An overview of the Berlin music scene that I wrote for Carnegie Hall’s upcoming “Berlin in Lights” festival is up on the slick, new “Berlin in Lights” website:

“Berlin is a city of contradictions. It is an old European capital with a youthful energy and vibe. Situated at the crossroads between East and West, the reunified city has the culture and sophistication of London or Paris and the run-down and grungy feel of Prague or Budapest. It is a place that is so burdened with history yet so free: a city where the weight of the past is countered by the vibrancy of nonstop artistic excellence and experimentation.

Zitty, a bi-monthly listings magazine, teems with music listings on everything from all-night raves in abandoned seven-story buildings to radical reinterpretations of Wagner operas. In between is exciting music of every stripe…”
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It is often complained the Pierre Boulez takes an overly analytic, clinical even approach to conducting music. This is perhaps no more evident than in his interpretation of Gustav Mahler, whose music he has long championed. In dispensing with the late-Romantic techniques and approaches of other conductors, Boulez often can bring a fresh perspective to Mahler, by treating him like a mid to late 20th century composer. Stripping away the sentimentality and expressiveness can make the music seem frigid at times.      On Friday night, however, Boulez brought the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to Carnegie Hall for a curious performance of Mahler’s Seven, that was anything but cold.
However, the warmth seemed to be generated more by an erudite music scholar than a committed performer. Throughout the five movements of this moody epic, Boulez seemed to be telling the audience to listen very carefully.
    It was a quirky and unorthodox performance that went beyond categories of like or dislike. With his highly surgical reading, Boulez gets you to wonder what makes Mahler tick. But in asking myself that question on Friday night, I wondered additionally, what made Boulez tick.
    Boulez, who is 81 this year, has behind him a long and distinguished career as both a conductor and composer. Prior to turning to music (studying with Messiaen, among others) he studied mathematics. This early training is evident in the Serialism of his early works and his methodical and calculating conducting style.

Friday night’s concert was performed without intermission –as not to diminish from the symphony’s integrity. However, the orchestra tuned up between movements, like surgeons sharpening knifes during an operation.  

    Though Boulez conducted the piece without a baron, his presence onstage was often like a giant metronome. The Chicago musicians are to be commended for delivering he kind of crisp, clear and accurate playing that his interpretation demanded. The first movement could be very sterile, with a monochromatic texture that made the work sound transparent. Uniform pacing and dynamics often revealed musical intricacies but came at the expense of emotional effect. Boulez treated the various elements of the orchestra with surpring equality. Even in the glorious tenor horn solo, with its rich sustained tones, wasn’t much favored over the other instruments. I guess you could call Boulez an egalitarian in that respect.

    One of the upshots of such clarity was that the piece retained unmuddled even at incredible volume. Equalizing the instruments made some details pop out unexpectedly; the ostinato in the violins and with heavy, loud arpeggios in the harps and highlighted intricate detail work in the winds, tympani and percussion. But such emphasis could seem excessive. For instance, before the tenor horn reentered with the main theme, the ultra-slow arpeggios in the violins seemed rather cumbersome. And in trying to make themselves heard over the strident strings, the winds could be piercing and shrill. The highly metrical, unvaried characteristic of the tempo made for an interesting yet puzzling experience.

The second movement seemed almost exaggeratedly slow in tempo. Boulez seemed to dissecti the music measure by measure: transfiguring it in the process. The lush theme sounded more like a danse macabre than the shimmering night music that Mahler indicates. As usual, Boulez tried to put melody and accompaniment on equal footing. His account of the scherzo was jerky with especially heavy staccato. The folk themes sounded almost Fellinieque. The harshly plucked mandolin solo in the second Night Music movement was cold and expressionless.

Boulez tore into the finale with heart-thumping pace. The horns did marvelous work while the rest of the instruments struggled to be heard over them. The reading of this movement was angular, precise and carefully articulated but lacked the emotional commitment to save is from sounding meandering and bombastic. There was crispness and attention to detail, but little momentum.

All in all, Boulez’s academic approach to the Mahler Seven made the work sound more like a dissection than a proper performance. And while it was different and instructive, I still can’t decide whether I like it.  

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.