Financial Times / September 23, 2003 / The Arts

James Levine / Met Chamber Ensemble
Zankel Hall, New York
MARTIN BERNHEIMER

The testing of Zankel Hall goes on.  A stellar chamber ensemble tried
its luck at New York's newest auditorium Sunday afternoon when James
Levine brought a contingent of Metropolitan Opera virtuosos to the lower
depths of Carnegie.  The concert balanced challenging modernism by Eliott
Carter and Anton Webern against hum-along hits of Mozart and Brahms.
Artistic success was offset, alas, by acoustic inequity.

Zankel publicity boasted design flexibility that would allow performances
in three different configurations.  The stage and seating areas, we were
told, were drastically movable.  All concerts this season, however, will
adhere to the conventional setup with players on the platform up front.
When an event is recorded, as was this one, stage-hands must tape a
makeshift tangle of wires to the stage floor.  So much for state-of-the-art
technology.

Intimate tones projected best on this occasion.  Carter's "In Sleep,
in Thunder" still seems progressive after 22 years.  An exercise in
compression, musical and expressive, it sustains tension while it explores
a vast terrain of instrumental color within a limited dynamic range. The
setting of Robert Lowell's poems creates its own rhythmic definitions,
even when speed of articulation diminishes comprehension.  (The management
printed the texts in the programme, then turned the lights too low for
reading.) The Met ensemble played brilliantly for Levine, and Matthew
Polenzani sang with accuracy and point, though his tenor sounded a bit
muffled.  The composer, nearly 95, waved approval from a seat at the
rear.

In eleven otherworldly miniatures of Webern (Opp.  16, 17 and 18),
Jennifer Welch-Babidge plucked pitches from the stratosphere with uncanny
aplomb, even lyric grace.  Significantly, her soprano sounded bigger and
brighter than it had a few days earlier as Donizetti's Lucia at the
oddly-miked State Theater.

Vexing problems arrived with Brahms' A-major Serenade, the climactic
offering.  With 23 players at work, decibels apparently rose too high.
The mellow rhetoric turned raucous, and the charm turned brash.  So did
the inevitable subway ostinato.  One couldn't blame Levine.

****
Tel 1 212 247 7800
www.carnegiehall.org

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