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Arts & Entertainment Preview - October 1997 B Y   A U S T I N   B A E R The Real Thing Garrick Ohlsson's turn to shine A topic in search of a doctoral candidate: the popularization of classical music by the movies. Disney's immortal Fantasia peopled Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 (the Pastoral) with centaurs and she-centaurs and gave Mickey Mouse a star turn as the Sorcerer's Apprentice in the brilliant Dukas tone poem. The elegiac Andante from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467 set the tone for Elvira Madigan, as did the volcanic opening flourish of Richard Strauss's tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra for 2001. Shine, which treats musical performance as blood sport, has established Rachmaninoff's lush Piano Concerto No. 3 in the popular imagination as an Olympic event -- and also the personal property of the tormented Australian pianist David Helfgott, who at this late stage in his career does not command the technique to play it. His American tour last spring sold out, but if the concerto rather than the human-interest angle was what you cared about, the performance to hear was the one by the lithe young Norwegian virtuoso Leif Ove Andsnes, with the New York Philharmonic. His reading (also available on an EMI CD) balanced the scales between poetry and heroics, pinning swirling galaxies of notes into coherent shapes by means of the subtlest accents. To judge from the tumultuous ovations, no one in the hall missed the will-he-crash melodrama of the simultaneous Shine tour. This month "Rach 3" resurfaces on a program by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The soloist is Garrick Ohlsson, an American artist whose Paul Bunyanesque physicality bespeaks his power but belies his delicacy. It may not be movie material, but the music should be thrilling. And thanks to the movie, a much expanded public will be flocking to it. Genius, in Due Time Dutilleux at the BSO In the pantheon of music's living masters Henri Dutilleux, born in France in 1916, has few peers. You would not, however, call him prolific. His apprentice pieces he has destroyed, staking his reputation on a handful of major works completed since the Second World War--works remarkable for their unpredictable yet organic sense of form and for their unorthodox interplay of single instrumental voices against the density of orchestral mass. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes Dutilleux in terms more befitting a testimonial than a reference work: "He remains attentive to the most diverse musical trends, but rejects anything which might distract him from his own ideas and sensibility; each new work represents a deepening of his thought, an attempt to go further. Yet the guiding principles remain always the same, making Dutilleux's art a shining example of diversity within unity." Such a composer is not a man to be rushed. Thus Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were forced in a recent season to postpone Dutilleux's latest major contribution, Mémoire des ombres (Memory of shadows), which now receives its world premiere in Boston (October 9, 10, 17, 18; 617-266-1200), bookending the New York premiere by the same forces at Carnegie Hall (October 15, 16; 212-247-7800). The wait has only sharpened the anticipation. Rome is Where the Heart Is Times have changed. A generation ago a blazing new talent like Daniele Gatti -- born in Milan in 1960, currently the music director of London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Bologna's Teatro Communale, and Rome's Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia -- would long since have been snapped up for a major recording contract. In today's cautious climate he has had to wait, to be signed at last not by an old blue chip but by hungry young Conifer Classics. Gatti's debut album (disserved by a drab, shifty-eyed cover portrait) presents Ottorino Respighi's ever-popular Pines of Rome, Fountains of Rome, and Roman Festivals, played by the Santa Cecilia. Delivered with such flair, these splashy crowd-pleasers are hard to resist. But there is much more to Gatti than surface dazzle, and his first tour at the head of the Royal Philharmonic concerns itself chiefly with the serious business of Schubert, Schumann, Mahler, and Bartók. From October 11 to November 2 Gatti and the RPO visit New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and thirteen other American cities. Precious little Respighi is scheduled, but there are always encores, for which a burst of Roman fireworks is just the ticket. Austin Baer is a writer based in New York. Go to ... Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.