Liberating Music of the Met

The players of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra have many reasons for loving James Levine. He has been conducting them for more than a quarter-century, and, as the Met’s artistic director, he hired most of them. He has made them into the most celebrated opera orchestra in the world. But their devotion to their chief may stem mostly from the fact that he lets them out of the pit from time to time.

Beginning in 1991, Levine inaugurated a series of symphonic programs with the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. In May, after the end of the Met season, he now takes it on tour, and on Sunday Levine brought the orchestra to Royce Hall at UCLA.

One turns to the Met Orchestra for freshness. Here is a great orchestra that has in its standard repertory none of the standard repertory. It knows Beethoven, but not the symphonies, and without the concerts, it wouldn’t know such non-opera composers as Brahms or Mahler at all.

But during the first years of concerts, the players sounded more anxious than liberated, as if they were underground creatures blinded by the stage lights, which perhaps they were. Gradually, though, they have adapted, and Sunday the orchestra was magnificent.

The program stuck this time with opera composers and emphasized theatricality. With the local premiere of Tan Dun’s “Death and Fire: Dialogue With Paul Klee,” it also emphasized that the Met is, however slowly, moving into the future.

Indeed, with the concert programs, Levine has sought to broaden the musicians’ experience with music of our time, since so little of it is played at the Met. With Tan, who has a commission for a new opera at the Met, this proved an opportunity for both conductor and orchestra to begin getting familiar with music that is, for them, something of a departure.

Tan seems to be just about everywhere these days. The composer, born in a village in China 40 years ago, has become a riveting, inescapable force in American music less than 15 years after emigrating to New York. Just last week, his latest opera, “Peony Pavilion,” a collaboration with Peter Sellars, had a triumphant premiere in Vienna. A new recording of “Death and Fire,” the second, has just been released on Ondine.

Written in 1993, “Death and Fire” continues the fascination that composers have had with Klee. Gunther Schuller and David Diamond have illustrated the Swiss artist’s paintings in their music, and the ‘50s European avant-garde used Klee’s drawings as formal models for shaping musical lines. For Tan, whose music is always about the interface of East and West, Klee’s linear approach seems close to the effortless simplicity of a Taoist aesthetic.

Though specific pictures are evoked, Tan is less interested in describing than finding, through Klee, a method of working, and what he comes up with feels like a series of small, stunning ceremonies. Each picture, including a central section that is a self-portrait of the composer looking at the painter, becomes its own sound world.

There is no simple way of describing this music, since it always seems different from moment to moment. Although there are thematic motives that run throughout, and the piece moves toward an extraordinary single-note crescendo in the low strings near the end, there is also the sense of a journey through a wonderland of orchestral color, of thundering percussion and moments of delicate beauty. In one brilliant moment, a wisp of Bach as serene background counterpoint to a Chinese-sounding melody seems to lift the curtain on centuries and continents. Levine, in tune with just how deep these sounds can go and how vivid he could make them, missed nothing.

The Tan was followed by a richly sensual account of Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe” Suite No. 2, and it was preceded by a ferocious performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Vadim Repin was the soloist, replacing Maxim Vengerov, who withdrew from the tour because of a death in his family. Repin is a tiger. With a tone full of gravitas but the technique of a record-breaking athlete, the 26-year-old Russian violinist played with a full head of steam, eager for explosions. It is certainly a dramatic way to go about the concerto, and the audience was rightfully dazzled.

But Repin lacks graciousness. He does not interact with the orchestra, but regally commands and lets everyone follow. Levine is a pro at selflessly accompanying arrogant soloists, but he also offered some striking assertions with the orchestra that gave the performance a much greater excitement.

Such excitement, however, may be just a bit too much for the newly renovated Royce Hall, which has a bright acoustic that allows for plenty of sonic punch but also creates a wearying sonic glare.

Still, there was no stopping Levine, who began with a brilliantly forthright account of Rossini’s “Semiramide” Overture and ended with an equally brilliant performance of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” Overture as an encore.