Exciting Dvorak from Benjamin Zander
Lloyd Schwartz - The Boston Phoenix, October 25, 2002
Posted: 2002-10-25 17:17:20
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, Benjamin Zander led the Cecilia Society (now Boston Cecilia) and a group of phenomenal soloists in what remains for me the most persuasive and thrilling live performance of the B-minor Mass - unorthodox, perhaps even unstylish, but shattering. I'll never forget it. In recent years, a number of Zander's performances with the Boston Philharmonic have seemed dominated - driven - by ideas, willed more than "experienced." Intelligence and thoughtfulness are rare enough in conductors. But Zander at his very best gives music a palpable feeling of being "lived through," and when it's not there, it's missed - though there's always plenty to admire. His season-opening concert with the Philharmonic overflowed with it.
I'd mentioned to a friend a few days before this concert that I was not looking forward to yet another performance of the Dvorák Cello Concerto. I hadn't loved Zander's version with Colin Carr a few years ago, and, frankly, I'm tired of all the rhetoric and sentimentality. Word of my lack of enthusiasm spread. Saturday morning, another friend, who had heard the Sanders Theatre performance the previous Thursday, called to urge me not to miss it. "You've never heard anything like it."
He was right - at Jordan Hall that night, Zander was in his best old form, with what must be the best orchestral team he's ever had, and with one of his favorite soloists, Scottish cellist Alexander Baillie. Together, they brought the Dvorák to stunning life. A friend across the aisle thought the playing was so spontaneous and natural it sounded like improvisation. Every player seemed to be listening to - responding to - everyone else. The opening bars for winds, paced with exquisite sensitivity, were as intimate as chamber music, and Zander kept the lid on until the powerful outbursts blew it off.
We were off on great personal adventure, and the hero was, of course, the cello. After bringing a galloping energy to the first theme, with his freedom and variety of attack and tone, Baillie let his cello dissolve into the melting second theme (introduced so beautifully earlier by Neil Daland's horn), which he later brought back as a mysterious lament sung against a background of quietly simmering strings and solo flute (Kathleen Boyd, in her finest contribution to the BPO).
In the second movement, Adagio non troppo, we were back in the world of chamber music, which everyone was playing with heartbreaking tenderness. Baillie gave the cello's filigree a sense of purpose (or different purposes) - a suggestion of searching, or waiting in suspense to see what was going to happen, or contemplating what had happened. Again, this was an unfolding of events, not just a moving from one musical section to the next. And even the intimacy had size, import, a large-heartedness.
The last movement began with a stealthy tread, then expanded, took off. The hero seemed more determined than ever to conquer his grief (Dvorák's beloved sister-in-law was dying during the time he was writing the concerto, his last piece composed in America; he even rewrote the last part of the last movement after she died). His adventure included the capacity to dance. But the contemplativeness was less about a tentative future than about an all-engulfing past - an aching nostalgia for something irretrievable that was preventing him from moving forward (like Frost's snowy woods, or Beckett's "I can't go on"/"That's what you think"). And when he was finally capable of moving ahead, that was a real achievement - a glorious victory over the past that seemed completely earned.
Zander ended the extended ovation by ushering Baillie back for an encore, the profoundly inward Sarabande from Bach's C-major Suite for Unaccompanied Cello.
No less remarkable was the opening Overture to Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro - a piece usually tossed off with brilliant bustle. Zander's approach was fuller and infinitely richer, actually contending with the issues of Mozart's great opera: the power of love and the pomp of power and the way nasty backbiting (embodied in witty little high-pitched "grace" notes) can trigger volcanic eruptions. Not a bar of music went by without thought or implication.
The evening ended with an exciting, vivid performance of Schubert's Great C-major Symphony (my evening it was without the major repeats). I actually prefer the more spacious approach to tempos and the textural variety of a Furtwängler or a Klemperer (who also eliminated the repeats) - with their sense of cosmic mystery, their suggestion of a revolving, spiraling universe, an all-embracing dance - to Zander's Toscanini-like single-minded consistency of tempo, a forward rather than circular motion that sounds rather more like Beethoven than Schubert (Zander made the allusion to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" in the Finale more audible than usual). But what joys in Peggy Pearson's Pied Piper oboe leading the grunting basses in the Andante con moto funeral march, in Thomas Hill's singing clarinet, in the glorious horn section that should be the envy of every orchestra in town, and in the continuous glow of the strings.
