Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Mysterious Tweet

Last night I attended the Boston Symphony Orchestra's concert at Carnegie Hall.  Music Director James Levine conducted a program of music by Elliott Carter, Hector Berlioz, and Maurice Ravel.  Piano soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard played Carter's Dialogues for Piano and Orchestra (2003), and Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1929-30).  BSO principal violist Steven Ansell played the solo passages in Hector Berlioz's symphony, Harold in Italy, Op. 16 (1834).  The concert concluded with the second orchestral suite from Ravel's music for the ballet "Daphnis et Chloe."  Many gorgeous sounds were produced by phenomenal musicians, but the abiding memory from the concert was a mysterious, high-pitched electronic tweeting that sounded in the hall sporadically throughout the concert.

There was much speculation by audience members about what might be causing the sound.  It clearly was not a cellphone ring, and there was much disagreement about whether it might be hearing aid feedback.  The normal procedure at Carnegie Hall to remind the audience to turn off electronic devices is a loud telephone ringing sound when the lights dim at the beginning of the concert, accompanied by a projection of a written message on the rear wall of the stage, asking the audience to turn off electronic devices.  After the mysterious noise recurred throughout the first half of the concert, the hall management broadcast a message after intermission asking the audience to turn off electronic devices.  This message was repeated between the Ravel pieces on the second half of the program, an unprecedented occurrence in my experience.  Yet the noise continued.  This leads me to speculate that the noise was not coming from inside the hall, but more likely from backstage.  My hypothesis: a smoke detector or other battery-operated device was undergoing a battery failure.  I also noted with my opera-glasses some electronic devices mounted high up above the stage, and perhaps a battery in one of them was running low, leading to a similar signal.  The tweeting sound struck me as similar to the sound that a smoke detector makes when its batteries run low - a persistent tweeting sound to get your attention to change the batteries. 

In any event, back to the concert....  

This was the first time I was hearing Carter's Dialogues, which was premiered in London in 2004 and was previously heard in New York in 2005 at a Zankel Hall concert by Levine and the Met Chamber Ensemble with pianist Nicolas Hodges, for whom the piece was written.  According to the program note, Carter conceived it for a chamber orchestra but authorizes performances with a full symphonic string section.  The composer, now age 101, was present last night, and stood and walked haltingly to the front of the auditorium at the end of the performance to acknowledge the cheering crowd.  What were they cheering about?  This is the difficult part.  Carter's music from recent years has been slightly more accessible than his earlier work, but I emphasize "slightly more."  I still find it difficult to appreciate on a first hearing.  I know that repeated listening would probably reveal its musical logic to me.  I've been finding that to be true of other Carter pieces that proved impenetrable on first hearing.  It takes time to absorb his music, and it takes repeated exposure to make musical sense of it.  At least, that is my individual reaction.  I am confident that Aimard, Levine and the BSO presented it as effectively as can be done, and perhaps some day I would be able to derive more than just a generalized response to its coloristic qualities, if I could listen to it repeatedly.

The Berlioz symphony is an old favorite of mine from recordings, but I've rarely heard it played in concert.  Berlioz wrote the piece with Paganini in mind as the viola soloist, but Paganini refused to perform it because it lacked the razzle-dazzle in the solo part that he preferred for his performances.  Nonetheless, he esteemed the work and later made a significant payment to Berlioz in acknowledgement of its composition, music that the composer used to support himself while writing his much-more-popular dramatic symphony, Romeo and Juliet.  BSO violist Ansell has a rich, singing tone, and made a spectacular soloist.   This orchestra has a long tradition of distinguished performances of this piece, dating back to the Serge Koussevitzky years, when that conductor made a fine recording with William Primrose, who returned to record the piece in the Lp-tape era with Charles Munch.  I have both of those recordings in my collection.  I think Seiji Ozawa may have recorded it as well, but I don't have that one.  Ansell and Levine produced a fine effect last night, and I wish this performance could be made available on CD.

After the intermission, it was all Ravel.  Aimard, so meticulous in the Carter, proved a wonderfully spontaneous soloist restricted to using his left hand for the Concerto, but everything on the program paled before the total splendor of the Daphnis suite.  This is one of those works of sheer musical genius that comes about as close to perfection as any orchestral piece can come, and this is the orchestra that knows how to really "put it over."  We've heard this piece quite a bit in New York.  It was a favorite concert closer of Zubin Mehta when he was music director of the NY Philharmonic, but hearing it in Carnegie Hall -- tweets and all -- was a much more thrilling experience than I ever felt hearing it at Avery Fisher, where the somewhat colder, more brash acoustic dampens some of the color inherent in Ravel's orchestration.  Levine and the BSO have released a recording of the entire ballet, with the vocal parts, on the orchestra's own label, and it is definitely worth acquiring., joining earlier memorable BSO recordings of the complete ballet led by Ozawa and Munch.  But no recording can completely capture that sheer sensual thrill of hearing one of the best Ravel orchestras in the world play this final scene under the leadership of an expert conductor in Carnegie Hall.  These last 18 minutes of the concert put everything that came before in the shade.

Postscript - My wish to be able to listen to the Carter piece repeatedly in order to make sense of it was quickly answered.  I had picked up the Naxos special Carter 100th Birthday release when it was issued in 2008 but hadn't yet listened to the recording.  Upon inspection, it turns out that it includes Dialogues for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, with pianist David Swan and Robert Aitken conducting his New Music Concerts Ensemble.  It now resides on my iPod, where I have begun my repeated listening.

Comments

[Tim Findlay-Coulson]

Glad to see you picking up on the mysterious whines at last night's concert. I noticed that it only occurred during the musical performances, with nothing at intermission, or between pieces. Very odd! I wonder if the concert was being recorded? Could it be a faulty microphone or similar? In any case, highly frustrating, but yes, the Ravel was splendid.

[Art Leonard]

A microphone hadn't occurred to me as the problem. I was assuming the sound was not audible when music was not playing because it was covered by audience chatter. But now that you mention it, I didn't hear the noise during those periods of intense quiet right before the orchestra would begin playing each piece. So perhaps a problem with a microphone is a better explanation than my smoke detector hypothesis. I hope the Carnegie Hall staff can figure this out quickly, so more concerts are not affected.