Passionate about 'Paradise'

NEW YORK - The music critic wants to talk about

Paradise and the Peri

, but the conductor is so tightly booked he's probably too busy. We'll run your request by SSR anyway, the handlers say.

But Sir Simon Rattle is above all a musical evangelist, the kind of conductor who can't pass up a chance to talk about a project or a piece of music that's gotten under his skin, and he e-mails back:

"Well, let's try to do this, everybody needs to know about this piece!"

And so the critic gets squeezed in, finding himself on this Saturday morning in the backseat of a limo, talking with the maestro about Schumann's curiously obscure masterwork while on the way to Washington Heights from his midtown hotel.

"Anyone with open ears is going to be stunned by the overwhelming beauty of the piece," says Rattle in a cheerily agitated state about

Peri

, which he leads with the Philadelphia Orchestra starting Thursday for three performances in Philadelphia and one, on Friday, at Carnegie Hall.

With this work, Rattle, 52, continues to develop his close relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is the only U.S. ensemble he conducts on a regular basis, and when he comes he gets to do the work he's feeling passionate about - almost no matter how ambitious it may be. (Recall the sprawling

Gurrelieder

he led in 2000.) Right now he is smitten with this Schumann rarity, a large-form secular oratorio for six vocal soloists, a chorus of 120, and a relatively small orchestra of about 70 players. It's a piece that defies exact genre classification - and it might be Schumann's most concentrated burst of genius.

Set to a poem from Thomas Moore's once-popular

Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance

,

Peri

is about a fairy expelled from paradise but promised readmittance if she brings to its portal "the gift that is most dear to heaven." It is often overlooked now, even by musicians who consider themselves to be on familiar terms with Schumann. But it is this score that established his reputation as a great composer. After its premiere in 1843, it was programmed dozens of times in Germany, England and the United States.

And yet this will be the orchestra's first performance of it, and Rattle's first time conducting the piece, which he only recently came to know.

"I felt so ashamed when I heard this," he said. "I thought, 'This is ridiculous. This has been around for years.' I was in my 20s when Giulini told me about it. And I just never got around to it. There is this sense that there is a kind of accepted wisdom about pieces, right? And because this doesn't fit into any kind of real category, people have allowed it to fall into disuse."

So rare is it that Rattle had not heard it until he listened to John Eliot Gardiner's stunning recording with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, from 1999.

Why is it so seldom performed? Perhaps it's the poetry, Rattle suggests, which is stylized and overwrought to the point of seeming dated. Or is it the music, which he thinks might actually be so beautiful it becomes unbearable?

"Maybe people found it too sweet. You know, to our very puritanical, middle-European ears, people think this is simply too beautiful, the dissonances are too extraordinary. People have a problem with ecstatic music."

All of which only makes the aesthete feel right at home in this work. Moore's peri (a Persian spirit) travels from place to place looking for a gift that will return her to heaven. She offers a drop of blood from a soldier who gave his life in pursuit of liberty; she brings the dying breath of a woman who sacrifices her life for her lover. Both gifts fail to lift the barrier to heaven. Then the peri sees a scene in which a criminal cries at the sight of a boy saying his prayers, and it is his tear of repentance that finally wins her entry.

Rattle says that despite the prayer and angels, the piece is not "at all" religious.

"I think Schumann loved it because he thought he was the fairy. I think it's a big metaphor for creating art and how you try to do the impossible. I think this idea of endlessly searching - this man who would spend one year only writing symphonies, and then one year only writing choral works at enormous speed . . . I think Schumann spends his life trying to capture the last sigh of a lover who was dying of the plague. I think he felt himself as always searching."

If Rattle's right, and Schumann thought of himself as the fairy, it's significant to listen for the stylistic journey that takes place in the work's hour and a half. The score makes brief nods to Bach, Mozart, Berlioz, Beethoven and especially Mendelssohn – Schumann's idol. But at the end, when the way is cleared for the peri to enter heaven, the music is so thoroughly Schumann it could be the jubilant finale to one of his symphonies.

"When you hear the first violins creeping in" - the work's very first notes - "it's as though they were always there. You are in a whole other world," says Rattle. "For me it . . . goes the closest to the heart of what I consider real Romanticism. Not that dark, dangerous Wagner Romanticism, but the real idealistic Romanticism."

Rattle is promoting the piece widely, hoping that it will regain its former visibility. In addition to performing it in Philadelphia and New York, he'll lead it Dec. 7 in London with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (with some of the same vocal soloists who are performing it here), then in Paris, Turin and Budapest.

Why does he feel the piece is ready for a resurrection?

"I have a friend who plays in the Bayerischen Rundfunks [Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra], the principal bassoonist. They played it last year with [Nikolaus] Harnoncourt, and I still have the text message on the phone, talking about the piece and saying, 'I am nearly 40 and principal bassoonist in a major orchestra and I have played so much [repertoire]. This is one of the great masterpieces of the world and I have never heard it before. What is this?'

"It does seem to inspire people," Rattle says.

Simon Rattle leads the Philadelphia Orchestra in

Paradise and the Per

i Thursday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. at Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Streets. Performances are in German with English supertitles. Soloists are sopranos Christine Brandes and Heidi Grant Murphy; mezzo Bernarda Fink; tenors Joseph Kaiser and Mark Padmore; bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni. With the Philadelphia Singers Chorale, prepared by music director David Hayes. Tickets are $10-$123. Information: 215-893-1999 or

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