Heaven!

Published Feb. 25, 2010 at 12:16 p.m.
The BSO and Boston Baroque at their best
Martin Pearlman's edition of Monteverdi's Vespro della Beate Vergine, with inserted antiphons to suggest an actual service, remains a masterpiece of historical research and inspired guesswork...

PARADISE REGAINED? Renée Fleming’s performance of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs might have echoed in your dreams.

Many concerts are very good, some are great, and the rare few are a privilege to be present at. In that last category was an extraordinary program assembled by James Levine with the Boston Symphony Orchestra — a kind of divine comedy, beginning with the Inferno of Berg's dense and difficult Three Pieces for Orchestra, moving upward to Richard Strauss's yearning farewell to the earth in his Four Last Songs (1948 — its title was appended after his death in 1949), and in Mahler's Symphony No. 4 finally entering Paradise. The BSO sounded radiant, and in the Strauss and Mahler, so also did our great American diva, soprano Renée Fleming. I returned two nights later just to convince myself this concert was as ravishing as I'd thought. It was.

Berg began the Three Pieces before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and completed them during the war. (They didn't get to the USA till 1952.) Berg's largest orchestra can sound like a massive onslaught, but Levine not only gripped me with Berg's ineluctable structure, he also clarified the intertwining lines and melodies of Berg's polyphony. The Präludium moved from ominous rumbling through Armageddon and back to the dissolution of a dying world. In the Reigen (Round Dance), one could hear waltzes and country dances, a grim and sardonic amalgamation of 3/4-time rhythms. And in the final sinister, percussive March, the inexorability of war was slowed down by a momentary oasis of reminiscences of earlier movements, before the final cataclysm. The performance was both stunning and surprisingly seductive.

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