Levine's three challenges with the BSO

Every great music director re-creates an orchestra in his own image. Every great orchestra accumulates a tradition and achieves an identity independent of any of its music directors.

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Out of the synergy between these two facts can arise the kind of electric music-making that attracts the public, makes waves, and helps renew the art.

This is what players and public always want to experience, and it is why the eyes and ears of the musical world are on James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra as they begin their partnership this week. Excitement is running high: Four of America's big five orchestras courted Levine, and the BSO got him.

Levine and the orchestra must address three big interrelated issues at a time when many American orchestras are in peril. The first is improving the quality of the BSO. The second is renewing and refreshing the repertoire. And the third is bringing the public along on the journey.

Improving the orchestra

There is no standard recipe for raising the standards of an orchestra, and in a unionized environment, no music director can resort to the old, tyrannical ways -- the tirade, the basilisk stare, the immediate dismissal. A slower process is required now, the gradual replacement of players as they retire. Much depends on the collective wisdom of the audition committee for new players and on the music director's role in the decision-making.

Another factor is the conductor's ear -- what he wants to hear, what he asks for, and what he can achieve through a rehearsal period and a run of performances.

Levine must get the members of the orchestra to listen attentively to one another. His historically informed seating pattern may encourage that; he prefers to put the first and second violins on opposite sides of the podium, cellos and violas inside, basses off to the left or across the back. This is the way orchestras were seated in the 19th century and well into the 20th, the way composers expected their music to be projected.

One of the boldest aspects of the Levine plan is his wish to reconfigure the entire rehearsal process the way he did at the Metropolitan Opera. He wants to break down the paradigm that says, "This week we rehearse the current program, and then we play it."

A more flexible use of rehearsal time is not something new, but was standard procedure back before orchestras played so many programs and concerts and before rehearsal schedules were controlled by contract. Nobody wants to return to the bad old days when musicians were exploited, but the current standard ratio of rehearsal to performance can lead to corner-cutting and to performances that manage to stay together without going anywhere.

A good example of Levine's method comes early in the season, when he has programmed the BSO premiere of "Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei," by the dean of American composers, Elliott Carter, a long and complex recent work that could not possibly be fully prepared in a normal rehearsal period. Levine began work on it last season, in his final appearance as guest conductor, when he rehearsed and performed one movement of the "Symphonia." The orchestra will be revisiting that movement and working on the rest of it until the first performance Nov. 11. This seems the only way a piece like the Carter could be programmed in a major orchestra's schedule today and the only sensible thing to do. The proof will be in the pudding.

Refreshing the repertoire
Levine believes in the importance of varied repertoire, of having the BSO explore music of the baroque, romantic, and classical periods, of playing opera (just as he believes the Met orchestra should play the concert repertoire), and of encouraging chamber music. This is how the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic function; it is also how his beloved NBC Symphony operated under the direction of the idol of his youth, Arturo Toscanini. Levine can encourage chamber-music performance more actively than his BSO predecessors because he has always been an active chamber musician himself, and he is already scheduled to play the piano with the BSO Chamber Players.

Refreshing and renewing the repertoire is a tricky business; some portion of the concertgoing public wants nothing more than to hear the pieces it knows and loves the best. Levine comes to the BSO with an advantage: He has known the standard symphonic repertoire most of his life, but he hasn't conducted it that often. One of the oddities of his career is that he has conducted Wagner's opera "Parsifal" far more frequently than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

One of the attractions of the BSO job, to him, was the orchestra's historic dedication to contemporary music and to American music in particular. This is one important dimension of responsibility for an American conductor that Levine has never been positioned to exercise as thoroughly as he would have liked -- although he was conducting demanding contemporary works from the time of his apprenticeship in Cleveland nearly 40 years ago. This season Levine's programs bring new works by Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and John Harbison, as well as pieces by Carter and such established 20th-century masters as Schoenberg, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, and Messiaen.

This is different from the approach of Serge Koussevitzky, the legendary BSO music director who did so much for American music between 1924 and 1949. So far, Levine is mostly programming old masters of new music -- some of them figures whose music has commanded attention and admiration from professionals for decades without ever winning over general symphonic audiences. Levine has the missionary belief that he can change that.

What Koussevitzky promoted were the works of a new generation of American composers. Aaron Copland was only 24 when Koussevitzky began leading his works, and young composers haven't been a regular feature of BSO programming since Koussevitzky's day. Some of Koussevitzky's proteges came to his attention at the Tanglewood Music Center, and perhaps once Levine arrives there next summer, the pattern will begin to repeat itself.

Getting the public interested
Bringing the audience along will be one of the biggest challenges for Levine. He can stretch the orchestra, can stretch himself, but the audience is going to have to stretch itself, too. The public that is interested in the latest films and novels and the most recent developments in the visual arts hasn't been interested in the latest concert music in a century; much of the symphonic audience is as stuck in the 19th century as much of the pop audience is stuck in the music of its youth.

The charisma and chemistry of a great musician can help overcome some of that inertia. Many older BSO subscribers in the Koussevitzky era were not happy with his emphasis on new music, but they put up with it because of the aura of excitement surrounding his concerts, which attracted generations of students who wouldn't dream of missing the latest premiere.

Levine does not have a big, flamboyant podium personality the way Koussevitzky or his protege Leonard Bernstein did. He has spent the greater part of his career tucked away, out of sight in the orchestra pit. In the course of learning to pace himself, through long and demanding operas, he has refined his technique so that he imparts what is necessary to the players, and nothing else.

But Levine does know how to put together a program that makes sense both on its own terms and in an ongoing context, how to build a season that stretches the orchestra and the audience. One program later this season, for example, juxtaposes contrasting works by Charles Ives, Edgard Varese, and George Gershwin that were written at about the same time.

And Levine is certainly not an enemy of popular appeal -- he's conducted far too much Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini for that. He is, after all, a man who has conducted dozens of gala concerts with opera singers, who led some Three Tenors extravaganzas, who presided over the soundtrack of the latest "Fantasia" film. Although he doesn't enjoy interviews, he is certainly media savvy, and he has stayed that way through a time that saw the collapse of the traditional recording business and a lot of classical music broadcasting.

This season does have crowd-pleasers such as the opening-night Mahler Eighth (the "Symphony of a Thousand"), Berlioz's "Romeo et Juliette," and Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman." Most of these feature prominent soloists from the Met such as Jane Eaglen, Ben Heppner, Deborah Voigt, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, as well as some remarkable young American singers. He also has brand-name instrumentalists including Alfred Brendel and Lynn Harrell. But five of Levine's programs feature the orchestra alone, without soloists; the BSO is not the backup band but the star.

It's going to take time and a lot of patience to learn to see things in the long view the way Levine does; he doesn't think in terms of sensational, hot-button concerts. For him, each concert is a step on the way to the next one.

It's also going to require a lot of Levine, and questions about his health linger, although these questions have concerned observers for most of the last decade, and Levine hasn't slowed down a whole lot.

Much of the Levine agenda for the BSO flies in the face of received wisdom about how business is usually conducted in the major orchestras. But what has become clear over the last few years is that the way business is usually conducted in American orchestras doesn't work anymore. Even a blue-chip institution like the Chicago Symphony is in deep financial trouble.

The Levine era will also probably influence other local musical organizations more than Seiji Ozawa's decades did; the BSO lived in its own world then and other organizations lived in theirs. But the BSO could become a flagship again. If the chemistry works and the Levine/BSO agenda takes hold, it could change the way orchestras around the country define their job; it could help them create a new role for themselves in our evolving culture.