LENOX, Mass., July 10 - With his first season as the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra behind him, James Levine took up the position's summer duties on Friday, when he opened the orchestra's Tanglewood season. Mr. Levine doesn't do things in half measures: his inaugural program was Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand," the gargantuan oratoriolike choral symphony, which he also led in October in Boston and New York to begin his Boston Symphony tenure.
This work's logistics and cost (there are eight vocal soloists), to say nothing of the complexities of directing vast choral and orchestral forces in so dense a score, have made it a rarity, yet this is its third appearance at Tanglewood since 1972. Mr. Levine launched into the score with decisively brisk tempos - no lingering on that opening "Veni, creator spiritus," just a grand choral statement accompanied by a remarkably taut orchestral sound. There would, of course, be ample time to temper those qualities, both by magnifying them, as in the over-the-top conclusion of Part 1, and by pulling back to create transparent, heavenly pianissimos, and in the most compelling moments in Part 2.
Among the vocal soloists, Heidi Grant Murphy's exquisitely floated rendering of the "Mater gloriosa" lines, sung from a perch above the orchestra, proved the most memorable. But the other singers - Deborah Voigt and Susan Neves, sopranos; Yvonne Naef and Jane Henschel, mezzo-sopranos; Johann Botha, tenor; Eike Wilm Schulte, baritone, and John Relyea, bass - all made important contributions, as did the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the American Boychoir. But the real thrill here was the Boston Symphony's rich sound and sheer virtuosity. It has been many years since this orchestra sounded so energized.
These players work hard at this summer retreat. Unlike the regular season, when it plays several performances of a single program most weeks, the orchestra offers three different programs here every weekend. Often, these are based on programs that were performed during the year (as the Mahler was), but each gets five hours of rehearsal. So on Saturday morning, the orchestra was back at the concert shed for a public rehearsal of its Sunday afternoon program, with Kurt Masur conducting and Emanuel Ax as the soloist in the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto. The same afternoon, Mr. Levine reclaimed the orchestra to rehearse next weekend's main event, an all-Wagner program with Ms. Voigt among the singers.
The musicians also offer chamber-music programs before many of the concerts; on Friday, its assistant principal oboist, Keisuke Wakao, gave a shapely account of a J. C. Bach Oboe Quartet and an unusual arrangement, for oboe and strings, of Mozart's Gran Partita (Op. 361).
And then there are the students of the Tanglewood Music Center, who spend the summer here preparing orchestra and chamber concerts, as well as the annual Festival of Contemporary Music. While Mr. Masur was rehearsing the Boston Symphony, Mr. Levine led a master class for the center's student conductors, at Seiji Ozawa Hall.
The Boston Symphony's management is using its time here to rethink Tanglewood itself. On Friday, Mark Volpe, the orchestra's managing director, said in a radio interview that the Boston Symphony planned to spend $20 million upgrading Tanglewood's facilities over the next few years. He also said that the projection screens that have been used experimentally in recent years to magnify the stage for listeners on the lawn would be used for all the evening concerts this year.
That's assuming the weather lets Tanglewood attract a lawn crowd. The last two summers, weekend rainfall took a heavy toll on lawn tickets. The rain on Friday was devastating as well, but on Saturday night there was a modest lawn audience for Mr. Masur's first program.
Joshua Bell was the soloist in the Mendelssohn, and when he wasn't rushing - as he did at both ends of the work - he played the music with a sweet glow and all the right touches (even a bit of portamento). He also played his own cadenza, a fiery interlude built on the rhythms of the first movement.
But the real surprises were in the Bruckner Fourth Symphony, with the orchestra and Mr. Masur each supplying some. The Boston Symphony now has a brass section as gleaming and polished as the Chicago Symphony's during Sir Georg Solti's tenure, and its playing in this perilously brass-heavy work was spectacular. The surprise Mr. Masur contributed was a vision of Bruckner as, against all odds, a rational structuralist. That isn't to say that his reading was drained of emotion. Far from it. But Mr. Masur seemed more interested in color, textural clarity and crisply articulated phrasing than in waves of Romantic breast beating. The revelation here was that this work makes a powerful impact, even when its heart is swept off its sleeve.