Techno beats were heard at Carnegie Hall during a concert by the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Orchestra concert on Tuesday night. The unexpected beats were a “pre-recorded intrusion” in Sofia Gubaidulina’s otherwise astonishing and powerful “Feast During a Plague,” which was being given its New York premiere. 

It was one of two mains works on the program (the other being Brahms’ Violin Concerto) conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, the orchestra’s Artistic Advisor (they currently lack a single musical director). The premiere was prefaced by a muscular performance of Beethoven’s “Coriolan Overture..” Davis led with very British style: refined, crisp and a little jesting. The orchestra played with seamless unity and appropriate dramatic flair.

“If the Coriolan Overture can be considered theatrical, then ‘Feast During a Plague’ is positively apocalyptic,” Davis stated in an announcement made before performance. He called the premiere “a piece with a tough message.” He delivered on the promise that the performance would be the “surprising and shocking.”
   
The Russian-Tatar composer Sofia Gubaidulina is known for her idiosyncratically spiritual music. Yet there was nothing at all religious about “Feast During a Plague,” a cacophonous and menacing piece that sounded through-and-through profane. Fleeting melodies, chilling harmonies and unexpected orchestral couplings combine in a sinister work with starkly alternating textures.  Jaunty and Charivariesque, it is a thoroughly wicked display of theatrical dissonance and experimentation: Basses snapped back their strings while harps provided inconstant solace; cutthroat violins played with ironic glissando, and twined in and out like a phonograph.  The thoroughly engaging work is full of nightmarish arpeggios, cackling trumpet and wailing horns and often builds to moments of incredible tension. Thrilling in its dramatic force, it, the work seemed almost like a modern-day “Sacré du Printemps,” until the unexpected – and unsuccessful, in my view - techno beats. The audience seemed thoroughly confused.
   
    After intermission, came the Brahms, with soloist Joshua Bell. This was a performance to savor, full of wild lyricism and dazzling pyrotechnics. Bell tore into the piece with fearless energy. It was a sharp, direct performance, both technically assured and interpretatively sophisticated and full of coloristic variety. The cadenza was full of intricate amblings and subtle variation in tempo. In the Adagio, Bell showed his more lyrical side, which was tasteful and refined in spite of pervasive vibrato and occasional flourishes. Davis led the orchestra in a clear-headed reading that softened the tension often felt between soloist and conductor. The appreciative crowd rewarded Bell with ovations after the first movement and at the piece’s proper end.
 
    The  final piece, Richard Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegel” seemed almost an afterthought. (A steady stream of visitors made its way to the exits after Mr. Bell’s final bows). Remarkably, though, the orchestra succeeded in injecting new life into this popular and over-played tone poem. The Pittsburgh musicians proved they had energy in them yet and gave an engaging and playful performance. Davis had a great sense for the work’s drama. He jumped about excitedly and nearly doubled over while describe a descending figure in the horns. It was a satisfying close to a musically rich and programmatically helter-skelter evening.

BY A.J. GOLDMANN 

The Boston Symphony Orchestra

Carnegie Hall

Saturday, November 11th @ 8pm 

Concert versions of operatic works are a risky proposition. When they work, they can astound. Undistracted by stage apparatus, both audience and performers can focus more intently on the music. Similarly, is that the sheer vocal power and mastery must be performed at a level that makes up for the lack of overt dramatic content. When done correctly, a concert performance can even surpass its staged counterpart (such as a performance of Das Rheingold with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic this past summer). Often, however, they can stagnate (such as a good many of the Met’s summer performances in Central Park). James Levine has long been a promoter of the arrangement, which allows conductors to assemble dream casts that hardly ever can be realized on stage. In his three-year-old tenure with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Levine has already presented concert versions of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, Don Giovanni and Elektra. On Saturday night, he brought the BSO to Carnegie for a performance of Bartok’s seldom-heard one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle.” It constituted the first half of a program that marked the orchestra’s second visit to New York this season. Levine is to be doubly lauded for bringing with him two singers of unquestionable credentials– the bass Albert Dohmen and the mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter – and for presenting a work that is sure to have scared away the more timid of music-goers.

“Bluebeard’s Castle” boasts chilling libretto by the Hungarian poet and theorist Béla Balåzs, which drips with symbolist language and hauntingly inventive imagery. The enigmatic prologue was delivered by the Hungarian actor Örs Kisfaludy, who popped out from among the harps delivered his introductory poem while walking through the orchestra. Balázs’s detailedstage directions were included with the program notes. Disturbing and minimal, they tantalized the listener. Dohmen, who joined the BSO last Spring for Beethoven’s Ninth, was booming and marvelously textured, ringing out clear amid the full, neo-romantic – and often cacophonous - orchestration. Von Otter, a great Strauss interpreter of Strauss (who was a great influence on Bartok early on), was impassioned and precise, although she struggled to make herself heard amidst the orchestra. What’s more, both singers seemed to have a good command of Hungarian, a language that is poorly represented in the opera repertoire.   
 
The opers’a music is typical of Bartok’s moody, neo-romantic style, although somewhat more grim that audience’s will be accustomed to. The score is a marsh of strange and gripping harmonies, a highly evocative score full of dissonant intervals (minor seconds feature prominently).  Levine had a fine understanding of the emotional drama latent in the score, slowly diffusing the theatrical booms and outcries. The playing was crisp and  methodical. There was an ominous quality to the basses and violas as they leapt and sputtered at and it leapt and sputtered at the unlocking of each door. This is music that can alternatively fizzle out and gear up, put-putting like an engine. Levine’s approach was highly evocative of the opera’s symbolist elements, most obvious in the musical representation of the treasures that lie behind each of the seven doors in Bluebeard’s castle. For a work that is so concerned with self-destructive love and unendurable melancholy, it almost seemed appropriate that the orchestra threatened to regularly to drown the singers.    
 
As if to reward the audience for their indulgence through a difficult and inaccessible work, Levine presented the popular Brahms’ First Symphony after intermission. The notes bled together in the opening bars, which Levine rendered a lush, moody blur. But soon, the Beethovian clarity of Brahms’ orchestration shone through Levine’s more modernist inclinations (perhaps the residual influence of Bartok).    

Levine conducted the first movement with more energy than usual. In the Andante, the oboe theme was rendered particularly poignantly, the faintest of the cellos’ pizzicatos were discernable, while the first violin’s solo was played with appropriate sublimity. In the famous final movement (which directly quotes Beethoven’s Ninth) pensive trombones sounded out their chorale effectively although there was a muddled moment of confusion. Towards the end, Levine grew animated increasingly animated. Leaning off his stool, with one leg on the ground, he brought the monumental work to a shattering close.

Levine shows no signs of giving up concert performances of underplayed operas anytime soon. In February, the BSO will be back at Carnegie for Berlioz’s baffling and complex La Damnation de Faust. This time, minus a popular accompanying symphony.