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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
James Levine is a happy man. Or so it seemed when I talked to him earlier this month, in his office at Symphony Hall in Boston. The man who leads the two most venerable institutions in American music--the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony--looked to be in good health. He spoke in rapid, enthusiastic, circuitous paragraphs, his eyes lighting up whenever he touched on a favorite score. Having just finished rehearsals for Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony and Elliott Carter's "Symphonia," he was full of thoughts about how Beethoven was really the first contemporary composer and how Carter is really an old master. He was fine-tuning programs for the following season, lavishing special attention on a series pairing Beethoven and Schoenberg. He had figured out how to present Beethoven's thorny "Grosse Fuge," which rivals anything by Schoenberg in its capacity to make audiences fidget. With a grin, he said that he would play the "Grosse Fuge" twice in the same program, with the violin concertos of Beethoven and Schoenberg in between. He was hoping to create a time-warp effect in which Beethoven would be heard as both past and present. "We can't make this into a piece from 'back then,' " he said. "It's a piece from right here and now." Resting on his piano was the freshly printed score of Milton Babbitt's "Concerti for Orchestra," which he will conduct in January. "Come look at this," he said, patting the music as...
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