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

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

    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.
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