Healthy James Levine opens Boston Symphony season

[September 25, 2008]  BOSTON (AP) -- James Levine returned to podium for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's gala opening night performance, after taking several weeks off following surgery for kidney cancer.

During a dress rehearsal earlier Wednesday at historic Symphony Hall, Levine said he felt great and was excited to return.

"I'm even more thrilled to be back than usual. We had a wonderful set of rehearsals for this concert tonight and everything just looks even more wonderful to me than it did before. I'm feeling very well and I was a very lucky boy," Levine said at a news conference following the rehearsal.

Levine, who was forced to miss much of the BSO's Tanglewood season this summer after having a kidney removed in July, said he had "smart doctors" who caught the cancer early. The BSO has said he will need no further treatment for the early-stage tumor.

"In the end, I felt just very, very lucky," Levine said.

The 65-year-old Levine also is music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he has already conducted this season. He led a performance of Verdi's "Requiem Mass" at the Met to honor the late tenor Luciano Pavarotti last week, and a segment of the opera's opening gala Monday night.

Levine offered the Boston musicians his critiques during the rehearsal ending one piece by saying, "the blend, the shape, wonderful."

As the rehearsal drew to a close, several members of the orchestra stopped by the maestro's podium to chat with him before he exited through a stage door.

Levine led the BSO Wednesday night in an all-Russian performance, including the "Letter Scene" from the Tchaikovsky opera "Eugene Onegin," featuring Latvian soprano Maija Kovalevska, "Pictures at an Exhibition," by Mussorgsky, and Glinka's "Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila."

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[Associated Press; By NANCY RABINOWITZ]

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