Roberto Abbado (left) and Peter Serkin performing Thursday night. (Michael J. Lutch) 綱渡りの代役で順調なBoston Symphony [音楽時評]
James Levine がBoston Symphony のMusic Directorを辞任してから，Orchestra は運用にたいへん苦労しているようですが，一応，これまでのところ，それなりの成果を挙げているようです．
最初の試練は，ボストンでのJames Levine& Maurizio Pollini という特筆すべき組み合わせが両者とも降りてしまったので，結局，Roberto Abbado（Claudio Abbado の甥） とPeter Serkinの組み合わせで， Haydn’s Symphony No. 93 as well as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and he partnered with pianist Peter Serkin in Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto. が演奏され，特に Bartok が好評だったようです， 敢えて代役に立った両者に敬意を表したいと思います．
次の演奏会はCarnegie Hall 公演でした．ここでは，Taking Mr. Levine’s place was Marcelo Lehninger, 30, a Brazilian-born assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony, who led the program this month in Boston. He was terrific, conducting all three works with impressive technique, musical insight and youthful energy.とブラジル生まれの Assistant Conductor, Violin soloist に German violinist ’Christian Tetzlaff という組み合わせでした．
Tetzlaffが前面に出て，初演を含む３つのViolin concertos を演奏したそうです．Before his intensely affecting performance of Mr. Birtwistle’s daunting new concerto, he gave a lithe, elegant account of Mozart’s Rondo in C for violin and orchestra. He concluded the evening with Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2, offering a dazzling yet probing performance of this difficult piece.
なかなかの実力者のAssistant conductor と，前面に出てくれたTetzlaff のお陰で，この Carnegie Hall 公演の初日も好評で終わったようです，
あと２回のCarnegie Hall 公演を切り抜ければ，あとはボストンで，やりくりがずっと楽になることと思います．
あとは，どうぞご自由にご渉猟下さい．
Music Review
BSO improvises with eloquent performance of a Bartok concerto
Abbado and Serkin step in to fill program
Roberto Abbado (left) and Peter Serkin performing Thursday night. (Michael J. Lutch) 
Even by recent Boston Symphony Orchestra standards, this week’s program required some major administrative improvisation, after both conductor (James Levine) and soloist (Maurizio Pollini) withdrew.
The Mozart-Schoenberg pairing these two had devised looked extremely promising, but it was also the kind of program that would have required its original personnel to be fully realized. So the BSO made the logical choice and started from scratch with this week’s repertoire.
The orchestra brought in the Italian conductor Roberto Abbado (Claudio Abbado’s nephew) to preside over Haydn’s Symphony No. 93 as well as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and he partnered with pianist Peter Serkin in Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto.
Thursday night, it came together reasonably well given the circumstances. Most distinctive was the Bartok, a remarkable work the composer wrote at the very end of his life as a gift for his wife, a pianist, to perform after his death. The final 17 bars were left incomplete and were later finished by Bartok’s colleague Tibor Serly.
Compared to the composer’s first two piano concertos, it is a work that speaks in a gentler, more intimate tone, notable from its very first bars. The pointed percussive qualities of Bartok’s other forays in this genre, with their densely knotted chords and irruptive runs, feel quite distant here, as lambent strings greet the piano’s first entrance, a line at once open and singing.
The slow movement — marked Adagio religioso — begins with a chorale of otherworldly tranquility, indebted to the luminous slow movement of Beethoven’s A-minor Quartet (Op. 132).
Abbado here was at his best in drawing from the BSO strings textures of uncommon sensitivity and refinement.
Serkin too played with lucidity and great eloquence in this middle movement, and in the concerto as a whole. The outer movements benefited in equal parts from this soloist’s incisive technique and musical intelligence.
Prior to the Bartok, Abbado’s Haydn had energy, vigor, and moments of impressive dynamic control, though a few of the grandly scaled swoops and flourishes in his conducting seemed to hinder more than they helped.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, closing the program, received a robust and muscular account, with tempos at times too fast to achieve maximum impact.
Boston Symphony Shows Verve Even Without Levine
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: March 16, 2011
No one would have blamed the Boston Symphony Orchestra for feeling demoralized when it appeared at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night. This was the first of three programs at the hall that its music director, James Levine, was to have conducted.
But early this month, coping with a lingering back pain and related health issues, Mr. Levine withdrew from the rest of the Boston Symphony season and, as expected, resigned as music director effective Sept. 1, leaving the orchestra in a leadership crisis.
Warming up on stage before the concert, the Boston musicians did seem subdued. Still, there was nothing subdued about their playing. This unusual and fascinating program offered three works for violin and orchestra, including the New York premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s new Violin Concerto, featuring the brilliant German violinist ’Christian Tetzlaff. Taking Mr. Levine’s place was Marcelo Lehninger, 30, a Brazilian-born assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony, who led the program this month in Boston. He was terrific, conducting all three works with impressive technique, musical insight and youthful energy.
The orchestra sounded great. And Mr. Tetzlaff had a triumphant night. Before his intensely affecting performance of Mr. Birtwistle’s daunting new concerto, he gave a lithe, elegant account of Mozart’s Rondo in C for violin and orchestra. He concluded the evening with Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2, offering a dazzling yet probing performance of this difficult piece.
Mr. Birtwistle, 76, is a towering figure in British music. His language, though complex and modernistic, is distinctive and exhilarating. In his 40s, he wrote a great deal of incidental music. He is also a significant opera composer. So even his thorny pieces have dramatic sweep and flair.
Most of his instrumental works bear descriptive titles, many drawn from Greek drama. But not this concerto, which is written in one continuous episodic movement of nearly 30 minutes. Many composers draw on the David and Goliath potential of the concerto genre to generate conflict between soloist and orchestra. Yet there is little sense of conflict in Mr. Birtwistle’s concerto. Rather, this moody, shifting piece comes across like an involved, intense, sometimes tortured but always respectful conversation. During five stretches of the work, the violin engages in sort of sub-talks with a series of solo instruments: flute, piccolo, oboe, cello and bassoon.
But the concerto does not begin like a conversation. The orchestra emits a murky mass of soft, tremulous sounds, like some primordial stew, from which the violin emerges, posing the first thoughts, the first questions. Soon the orchestra breaks into spurts, echoing the rhythmically restless violin lines, as if reframing or rebutting the statements.
Throughout the piece the violin plays a stream of jagged chords, gnarly intervals, and twisted thematic flights. Then something will happen in the orchestra — a pungent harmony, a twitch of somber counterpoint — and the violin responds with a wafting melodic line in its shimmering high range. You know that this elusive yet organic concerto is coming to an end when the music breaks into circular riffs and then spins itself out, settling into a piercing, pensive final episode. The violin cannot stop fidgeting but finally does, ending the conversation, for now, with a few plucked clusters.
After the Birtwistle, I thought the Bartok was going to sound like a folk music concerto. Not so. The first movement is fitful, the second a theme and variations. Even the chirpy finale keeps being interrupted by virtuosic excursions and a ruminative, radiant timeout. Mr. Tetzlaff and Mr. Lehninger emphasized the work’s wildness and fractured character in a riveting performance.
In a way, Mr. Levine was present here. He fostered a relationship between Mr. Tetzlaff and the Boston Symphony, devised this program with him and commissioned the Birtwistle work. He brought Mr. Lehninger to Boston and deserves enormous credit for reinvigorating this eminent orchestra. Perhaps this was a night to think about the positive impact of Mr. Levine’s tenure at the Boston Symphony.
