Fire, Bravura & Belligerence

On Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall, James Levine conducted one of his favorite orchestras — the one from the Metropolitan Opera. And he conducted them in four of his favorite composers: Webern, Mozart, Berg, and Strauss. They were pretty much all there except Elliott Carter. And Mr. Levine had with him two big-name soloists: Alfred Brendel, the senior pianist, and Deborah Voigt, the soprano.

The concert began with Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra. You don't want to get too cute with these numbers; and Mr. Levine is never a getter-cute. As can be expected, he conducted straightforwardly and astutely. You could hear pretty much every note within the overall mists. So clear and precise was this performance, you fancied that you could copy down the score.

In Piece No. 3, it's not easy to get those with solo turns to phrase as one. But Mr. Levine did. And in the following piece, he played the acoustics of Carnegie Hall well: The orchestra was quiet to the point of inaudibility, but not inaudible — very important. That was at the beginning. At the end, Mr. Levine calibrated the great crescendo bone-jarringly.

After each of the six pieces, the man next to me exhaled loudly, as if having experienced something really, really intense. He had a point.

Alfred Brendel played a Mozart piano concerto: that in C minor, K. 491. He is known as a sage, and there were sagely elements to his playing on this occasion. He was sensible and feeling — also rather gentle, autumnal. This was not a fiery, Beethoven-like K. 491.

The cadenza he wrote for the first movement was quite interesting: beautiful, kind of elegiac, conforming to the pianist's overall approach. I also might point out that, charmingly, he played during one of the tuttis. Throughout the concerto, there were imperfections, of course: In the final measures of the Larghetto, Mr. Brendel did some of his harsh, blunt, unlyrical phrasing. And, at the beginning of the last movement, his fingers betrayed him a bit. But this was a fine outing for him, and he deserved his applause.

And Mr. Levine deserved his: He conducted as he usually conducts Mozart — fully, boldly, beautifully, richly, strikingly. He is smack in the tradition of Walter, Krips, Böhm, and, of course, Szell. The fire and bravura that Mr. Levine added to the last movement were blood-stirring. I'm not sure about the slight pause between the final two chords — but Messrs. Levine and Brendel had probably worked that out.

By the way, why doesn't Mr. Levine — at one of these concerts — sit himself down and both play and conduct a Mozart concerto? Everyone else does — including those who can neither play nor conduct.

Mr. Brendel favored the audience with an encore: Beethoven's Bagatelle in A, Op. 33, No. 4. It was songful and dear. None of the many trills was real clean. But they were all the same, lending a helpful consistency.

Mr. Levine began the second half of the concert with Berg's Three Orchestra Pieces. He has conducted these pieces for a very long time. In fact, when he first took the Met orchestra out of the pit and put it on concert stages, he conducted this Berg. On Sunday afternoon, we heard the Three Pieces as they should be: refined, yawpish, creepily sensual. The third piece had a militancy — a hot-breathed belligerence — that shook mind and almost body.

As my colleague Fred Kirshnit has long said, no one in or out of Vienna conducts the Second Viennese School like Cincinnati's Jimmy Levine.

To close the concert, he was joined by Ms. Voigt for the Final Scene from Strauss's "Salome" (which I have always called "the mad Liebestod"). In the 1990s, Ms. Voigt established herself as a Strauss singer of the first order. She did not have her best outing three days ago. But she was certainly adequate: in voice and in understanding, musical and theatrical. Some of her high notes were low. But not the crucial B flats at the end.

There was nothing exactly wrong with this performance — but the Final Scene did not thrill and electrify as it can. Mr. Levine conducted with animation and fluency. But he had the orchestra very, very loud — too loud for Ms. Voigt. And she did not push to cut through it.

Speaking of Final Scenes, were you at the New York Philharmonic last season when Lorin Maazel conducted it? (The soloist is irrelevant.) The hair on the back of my neck only recently went down.