Elvis Costello's aim is true. These days he's appearing with orchestras and finishing up an opera, but he isn't selling out or entering a new phase; he's just showing another side of himself that was latently there all along.
Last night Costello was the guest artist at the 121st opening night of the Boston Pops. The program featured a 15-minute suite from his ballet score, Il Sogno, The Dream, which is based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, after which Costello sang nine songs spanning his career, from "Alison" through his first post-9/11 song, the harrowing, machine-gun rattle of "Hora Decubitus," lyrics written to music by Charles Mingus.
Costello is the most successful composer to cross over from popular music into orchestral composition since Gershwin, and he did it all himself. In the early '90s, the singer-songwriter overcame his resistance to learning to read music and write it down. Il Sogno is not just a series of good tunes, although it is full of them. Instead it is a series of themes that develop from a generative harmonic progression in order to tell the story — which also advances through interactions of orchestral colors ("Puck," Costello said with a grin last night, "is a jazz fairy" and he puckishly dedicated the performance "to everyone who has ever fallen in love with an ass").
Perhaps the music could use a little more texture and inner workings, and the full score is more persuasive than the suite, which lacks development. Though the music is rooted in British folk tradition, it is delightful and dodgy rather than reassuring, and there is a touch of magic in it. Keith Lockhart led a performance that could probably have used another rehearsal, but it was enjoyable anyway.
Costello looks a little like Henry Kissinger these days, and compared to a plastic contestant on American Idol he has no moves, but he's still romantic, even sexy, because what he has to offer is musicianship, brains (which develop his elusive, allusive lyrics), and a compelling baritenor voice, slightly husky, sometimes slightly flat, but strong all the way up to solid high B-flats in "God Give Me Strength."
Costello is aware that not all of his old songs will work with a full orchestra, but feels that some like "Alison" and "Watching the Detectives" are fulfilling their potential — "Detectives" now has a louring orchestral menace worthy of that master of musical noir Bernard Herrmann. "She" also flowers, although Costello joked that asking him for a straight romantic ballad was like asking Peter Lorre to play the Cary Grant role in a movie — actually "She" has some pretty scary/sad lyrics. Perhaps the most touching song was "My Flame Burns Blue," an old Billy Strayhorn tune, as twistingly chromatic as anything in Schoenberg, with new Costello lyrics curling around it like smoke.
Excerpts from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, deftly conducted and played, did not eclipse Costello. A video "postcard to Boston" by Susan Dangel and Dick Bartlett accompanied John Williams's "Hymn to New England" — there were cheers for the Red Sox and the Patriots when they appeared on screen. Suppe's delightful "Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna," launched by Martha Babcock's elegant cello, earned a nice hand. Lockhart and the Pops held their own.
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