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Concert Review: Renée Fleming and the Boston Symphony Orchestra

It was a fishy night at Carnegie Hall, as Renée Fleming and James Levine brought French music spanning a century and a half to the Isaac Stern Auditorium. One would think that Fleming and Levine could pull off a successful concert in their sleep, but lack of discipline in the orchestra and unremarkable songs for Fleming led to a rather iffy evening at the red velvet.

Opening the concert were Berlioz’s deft orchestral excerpts from his often overlooked symphonic masterpiece, Roméo et Juliette. They are a testament to Berlioz’s genius as both a technician and a Romantic (although it is sad not to be able to hear some of his gorgeous and unique vocal writing). In these excerpts, you can hear what would be derided by later generations of French composers as an out-of-fashion focus on the Teutonic tradition of Beethoven. But it works. You can also hear premonitions of Wagner; almost unfathomably, the Prelude to Tristan sounds as if it had been lifted from Berlioz’s “Romeo Alone” music. (The program notes indicate that Wagner had attended a concert of Roméo et Juliette in 1939, twenty years before writing the haunting introduction.) But as much as the music is astonishingly powerful, it also has a tendency to feel really boring. And this wasn’t helped much by the fact that James Levine sat while he conducted: For the whole concert. (Is he injured? Does anybody know?)

To make matters worse, Levine conducts two orchestras: the strings, and everybody else. I detected a similar affect in his haphazard interpretation of Lucia di Lammermoor earlier this season at The Met. During the Berlioz, you could barely make out the woodwinds, what for the brilliant sound of the strings (and they did sound brilliant; resonant; unified) that seemed to dominate Levine’s imagination. Where was he when the lead horn flubbed a couple entrances during the interminably gorgeous “Love Scene”? Oh, obsessing over the robust unison between the cellos and violas. And in the third piece, the “Queen Mab Scherzo”, the entire horn section had trouble pulling it together while the rest of the orchestra pounded away at fractious hemiola. And to top off the craziness, when the piece had finished, Levine edged his way past the strings to give props to the horns. Uh…what? Levine is either senile or covering. Either way, something smells foul.

But that could have been coming from Ms. Fleming’s dress, which was a very mermaid number done in gold and celadon sequins, with a little poof of a tulle fin at the ankles, and an enormous celadon satin sash that wrapped like a piece of seaweed about her body. (Okay, okay, the dress is “by John Galliano for Dior.” Seriously. It’s in the program notes.) She came out to perform a newly commissioned cycle of songs from French composer, Henri Dutilleux, Le Temps l’Horloge (Time and the Clock). And let me tell you, the clock had definitely stopped for this composer, maybe somewhere around, oh, I don’t know…1950? Dutilleux’s language comes straight out of the twentieth century’s atonal dogma, but also retains a dedication to Debussian oceanica. A little shimmer here, a little sprechtstimme there. The vocal lines seemed lost within the swimming dissonance of the orchestra. Fleming, to her credit, performed these songs in great voice and with feeling. What is impressive about her talent is that she is able to be dramatic (effectively theatrical) in all of her registers. The final song, “Le Dernier Poeme” (“The Last Poem”) used an accordian to nice effect, evoking the “shadow” of love that the poet (Robert Desnos) is doomed to become. But the ravenous applause at the close of the set had more to do with preprogrammed adoration for both Dutilleux (he stood up to get his back patted) and Fleming.

After the break, Fleming returned to perform some orchestral settings of songs by the Henri Duparc, one of the fore-fathers of modern French melodie, even though he remained obscure during his lifetime. I’m not sure if the orchestral atmosphere really works for these pieces, which are moody studies of tone and color, even though, at times, the orchestrations, because they are larger than the voice, bring out certain dissonances more than a piano would.

I should also say that Fleming’s voice was not as big as I had anticipated. Perhaps she is known more for her perfect tone rather than for blowing the roof off the opera house. And the four songs didn’t really seem to showcase her specific talent. Even though she appeared to be really feeling the songs (each of them ending with a kind of dazed “wasn’t that beautiful” look of wonderment on her face), I didn’t really feel that energy connect beyond the stage. I know the teaming hordes in the audience who roared to congratulate her afterwards will disagree. But again, even these accolades felt more as if they came from merits earned on prior occasions.

The concert ended with Debussy’s famous La Mer, written as three “symphonic sketches” based on childhood memories of the ocean. The orchestra finally felt at home in these pieces, and the imbalance between the strings and the rest of the orchestra was corrected. Perhaps they sounded better because they’ve most likely played these pieces a billion times. (Although, that’s a better alternative than getting sloppy with age.) The whole tone scales, pentatonic figures and augmented sixth chords that are the building blocks of Debussy’s late language, churned and spilled about the auditorium. The orchestra executed the perfect crescendo leading into the climactic burst of sunlight at the end of the first movement. It’s hard to understand why conductors don’t exchange the first movement for the last, especially since they are written as “sketches” (and are not collectively “the greatest symphony ever written by a French composer,” as the program says it has been called–you probably have to give that credit to something Berlioz). When you get to this glorious breakthrough…“duuuuuh…duhn…duh dah!!!!…” it’s enough. You had your orgasm and now you want your cigarette. So to sit through two more movements of essentially the same material doesn’t really work. At least, last night, it was nice to hear the orchestra come together, if but for these few maritime moments. But someone needs to tell Levine to take off the cruise control, and get back to really manning the wheel.