Levine Explores Bluebeard's Castle With Gusto

Concert versions of operatic works are risky propositions. When they succeed, they can astound. Undistracted by stage apparatus, both audience and performers can focus more intently on the music.

The sheer vocal power and mastery, however, must be performed at a level that makes up for the lack of overt dramatic content. When done correctly, a concert performance can surpass even its staged counterpart, though the concert can often stagnate. James Levine has long been a promoter of the arrangement, which allows conductors to assemble dream casts that can hardly ever be realized on stage. In his three-year-old tenure with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Levine has already presented concert versions of Romeo et Juliette, Don Giovanni, and Elektra. On Saturday night, he brought the BSO to Carnegie Hall for a performance of Béla Bartók's seldom-heard one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle. It constituted the first half of a program that marked the orchestra's second visit to New York this season. Levine is to be doubly lauded for bringing with him two singers of unquestionable credentials-the bass Albert Dohmen and the mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter-and for presenting a work that is sure to have scared away the more timid of opera-goers.

Bluebeard's Castle boasts chilling libretto by the Hungarian poet and theorist Béla Balázs, which drips with symbolist language and hauntingly inventive imagery. The enigmatic prologue was delivered by the Hungarian actor Örs Kisfaludy, who popped out from among the harps and delivered his introductory poem while walking through the orchestra. Balázs' detailed stage directions were included with the program notes. Disturbing and minimal, they tantalized the listener. Dohmen, who joined the BSO last spring for Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, sang boomingly, his voice marvelously textured, ringing out clear amid the full, neo-romantic-and often cacophonous-orchestration. Von Otter, a great interpreter of Strauss, was impassioned and precise, although she struggled to make herself heard above the orchestra. What's more, both singers seemed to have a good command of Hungarian, a language that is poorly represented in the opera repertoire.

The opera's music is typical of Bartók's moody, neo-romantic style, although somewhat more grim. The score is a marsh of strange and gripping harmonies and highly evocative dissonant intervals, in which minor seconds feature prominently. Levine has a fine understanding of the emotional drama latent in the score, slowly diffusing the theatrical booms and outcries. The playing was crisp and methodical. There was an ominous quality to the basses and violas as they leapt and sputtered at the unlocking of each door. Levine's approach was highly evocative of the opera's symbolist elements, most obvious in the musical representation of the treasures that lie behind each of the seven doors in Bluebeard's castle. For a work that is so concerned with self-destructive love and unendurable melancholy, it almost seemed appropriate that the orchestra regularly threatened to drown the singers.

As if to reward the audience for indulging him throughout the difficult and inaccessible work, Levine presented the popular Johannes Brahms' Symphony No. 1 after intermission. The notes bled together in the opening bars, which Levine rendered a lush, moody blur. But soon, the Beethovian clarity of Brahms' orchestration shone through Levine's more modernist inclinations.

Levine conducted the first movement with more energy than usual. In the andante movement, the oboe theme was particularly poignant, the faintest of the cellos' pizzicatos were discernable, and the first violin's solo was played with appropriate sublimity. In the famous final movement, which directly quotes Beethoven's Ninth, pensive trombones sounded out their chorale effectively. Toward the end, Levine grew increasingly animated. Leaning off of his stool, with one leg on the ground, he brought the monumental work to a shattering close.