{"id":907,"date":"2017-12-22T22:29:09","date_gmt":"2017-12-23T03:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=907"},"modified":"2017-12-22T22:29:09","modified_gmt":"2017-12-23T03:29:09","slug":"the-case-of-james-levine-taking-stock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2017\/12\/the-case-of-james-levine-taking-stock.html","title":{"rendered":"The Case of James Levine: Taking Stock"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When a pianist plays the piano, when a violinist plays the violin, when a conductor conducts an orchestra, the performer channels music through a network of personal traits. This should be self-evident.<\/p>\n

It has always seemed to me, for instance, that Artur Rubinstein was an exceptionally wholesome artist. Listen to Rubinstein\u2019s recordings of Chopin waltzes and you will discover (however subliminally) a broad emotional vocabulary at play \u2013 and a conscious application of specific emotional states to specific waltzes. The entire exercise is one of cultivated civility and worldly maturity. We are sampling the performer\u2019s persona.<\/p>\n

I have two favorite studio recordings of Schubert\u2019s \u201cGreat\u201d C major Symphony: Wilhelm Furtwangler with the Berlin Philharmonic and Josef Krips with the London Symphony. Back in the days when such things mattered, these were known readings. (As a young New York Times<\/em> music critic, I once wrote an assessment of the Furtwangler performance. A reader wrote to state his preference for Krips, and explained why.)<\/p>\n

Furtwangler\u2019s Schubert C major<\/a> is epic and demonic. Krips\u2019s<\/a> is warm and songful. In affect, these readings have little in common. They both deeply engage with the scope and pathos of a score that \u2013 as so often in Schubert \u2013 is uncannily polyvalent.<\/p>\n

It is easy to trace the lineage of these readings. Furtwangler\u2019s feasts on Germanic Innerlichkeit, and also precepts of interpretation preached by Richard Wagner. A constant flux of tempo\u00a0calibrates flow, structure, and climax. Krips\u2019s interpretation extols Viennese gemutlichkeit; Furtwanglerian interventions, in such a context, could only get in the way.<\/p>\n

James Levine\u2019s high reputation as a musical interpreter has always seemed to me a frustrating mystery. Whether of Verdi or Wagner, his performances evinced no lineage. And his persona, so far as I could tell, remained a blank.<\/p>\n

When he first arrived at the Met, he whipped the orchestra and chorus into shape and refreshed the repertoire. No doubt he was a facile musician. Even as a young man, he had evidently acquired a lot of repertoire and practical experience. His readings were typically intense, massive, and loud, sometimes to the point of brashness. In subsequent decades, he mellowed. But I never heard from Levine much evidence of emotional variety or depth. According to my experience, he had little capacity to organize a long stretch of music, or to powerfully shape a climax or pregnant phrase. He did not produce a sonic signature \u2013 as Furtwangler and Krips did; as Gergiev and Muti do. He did not possess an ear for color or texture.<\/p>\n

If you listen to the Met broadcasts of Ettore Panizza<\/a> and Artur Bodanzky<\/a> \u2013 broadcasts I have written about in this space \u2013 you\u2019ll hear conducting (and orchestra playing) of a higher caliber. And Panizza and Bodanzky stood on the shoulders of giants: Seidl, Mahler, Toscanini. The early Met was a conductor\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

Let me share a couple of vignettes.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s I was artistic advisor to the Schubertiade at the 92nd<\/sup> Street Y. The central participant was the baritone Hermann Prey, invariably partnered by Leonard Hokanson. Hokanson had studied with Artur Schnabel. His Lieder accompaniments were highly shaped, highly inflected interpretations; I would call them \u201cSchubertian\u201d a la Schnabel. He and Prey worked seamlessly together. Then it happened that Prey was offered a Carnegie Hall recital, singing Schubert. He replaced Hokanson with James Levine. Levine and Prey also worked seamlessly together. But Levine\u2019s accompaniments, next to Hokanson\u2019s, were stiff and generic. The performances were forgettable.<\/p>\n

A little before that, when I was a critic for the Times<\/em>, I hung out at the home of a psychoanalyst who would rent an extra bedroom. His tenant, for a period of time, was a young man from within James Levine\u2019s inner circle. I was recklessly frank in sharing my poor opinion of Levine\u2019s performances. On one occasion, I suggested that Levine (then in his thirties) lacked sufficient life experience to conduct opera at the highest level. Opera is theater, after all. You don\u2019t entrust Hamlet<\/em> to someone who doesn\u2019t know life. His quick response told me that this question had been asked and answered before \u2013 the answer being that breadth of \u201clife experience\u201d wasn\u2019t a valid consideration in the world of classical music performance.<\/p>\n

I shared these views the other day with a member of the Met orchestra. He contrasted James Levine with conductors who command a \u201ccomplete\u201d concept of an opera. He mentioned Carlos Kleiber and Daniele Gatti. My Times Literary Supplemen<\/em>t review of Gatti\u2019s Parsifal<\/em>\u00a0appeared\u00a0in this space<\/a>; it made the Levine Parsifal<\/em> sound square and cumbersome. I did not hear Kleiber\u2019s Rosenkavalier<\/em> at the Met. My friend remembers Kleiber instructing the orchestra that the music accompanying the Marschalin must shimmer like chiffon, creating a veil through which this character\u2019s fading beauty could be apprehended.<\/p>\n

On youtube you can watch Kleiber<\/a> rehearse the overture to Die Fledermaus <\/em>\u2014 a supremely worldly operetta. After three notes of the first, teasing theme in the violins, he stops the orchestra to ask for a rendering \u201ca little more dishonest.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a ripeness in that exhortation that my ears never detected in the performances of James Levine.<\/p>\n

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When a pianist plays the piano, when a violinist plays the violin, when a conductor conducts an orchestra, the performer channels music through a network of personal traits. This should be self-evident. It has always seemed to me, for instance, that Artur Rubinstein was an exceptionally wholesome artist. Listen to Rubinstein\u2019s recordings of Chopin waltzes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-907","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-eD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":911,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions\/911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}