Levine’s Economy of Gesture
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: October 11, 2006
With the shoulder injury that put him out of action last season fully behind him, and a summer at Tanglewood to get limber, James Levine has returned to his full workload at the Boston Symphony, which he brought to New York on Monday evening for the first of its three Carnegie Hall concerts this season.
But if you’re expecting him to have become an arm-swinging
hip shaker in the Lorin Maazel mold, forget it: Mr. Levine, though
looking notably more flexible than in recent seasons, still
conducts from a high stool, and his gestures remain nearly
microscopic, in the Fritz Reiner tradition, much of the time.
But what of it? With both the Boston Symphony and the Met
Orchestra, Mr. Levine’s barely perceptible gestures clearly convey
both bold strokes and subtleties to his musicians. As he once told
a conducting master class at Tanglewood, the important part is what
you project in front of you, to the orchestra, not behind you, to
the audience.
Mr. Levine’s program on Monday was split between Schoenberg
and Beethoven. Often you had the sense that he would have loved to
compress the distance between them, and there were times when he
succeeded. His obsessive attention to dynamic and balancing details
in the Schoenberg Piano Concerto and the Beethoven Piano Concerto
No. 4 cast both as Romantic high dramas, Beethoven’s Classicism
and Schoenberg’s Serialism notwithstanding.
Strangely, the odd work out wasn’t Schoenberg’s concerto but
his early “Verkl鋜te Nacht.” The Mahlerian lushness of this 1899
score would have been alien to Beethoven, and Schoenberg had
abandoned that language long before he wrote the Piano Concerto in
1942.
Mr. Levine, leading a huge ensemble in Schoenberg’s later
string orchestra expansion, took every opportunity to magnify the
score’s gestures: dramatic passages had a molten intensity, and
pianissimo writing was about as hushed as string players can be
while still moving their bows. Where Schoenberg wrote a diminuendo,
Mr. Levine often responded with a sweeping gesture in which a
phrase began with a brawny robustness and quickly melted into
silence.
Daniel Barenboim was the soloist in both concertos, and he and
Mr. Levine seemed to be of one mind. Their reading of the
Schoenberg was vivid and punchy, with an assertive and sometimes
zesty piano line set within a thoroughly tactile orchestral fabric.
As in “Verkl鋜te Nacht,” Mr. Levine’s manipulation of color and
dynamics bordered on micromanagement, but invariably proved
expressive rather than merely fussy.
The Beethoven, handled in much the same way, sometimes crossed
that line: the pianissimo rendering of the first bars in the
finale, for example, had a daintiness that accomplished little more
than showing off an effect Mr. Levine had already used amply
throughout the evening.
Mr. Barenboim’s Beethoven was big-boned and warm in the
opening Allegro, and fleet in the finale. But he was at his best —
and his collaboration with Mr. Levine was at its most satisfying —
in a graceful, fluid account of the Andante con moto.
James Levine and the Boston Symphony return to Carnegie Hall
on Nov. 11; (212) 247-7800.
