Another American avant-gardiste, but in high contrast to Xenakis and Antheil, Virgil Thomson wrote some of the most deceptively simple and appealing music of the 20th century. One of his masterpieces is his first operatic collaboration with Gertrude Stein, the fanciful and charmingly non-linear depiction of spirituality, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934). The best version I’ve ever seen is the one Mark Morris did five years ago. With its indirect but evocative language (“Pigeons on the grass alas”) and absurdist devices (there are more than three acts, and they’re not performed in numerical order), it’s a work people find hard to follow. Morris revived it last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as the first half of a double bill with another masterpiece, also out of commission for some years,Dido and Aeneas, in which he originally choreographed the dual role of Dido and her nemesis, a sorceress, for himself.
Both works got shapely and moving musical performances under the baton of Baroque-tenor-turned-conductor, Jeffrey Thomas, with several Boston-based singers in excellent form. Baritone James Maddalena’s Aeneas was the most moving and vocally beautiful performance of that role I’ve heard; he was also profoundly expressive as Thomson’s St. Ignatius (whose “Pigeons on the grass alas” became a meditation on the Holy Spirit). Soprano Jayne West was in radiant voice, and so was Baroque star Christine Brandes (as St. Theresa and Dido’s sister Belinda). Mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton’s well-sung but bland Dido, despite having one of the great tragic arias in all of opera, paled beside Maddalena’s full-hearted emotional commitment. (Morris’s first Didos were Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Mary Westbrook Geha.) On stage, in the Thomson, Morris’s dancers flirted a little too much with the audience; the piece works best when the performers are dead serious about everything, even the jokes. And in Dido, Morris’s decision to divide his dual role between two dancers diminished the size, impact, and meaning of his original conception.
In Boston, Morris’s new piece for Boston Ballet, Up and Down, offered audiences a real rarity: Aleksandr Glazunov’s very late (1932!), louchely luscious Saxophone Quartet. Soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxes were sumptuously played by (respectively) Tom Ferrante, Roderick Ferland, Donald Bravo, and Gregory Newton, who sounded as if they’d grown up in Russian late-night dives. (In Jorma Elo’s Plan to B, Dianne Pettipaw’s rendition of selections from Biber’s violin sonatas also stood out.)
It’s not common for a soloist and a conductor to enter with their arms around each other’s shoulders, but Yo-Yo Ma is not your common musician, and his warmth is apparent even before he starts to play. Because Osvaldo Golijov hasn’t yet completed his commissioned Cello Concerto (the premiere is now scheduled for Tanglewood), we got to hear Ma’s infinitely complex, multi-layered, and richly textured rendition of Schumann’s Cello Concerto. Conductor David Robertson and the orchestra made better collaborators than most of Ma’s chamber-music partners.
Robertson just rescued the BSO’s long-planned five-city tour by taking over for the injured James Levine at very short notice, so the orchestra was on his side. The program began with György Ligeti’s early Concert românesc, which has infectious folk tunes and a haunting duet for horns (one on stage, one echoing it at the back of the second balcony); it ended with an invigorating yet subtle, sweeping yet witty performance of Richard Strauss’s autobiographical Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero’s Life”), which had some pretty sumptuous solo work by concertmaster Malcolm Lowe.
