James Levine Conducts the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Elgar and Mahler at Carnegie Hall
By: Susan Hall - Dec 22, 2009
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Conducted by James Levine
Stephanie Blythe, mezzo sopano.
Edward Elgar, Sea Pictures for voice and orchestra; Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony.
Carnegie Hall
December 20, 2009
On Sunday afternoon, the Metropolitan Opera orchestra rose from the pit to fill the stage of Carnegie Hall. Tthey performed Elgar and Mahler under their principal conductor, newly recuperated from an back injury, sustained after the opening night of 'Tosca." James Levine was welcomed with a standing ovation.
Stephanie Blythe swept in like the sea itself in a shimmering blue gown and floor length cape to sing the Elgar songs, "Sea Pictures." Originally written for soprano, Clara Butt, a contralto, asked Elgar to lower the key. He did. Butt dressed for the first performance like Disney's Ariel, in a mermaid costume. In the third performance of the piece, Elgar and Butt traveled to the royal retreat at Balmoral to perform for Queen Victoria. (Butt did not wear her mermaid costume).
Having heard Blythe recently as Orfeo in "Orfeo and Euridice" and in all three one act operas of "Il Trittico," it's clear whatever and wherever she sings is worth the trip. Her large, beautiful voice comfortably takes on the mezzo tessatura, including high notes. Her interpretation of the charming Elgar songs was compelling. She shapes lines with dynamics that come to her by grace (I am sure that she hones and husbands her great gift with hard work). No one singing today is more comfortable in a simply gorgeous voice, as much an elemental force of nature as "The Swimmer," the last raging Elgar song.
When President Obama visited Great Britain earlier this year, he presented Queen, Elizabeth, with a ipod loaded with Broadway tunes. Maybe he can add long distance our homegrown.Blythe's performance of the Queen's homegrown composer to her personal listening device.
Elgar and Mahler may seem like strange program fellows, the one magisterial, the other, a violent swirl of notes. Both men saw the Victorian world wrenched apart and both composed around the central idea of dissolution. Both composed military, funereal and processional passages, with drumbeats and horns signaling the Western world on the edge of an abyss. Although Mahler died in 1911 and Elgar in 1934, Marhler's is the more contemporary take.
The Fifth is Mahler's best known symphony, particularly the 4th movement which Visconti used as the musical track in "Death in Venice," and is often played as a stand alone at pops and at burials-- as Leonard Bernstein did for Robert Kennedy's burial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Mahler asked, reflecting back to the Elgar, "What should they [the public] make of these primeval noises, this rushing, roaring, raging sea."
The first movement is a funeral march with elegiac asides and one incredible outburst of anguish. The second, an eruption of furious energy punctuated by moments of utter despair. The third movement is a delirious scherzo with little dance episodes and delightful horn solos. Then back to the business at hand, the Adagietto for strings and harp.
Critics clock Mahler the way trainers clock their racehorses, but the goals are not the same. Clearly with horses, who gets over the finish line first is best, but with the 4th movement of the Mahler, some think Bruno Walter, Mahler's protegee, took it too fast-- under 10 minutes. Other interpretations can take fifteen. The big complaint about slow is that this is a song without words, and should be able to fit in the human voice. That would favor the under 10 clip.
Sunday offered a different circumstance. Because the Met orchestra listens to song all the time, it brings an unusually lyric sense to the pieces it performs. Can we argue that Maestro Levine's deliberate pace allowed the orchestra to sing? My minute hand read 13.5.
Of course, being able to hear the details in Mahler is important, and Carnegie has one of the best acoustic environments in the world. Levine's rendering had a yearning beauty, created in part by keeping the reins tight on the instruments so that the listener tugged with them to go forward to the fifth movement -- which ends in darkness. Levine is a master, holding all the disparate pieces of the Mahler together. His return is most welcome.
Mrs. Elgar, who wrote the poem "In Haven (Capri), the text of the second Sea Pictures song, also wrote a charming Christmas greeting:
The pifferari* wander far,
They seek the shrines, and hymn the peace
Which herald angels, 'neath the star,
Foretold to shepherds, bidding strife to cease....
..As"Noel! Noel!" sounds across the night.
Music allows us such breadth in celebrating our year end holidays.
James Levine and the Met Orchestra return to Carnegie with soprano Diana Damrau for Schubert, Richard Strauss and Beethoven on January 24th.
*traveling musicians