Back in May, I spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon listening via satellite radio to a live concert from Carnegie Hall featuring the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. This hot-shot "pit band" turns into a world-class symphony orchestra when its members go up onstage, as they do two or three times a year.
But this was a particularly momentous occasion, because for the first time in two years, the Met's esteemed music director, James Levine, took the podium to conduct the marvelous ensemble that he's polished and perfected during his 40-plus years at the Met.
Levine has been plagued with back problems that required extensive surgery and left him unable to conduct -- until now. He used a motorized wheelchair and a platform, built by the Met's incredible backstage crew, that raised him up to where he could see and be seen by the entire orchestra.
And to open this much-anticipated concert marking his triumphant return, Levine chose the Prelude to Wagner's Lohengrin, a captivating piece that was singularly appropriate for the weekend before the bicentenary of the composer's birth. I wrote earlier about this piece after the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, under Jaap van Zweden, performed it in an all-Wagner concert the same weekend as the Met Orchestra's concert.
On hearing this performance, there should be no doubt that Levine's physical problems haven't cost him anything musically. Those who suggested he should resign as the Met's music director when he had to stop conducting should now feel free to hang their heads in shame. It was his back that went out -- not the musical genius that's kept on giving to appreciative audiences for over four decades.
Levine's friend Evgeny Kissin joined him for a brilliant performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, and the concert concluded with one of my favorite symphonies, Schubert's Ninth. The Met Orchestra under Levine was as you would expect -- sensational.
The Met's radio announcer, Margaret Juntwait, even helped by not falling into a trap that's bugged me for years about the Schubert symphony's nickname, the "Great." People who should know better -- classical radio announcers, even the web page for Carnegie Hall -- almost invariably refer to the Schubert Ninth as "the Great symphony," inferring the common English meaning of that word as "of high quality" rather than the original intent of the German "große," meaning "large." His publisher dubbed it "the Great C Major Symphony" to distinguish it from his Sixth Symphony, the "Little C Major." There's no doubt that it's "great" music, but "Great" was used for the distinction because of the Ninth's length (almost as long as Beethoven's Ninth) and the size of the orchestra required to play it.
Next month, Maestro Levine will undergo the real test of his recovery when he returns to the pit at the Met to conduct a run of Mozart's Così fan tutte, followed by a new production of Verdi's Falstaff around the holidays, and Berg's Wozzeck along with Così again in the spring. Plus three more Carnegie Hall concerts with the Met Orchestra.
Welcome back, Jimmy!
