Levine Re-energizes Tanglewood

[Ralph]

From The New York Times:

July 22, 2005
Tanglewood Enters the Age of Levine
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Lenox, Mass. — The imposing bass Stephen Milling, singing the role of Hunding in Wagner's "Walküre," rumbled forth with stage-shaking low notes in his first rehearsal with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.

Jaws dropped in the first-violin section. Some of the young players, students at Tanglewood and top-notch musicians themselves, smiled in amazement. One violinist mouthed "Wow!" to her stand partner.

It was a singular moment and a symbol of Tanglewood's entry into a new era: the Levine era.

James Levine has just finished his first season as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In that role, he also has artistic control of the Boston Symphony-run Tanglewood summer music festival. Nearing the halfway point of his first Tanglewood session, he has made his imprint clear in the Berkshires.

"James Levine is the best thing that ever could happen to Boston and Tanglewood," said Bright Sheng, a former Tanglewood fellow and a composer who led a master class this summer. "Every bit of his talent could be utilized - his knowledge, his experience."

Last weekend's Wagner performance of two acts from the "Ring" cycle is the most obvious example. The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra - made up of fellows, mostly in their 20's, who audition to study at the center - shared the stage with opera stars and Wagner specialists, themselves drawn by the presence of the man on the podium. Several, notably the soprano Deborah Voigt, have sung with Mr. Levine at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is music director.

Most of the students were playing "Ring" music for the first time with one of the world's foremost Wagner conductors, a musician whose face was on the cover of Time magazine before some of them were born. They performed on Saturday night to strong reviews.

"I haven't felt such excitement in the shed since a certain relative of mine was there," said Jamie Bernstein, a daughter of Leonard Bernstein. She was on hand as the host of the live radio broadcast of the Wagner performance on Saturday by WQXR (owned by The New York Times Company).

In a score of interviews over four recent days at Tanglewood, administrators and students often gushed about Mr. Levine, although given his power in the music world, it was unlikely that they would withhold praise on the record.

"People are pretty dazzled," said Ellen Highstein, the director of the Tanglewood Music Center, the training arm of the festival.

But privately there was grumbling from Tanglewood orchestra musicians about Mr. Levine's minimalist, and thus hard-to-read, conducting style, something he says is intended to elicit more focus, freedom and self-reliance from the players.

Other participants wondered how much his presence would change what they consider the increasingly corporate atmosphere at Tanglewood, which has expanded both its grounds and its marketing efforts in recent years.

It also remains to be seen how Tanglewood ticket buyers will take to Mr. Levine's more challenging programs. Ticket sales for last Sunday's concert, featuring difficult modern works, numbered 6,785, compared with 10,136 the previous Sunday, when the weather - a factor in lawn seating - was better.

The Master's Lessons

One of his chief challenges could be the conducting program.

With high-profile alumni like Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Lorin Maazel and Seiji Ozawa, it has fallen in recent years into a "holding pattern" and failed to produce illustrious conductors, the Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer wrote recently. Mr. Levine has yet to elaborate on his plans.

As a performer, Mr. Levine, a pianist, made his presence felt early on, in Mozart's "Kegelstatt" Trio in E flat for clarinet, viola and piano at opening exercises of the music center on July 3.

In the weeks since, he has filled his days with concerts, rehearsals, coaching sessions and - a new wrinkle - faculty meetings.

He held a master class for voice students, something no recent music director at Tanglewood has done, officials here said, occasionally jumping in for the piano accompanist. "Our people get to find out what a major conductor cares about in singing," said Phyllis Curtin, Tanglewood's venerable voice teacher.

He has given lessons to two conducting fellows, and this week he led master classes for both the conductors and singing fellows in parts of Mozart's "Don Giovanni." Could piano master classes be on the agenda?

Perhaps a result of the Levine Effect, the level of singers appeared to be higher this summer, Tanglewood officials said. "The vocal department was very aggressive," Mr. Levine told trustees in a meeting on Saturday.

Mr. Levine has brought an air of artistic excitement and vision to a place that some felt had grown stagnant in the two years since Mr. Ozawa left the leadership of the Boston Symphony. Even before then, Mr. Ozawa's influence was erratic.

"There is a maestro on campus," said Cristian Macelaru, a violin fellow and a graduate student at Rice University.

The Tanglewood marketers are happy, too. An internal message to supporters notes the "good fortune of extensive press coverage," thanks to Mr. Levine. Ticket sales as of last weekend were up 4 percent over last year, the orchestra reported, although bad weather might have played a role.

A Taste of the New

Mr. Levine has also brought his emphasis on new music. In the Sunday afternoon concert, a day after the Wagner concert, he reprised the Boston Symphony's March premiere of works by John Harbison and Charles Wuorinen, along with the cacophonous "Amériques" by Varèse.

At an open rehearsal, Mr. Levine spoke briefly about the works, a rarity for a music director on the stage of the Tanglewood shed. "I hope you'll have a good time," he said.

Robert Kirzinger, a festival program annotator, said of the weekend's concerts, "Together, they are emblematic of what Levine is trying to do."

In an interview, Mr. Levine emphasized that he was intent on absorbing the Tanglewood experience and not disrupting its operations with big changes.

"My goal is simply that everything we do should be at the highest possible level and unavailable anywhere else," he said. "It's my first summer, so I wouldn't presume to change a thing."

He did offer clues about the future, saying he was mulling over the idea of expanding the weeklong contemporary-music festival to two weeks. "I think it's important to go in the direction of not ghettoizing" new music, he said.

For next season, he said he would repeat the "Ring" scenario with Strauss's "Elektra" and conduct a Boston Symphony performance of "Don Giovanni."

Not unexpectedly, Mr. Levine is injecting his vast opera experience into Tanglewood's life, in the form of an emphasis on the voice.

"My orientation puts the voice in the center of musical expression," he said, including instrumental playing. "If you don't have a vocal conception, then you get to a point where everything is abstract." He has tried to convey the idea to the Boston Symphony.

"He wants to hear a vocal quality in everything we do," said William R. Hudgins, the principal clarinetist and a Tanglewood alumnus.

Performing the "Ring" excerpts not only let the students play music they probably would not have had a chance to perform elsewhere, it also placed great singers right next to their ears.

Mr. Levine is an experienced hand at summer festival work, but at places without Tanglewood's emphasis on training, like Ravinia, near Chicago; Salzburg; and Bayreuth. The only experiences at Tanglewood that he mentions were as a visitor at the age of 13 and as a young guest conductor in 1972.

So as a newcomer, he is perhaps more hesitant to intrude on the fabled traditions that Tanglewood denizens and Boston Symphony officials love to cite.

"What you have to remember is the history of the place," said the pianist Emanuel Ax, who has a home nearby. "One of the things that surround you here are the great figures of American music of the past. They have all been molded here."

But orchestra officials also say that Mr. Levine, as a former protégé of the legendary maestro George Szell, has a keen sense of historical lineage.

Traditions Revered

The Tanglewood Festival was founded as the Boston Symphony's summer home by the music director Serge Koussevitzky in 1936. Copland and Hindemith were on the earliest faculty roster. Tanglewood says that its alumni make up a fifth of the members of American symphony orchestras and nearly a third of their principal players. Half of the Boston Symphony musicians attended.

The flame of tradition is carefully tended.

Seranak, Koussevitzky's summer home and now a Tanglewood guest house, is tended as a shrine to the great man. His concert tails and shoes are carefully placed in a closet in his room at the start of every summer. Alumni reverently point to the balcony where Bernstein would recite Shakespeare into the night, or recount stories about Bernstein's Rabelaisian composition classes in the elegant living room to rapt fellows.

When the Beaux Arts Trio played on July 14 at Ozawa Hall here, it repeated the program of its debut - at Tanglewood, in 1955 - right down to the encore.

Now Tanglewood fills many functions: summer home to the Boston Symphony and a source of its prestige; Berkshire concert site and tourism engine; training ground and networking nirvana for 150 young musicians.

More than 300,000 people visit Tanglewood each season. Many are New Yorkers, giving the Boston Symphony access to another major audience. And many of the New Yorkers are bound to be Met Opera-going Levine lovers.

Tanglewood's genteel lawns are the sort of place where on an afternoon you can see a sockless, white-haired gentleman wearing a red linen jacket and a candy-striped tie, hear three young people sing snatches of "West Side Story" while they stroll across the grass, and enter a cafeteria door where a sign says shirts and shoes are "preferred," not required.

The festival is an important revenue source for the Boston Symphony, so much so that the loss of ticket sales from heavy rains last summer contributed to the orchestra's $618,000 budget deficit.

Conductors in Training

For Mr. Levine, 62, Tanglewood marks a new career stage: an emphasis on teaching. He has never had time for many conducting students.

"Now I'm at an age where working for the next generation is the most important work I do," he said. "This whole period of my life is turning into the most beautiful I've had."

Prominent conductors give master classes, but Mr. Levine's continuing presence is a boon to this season's two conducting fellows, Julian Kuerti and Steven Jarvi.

Mr. Kuerti, 28, who lives in Berlin and was recently appointed assistant conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, said Mr. Levine had made few technical comments during their sessions.

"He wasn't there to judge us," he said. Mr. Levine's message was to free the musicians to play freely. "It's opened up a new level of trust that I can actually trust an orchestra more than I thought."

Mr. Jarvi, 27, said, "He boiled it down to the truth of the score." Mr. Jarvi, the conductor in the Washington National Opera's young artist program, said he was struck by how down to earth yet efficient Mr. Levine was in rehearsal.

Giving Players Freedom

The generous 30 hours of rehearsal for the "Ring" concert amounted to an immersion course in Mr. Levine's musical world.

At the outset, he asked for a show of hands from players who knew the plot. Only a few did. He had a synopsis distributed, brought in a lecturer and had DVD's of his performances played in the student lounge.

His rehearsals showed him delivering a mix of the practical and intangible. Praise was constant. The orchestra was often warned about covering up the singers.

Many of his comments were aimed at creating a sense of freedom in the playing. He said to the violins, after a section of fast, repeated motifs, that if the passage ever felt like an étude, play it like a melody. He suggested that the violins think of themselves as a collective of soloists.

"I'm not a technical perfectionist at all," he told the players. "I care about character." He called for fast volume drops to be lightning quick, more highs from the violins, more inner voices in brass chords and a resonance in every voice.

"Keep your sound always very beautiful and your texture relaxed," he said. Poised to give the downbeat for a loud string entrance, he added, "Kill 'em," and then, "Big splash!" A stuttering woodwind passage should laugh. Staccato passages must be "short but not tight."

After the dress rehearsal, the players clapped, stamped their feet and tapped their stands with bows in appreciation.

"This is probably the best experience of my life," said an awed Katherine Bormann, 22, a violinist studying at Juilliard. "You just don't get to work with people like this every day."

[karlhenning]

... A Taste of the New

Mr. Levine has also brought his emphasis on new music. In the Sunday afternoon concert, a day after the Wagner concert, he reprised the Boston Symphony's March premiere of works by John Harbison and Charles Wuorinen, along with the cacophonous "Amériques" by Varèse ....

Yes, quite cheeky of Levine to program the Wuorinen and the Varèse at a summer festival, n'est-ce pas?

I heard the broadcast; a good performance, and the Wuorinen is as strong a piece as I remember hearing it in Symphony Hall.

[MahlerSnob]

I was out there last weekend for the Wagner concert and I had several friends in the orchestra. They all seemed to like Levine, although the comment from one of my good friends who was playing first horn on Walkure was "The guy thinks he's Solti!" It was an excellent concert (a bit long), and the rough spots were excuseable - That's a huge amount of music to learn in only 30 hours of rehearsal time.

As for how much Levine will change the place - that's hard to say. While every past music director has left some kind of mark on the place, Tanglewood is EXTREMELY set in it's ways. Some traditions there date back to opening day, 1940. There would be a lot of resistance to any big changes.

[MahlerSnob]

One more thing...

"James Levine is the best thing that ever could happen to Boston and Tanglewood"

I think Koussevitsky wins that prize.

[Ralph]

One more thing...

"James Levine is the best thing that ever could happen to Boston and Tanglewood"

I think Koussevitsky wins that prize.

*****

Too bad he can't collect it.

[MahlerSnob]

I think he did. Not only did he found the festival, but he served as it's director from 1940 until his death in 1951(?). There's also a rather disturbing number of things named for him or related to him out there... The Koussevitsky Shed, the Koussevitsky Prize, Saranak (the Koussevitsky House), etc.