Yo-Yo Ma and James Levine Play Dvorák at Tanglewood
One of the summer's most popular events.
By: Michael Miller - Aug 16, 2007
Tanglewood Festival
Saturday, August 4, 8:30 p.m., Koussevitsky Music Shed
Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, conductor (replacing Edo de Waart)
Yo-Yo Ma, cello
Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904)
Cello Concerto in B minor, Opus 104
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Opus 95, From the New World
Tanglewood is an ideal venue for Yo-Yo Ma's expansive way of relating to audiences. When he plays in Seiji Ozawa Hall, he can address the audience directly, winning over their sympathy for his repertoire, or through a colleague, like Emanuel Ax last year in their fine program of Beethoven cello sonatas. In the Koussevitzky Music Shed he can reach out to a much larger audience—a truly enormous one, when one takes the Lawn into account—through his extensive repertory of gestures and glances. The audience loves this, as the packed Shed and Lawn attested on a Saturday night early this month, even people who may not have come focused on absorbing his views on Dvorák's late concerto for cello and orchestra. Before and while he plays Yo-Yo Ma exchanges demonstrative glances with the front rows of the audience, the conductor, the concertmaster, and other members of the orchestra. Of course all this looking around, particularly on his side of the stage have a reason, but it does appear as something of a feat that his concentration on the music never suffers. His musical function, in fact, includes a role as a secondary conductor, when he communicates with the front desks and other members of the orchestra, as they contribute obbligato parts, intimately linked to his solo. Again it is something of a feat that this never conflicts with the work of the conductor on the podium, but James Levine is at the very least unflappable, and in fact a conductor who can enthusiastically join in with this conception of Dvorák's concerto as a gigantic piece of chamber music.
In fact everything at Tanglewood was on an enlarged scale that evening: the crowds pouring through the main gate, security, the dense population of picknickers on the lawn, a scene which called for Reginald Marsh, if he were to return to this earth in search of his familiar beach at Coney Island. For that matter the parking lots had more than their share of New York and New Jersey plates. For the first time a guard accompanied me directly to the press porch, although he bade me good-bye just before it, suggesting that he'd found in me an excuse to get away from the front gate for some reason...but never mind; I came to hear Dvorák.
The cello concerto was a adventure for the composer. He wrote it mostly during his years in America, where he was invited to function as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, also an adventure for him, and not an entirely congenial one. He began the work during a happy respite on a family vacation at a Czech settlement in Iowa. Cello concerti were particularly rare at the time. Dvorák was stimulated to write it by the suggestion of a cellist who had collaborated with him in chamber music and by hearing the first performance of Victor Herbert's cello concerto in New York. He added a lyrical passage to the slow movement as a tribute to a recently deceased woman who had figured significantly in his life. The result was an intense, expansive work, which stretched his customarily neat control of musical form to the limit. Its rhapsodic quality sets it off from his other familiar works, most of which are symphonies of a Brahmsian mould. (Shouldn't his wonderful tone poems, his concerti for violin and piano, his church music, and his operas be more often performed than they are?) It is a particularly challenging work, both for the soloist and the conductor, although a great many of its most prominent exponents have overcome it most successfully.
Levine began the Cello Concerto with a deliberate tempo and dramatic phrasing, which presaged an intense performance ahead. He has been fond of extremely slow tempi in recent years, and Furtwänglerian tempo shifts have been especially prominent this season in particular, most brilliantly realized in his opening performance of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. Yo-Yo Ma's mastery of the piece kept things going, for the most part. As extreme as his expressiveness and variety of tone could be at moments, he always maintained the flowing line of his part. I only began to feel unconvinced at the appearance of the horn subject in the first movement. Levine slowed the tempo as far as he could, as if to allow his principal horn to squeeze out every possible beauty he might find in it. This did in fact break the flow of the music for me. It seemed self-indulgent, and it compromised the structural and dramatic function of the theme, as the soloist takes it up later on. This excess gave away too much of Dvorák's hand right at the beginning. Czech musicians traditionally keep tempo fluctuations in their national music under control, cleaving to a singing line, which respects both the folkish character of the music, as well as Dvorák's lucid structure and tempered drama. Except for that, I have nothing to question. The BSO played beautifully, including the horn principal. Yo-Yo Ma and Levine managed the coda of the last movement brilliantly. Here, a considerably broadened tempo and sustained pianissimo served to clarify the proportions of these expressive bars, preventing any sense of abruptness in the conclusion.
In Dvorák's Ninth Symphony, which filled the second half of the concert, James Levine followed the same approach, which proved more deleterious in the more tightly organized symphony. The extremely slow, pianissimo opening warned us of future excesses, and indeed the balanced proportions of the symphony were somewhat thrown off, by the conductor's free tempi. The slow movement, with its famous horn solo, was far too drawn out and static. It sounded pretentious and impaired the songfulness of the music. The incisiveness of the ensemble and expressive wind playing, however, made for an exciting final movement. Other listeners may disagree, but this reviewer does not believe that Dvorák is the most congenial for Mr. Levine, who, it must be remembered, filled in for an ailing Edo de Waart.
Web: http://michaelmiller.goodletters.net
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