．Levine

Boston Symphony のMusic Director を辞任し，Metropolitan Opera のMusic Directorに専念することにした James Levine が，予定通り，Metropolitan Opera Orchestra のCarnegie Hall 公演を指揮して，その好演振りが評論されています．

when he does mount the podium — as he did last week to conduct “Wozzeck” at the Metropolitan Opera, and again on Sunday afternoon, when he led the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall — his performances are invariably so finely polished and intensely communicative that you cannot doubt that he is at the top of his game.

彼の指揮台への歩行，礼をする仕草などが，次のように紹介されています．he now walks on and off the stage with a wheeled walker (which lets him move at a speedy clip); he uses a cane during his bows; and he leads his players from a swivel chair. But once he begins to conduct, his gestures are clear and energetic, and the power of the musicians’ response is something to behold.

プログラムは，　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1　with Evgeny Kissin &                                 Brahms’s Symphony No. 2                                                                       　だったようです．

Schoenberg はBrahms のムードで指揮したそうで，Levine の解釈として興味深い点です．　　He made a more subtle connection too, focusing on Schoenberg’s often fluid, sometimes tactile use of tone color in presenting slowly but inexorably unfolding musical ideas 　

Evgeny Kissin はすっかり大家になったようで，Levine と見事な競演を展開したそうですが，Levine はBrahms を演奏するようにオーケストラの音を張り上げていたようです．それでも，　　Mr. Kissin’s contribution was a pure-toned, poetic line, driven but singing, with an almost narrative directness and momentum. He showed an entirely different side of his interpretive personality in his encore, an incendiary, deeply personalized account of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2.

後半がBrahms の2番だったのですが，The Brahms offered other joys all its own, not least the kind of sweeping phrasing that, in hands as deft as Mr. Levine’s, makes the most familiar scores sound fresh and vital. And section for section, the orchestra played with a virtuosity and unity that are prerequisites for that kind of performance.　とたいへん新鮮な名演を聴かせたといいます．

なによりも James Levine が，身軽になって，Levine らしさに溢れた演奏を展開したことをたいへん嬉しく思います．

 

Music Review

The Brahms Behind the Schoenberg

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: April 11, 2011

Whatever toll James Levine’s health problems have taken on his conducting schedule, and his career more generally, when he does mount the podium — as he did last week to conduct “Wozzeck” at the Metropolitan Opera, and again on Sunday afternoon, when he led the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall — his performances are invariably so finely polished and intensely communicative that you cannot doubt that he is at the top of his game.

Daniel Barry for The New York Times

The Met Orchestra, with the pianist Evgeny Kissin and the conductor James Levine, at Carnegie Hall.

Yes, he now walks on and off the stage with a wheeled walker (which lets him move at a speedy clip); he uses a cane during his bows; and he leads his players from a swivel chair. But once he begins to conduct, his gestures are clear and energetic, and the power of the musicians’ response is something to behold. That was not lost on the Met Orchestra’s audience on Sunday, which gave Mr. Levine a standing ovation and had him return to the podium three times before he had the concertmaster follow him offstage.

Mr. Levine seemed in a Brahmsian mood, and not only because the second half of the program was devoted fully to Brahms’s Symphony No. 2. He gave Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra a Brahmsian heft, and shaped them, at times, as if Brahms were the score’s guiding spirit. And if the pianist Evgeny Kissin’s playing in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 had a thoroughly Chopinesque litheness, the orchestral passages were so loud and so broadly drawn that it was hard not to hear them as having a Brahmsian girth.

It is not uncommon to draw connections between Brahms and Schoenberg: Simon Rattle did exactly that during a visit with the Berlin Philharmonic last season. And the Five Pieces, from 1909 (heard here in the 1949 revision), early experiments in escaping the constraints of tonality, lend themselves easily to this exercise. Mr. Levine made the kinship unusually clear partly by emphasizing the work’s late Romantic accents rather than its early modernist ones.

He made a more subtle connection too, focusing on Schoenberg’s often fluid, sometimes tactile use of tone color in presenting slowly but inexorably unfolding musical ideas — and then, after the intermission, pointing up Brahms’s use of similar techniques in the Second Symphony.

The Brahms offered other joys all its own, not least the kind of sweeping phrasing that, in hands as deft as Mr. Levine’s, makes the most familiar scores sound fresh and vital. And section for section, the orchestra played with a virtuosity and unity that are prerequisites for that kind of performance. That combination of qualities enlivened the Chopin too, and created the illusion that the orchestral scoring here was as inventive as the piano writing.

Mr. Kissin’s contribution was a pure-toned, poetic line, driven but singing, with an almost narrative directness and momentum. He showed an entirely different side of his interpretive personality in his encore, an incendiary, deeply personalized account of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2.