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Rockwell Matters

March 31, 2008

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In the roller-coaster of casting changes that enlivened the Metropolitan Opera’s recent run of “Tristan und Isolde,” the one constant was James Levine. Maybe you took a perverse pleasure in all the illnesses and stage malfunctions and injuries and mid-performance singer switches, although I for one doubt Alex Ross’s contention that opera lovers secretly anticipate disasters as much as epiphanies.

 
I saw Janice Baird, an honorable second-tier German-provincial Isolde, and Ben Heppner, who has a gorgeous voice that can tire, as it did toward the very end of Tristan’s third-act ravings, and who still lacks that last iota of poetic intensity that Wolfgang Windgassen brought to this music.

But everyone loved, and loves, Levine. It’s been 35 years since he was named principal conductor, the first of his several titles as the chief conductorial force at the Met, and he still gets cheers every time he ascends the podium. People got sick of Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, they got sick of Seiji Ozawa in Boston, but they don’t get sick of James Levine.

Partly that’s because he’s held the conservative line at the Met against trendy Eurotrash stage productions and against trendy new music, although Peter Gelb is challenging him now, at long last, in both areas. More importantly, it’s because he has built the Met Orchestra into an extraordinary pit band — and symphonic ensemble, to judge from its Carnegie Hall series. Whatever the upheavals on the Met stage, you can revel in the orchestral richness and detail.

And yet — I still find it hard to accept Levine fully as a sovereign musical interpreter. Forget his stubborn, fustian insistence on hard-core modernist music, which he is now eagerly force-feeding his audiences at the Boston Symphony. Forget his lack of authority in mainstream symphonic repertory, in which he has never equaled his operatic mastery.

My problem with Levine is an overall lack of intensity from the podium, which may have something to do in “Tristan” with Heppner’s own lack of intensity. Levine wants the music to speak for itself, and it often does: long stretches of Mozart or Verdi or Wagner, particularly the more bucolic “Die Meistersinger,” have purled along ravishingly under his baton. But when he has to dig deep, to burn the music into your brain, Levine often falls short. In “Tristan” recordings, in their very different ways, I’ll take the white-hot Karl Boehm or the mystically Teutonic Wilhelm Furtwaengler (or his latter-day incarnation, Christian Thielemann), any day.

— John Rockwell

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