From Newsday, May 2004

Concerns about conductor James Levine's health and sniping over the Metropolitan Opera's revival of Wagner's Ring dominated the last weeks of the Met season. Traditionalists and proponents of more inventive stagecraft squared off over the Met's doggedly backward-looking production of the composer's tetralogy. One wonders what Wagner, who fancied himself a revolutionary, would have thought of the controversy.

Sunday's Carnegie Hall concert by the Met Orchestra found Levine in apparently fine fettle, and Wagner absent from the program but hovering over the proceedings like a stubborn, restless specter.

Arnold Schönberg's 1903 symphonic poem "Pelleas und Melisande" inhabits the musical and spiritual world of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Thematically similar to Wagner's drama, it tells the story of doomed, adulterous lovers and is based on the Maurice Maeterlinck play that also inspired Debussy's opera. Like Tristan, Schönberg's "Pelleas" trills and twirls at the edges of tonality, bringing together questing but deflated opening phrases, doleful writing for winds and lush, cunningly soured harmonies.

It would be hard to imagine a more gorgeous performance of Schönberg's symphonic poem than the one offered by Levine and the Met Orchestra. The huge ensemble ("Pelleas" is scored for more than 100 instruments) seemed to heave and swell as one. They wrought an extravagantly sultry sound for the theme representing Melisande's marriage, shrieked their way through the music for her husband Golaud's jealousy, and spun weird, glassy harmonies in the tower episode. A shuddering recapitulation of the opening forest murmurs brought Schönberg's youthful masterpiece to a bleak end.

Mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina was the soloist in Hugo Wolf's 1893 orchestral version of his song "Kennst du das Land." Wolf was a Wagner acolyte, and his heavy-handed setting of Goethe's delicate poem sometimes seems a parody of the master's style. The strings stab and the brass boom their way through the waif Mignon's evocation of a daunting mountain pass. It's a bit much, and Levine and the Met forces tended to dawdle. Still, Borodina's ripe, lustrous voice worked its customary magic.

With his devotion to classical forms and non-programmatic music, Brahms has long been perceived as an anti-Wagner. Save for some thickness of sound and a lumbering pace, Levine and the Met Orchestra's performance of Brahms' Fourth Symphony did little to dispel that notion.

It was a tidy reading, a bracing tonic to chase away all the chromatic swoons that had gone before. The opening allegro was a vigorous, slashing thing—no "autumnal" or "bucolic" Brahms here, no lingering over those sighing intervals—and the pizzicatos in the second movement sounded with military crispness. There were a few horn flubs, some sublime flute and clarinet solos and much white-hot playing, particularly in the 30 variations that comprise the symphony's finale.

Like the program as a whole, this performance of Brahms' Fourth showed that both inside and outside the Wagnerian tradition, Levine and the Met Orchestra remain a force to be reckoned with.

THE MET ORCHESTRA. Music by Schönberg, Wolf and Brahms. James Levine, conductor. Carnegie Hall