Last night Mr Pinault and I were invited to attend a closed rehearsal of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus as they prepared for tonight’s world premiere performance of William Bolcom’s Eighth Symphony (here) under the tutelage of James Levine.
The evening started in a reception room with a buffet of cheese and crudites and a cash bar. Then we were shepherded into Symphony Hall, where the orchestra and choir were warming up in a cacophany of melodies. Everyone on stage wore comfortable street clothes that made the audience of 200 invited patrons look overdressed. Mr. Pinault and I couldn’t believe that the staid and proper concertmaster was wearing casual slacks and a hooded sweatshirt. If I saw him on the street dressed like that, I’d think “retired high school science teacher.”
Up until last night, I had never laid eyes on James Levine, the BSO music director since 2004 as well as the longtime music director for the New York Metropolitan Opera. I have only ever seen guest conductors — unfailingly some old white gaunt distinguished European man.
So it was a pleasure to finally see Levine, a trollish American Jew, at the conductor’s podium. There Levine was, perched upon a wooden stool on a plush velvet seat, a pot-bellied, thin-lipped, triple-chinned man with a wild puff of gray hair hovering atop a bald spot that cruelly beamed in the spotlight. (I guess it was more of a visceral pleasure than an aesthetic pleasure.)
At first, watching the rehearsal was fun. So “behind-the-scenes.” Levine kept stopping the music and repeating sections, sometime 5 or 6 times. Most of his comments were about dynamics: “I’m concerned about what is happening in bar 45. Could we be careful that the crescendo doesn’t go too loud until the second half of the bar, when it should go to mezzo-forte. 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, bing-bong-bing-bong…”
After an hour, the orchestra and choir members looked bored, but not nearly as bored as the audience, who freely fidgeted, coughed, and occasionally whispered. After Levine stopped the music for the umpteenth interruption during a key cresendo, the elderly gentlemen in front of me leaned forward and stared hard at Levine, as if willing him to just shut-up and let orchestra play longer than 30 seconds at a time.
Pictured to the right and below are some shots of the rehearsal from Mr. Pinault’s cell phone. In the top picture on the right, one can sort of see the 80-person Tanglewood Festival Chorus at the back of the stage. Obviously, Levine is the guy sitting in the stool.
