SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart and Berlioz: Imogen Cooper (piano), Matthew Polwnzani (tenor), Tanglewood Festival Chorus, PALS Children's Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, Symphony Hall, Boston, 2.5.2009 (KH)

Mozart: Piano Concerto № 25 in C, K.503
Berlioz: Te Deum, Opus 22


Sir Colin Davis brought the Boston Symphony season to a majestic close this weekend past, with the help of a composer on whose behalf he has labored long and passionately: Louis-Hector Berlioz. 

Davis has a long association with the BSO; his debut here at Symphony Hall was in February 1967, and he served as the orchestra’s principal guest conductor from 1972 to 1984.  In the art of music, ongoing relationships matter; and in this concert, the beneficial synergies of familiarity and mutual esteem between conductor, chorus and orchestra were readily apparent.

In a draft for this review, I came close to complaining about the program’s brevity.  But had an overture been added to the program it would have meant less rehearsal time for (say) the Mozart, and my pencil struck through the nascent complaint.  There’s been some dishwater Mozart out there — the composer gives (as Jeeves would say) general satisfaction, and no particular effort is required to produce a pretty result.  It scarce requires saying that at times injustice is executed upon some marvelous music.  Imogen Cooper and Sir Colin together worked up perhaps the best Mozart to have sounded in the Hall this season.  A fleeting duet lingers in the memory, of flutist Elizabeth Rowe and Ms Cooper, just a single measure in thirds emerging soon after a big tutti in the central Andante;  a musical moment occupying less time than it takes to read this paragraph.

Just a word more touching on the selection of this particular concerto.  I was a bit baffled to read in the program notes that, after the first Boston Symphony performances of the K.503 — which Robbins Landon calls “the grandest, most difficult and most symphonic” of all Mozart’s piano concertos — in March 1883, the orchestra did not play the piece again for 79 years.  A bit strange it is, to find a major work of Mozart’s maturity thus long neglected here in Boston. 

In contrast, the phrase long neglect and the music of Berlioz go together like Romeo & Juliet.  When Berlioz first conducted his Te Deum for tenor solo, double chorus, children’s chorus & orchestra at the Church of St-Eustache in April of 1855 (six years after he had finished composing it), it would prove the only performance during the composer’s life.  The first American performance was in Chicago (December 1887) followed shortly by the first Boston performance, given by the Handel & Haydn Society, on 29 January 1888.  Only as late as August of 1954 came the BSO’s first performance of the Te Deum, under Charles Munch at Tanglewood; and if I understand aright, this magnificent work did not resound in Symphony Hall itself until February of 1973 — under the direction of Colin Davis.

The 4,800-pipe Aeolian-Skinner organ in Symphony Hall was completely overhauled in time for the opening concert of the ’05-’06 season (on which occasion it was christened with the Saint-Saëns ‘Organ’ Symphony).  Berlioz opens his Te Deum with grand chords alternating between the orchestra and the organ, and on Saturday this was (to use the term in a strictly musical sense) a blast.  The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, again and reliably, sang magnificently; they were arrayed as two separate choirs flanking the white-vested PALS children’s chorus, in the center of the risers, who fulfilled their role with charm and assurance.  Tenor Matthew Polenzani was fine in the Te ergo quæsumus, but he was perforce upstaged by the TFC at the close of this number, the ethereal unaccompanied setting of the Fiat super nos misericordia, essentially a five-part, men’s-voice-heavy, passage richly suggestive of Russian choral music (Berlioz first visited St Petersburg in 1847, the year before he began work on the Te Deum).  Tom Rolfs and assistant played the cornet parts in the Dignare with sweet warmth.  As stirring as it is to be in the hall, with the stage bristling with all that assembled talent, there is an additional thrill in watching the percussionists rise during the Tibi omnes to strike five pair of crash cymbals in unison;  and not only the fortissimo accents, but a few (comparatively) quiet tzings towards the close of the number.  The grandest stroke of all is the concluding Judex crederis; in the program notes, Hugh MacDonald points out that it opens with “an unconventional fugue with each voice entering a half-step higher than the last.”  Tellingly, to avoid confusing the multitudinous performers in all this chromatic devilry, Berlioz does without any key signature for that opening fugue — it opens with a statement in E-flat minor, which would be a signature of six flats, and the ‘corrective’ accidentals to adjust for the second entrance in E minor (the sopranos of Chorus I) would be a nightmare. 

To repeat gladly what I said at the outset, this concert was a majestic close to a great season here on Huntington Avenue.  Next January, Colin Davis brings us the US premiere of MacMillan’s St John Passion (a BSO co-commission); this listener can hardly wait. 

Karl Henning


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