Anniversary season promises a wealth of bold programming
There is a special buzz about the Boston Symphony Orchestra as it opens its 125th season, and that's because James Levine is entering his second season as music director.
Already Levine has brought the orchestra to a new level of technical and insightful excellence. Because he is the leading American conductor of his generation and a major international figure, he has also attracted some of the most important soloists of our day, particularly singers. January's performances of Beethoven's ''Missa Solemnis," for example, feature four of the greatest singers in the world: soprano Deborah Voigt, mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, tenor Ben Heppner, and bass Rene Pape.
The bedrock on which all the excitement rests is meticulous rehearsal, and before that, advance planning. Whatever anyone thinks about Levine's taste, or even about his conducting, no one can deny that he is a great planner.
The 125th season opens Friday night with the first of 11 programs (out of 26) that Levine will conduct. The evening highlights one strand in Levine's programming: giving his take on music long associated with the BSO, especially French music. The program includes Saint-Saens's ''Organ" Symphony, which the orchestra has not been able to play for many years because the Symphony Hall organ was in such terrible shape; the instrument's restoration a year ago makes it possible. Like his predecessor Seiji Ozawa in his own early seasons, Levine also seems particularly eager to put his imprint on the orchestra's celebrated Berlioz repertoire; this season brings the ''Corsaire" overture and the ''Symphonie fantastique."
All told, Levine will lead 32 works, including one from the 18th century (Mozart's ''Haffner" Symphony), nine from the 19th century, 17 from the 20th century, and three from the 21st. There is nothing from the Baroque period; like most other major orchestras, the BSO has relinquished this repertoire to specialist, period-instrument ensembles.
Levine is the most prominent American conductor since Leonard Bernstein, and like Bernstein, he says he feels a responsibility to American music. One attraction of the BSO job, he has noted, was the chance to make a statement about such music; none of his previous posts offered him a proper platform for that.
This season he leads works by eight American composers, including one all-American program. There are classics by Ives and Gershwin, as well as pieces by Lukas Foss, Gunther Schuller, George Perle, Elliott Carter, Jonathan Dawe, and Peter Lieberson.
Two of these works are world premieres: the nonagenarian Carter's ''Three Illusions for Orchestra" (''Micomicon") and Dawe's ''The Flowering Arts," originally scheduled for a future season, which replaces a work by Leon Kirchner that is not finished. Lieberson's ''Neruda Songs" is an East Coast premiere.
Levine's focus on contemporary music last season generated excitement but also unsettled some concertgoers, particularly because Levine is obviously so committed to the modernist stream.
This is probably a function both of taste and of experience. Levine's first important musical mentor as a child growing up in Cincinnati was Walter Levin, the founder and first violinist of the LaSalle String Quartet, a leading international proponent of contemporary music. Levine grew up discovering Schoenberg at the same time that he was discovering Beethoven.
This experience may inform his boldest programming initiative to date: a series of 10 concerts, spread over two seasons, juxtaposing the music of Beethoven and Schoenberg, two composers who changed the history of music and generated furious controversy in their lifetimes for doing so.
This season, five orchestral concerts in this series bring the two evening-length masterpieces, Beethoven's ''Missa Solemnis" and Schoenberg's ''Gurrelieder" (one of the last great summations of musical romanticism, and with a cast that isn't too shabby: the blazing Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, Lieberson, and tenor Johan Botha); an all-Beethoven program; an all Schoenberg program (both balancing early, ''accessible" pieces with later, demanding ones); and one Beethoven/Schoenberg program pairing Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony with Beethoven's mightiest, the Ninth.
A pendant to this will be Levine's annual keyboard appearance with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, which features songs and chamber music by Beethoven, Schoenberg's Piano Pieces (Op. 19), and one of Schoenberg's signature works, ''Pierrot Lunaire," featuring the legendary diva Anja Silja.
The contemporary-music schedule does expose one of the few points on which Levine's programming is vulnerable. Other than the 40-year-old Dawe, the youngest of the American composers Levine will feature is Lieberson, who turns 60 next year. (Guest conductor David Robertson will introduce a new work Osvaldo Golijov has written for cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the orchestra; Golijov turns 45 in December.)
Critics have pointed out to Levine the absence of youthful composers, but he says he wants to be the one to bring forward the culminating works of the composers of his lifetime whom he has admired the most.
Finally, a trend this season is to revisit works that were given their world or US premieres by the BSO. One Levine program surveys four BSO commissions -- Stravinsky's ''Symphony of Psalms" (composed in celebration of the BSO's 50th birthday); Henri Duttileux's Second Symphony, ''Le Double" (written for the 75th anniversary); a return to Levine's first BSO commission (Elliott Carter's ''Boston Concerto"; and perhaps the most famous commission of all, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra.
The programming of most of the guest conductors parallels and extends Levine's. It is not that they are following his example, because former principal guest conductor Sir Colin Davis, Kurt Masur, David Robertson, Robert Spano, and Christoph von Dohnanyi have always tried to program standard repertoire and newer works in mutually illuminating ways. Each, however, also expresses his own experience and taste. Davis returns with an antiwar oratorio (''A Child of Our Time") by a contemporary composer with whom he has declared a close affinity, Michael Tippett. Masur brings the ''Water Concerto" by Tan Dun, a composer one can hardly imagine Levine conducting. Spano brings the season's only work by a woman composer, Kaija Saariaho's ''Nymphea Reflections." And Dohnanyi has scheduled the US premiere of the ''Adagio and Fugue" Henze has arranged from his opera ''The Bassarids."
Sophisticated and systematic as he is, Levine hasn't created a new paradigm for programming; he has extended a commitment to new music that has marked the orchestra since its very first season.
It's fun to study the 20 programs Georg Henschel, the first music director, led in 1881-82, when much of the music the BSO will play this season had not yet been written. Beethoven had then been dead for only 54 years, putting him in the same temporal relationship to the BSO's first audiences as Schoenberg, who died in 1951, is to today's public. Henschel led all nine Beethoven symphonies and quite a lot of recent music (Wagner's ''Die Meistersinger" was only 13 years old), including three works by his friend Brahms. These were very difficult for their first listeners to absorb, so Henschel repeated both Brahms's brand-new ''Tragic" Overture and his ''Alto Rhapsody" one week after the first performances. One can imagine Levine wanting to do something just like that.
