by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2006.
Concert
life in New York has never been more vigorous than it is right now. Or
so it seemed during a sustained delirium of musical events in late
January and early February. The Berlin Philharmonic, under Simon
Rattle, brought its dark-gold sound to Carnegie Hall, in four programs
touching on four centuries; Mozart was celebrated on the
two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. Lincoln Center
brought in John Eliot Gardiner to conduct Mozart Masses and symphonies,
but it gave more attention to a not-at-all-dead composer, the
impossibly vibrant Osvaldo Golijov, whose flamenco opera “Ainadamar”
and pan-Iberian song cycle “Ayre” played to sold-out halls. The
Juilliard School, in its annual Focus! Festival, presented six evenings
of works written in 2005, including Donald Martino’s Fifth String
Quartet, a valedictory tour de force in high-modern style (the composer
died in December), and Mason Bates’s “Digital Loom,” for organ and
electronics, which transformed the hall into something between a
decaying cathedral and an East Berlin club. At one point, determined
not to be defeated by the surfeit, I made an early exit from a
fabulously murderous twentieth-century program by James Levine and the
Met Orchestra—Bartók’s “Miraculous Mandarin,” Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,”
Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”—to catch a program of Renaissance
polyphony by the Hilliard Ensemble, in the Music Before 1800 series, at
Corpus Christi Church. I don’t recommend going from blood-spattered
Austrian atonality to unyielding Franco-Flemish counterpoint by way of
a hellbent cab ride.
All this was meticulously planned by concert programmers, whose job
is to disappear behind the charisma of performers, but who deserve to
be celebrated on occasion. Two people in particular are playing crucial
roles in New York music: Jane Moss, who is the vice-president for
programming at Lincoln Center, and Ara Guzelimian, who is the artistic
adviser of Carnegie. Each has a distinctive approach, but their tastes
overlap enough to suggest a consensus on what intelligent programming
should look like in the early twenty-first century. Both Moss and
Guzelimian routinely celebrate living composers. They favor festivals
and thematic series—or, in Carnegie’s parlance, “Perspectives”—so that
a creative musician like Valery Gergiev or Ian Bostridge can offer a
world view rather than a bunch of pieces. And they have embraced
non-classical personalities: Carnegie has hosted Caetano Veloso and
Youssou N’Dour, while Lincoln Center recently featured the remarkable
indie-pop singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, whose stark religious song
“Seven Swans” was strangely similar in psychic impact to the Nicolas
Gombert Mass that Hilliard sang at Corpus Christi. The idea is not to
dilute classical music with crossover novelties but to move it back
into the thick of modern life. The old art will no longer hold itself
aloof; instead, it will play a godfather role in the wider culture,
able to assimilate anything new because it has assimilated everything
in the past.
In the middle of this midwinter musical carnival,
the Collegiate Chorale, a venerable New York institution now under the
direction of Robert Bass, presented an all-Puccini program at Carnegie
Hall. It wasn’t an official Carnegie event; the chorus rented the hall,
hiring the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to provide accompaniments and the
soprano Aprile Millo to supply diva ferocity. At first glance, the
concept of a Puccini evening may seem less than fresh, given that the
composer hardly lacks exposure in this town; “La Bohème” is, after all,
the reigning box-office champion at the Metropolitan Opera, having
received 1,178 performances since its local début, in 1900. (“We cannot
believe that there is permanent success for an opera constructed as
this one is,” the Times opined.) But the Collegiate Chorale
accomplished something with Puccini that no one this season has so far
managed to do with Mozart: it succeeded in putting an ultra-familiar
composer in a novel light.
Thoughtful programming reveals something about musical works simply
by juxtaposing them. The Collegiate Chorale put together Puccini’s
first and last operatic thoughts: “Le Villi,” a brief gothic melodrama
about a faithless lover haunted by his dead beloved, which Puccini
wrote in 1883, at the age of twenty-four; and Act III of “Turandot,”
the epic tale of an icy Chinese princess, which he was still working on
at the time of his death, in 1924. “Le Villi” is hobbled by a rickety
dénouement, but the first act is a wonder. It is pure Puccini, lush on
the surface and economical in construction. Italianate lyricism,
Wagnerian harmony, and French atmosphere merge as one. The
orchestration is at once transparent and enveloping. Vocal lines evolve
from a conversational monotone into electrifying lyric arcs. Franco
Farina sang the male lead, while Millo was the maiden turned ghost,
looking properly spooky in a black cape and Bono-style glasses;
together they brought out the systematic ratcheting up of emotion and
tension that defines Puccini’s strongest ensemble writing. The feeling
is of a creative voice materializing out of nowhere, as if by divine
command—which, indeed, is how the usually levelheaded Puccini said that
he was summoned to write opera.
“Turandot” shows the composer facing his greatest
challenge—dramatizing a heroine who, in contrast to the magnificently
earthy characters of “La Bohème” and “Tosca,” is fundamentally inhuman.
To convey Turandot’s awesome coldness, Puccini uses what he has learned
from the modernisms of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. He does not abandon
his lyric gift, as billions who have hummed along to “Nessun dorma” can
attest. The task of reconciling these extremes caused Puccini
uncharacteristic agony. He died before he could write the finale, in
which Turandot’s heart finally melts, and was unsure how to illustrate
her last-minute transformation in musical terms. There is nothing in
opera quite as heartbreaking as the preceding scene, which describes
the death of the slave girl Liù, for the composer of heartbreak is
dying, too; after a heavy-footed procession that echoes the “Spring
Rounds” section of the “Rite of Spring,” ethereal clouds of choral
sound that glance ahead to Messiaen (the Collegiate Chorale had been
waiting for this moment, and made the most of it), and a high piccolo
note shining through a fogbank of E-flat-minor strings, the Voice is
gone.
The quandary of the ending, for which Puccini left a pile of
sketches, one of them containing the famous remark “Then ‘Tristan,’ ”
has bedevilled opera houses ever since Toscanini conducted the
première, in 1926. Puccini’s colleague Franco Alfano fashioned a
conclusion that hurried past the central dramatic challenge into an
orgy of crude triumphalism. The Collegiate Chorale elected to use a far
subtler completion that was prepared, in 2001, by the late Luciano
Berio, whose high-tech, avant-garde façade always concealed a nostalgia
for Romanticism. Berio’s effort is far more satisyfing than Alfano’s,
not only because it is beautifully crafted but because it honors the
fact of Puccini’s death; the new material begins with a shivery
sequence of polytonal chords, suggesting a spirit gliding away, while
also recalling the harsh sonorities with which the opera began. This
version ought to replace Alfano’s at the Met and elsewhere. Still,
there is no mistaking the loss of power that happens when Berio takes
Puccini’s place.
There are amazingly few books about this most beloved of opera
composers. The newest is William Berger’s “Puccini Without Excuses”
(Vintage), which provides an easygoing introduction to the operas and
also feistily defends them against the perennial sneers of
intellectuals. Berger points out that Puccini, despite his popularity,
creates discomfort in this hyper-stylized, ironic age, because he deals
in direct emotion, avoids ideology and moralism, and often favors
characters “of no major consequence,” except insofar as they mirror the
audience. Puccini confounds opera directors who have no interest in
ordinary people; he almost affronts the cool professionalism of the
average young opera singer. Millo is valuable because she has no fear
of raw emotion; she is not afraid to try the potentially ridiculous
gesture that ends up making one’s hair stand on end. Singing Turandot
with the Collegiate Chorale, she communicated everything with a
tentative, wondering enunciation of the word “amore.”
