Newsday, January 2005

THE MET ORCHESTRA. Music by Weber, Carter and Mahler. James Levine conducting, with soloists Anne Sofie von Otter and Ben Heppner. Attended Sunday at Carnegie Hall.

Clapping and stomping, tossed bouquets, a shower of confetti: These are some of the ways listeners hail a fine concert. But the most grateful tribute of all may be a long, rapt silence—when audience members dare not applaud or even exhale out of reluctance to shatter the magic wrought by inspired musicians.

That kind of quiet appreciation greeted Sunday's Carnegie Hall performance by the Met Orchestra of Gustav Mahler's song cycle "Das Lied von der Erde" ("The Song of the Earth"). Lusty applause eventually erupted, punctured by hollers worthy of a hootenanny, when conductor James Levine acknowledged his soloists. Still, the earlier silence, along with the magisterial music-making that preceded it, will linger in the mind.

The sound-picture of Mahler's valedictory work resembles a spray of peacock feathers: densely colored, iridescent, but with a quivery weightlessness about it. The Met Orchestra summoned a palette fully worthy of the composer's fancy. It ranged from the murmurs, first nature-inspired and then wraithlike, of "Der Einsame im Herbst," to the sparkling, watery landscape of "Von der Schönheit," and from the icy phrases that poison the giddiness of "Trinklied" to the splats of bitterness and dread that punctuate the closing "Der Abschied."

To mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter fell the thankless task of filling in for the injured Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. With her lean, sometimes sinewy tone, von Otter cannot match the impact that more sumptuous-voiced artists make in this music. Still, she mustered fierce radiance and concentration in the long, shattering "Abschied" ("Farewell"). Her timbre lit with the crepuscular glow of Mahler's music, von Otter offered singing of heartbreaking eloquence for the knight's leave-taking. Her repetitions of "ewig" ("eternally") seemed uttered from beyond, while laden with a poignant, palpably human ache.

Tenor Ben Heppner, whose triumphant Otello opened the Metropolitan Opera season, brought to Mahler's songs the same combination of clarion strength and melting grace that he lavished upon Verdi's Moor. His voice took on a metallic edge for the mocking strophes of "Trinklied" and poured forth with springlike freshness in "Von der Jugend."

With the 96-year-old composer in attendance, the Met Orchestra served up a virtuosic reading of Elliott Carter's "Variations for Orchestra." Warm, lush string phrases, voluptuously smeared chords, grinding brass progressions that give way to jaunty sequences spiky with percussion: Gratitude and awe shone in Carter's stern gaze, and rightfully so.

The concert opened with a buoyant performance of the overture to Carl Maria von Weber's "Oberon." Weber's wondrous operas are long absent from the Met stage, and the Met Orchestra's evocative playing almost made up for this neglect, with the opening horn motif bathed in the night's mystery and the scampering wind and string figures seemingly kissed by moonlight.

Incidentally, the Carnegie Hall program noted that Heppner has "Oberon's" tenor lead in his repertoire. How about it, Maestro Levine and valiant crew?