A search for the spirit of BSO seasons past

A BSO concert with violinist Christian Tetzlaff (left, with James Levine) was both intellectually and viscerally exciting.

On Wednesday night in Symphony Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will open its 128th season. The program is a shiny all-Russian affair with music by Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and Mussorgsky in which the orchestra is almost guaranteed to dazzle.

But the questions on my mind recently have been about the precise nature of that dazzle, about how the tenure of music director James Levine has been evolving, and about what appears to be an easing away from the boldness and breadth of vision that characterized his opening years with the orchestra.

Levine is now entering his fifth season with the BSO and he has done phenomenal work revitalizing the orchestra. Depending on the night, one may hear the change as a deeper, clearer, warmer, more transparent, more luminous or more rhythmically vital sound. The profundity of his Mahler Ninth last season showed a major conductor in his prime.

But interpretive depth and the sheer sonic glory of an ensemble on any given night is only part of the equation. Over the long term, what the orchestra is actually playing becomes at least as important. When Levine began his tenure as music director in the fall of 2004, he made quick technical strides with the orchestra, and even more promisingly, his first year of programming was brilliant, daring, and full of intelligent risk-taking. Alongside the standard repertoire that is the backbone of any season, there were not only world premieres but also a sustained reckoning with important masters of the 20th century.

Already by his second week of concerts, Levine was tilting the traditional balances between centuries, placing Mozart's "Prague" Symphony in the company of Gyorgy Ligeti's quietly shimmering soundscape "Lontano" (of 1967), Schoenberg's searching Five Pieces for Orchestra, and Stravinsky's iconic "Rite of Spring." Big orchestras are known to be lumbering conservative institutions, but here was an eminent conductor bent on embracing the idea of the orchestra as an agile modern instrument. Reveling in his newfound freedom, Levine described himself as "a kid in a candy shop."

Some subscribers resisted the sudden boost in the quantity of challenging modern music, but according to former Globe critic Richard Dyer, other groups of listeners who had long given up on the BSO under Seiji Ozawa began coming back. Suddenly there was national buzz emanating from Boston. Musical insiders in New York could be seen taking the train up to catch a concert in Symphony Hall. And when the BSO played at Carnegie Hall, the place went wild. At one such concert in the fall of 2005, The New Yorker critic Alex Ross heard Levine lead the orchestra in a bracing all-American program and then dashed off a blog entry declaring the BSO the greatest orchestra in the country. "Old Charles Ives would have fallen out of his chair to hear his music done as perfectly and passionately as the Bostonians played 'Three Places in New England,' " he wrote.

That same season, Levine's second, he also unveiled an inspired two-year series pairing the music of Beethoven and Schoenberg. It was designed to expose the hidden links between these two revolutionaries, but it also showed how a BSO concert season, in addition to providing terrific weekly entertainment, could be a kind of sustained collective exploration, a journey of the mind. On one memorable November night, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff unspooled astonishing back-to-back performances of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and the Schoenberg Violin Concerto, and on both ends of the program, Levine led the orchestra in an arrangement of Beethoven's stunningly visionary "Grosse Fuge." Very few concerts manage to be both intellectually rewarding and viscerally thrilling. This one had it all.

But things feel different these days. The orchestra is still playing at an extremely high level, yet the sense of mission and risk-taking in the programming has waned. On paper, the new season is looking like the safest and most conservative of Levine's tenure thus far. Part of the shift can be seen in the numbers. Levine himself leads nine weeks of subscription concerts, down from 12 his first season. There are still four world premieres, but the connecting tissue, the music of the last 100 years that links today's fractured sonic landscape with the great masters of the past, is in retreat. In his first year with the orchestra, more than 60 percent of the works Levine conducted were from the 20th or 21st centuries. This coming year, fewer than a quarter of the works he will lead were written after 1900. That's a striking contrast. The opening page of the BSO's subscription brochure touts a season "especially rich in the keystone works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, while continuing to explore the orchestra's longstanding legacies in the great French repertoire and the transcendent music of Mahler." That about sums it up.

Of course, the BSO podium has also been a place for Levine to leave his mark as an interpreter of the standard orchestral repertory, and he is deeply committed to this core body of classical and Romantic masterworks. And even this season there are still a few weeks that promise to crackle in more modern Levinean ways - such as the all-French program this fall that should place the music of Berlioz, Pierre Boulez, and Messiaen in exhilarating dialogue. Or the program on Dec. 4, just a few days shy of Elliott Carter's 100th birthday, which will feature the world premiere of a new Carter piano concerto performed by Daniel Barenboim alongside "The Rite of Spring," the work that first made Carter dream of becoming a composer. Levine will also lead premieres by Leon Kirchner and Gunther Schuller, the latter postponed from an earlier season.

But when it comes to programming, Levine and the BSO seem to be backing away from the week-to-week boldness and imagination that characterized the first three years of his tenure, and which generated so much discussion, occasional controversy, but most of all excitement locally and nationwide. The BSO's big banner program once again this year is a concert performance of an infrequently heard 19th-century opera (last season it was Berlioz's "Trojans"; this time it's Verdi's "Simon Boccanegra"). Don't get me wrong: These opera events have been, and likely will be, exceptional performances of works that are not going to be heard again in Boston anytime soon. They also help the orchestra close gaps in its own repertory and broaden its stylistic palette. Last year's performances of "The Trojans" grew successively stronger, culminating in an extraordinary opening weekend at Tanglewood. But in the end, if it is to fulfill its initial promise, the Levine era at the BSO surely must amount to much more than a strong record of opera in concert.

Music directors are faced with a constant balancing act: how to reach out to new audiences without sending current subscribers packing. Orchestra administrators also typically caution against reading too much into a single season. That said, Levine may have been taken aback by some of the negative reaction to his programming of Schoenberg's music between 2005 and 2007. Perhaps he feels he overestimated the public's willingness to sample from the high-modernist tradition which for him is the most vital of the 20th century. At a Symphony Hall press conference in April, he expressed a wish for an ideal listener to have a "willingness to look at the spectrum [of modern music] as something exciting, instead of as a bad day at the dentist."

Of course, Levine's chosen strain of modern music has historically been the most difficult to champion, and he insists on only conducting composers he believes in. It is hard to argue with that, but there is also no doubt that the artistic leadership of the BSO would ultimately help its own case by putting additional slices of the contemporary pie more persuasively before the public.

Beyond commissions or the programming of modern music, at issue here is also a matter of approach. One of the best things about the two-season Beethoven/Schoenberg Project had little to do with the composers themselves. It was about an orchestra painting on a broader canvas, and setting the terms of an exploration that stretched beyond any one concert. There was no equivalent last season or this coming one. When asked about a follow-up series, Levine has said in the past that he simply does not have other thematic programming ideas as authentic and compelling as the Beethoven-Schoenberg pairing. But perhaps he is placing the bar too high. Even a more circumscribed theme picked up at various points, or as a mini-festival, can bring essential shape, direction, and energy to a season, as Levine's enormously successful Carter festival did this summer at Tanglewood.

Thematic programming is not a panacea but it tends to get listeners engaged, and to make the concert hall feel less like a hermetically sealed temple of art and more like a living theater of ideas in dialogue with the outside world. Witness the excitement generated last year by Carnegie Hall's ambitious and expansive "Berlin in Lights" festival, which focused on the vibrant cultural life of a single city, and involved collaborations with institutions all across New York.

If Levine is not interested in a thematic approach for his own programming, the BSO should explore this route during some of the long stretches when he is not on the podium. In this upcoming season, for example, Feb. 21 will be Levine's final concert. The BSO might have used a portion of March or April to really make something broader happen, but instead we will get a dissociated parade of prestigious guest conductors. Many nights of good or great performances surely await in this stretch, but will they add up to anything more than the sum of their parts? Or think back to last winter. At the height of the January doldrums, while Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos was leading the orchestra in blandly accomplished readings of Strauss tone poems, David Robertson was visiting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and leading a fascinating mini-festival called "Concrete Frequency," exploring the linkages between music and urban life. The most serious Boston music fan I know simply hopped on a plane for California.

Levine and the artistic leadership of the BSO know what it means to put together an exhilarating season of real significance. It's time to reconnect with the spirit of adventure and discovery that jumped from the pages of the season schedule a few years ago. This makes not only artistic but practical sense. Orchestras today simply cannot expect to play it entirely safe and still secure an audience for the future. Levine has shown how brilliantly the BSO can play under his baton, and he has shown how boldly he can think about what a symphony orchestra should be in the 21st century. It's time to bring these threads together again.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.