MANY DIFFERENT SAMPLES OF REVIEWS December 1, 2006 Music Review | Miró Quartet A Favored Foursome Steps Outside the List of Favorites By ALLAN KOZINN It often seems surprising that, as vast as the string quartet repertory is, most ensembles draw from a relatively circumscribed well of favorites and acknowledged masterworks. The young musicians of the Miró Quartet set the core canon aside on Wednesday evening, when they played a concert at Alice Tully Hall. The program, presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as part of the quartet’s 2005 Cleveland Quartet Award, included less frequently traveled works by Shostakovich and Dvorak, and a score by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, a 19th-century Spanish composer whose works are now finding their way into the repertory. The group opened its program with Arriaga’s String Quartet No. 3, a work that it is also playing tonight on an otherwise unrelated program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can’t have too much Arriaga: this Spanish composer died in 1826, just shy of his 20th birthday, but the pieces he left — the quartets and some symphonic works — have a true spark of originality. He was called the Spanish Mozart, but his spirit and style are more akin to Beethoven’s; the opening movement of this Third Quartet bears a passing resemblance — in its rhythms and the shape of its main theme — to Beethoven’s Quartet No. 1 (Op. 18, No. 1). Even more striking are the later movements, which point toward Schubert, Brahms and Dvorak in both their melodic and textural richness. Whether or not the Miró players find the Mozart comparison apt, they wisely played the Arriaga with the sumptuousness better suited to Arriaga’s time than to Mozart’s. That warmth, appropriately magnified and cast in darker hues, returned at the end of the concert, in Dvorak’s Quartet in A flat (Op. 105). This was a reading that had everything right: the big-boned chordal punctuation in the first movement was unified and precise; the slow movement had a lilting, vocal quality; and the finale, though certainly vigorous, bore this comparatively late work’s weight of maturity. Between the Arriaga and the Dvorak, the Miró players gave a resolute, thoroughly focused account of the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 14 (Op. 142). This is philosophical, rather than bitter, Shostakovich. It catches him, two years before his death, thinking about mortality, much as he does in his Fourteenth Symphony. As in the Arriaga, the musicians produced a rich, textured sound but wisely resisted the temptation — in, for example, the hushed intensity of the Adagio — toward sheer beauty. Instead they gave the music an inner glow, which is just as irresistible. The Miró Quartet is playing an all-Spanish program with the guitarist Eliot Fisk tonight at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (212) 570-3949. November 30, 2006 Music Review | 'London Philharmonic - Kurt Masur' An Affectionate Homecoming for Masur By BERNARD HOLLAND If psychologists ever made a study of post-departure syndrome, they might begin with Kurt Masur’s return to New York with the London Philharmonic. In his time as music director of the New York Philharmonic Mr. Masur was received as something of a drill sergeant in charge of a wayward platoon, a kind of bitter medicine designed to purge the orchestra of its loose ways. But waves of friendship greeted him at Carnegie Hall on Monday and Tuesday nights, a genuine warmth like nothing he experienced during his years in New York. Were all those happy listeners remembering with a new perspective, or had they simply forgotten? Maybe affection grows as the sustained power to influence our musical lives goes away. I was always a fan, and it was good to have him back. A year ago illness forced Mr. Masur to cancel a similar visit. At 79 he is erect but frail. The vigorous conducting technique is now withdrawn and minimal, but other means have been found. While the physically active conductor goes out and gets performances, Mr. Masur has learned to stand quietly and let performances come to him, the positive electric charge becomes a magnet. In two concerts of repertory standards, this appealing orchestra seemed to know what was on its conductor’s mind and also to like him personally. Rough edges and inexact entrances on Monday were a small price to pay for music making of such good will. “Les Préludes” by Liszt — big-boned and hearty — began Monday’s program; the Brahms Second Symphony ended it. Mr. Masur likes to divide long phrases into shorter ones, producing semi- detachments that are not quite full breaths. Created is an austerity seemingly aimed at preventing passionately lyrical music from sinking into sentiment. Between Liszt and Brahms came Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. Its soloist, Elisabeth Leonskaja, was to be thanked for halfway humanizing music of such open hostility. She was in confident command of Prokofiev’s florid, often vicious sieges of technical difficulty, and the nastiness lesser musicians bring to this music was softened to something almost moving, occupying a place somewhere between regret and resentment. On Tuesday Sarah Chang played the Sibelius Violin Concerto. The purity of her tone and its broad, deep carrying power was fitting, indeed touching in exposed moments, as was the recklessness with which she attacked the difficult finale. At other times the throbbing vibrato and almost theatrical bowing sounded more like beautiful violin playing than Sibelius. Tuesday also brought Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, a piece that has also been occupying the New York Philharmonic a few blocks to the north this week. The mileage on this well-traveled masterpiece precludes anyone saying anything new about it, but the London players were involved down to their toes in an honest and deeply earnest performance. == November 29, 2006 Music Review | 'La Passion de Simone' An Earnest Meditation on a Life Devoted to Human Suffering By ANNE MIDGETTE VIENNA, Nov. 27 — The problem lies in the title: “La Passion de Simone.” In a work described as “a musical journey in 15 stations,” Kaija Saariaho, the Finnish composer, and Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese- born writer who also provided the librettos for Ms. Saariaho’s other two operas, follow a traditional religious model in a homage to someone they compare to Jesus. But in doing so, they effectively distort what Simone Weil, the French philosopher, mystic and activist, was about. Weil, who died in 1943 at 34, is notoriously difficult to summarize. Devoted to the study of human affliction, she worked herself to the point of illness at various factory jobs to understand better the workers’ lot; she developed a profound relationship with Christianity, but felt that to actually be baptized (she was Jewish) would be to betray the unsaved masses. She died in England when, sick and weak, she refused to eat more than her compatriots were getting in war-torn France: the cause of death was starvation. A contradictory and off-putting figure, she is best understood through her own words, which have a lucidity that Mr. Maalouf’s heightened second-person text, an apostrophe to Weil from an imaginary sister interwoven with quotations from Weil herself, largely obscures. “La Passion de Simone,” which opened on Sunday evening at the Jugendstiltheater in an outlying district of Vienna (at the center of a hospital complex renowned as a headquarters of Nazi medical experimentation), is a centerpiece of Peter Sellars’s New Crowned Hope festival, which is all about social relevance and working to improve society: goals to which Weil devoted her life. So she would seem to be an ideal subject. But at New Crowned Hope, interpretations of social relevance are filtered to yield tones of heartfelt, teary-eyed sincerity in attempts at the beautiful and the good. In short, they bear the stamp of Mr. Sellars himself. Mr. Sellars, who also directed Ms. Saariaho’s other operas, kept this one appropriately spare and dark. He had the vocal soloist, Pia Freund, enact the things she was describing (ending by writhing on the floor in her final death agony), and added a silent dancer as a personification of grace, the masses or anything else that needed personifying. Adding a figure was a reasonable response to the challenge of trying to stage a piece that is not inherently dramatic. For what Ms. Saariaho has produced is a meditation rather than an opera, with music that is mystical, angular, episodic, surging. Sustained tones in the strings or brasses, burnished with a kiss of gongs and electronic boosts, spread out a carpet of sound to support individual incidents, in which the energetic conductor, Susanna Malkki, often whips Klangforum Wien into an anguished frenzy. But like John Adams in his new opera-oratorio for New Crowned Hope, “A Flowering Tree,” Ms. Saariaho seems to have set out to create something beautiful and moving, and thereby achieved a self-conscious lushness that may be an aural hallmark of Mr. Sellars’s stamp. The piece was written for Dawn Upshaw, who had to cancel her New Crowned Hope commitments to deal with early-stage breast cancer, according to a statement from her manager earlier this month. Her replacement, Ms. Freund, offers a workable, straightforward voice, whose limitations are blurred by passionate intensity and smoothed away to some extent by the microphone. Amplification is necessary; the action plays on a raised platform at the back of the stage, with the orchestra spread before Ms. Freund and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir literally beneath her feet: an ocean of loud sound. What comes across is incidental music, since the story being told lies outside the piece itself.