James Levine leads BSO into a new era

By the official count there were 327 musicians last night in Symphony Hall, and the house crew had to remove more than 5 rows of seats in order to accommodate the stage extension -- the orchestra, supplemental players, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the American Boychoir, and eight of the world's most prestigious singers, all of them giving their all. The mighty Symphony Hall organ, recently restored at a cost of $2 million, made its presence felt when James David Christie led off with a mighty, rumbling low E-flat that was like shock therapy.

The 328th person on the stage was the most important, Levine, who entered with a face-spanning smile, took one brief bow, then settled on his high, velvet-upholstered chair and started to work. His conducting was undemonstrative, but vividly detailed and obviously inspiring. Only a little of it was invisible weaving; most of the time his baton sliced through plenty of space, and decisively. Over the last decade, Levine has had trouble with intermittent tremors in his left arm, but that wasn't noticeable last night. He didn't use his left hand all the time, but when he did it was meaningful -- it swept across the music like a surfer riding a perfect wave. If anything was jumpy, it was his left leg and foot.

Ceremonial occasions like the opening of a new music directorship demand something loud and celebratory, and the Mahler Eighth certainly fills the bill. It was composed in a fever of inspiration -- Mahler later said he felt as if he were taking dictation. The first large section is a fervid setting of the ancient Latin hymn, "Veni, Creator Spiritus" ("Come, Creator Spirit"); the second, even larger, is a setting of the final scene from Goethe's "Faust," a cosmic apotheosis in which sinning, aspiring man is redeemed. The two sections are full of contrast, yet tightly interlinked thematically. Mahler intended us to hear something more than human voices -- the planets and suns revolving in their courses.