Reviews

Thursday, 31 July 2003, The Berkshire Eagle
Review of Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music

Classical Music Review
Tanglewood Music Center tendered good things in big and little packages
By Andrew L. Pincus
Special to The Eagle

LENOX -- Contrary to the saying, good things come in both little and big packages.

The Tanglewood Music Center tendered gifts in both categories on consecutive nights this week: a program of Ned Rorem's songs on Monday in celebration of his 80th birthday, and the TMC Orchestra's third concert of the season on Tuesday.

With only singers and pianists, Rorem said more about the quandaries of human existence than all the furies loosed in Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring, which Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducted with a monster orchestra. Isn't that peculiar? Stravinsky can raise the hair on the back of your neck with his barbaric screams and squeals, but Rorem sends a shiver through the heart with his meditations on love and mortality.

*

The orchestra is the Tanglewood school's big-ticket item. On the clear, cool evening, Seiji Ozawa Hall and its lawn were jammed for the concert -- a total of 2,500 or so listeners. Maybe one-tenth that number showed up for Rorem.

Yet the Rorem program was so wonderfully done -- from the quality of the songs and performances to the 80-year-old's athletic leap onto the stage to take a bow -- that it has to rank as one of the school's finest achievements. Lovingly prepared in the midst of rehearsals by these same students for the two commissioned operas, it also showcased a side of the TMC program that lives in the shadow of the chamber and orchestral concerts -- not to speak of the operas.

*

Rorem has rightly been called the United States' Schubert. His songs cover a range of human emotion much as Schubert's do, but with the touch of angst common to our times.

Each song carries a thrill of surprise. The texts, richly expressive in themselves, gain meaning when Rorem takes them to unexpected places. The subject can be as whimsical as a serpent that loves to sing -- "And the Woods Resounded with many a Shriek,/ As the birds flew off to the End of Next Week" -- or as regretful as a swan that, on dying, laments, "More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise." (Typically for Rorem, the poets here are Theodore Roethke and Ben Jonson. ) The music always adds dimension to the text.

The evening's centerpiece was "Aftermath," a cycle of 10 songs composed in the aftermath of 9/11. In a brief talk, Rorem, who lives in New York City, said that after the attacks, he asked himself, "What's the point of art?" Then a week later, he realized, "Art is the only point."

Like other Rorem songs -- especially, on this occasion, a pair by Walt Whitman -- this set carries an implied pacifist message. But grief and pity reign. And not just for victims of the attacks. Rorem's purview extends to all those who have loved and lost.

An unforgettable evening.

*

Energy overflowed as the music center's two conducting fellows opened the orchestral program. James Gaffigan and Laura Jackson laid on the drama in highly charged performances of Beethoven's "Leonore" Overture No. 2 and Haydn's Symphony No. 104 ("London"), respectively.

Making his debut as a TMC conductor, Frühbeck took an almost clinical approach to Stravinsky's 1913 shock ballet. That was, indeed, the glory of the performance. It went off as a controlled chain reaction rather than a series of nuclear blasts with interludes between -- the more usual outcome. Countless details, especially in the winds, emerged from the riot of orchestral activity. The music spoke, not the conductor.

Ozawa Hall was too small to contain the eruptions of sound set off by an orchestra heavily reinforced -- by about 25 percent -- with Boston Symphony members and other "guest artists." But if deafening at times, the performance was a demonstration of great orchestral playing, under a master conductor, in music once deemed too difficult to play. The players joined the audience in giving Frühbeck a nuclear ovation.