Boston Globe, MA
Dec 3 2004

Audience gets an earful at BSO rehearsals; soprano heroine to be
honored

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff | December 3, 2004

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Open Rehearsals under James Levine
are finding a new rhythm. Some people who attended the new music
director’s first such event a couple of weeks ago objected to the
fact that he used most of the time to rehearse detail in Elliott
Carter’s “Symphonia” and created a glass wall between stage and
audience.

Yesterday, Levine shattered the wall and addressed the audience. I
missed Levine’s comments because of bad parking karma, but neighbors
reported that he said he understood that some members of the public
aren’t happy when he needs to stop. He explained that in the final
rehearsal, the day of the concert, there are some things that he and
the orchestra need to do, and some things that they cannot do. He
thanked the audience and gave it a thumbs-up.

Levine did stop occasionally yesterday morning to adjust details and
balances in Berlioz’s “Romeo et Juliette.” But he also went through
several movements without interruption. After the grand climax at the
very end of the work, the audience burst into applause, which Levine
acknowledged, asking the orchestra to rise. But then most in the
audience began to leave, quite noisily and rudely, although the music
director and orchestra were still onstage with work to do. Ultimately
Levine had to whistle for silence, and cried out in mock-agony the
dying words of the villainous police chief Scarpia in Puccini’s
“Tosca” after he has been stabbed. “Aiuto, soccorso!” (“Help me! Come
to my aid.”) More freely translated: “Give me a break.” It would be
fun to hear Scarpia sing that someday.

Those who left missed some fascinating work on the famous “Queen Mab”
Scherzo — and a moment of Levine humor. He was urging the orchestra
for more lightness, to keep the music “up in the air.” “When I want
weight in Wagner, I have the body language to ask for it,” Levine
said. “It’s a little harder for me to get lightness.”

A tribute to a heroine: Soprano Elvira Ouzounian will be honored
Sunday at 4 p.m. in the Armenian Cultural Foundation (441 Mystic St.,
Arlington). Her career spanned four decades in the former Soviet
Union and especially in Georgia and in Armenia, where she was a
national heroine. She sang most of the standard coloratura roles in
Italian operas and many roles in Russian and Armenian operas. She now
lives in Belmont, where she founded an organization to assist young
Armenian singers and musicians, Help Young Talent. The event will
feature musical tributes by tenor Yeghishe Manucharyan and mezzo
Victoria Avetissian; and author Diana Der-Hovanessian. There will
also be souvenirs on video of Ouzounian in performance.

One of a kind: One of Janice Weber’s six books is titled “Hot
Ticket.” It is not an autobiography but a novel, although a hot
ticket is exactly what the pianist and writer is. There’s nobody like
her.

Weber’s annual recital in the Piano Masters Series at the Boston
Conservatory on Tuesday night brought both rarely-heard works and
some old favorites. William Bolcom’s “Dance Portraits” are full of
rhythmic and pianistic ingenuity. The 4th Sonata by the eccentric
Russian-American composer Leo Ornstein (1893-2002), a work Weber has
performed before and recorded for Naxos, is in the style of golden
age Hollywood film scores in Orientalist style.

In virtuoso music like this, Weber’s a complete natural; the music
flows out of her body and across the keyboard. In a way, she sells
herself short by not dramatizing her feats the way showoffs like Lang
Lang do; only the ear is there to tell you she has brought off some
incredible bit of derring-do.

The Martin Preludes brought out other facets of her talent. Weber
played these post-World War II works with sensitivity and
imagination. At the end, she moved directly from the strange
wanderings of No. 6 into a waltz by Johann Strauss Jr., “Roses from
the South,” in a transcription by the Austrian pianist Hubert Giesen
that will appear on her next CD. This was a drop-dead demonstration
of prestidigitation, fingers magically pulling cascades of
glittering, dancing notes out of the keyboard. Applause and floral
deliveries followed, so Weber obliged with an encore, a transcription
of Saint-Saens’s “The Swan” by Leopold Godowsky whose musical
imagination gave us not only the swan’s aching melody, but the ripple
of the water through which the bird was swimming and, it seemed, the
reflection of the swan in the water. Knowing Godowsky, it was
probably upside down, too.