By
BERNARD
HOLLAND
William
Bolcom’s Eighth
Symphony writes out the poetry of William Blake in capital letters. Its four
movements, as played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Monday evening, think big in
every way.
String sections
are augmented; musicians crowd the stage. The music begins with a cannonlike
explosion and ends with screaming high-altitude trumpets. The mixed chorus
sings, speaks, whispers and shouts. The Eighth Symphony takes Blake’s visions
of cosmic struggle and calamity at face value. This is not a narrative of a
poet’s imagination; it is the events imagined given physical veracity and
magnified to the appropriate scale.
Blake’s
prophetic books, from which these four movements derive, occupy an invented
mythological world grounded by political geography. Shaggy chimerical creatures
— fiery, thundering and with flapping wings — are personifications of virtue,
villainy, love and danger. Blake, on the other hand, is also talking about the
American Revolution and revolutions like it.
Side by side
with the fabulous and the magical are the down-to-earth references to Africa,
Spain, France, Canada, Mexico and Peru, not to mention ancient Rome and
Jerusalem. We are given a late-18th-century world atlas of social upheaval
presented as a hallucination of heaven and hell.
The Eighth
Symphony is unashamedly theatrical, and Mr. Bolcom’s deep experience and
impressive control keep the pot boiling. Such relentless high drama in the
hands of huge forces like these could just as easily have run off the tracks,
but this is a composer with a singular talent for inflecting words, making them
clear and finding just the right orchestral color for the emotion of the
moment.
If the
universal calamities of his first three movements keep our attention, “A Song
of Liberty” at the end does something more. With “For every thing that lives is
Holy” as the text, rising scales and rich counterpoint in the chorus part
create a deeply affirmative ending. Loud though it is, its loudness has
substance. I was very moved by it.
James Levine conducted. The
Tanglewood Festival Chorus, prepared by John Oliver, sang difficult music
fearlessly and from memory.
Before
intermission, the orchestra scaled down its numbers for Schubert’s “Tragic”
Symphony. Reduced volume satisfied the needs of Classical style; intensely
beautiful playing implied bigger, more serious matters. Schubert had it both
ways.
He was still a
teenager in 1816, but the two inner movements are unmistakably his own. The
Andante is deeply satisfying for its simple songfulness; the Menuetto has happy
surprises.
Thomas Quasthoff canceled his scheduled appearance because of respiratory illness, and
Brahms’s Serenade No. 2 stood in for the Schubert songs he was to have sung.
Notable for its absence of violin parts, the serenade went its modest, amiable
and always elegant way.