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The Boston Globe
BSO Looks Back At Zemlinsky
By Richard Dyer Over the last 20 years there has been a major revival of interest in the music of Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was born in Vienna in 1871 and died in Larchmont, New York, in 1942, a refugee from Hitler. German theaters have produced several of his operas with success, and some of them have been recorded, along with his tone poem "Die Seejungfrau"; his song cycle, the Lyric Symphony, has entered the international repertory and been recorded many times, although by more inquiring minds than those in Symphony Hall. The Boston Symphony has not gotten around to it until this week. There are good reasons for being interested in Zemlinsky, and maybe one had one. He was a distinguished composer and conductor whose music has always attracted the attention of adventurous musicians - the great Belgian bass-baritone José van Dam jumped at the chance to learn the Lyric Symphony especially for this week's concerts. Zemlinsky taught composers as diverse as Schoenberg, who married his sister, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; Mahler conducted Zemlinsky music and Alban Berg quoted the Lyric Symphony in his own Lyric Suite. Zemlinsky's music is a kind of "missing link" connecting all these figures, and Richard Strauss as well; yet it has its own integrity and identity, and casts its own spell. All serious artistic work is an investment in the future; the Lyric Symphony, completed in 1923, had to wait more than 50 years for frequent performance. The bad side of the question is that too many musicians turn to forgotten music of the past, which time has somehow made more accessible, rather than undertaking the even more difficult work of advocating the new. The Lyric Symphony is a song cycle on the model of Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde." The texts come from the once popular and "exotic" Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore. They are as luscious as the Song of Solomon, but they are about yearning, isolation, and loneliness more than fulfillment. The music is more expressionistic than Mahler's the poems depict extreme emotional states that the music reflects. Alessandra Marc came in at short notice to replace Luba Orgonasova, who was felled by the flu. The soprano's voice, voluminous and lustrous throughout the wide range, ought to have made the singer even more prominent than she is. But her appearance limits her operatic repertory, and questionsable interpretive habits also crowd into her path. It's commonplace to observe that every light-voiced singer fancies herself a Bruennhilde. Marc has a Bruennhilde voice from which a soubrette is struggling to escape; there is a lot of coy swooping around that goes beyond characterization into the area of mannerism. When she is singing quietly in the middle range she shows sensitivity to words; when the warpaint goes on, they virtually disappear. Still, it was easy to bask in the glow of her tone. Van Dam has to work harder at the heavy lifting than he used to, but even the loudest, highest singing never affects his equilibrium, and when he can spin a legato line, color a word, control musical time and space to create a phrase, he still sounds like the greatest singer before the public. In the last song, his delivery of the words "Stand still, O beautiful end" was of a profound and eloquent simplicity that stirred the soul. The Lyric Symphony is right up Seiji Ozawa's alley; he reveled both in the music's sensitivity and in its excesses, gloried in its range of color and emotion, and led everything with passionate conviction - sometimes to the point of threatening to overwhelm his singers. The playing had character, splendor, and subtlety; there were outstanding contributions from concertmaster Malcolm Lowe and James Sommerville, horn. The concert opened with a trim, alert, energetic, and stylish performance of Beethoven's Second Symphony. | |||