I went to Boston for the premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Violin Concerto, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but walked straight into a music-business news story. The orchestra’s music director of seven years’ standing, James Levine, resigned on the day I arrived. Chronic ill health had long been forcing cancellations on him — he pulled out of the Birtwistle performance the week before — and he finally faced the harsh reality that he physically can’t combine this prestigious, demanding job with occupying a similar post at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.
The loss is sadder in that Levine is felt seriously to have revived the orchestra’s fortunes after the too long reign of Seiji Ozawa. Levine, a revered figure, brought not only his intense musicianship and a pedagogical power, but a passionate commitment to the new: reaching back to Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, and extending to recent works by Elliott Carter and to the locally celebrated John Harbison, a two-year cycle of whose six symphonies is in progress.
Birtwistle is a British beneficiary of these enlightened policies. Five years ago, Levine asked him to write something for the orchestra: at first, it was a purely orchestral piece, then a cello concerto, and finally a violin concerto — which appealed to Birtwistle as “the most difficult thing I can think of doing”. He is not the first British composer to be favoured by the BSO. In 1981, Maxwell Davies’s impressive Symphony No 2 was premiered by them, and, in 1984, Michael Tippett’s cantata The Mask of Time. Strikingly, Birtwistle in Boston is about to be followed by another British composer, Thomas Adès, who conducts a programme including two of his works.
Both Colin Davis and Mark Elder direct programmes this season. One can’t but feel Boston is a very open-minded place. The subscription audience — always, in my experience, civilised, informed and impassioned — were receptive to the Birtwistle if overheard interval comments were anything to go by. They have, after all, been habituated to Schoenberg; indeed, the next programme was to have centred on his Piano Concerto, performed by Maurizio Pollini. Alas, cancellation seems to be a Boston virus: he also pulled out because of illness (the strain of the Pollini Project, in London, must be telling), and was replaced by Peter Serkin, offering the more tractable Bartok Third Concerto instead.
The other items were altered, too — a pity, since the original concept, like the Birtwistle programme, exemplified Levine’s innovative approach. The Schoenberg would have been juxtaposed with a late concerto by Mozart and Schoenberg’s Variations with Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Levine holds the admirably unegotistical view that a distinguished soloist is wasted on only one work. This was taken to an extreme by the Birtwistle programme (given four times in Boston, due in New York on Tuesday), which, uniquely in my concert-going life, consisted entirely of violin concertantes: first Mozart’s Rondo in C, K373, a sort of aperitif, then the Birtwistle concerto and, in the second half, Bartok’s sublimely strenuous Second Concerto. The soloist was Christian Tetzlaff, and Levine’s stand-in the Brazilian-born Marcelo Lehninger, one of the BSO’s two assistant conductors.
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Tetzlaff is renowned for his interpretation of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, one of the most successful of recent years and a daunting model for any composer. But Birtwistle is ever his own man, drawn back to musical first principles with each new piece. The hard challenge of the genre had to do, he said, with his lack of direct experience of the violin and, more pertinently, the perennial difficulty of balancing it with an orchestra. His typically radical solution is strictly to exclude other players from whatever register the violin happens to occupy. He exploits the resultant “toothcomb” interlocking of soloist’s and accompanists’ lines, and nominates five players — flute, piccolo, cello, oboe, bassoon — for special supporting roles, duetting with the soloist in turn. It is a device he has often used in ensemble pieces, though here he does not ask the respective players to come forward on the platform, or even (Mahler fashion) to stand up (which might actually have been useful).
Though not so different from accompanimental strands one would expect in any concerto, the obbligatos offer themselves as structural markers in a continuous 25-minute span that evokes traditional form while always keeping at a subtle remove from it. It is as though Birtwistle has to rediscover the concerto paradigm from scratch. The time-honoured three movements are hinted at, yet the manner of proceeding is not at all conventional.
In a pre-concert talk, he commented that the work is in a state of “permanent exposition”, or perhaps “enunciation”, and of “permanent interruption”. Ideas flow forth, are “discussed” by the soloists, the concertino-chorus, the tutti, but are not “argued” over. The encounters are friendly rather than competitive, though there are several imposing climaxes. The last word is given to the soloist: a dry, firm pizzicato D to cut off further enunciations. Hearing the piece three times in the famed shoebox acoustic of Symphony Hall (in a thawing Boston littered with greying heaps of snow) was a privilege. Clear to begin with — Birtwistle really has ensured that the soloist’s every note is audible — the concerto seemed increasingly inevitable and substantial. Its transparency is new in his output: this and other features reminded me of Carter’s late style, though the resemblance is probably fortuitous.
The concerto always holds the violinist back. And it refuses to grant the traditional cadenza. It likes to toy with not being a 'concerto' at all
The work is far from the black, rampaging densities of Birtwistle’s classic Earth Dances, and even removed from the less intransigent multi-layeredness of his Chicago Symphony Orchestra piece, Exody, or Cleveland Orchestra commission, The Shadow of Night; and without the obsessive ritualism of some of his scores.
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One could believe, at times, one was in the world of Berg’s Violin Concerto; and the Bach chorale-led final section of that work finds its equivalent in a curious coda whose otherworldliness is compounded by a mechanical tapping of castanets. Yet, though Birtwistle’s violinist frequently betrays a lyric impulse, the concerto always holds him back. And it refuses to grant the traditional cadenza. It likes to toy with not being a “concerto” at all.
It is, in short, a work of true originality. But there was no mistaking the genuinely violinistic quality of the solo part. Tetzlaff’s thrustful performance suggested he was glad indeed to have acquired this vigorously if implausibly idiomatic vehicle. It was as if he had been at home with it for a long time; and the orchestra, too, showed no signs of strain or resentment in handling Birtwistle’s characteristic but doubtless, to them, unfamiliar juddering rhythms, off-beam ostinati, abrupt (cadential) glissandi and austere polyphony. Lehninger’s conducting was amazingly assured, exact, invigorating. His account of the Bartok had huge distinction, Tetzlaff’s mastery of the solo part as blindingly brilliant as it was deeply humane.
The three concertos formed a satisfying prismatic whole. Levine’s programming philosophy pays off. The BSO must now be urgently seeking his replacement, and we must hope for the solemn and uncanny Violin Concerto’s British premiere. (I have an idea it isn’t far off.) Meanwhile, Birtwistle is embarking on a second piano concerto.