You want to know what it takes to compose great music, serious music that can reach out and touch people importantly. Read Adams in his wonderful new memoir, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, especially the pages on his activities after 9/11. As it happens, he is in London at the time, preparing a recording of his Death of Klinghoffer, the opera that pits choruses of Jews and terrorists against one another in equal force. The New York Philharmonic wants a piece from him on the tragedy. He is repulsed by the idea, by the media’s almost immediate “kitschification” of the attack. He is moved, finally, by New York itself, by the hand-lettered signs posted around Ground Zero, by the racket in the streets even at 3 a.m., by the “fractals of information” that he can interweave with a text of victims’ names, quietly spoken by a chorus of children. Most of the performing organizations made the automatic move on 9/11, plugging in the great requiems of Mozart and Brahms. The intensely human, quiet urgency of Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, completed months later, came far closer to the sense of that day. It also earned Adams his first Pulitzer Prize.

Composer-memoirs, no less than prose ——–
AUTHORs’ memoirs, come a dime a dozen. Something about this intense, immensely charming and revealing work of Adams, however, transcends the bunch. Show me another composer willing to admit that one of his best orchestral works, the Chamber Symphony, is a blend of influences by atonality pioneer Arnold Schoenberg and the cartoon comic Ren and Stimpy favored by his son Sam. (Show me another composer, for that matter, willing to name his firstborn after a beer.)

Hallelujah Junction follows a circuitous path – like the eponymous dirt road in the High Sierras, where Adams’ maintains his composing retreat. It starts with a dance-band on a New Hampshire pleasure boat, with Dad on clarinet and young John listening, learning, moving on to music jobs at summer camps, eventually to Harvard. There his life is bracketed by the Beatles, LSD and Pierre Boulez. He learns the rules of strict counterpoint, discovers John Coltrane and submits his first composition, The Electric Wake. On graduating, his mother presents him with a copy of John Cage’s Silence, a libertarian manifesto; Adams’ response is to climb into his car and head west. Cruising along California hilltops at sunrise, Wagner on the car stereo, he has his first epiphany; he begins to know what music is all about. Later, looking down at the Pacific, he will turn a second epiphany (The Dharma at Big Sur) into music to help dedicate Disney Hall.

The first San Francisco years run on familiar tracks: beans and ramen in the Haight-Ashbury, one marriage torpedoed, one small break leading to a bigger one, a brave new conductor at the symphony (Edo de Waart) willing to take a chance and ndash; kaboom! ndash; Harmonium, a first masterpiece and a big one. The second was the supergorgeous Grand Pianola, and I was privileged to be in the Lincoln Center audience that erupted in almost-unanimous booing, and to chronicle the event in Newsweek as the arrival of West Coast music.

Adams gained security: composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony. He had not composed a note for the human voice when, in 1982, boy-genius Peter Sellars descended upon him with plans fully drawn for an opera called Nixon in China, but somehow he drew blood. Everything you wanted to know about Nixon is set forth in Adams’ brilliant character-analysis of Sellars’ and Alice Goodman’s scenario and libretto.

Next came, however, Klinghoffer, with its good-Jew/bad-Jew censorship controversy that won’t go away so long as producers assume the chutzpah of producing the opera in any form. (The original Sellars staging has been superseded by the interesting Penny Woolcock revision on DVD, which does not, fortunately, pull the teeth of the drama.) Adams fairly details the many attempts to kill the work, most of all the jeremiad by musicologist Richard Taruskin, which ran in The New York Times, which is answered with equal sting by librettist Goodman (who converted from Judaism while creating Klinghoffer’s poetry).

Doctor Atomic differs in that Adams approached Sellars with the idea rather than vice versa; the piling-up of controversy, the intensity of positive and negative criticism, remain the same. (Balancing, however, is the sublime A Flowering Tree, composed almost simultaneously, impossible to disparage.) First of all, Doctor Atomic rests on a fabulous mingling of poetry: John Donne, the Bhagavad Gita, Muriel Rukeyser, blended into Sellars’ gathering of scientific memoranda, data rescued from trash cans, etc. Again, any doubts about the sureness of Adams’ part in this music are easily dispelled in his own words on the opera’s focal moment. J. Robert Oppenheimer stands alone, his soul lacerated by the words of John Donne, the shadow of The Bomb behind, as John Adams lacerates us all in the key of D minor. You don’t need to read music to know how this works; Adams is there to make it clear.

HALLELUJAH JUNCTION: COMPOSING AN AMERICAN LIFE | By John Adams | Farrar, Straus Giroux | 352 pages | $26 hardcover

Why do such things happen? I suppose it goes something like this: Howard Shore writes these splendid movie scores. The Lord of the Rings gets turned into a symphony – a huge, pompous-ass symphony that doesn’t for a minute shed its movie-biz identity, but a symphony nevertheless. Shouldn’t an opera be the next career move? Does it matter that he has no sense at all for a vocal line? How to differentiate between a love theme and an anger theme? Apparently nobody thought to ask. Maestro Domingo, whose last foray into contemporary opera was Nicolas and Alexandra, is again seduced by mediocrity.

For the two and a half hours of The Fly at the Chandler Pavilion, the ear is insulted with words set to music that almost never allows them to take shape. David Henry Hwang (of M. Butterfly) provided the text, which includes a steamy love duet about flesh, flesh and more of same. Sure, the opera has no connection with Cronenberg’s film. How could it? The basic premise, the bodily disintegration the makeup guys worked so brilliantly upon Jeff Goldblum in the film, is only hinted at in an embarrassing moment, when the opera onstage simply stops, and the supertitles, alone, are left to tell the story. When action returns, there is Doctor Brundle again, bent over and with a cane but still full size. Call this illusion? I call it cop-out.

Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch does a reasonable job as Doctor Brundle, including a few seconds of creditable Full Monty. He also does a couple of backflips to demonstrate the agilities of the New Flesh (although a double comes on for the sterner stuff). Romanian soprano Ruxandra Donose is the put-upon Veronica, and a couple of minor roles are handled, as well as need be, by Gary Lehman and Beth Clayton. Oh yes, I almost forgot: The opera ends with the message that brave Veronica is pregnant with Brundle’s child and has refused an abortion despite the possibility of giving birth to a you-know-what. Sequel, anyone? Now that’s what I’d call a horror story.

Before any of this, and by far the weekend’s better-spent time, was the opera’s excursion onto the triple bill of Puccini one-acters that some put forward as the best of all his music, beautifully planned and led by James Conlon. I cannot argue; Il Tabarro, the first of the set, does indeed have some of his most adventurous music; Gianni Schicchi, the last, is the music I turn to when the old hate-Puccini impulses start to churn. Unfortunately, Suor Angelica, the middle and sad sister of the three, is one of the works that does, indeed, start those impulses. William Friedkin staged the first two in the series; he had also staged Gianni Schicchi in 2002; now it was someone else’s turn.

All three short works, so different in narrative and tone, have in common the plan of a slow, leisurely start through an extended musical landscape; we know these people before their actions coalesce. Il Tabarro offers a remarkable portrait of a Parisian dockside: the barge of Michele and the gathering onshore. The orchestra projects a broad panorama; wonderful little dabs of color evoke the schemes of Monet and Debussy and remind us of the range of sympathy in Puccini’s late years, when works like Pierrot Lunaire seized his awareness. Lovely moments occur; an organ grinder’s instrument honks out a souvenir of La Bohegrave;me. As sunset turns to dusk, Puccini’s orchestra makes this tangible; it’s one of opera’s great moments, and our company does it well.

Mark Delevan is the murderous Michele; Anja Kampe is the wavering wife: a superb and superbly matched couple. Salvatore Licitra is the fly in their ointment, and he gets swatted. He was the tenor who stood in for Pavarotti on the night of the Great Cancellation: an okay tenor with a bit of howl.

Suor Angelica is all sweet atmosphere, and it takes patience, as the young nuns and novices bustle over their cabbages and their chores. Sandra Radvanovsky is Angelica, and she is all drama up to that high D (I think it is) at the end of her big death aria. But Conlon has had to dig up a second aria, meant by Puccini to follow the big “Senza mamma,” inferior music and, in this context, anticlimactic. It is usually cut, and should be; it prolongs a scene which, considering the brevity of the entire work, was the proper length before.

Gianni Schicchi is Woody Allen’s show, but not entirely. The opening bit is Woody-sophomoric: a screen with funny Italian words – e.g., “impetigo” just to be Woody-cute. But that is soon lifted, and Gianni Schicchi has resisted worse than that. It’s a wonderful, boisterous show, staged on a crowded design by Santo Loquasto – a backyard and tenement of any century, any neighborhood – that is really part of the fun. The opera is a great boondoggle, a Woody Allen specialty if ever there was. Thomas Allen is the seedy, self-important Schicchi; Laura Tatulescu sings the “O mio babbino caro” most seductively; and the show is stolen (literally) by 9-year-old Sage Ryan, who in the brief span of this opera picks every pocket and steals every heart.

Among the myriad variations in nature, a little bit of repetition

Steve Reich was the dominant figure. A fair number of the pages in the lavish, 120-page program book trumpeted the news that he was America’s greatest composer, and there was evidence to sustain, perhaps to clobber. Opening night, Thursday (June 5), was all-Reich, old and new; closing day, Sunday, had Reich in the morning and again at night. Sometime in between, at a so-called symposium event, a capacity audience in an airless church sat through a half-hour of recorded Reich midway through what was billed as a “conversation.” A lot of Steve, to be sure.

Conductor Brad Lubman organized the opening program, with Signal, his brand-new performing ensemble, which had been christened only days before at New York’s Bang on a Can Festival. Young musicians working their way through the inventive intricacies of Reich’s Eight Lines and the sheer chutzpah of that historic audience goad Four Organs – it served as a kind of guarantee that the music would find its performers for another generation, at least. As for the final work on that opening program, Reich’s recent Daniel Variations – which was composed for and has now been recorded by our own L.A. Master Chorale – the performance under Lubman was less successful, turned into hash by microphoning that left the text incomprehensible and the orchestral detail muddy.

Better in all respects was the Sunday morning program, nicely organized by this year’s music director, David Robertson, around Drumming, Reich’s early, primal masterpiece. First came Clapping Music, that nice little portable number, done by its originators, Reich and Russell Hartenberger. Then this year’s sensational newcomer, L.A.-born pianist Eric Huebner, made an hors d’oeuvre out of a couple of killer Ligeti piano etudes. Every percussionist within reach – including Reich’s veteran Nexus group, the upcoming So Percussion, Huebner and festival artistic director Tom Morris – then piled on to the stage to re-create the granddad of all bang-away masterpieces, Edgard Varèse’s 1931 Ionisation, after which it was only natural for Reich’s 1971 Drumming to fall into place, all 75 minutes’ worth.

What a great piece! And how it grows in the open air, as a visual and auditory phenomenon, the players moving in and out of position, building suspense even as they stand silently, raising expectation for their next lunge, as the music develops in complexity, reaches its zenith, subsides, creates a form all its own. From this music alone I might argue the case for some kind of Reichian supremacy – but does it matter? Drumming was, at least, the high point of this one festival. Later that day came Tehillim, a towering edifice of the Steve Reich that is; nothing can compare with the Steve Reich that was.

David Robertson, Santa Monica born, currently turning his Saint Louis Symphony into a consequential, forward-looking orchestra, was the excellent choice for Ojai’s music director this year; he is young, bright and full of ideas. That is not the same, however, as declaring that his ideas, the first time out, were exactly right for the territory. Of the four precious evenings on Ojai’s calendar, the two Steve Reich events were right for Ojai; two, it seemed to me, somewhat misjudged the territory.

One thing that the Libbey Bowl – that sylvan depression in Ojai’s town park, where concerts happen, friends gather, birds cluster to approve and sycamores overhang menacingly – is not is a place to show movies. Whatever motivated Robertson to turn over half a festival evening to a rerun of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, it couldn’t have been the anticipated pleasure of reliving the 1936 curio, weeping along as David Raksin’s gooey tune slithers past several times too often, losing one’s heart once again to Chaplin’s travails or to Paulette Goddard’s gamine or to Chester Conklin’s delirious cameo. For the folks on the lawn up back, the film must have been nearly unseeable; for those in the first couple of rows down front, bent collarbones were also the order of the evening. I can see film as a festival adjunct, nearby at the Ojai Art Center or in the movie theater just across the street – but not subsuming half an evening’s program on the main premises in festival time.

The other half? There are those who hold a warm spot for the naiveté of America’s “bad boy” George Antheil, fondled by a generation of pseudo-intellectuals and hailed as some kind of genius manqué; his “Jazz Symphony” I find merely a shorter show-off piece than some of his trash, and offensive in its rooty-kazooty brevity. I had believed it the worst of its breed until I came across its program mate on Friday night, something by one François Narboni, quite accurately titled El Gran Masturbador, in which, I can only assume, that otherwise pleasurable household sport is extended to the art of composition.

On Saturday we were invited into the presence of two high-strung – unless I can find a stronger word – women: the first one Nabokov’s Lolita, as imagined within the electronics of En echo, by Boulez disciple Philippe Manoury; the other Michael Jarrell’s Cassandra, proclaiming live the epic of betrayal as her beloved Troy (not New York) falls to ruin at her feet. For Manoury’s Lolita there was an empty stage, with a few lights behind a scrim and a soprano – Juliana Snapper – out front, as inappropriate an Ojai Festival setting as the Chaplin film had been the night before. The great German actress Barbara Sukowa, stage-filling under any circumstances, spoke the words of Cassandra in English; Jarrell’s music, mostly a raw, grinding undercurrent of no particular attractiveness, served to underscore the intensity of Sukowa’s delivery of Christa Wolf’s slashing text. (Remember Sukowa from her Pierrot Lunaire some years back? If anyone at LACMA had remembered that performance, LACMA would never have abandoned its music programming.)

Dawn Upshaw returned, as I was saying, to sing to Gil Kalish’s piano, a varied program: Stephen Foster, Kurt Weill, Bill Bolcom and a Schubert song as the one encore that seemed to encapsulate the delight those who love this place feel upon every happy return. That delight extends when someone new turns up with the same spirit, a way of knowing the breadth of music and where it aligns with the human spirit. I sensed that in this Huebner kid, whom I’ve known now through Juilliard and into his big career in New York, with his amazing fingers and all-knowing smile. At Ojai he also played Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies, that extraordinary piece that simply fills the piano with notes. He will be with music for a long time.

So will Ojai. Next year’s “Music Director” is the chamber group eighth blackbird. If there’s any gas left, and any money to pay for it, I’ll be there. You too.

Come concert time, the seat next to me was fully occupied, not by my grateful minstrel but by a corpulent heavy-breather who had bought my extra ticket, at a fairly inflated price, from the street fiddler. When I came out at intermission, that guy was still sawing away at his sidewalk station. I’ve never trusted one of those street players since.

Until, that is, Mr. Nathaniel Ayers began to restore my faith, with help from Steve Lopez. The slice-of-life columnist for the Los Angeles Times comes into the picture where I might have, if that klutz in New York hadn’t sold my ticket. Lopez’s splendid new book, fashioned from his columns, is called The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. Lopez discovers Ayers first, a lone fiddler playing astonishingly well, on a downtown street corner. They meet, some bullshit is exchanged for better or worse, they part, they meet again. “…[Nathaniel] plays for a while, we talk for a while, an experience that’s like dropping in on a dream,” writes Lopez.

Nathaniel takes nonsensical flights, doing figure eights through unrelated topics. God, the Cleveland Browns, the mysteries of air travel and the glory of Beethoven. He keeps coming back to music. His life’s purpose, it seems, is to arrange the notes that lie scattered in his head …

“Your violin has only two strings,” I say. “You’re missing the other two.”

“Yes,” he says, he’s well aware. “All I want to do is play music …”

The encounter becomes a column, and then a series. A used-instrument dealer named Al Rich (not this one) donates intact instruments; so do others. Lopez digs deeper: Yes, a Nathaniel Ayers attended Juilliard some years back, showed great promise, dropped out, dropped off the planet. Former teachers remember him with passion; long to contact him. There’s a sister, a father still working in Vegas. Meanwhile the present-day Ayers becomes, for our dedicated journalist, something of a career, something of a handful.

Lopez turns impresario, virtuoso. With help from the Philharmonic’s press department, he invites Ayers to a rehearsal: Beethoven’s “Eroica” no less. Ayers sneaks his own instrument onto the emptied stage and plays some notes, hence qualifying as “soloist.” Against considerable and vociferous opposition, the middle-aged, cantankerous Ayers is force-fed into the city’s welfare system. A room is procured at one or another downtown Skid Row settlements; just as often, Ayers would prefer to plop his pillow in the Second Street Tunnel, usually out of the perfectly understandable need to stand watch over his possessions.

“The flapping of pigeon wings,” he explains, “comes down to me as applause.”

Obsessions battle: Ayers’, with maintaining his toehold in a Cloud Cuckoo Land where Beethoven calls the shots from above all rooftops; Lopez’s, to guide this tragically terminated, halfway-educated mooncalf back into loving, professorial arms and, perhaps, get him a decent job with a symphony orchestra or some such, thereby possibly harnessing his soaring spirit forever. You might ask yourself whether the world has to be so small that a reasonably amiable schizophrenic can’t sleep in a traffic tunnel and play on a two-stringed violin now and then.

The Soloist is a sweet and moving story, and there are some authentic tearjerks along the way: Ayers’ old cello prof in Cleveland first getting word that his favorite pupil is alive; Ayers and his sister reunited after all those years. (There is also a film on the way from DreamWorks, and don’t say you’re surprised! Jamie Foxx is Nathaniel Ayers, Robert Downey Jr. is Steve Lopez, and Esa-Pekka Salonen plays guess-who.) I would, however, raise an eyebrow, draw a line, or whatever the current expression has it, concerning the subtitle. Believe me, there is no “redemptive power” in music, I am most happy to report after some 60 years. It’ll knock you out, drag you down; it has sandpapered some of Nathaniel’s more interesting edges, as Lopez carefully points out on almost every page. Thank God, it hasn’t redeemed him.

THE SOLOIST: A LOST DREAM, AN UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP, AND THE REDEMPTIVE POWER OF MUSIC | BY STEVE LOPEZ | G.P. Putnam’s Sons | 273 pages | $26 hardcover

Helmut Lachenmann cuts a solitary figure in today’s musical world. At a time when much of the talk centers on accessibility, on a generation of composer-heroes – Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters – who have found ways to reach out to audiences with serious and imaginative creativity, that old notion of the composer on his private Olympus, proudly and defiantly cloaked in his mantle of inscrutability, rests almost solely with this tall, gaunt yet smiling German gent whose music ground its way through Zipper Concert Hall last Monday. This was the last, and most off-the-wall, of this season’s Monday Evening Concerts, the venerable series rescued and restored to its historic position as one of music’s most adventurous programming enterprises anywhere in the land.

Monday evening’s program began with Lachenmann himself, at the piano in a suite of Ein Kinderspiel (Child’s Play), nicely set with keys of the upper and lower octaves silently depressed so as to enhance the piano’s resonance. Okay so far? Came then Movement (Before Paralysis), sizable music for 18 players, screeching out in all directions with jagged, dark, mysterious and inchoate patterns that defied connections (or welcomed disconnections?). This, we are told, is Lachenmann’s delight. “He is the world’s greatest composer,” proclaim a few holdouts in the new-music community who dote on inscrutability. At them in response, I fling my favorite James Thurber line: “nbsp;lsquo;He’s God!’ screamed a Plymouth Rock hen.”

Yet the concert drew a large crowd, and there were many who stood and cheered at the end. I would love to know what they heard. Prior to this concert, I knew Lachenmann mostly from the ECM recording of his setting – “opera” in the broadest sense – of the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl,” onto which he has hung the whole paraphernalia of his “fractured aesthetic” (Alex Ross’ term), culminating in a horrendous musical mishmash in which the ghosts of every composer in Lachenmann’s own scrapbook, Mahler, Berg, Stockhausen, Boulez, pass by simultaneously as if in some horrendous wet dream. Does that lovely, sad Andersen story deserve that? Do we? Did we on Monday?

I had never before endured pain at a Monday Evening Concert; this time I did: pain and anger. A splendid young group, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, under Michel Galante, traveled with Lachenmann to perform the Movement; another, consisting of three members of Ensemble Recherche, played his Allegro Sostenuto (more of the same) after intermission. “Played,” by the way, often consisted of blowing through only the mouthpiece of a wind instrument, banging on the case of a piano, delivering frenzied blasts through a brass instrument and otherwise violating the customary sound possibilities of various instruments. Such procedures are not new, and they have a certain joke value the first time around. The Lachenmann works were long enough to allow these things to happen several times, and you all know what happens to a joke when you tell it more than once.

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Beethoven, Bloomberg, Blog

Some of the happiest moments in a critic’s life come with discovering music you should have known long ago but didn’t. At Midori’s recital in Disney Hall, a week ago Sunday, there was a Beethoven Violin Sonata – A major, Opus 30 No. 1 – that I swear I had never heard before, or at least never paid attention. It had an ordinary, perky first movement. Then came an adagio straight out of heaven: a melting, embracing slow theme and a middle section that stood on a threshold and welcomed me with one arm and Franz Schubert with the other. Oh my, Midori plays wonderfully these days; so does Robert McDonald, her excellent collaborating pianist. A couple of weeks before, I had heard her in an unpublicized USC concert, before a paltry audience, performing a big, dramatic Penderecki sonata from 1999, very long and very intense; that work deserves to be brought out in a public performance now that she is located in Los Angeles and draws big crowds – as she did last week. I had gone to her Disney Hall concert out of curiosity for John Corigliano’s Sonata, but that turned out to be an early work, highfalutin Americana, not worth the carfare. It was Beethoven who made the evening.

Beethoven was my first love – the “Pastoral” Symphony, or what remained of it in Walt Disney’s Fantasia butchery. The Eighth Symphony figured in my first published review: Boston Herald, Thanksgiving Day, 1944, a Boston Symphony Youth Concert – and on that day, I abandoned my premed ambitions forthwith, breaking my mother’s heart, for a couple of years anyhow. (It was repaired when I introduced her to Leonard Bernstein.) Sue Cummings hired me as music critic for the Weekly in March 1992, and I got a nice note from her this week on the occasion of this, my final column. It was Cummings who thought up the title “A Lot of Night Music.” I wanted “A Little Night Music” in honor of two favorite composers (guess!), but I had no idea I’d be writing such a lot. Sixteen years! with the most cooperative local management and – honest! – the best readership any serious music critic could ever ask for. My lord! the outburst over my termination has been as gratifying as 10 Marriage of Figaro performances over a single weekend.

From this week, I’ll be writing regularly for bloomberg.com. My own blog, soiveheard.com, will be starting up any day now; there’ll be announcements on KUSC and elsewhere. I’ll also be keeping one foot in the door here at the Weekly; in fact, I’ve already got an assignment.

So, you see, it’s not so bad.

The air was full of memories at the season finale of the “Piano Spheres” concerts last week; the music was too. Ursula Oppens was the pianist – “Oyssla,” as Morty Feldman always called her in his high Brooklynese – and everything on her program was also by one or another of her (or our) old friends: Charlie Wuorinen, who loved to shake things up in New York academe; Bill Bolcom, ragtimer one time and tragedian the next time around; and, to cap it all, the quizzical-empirical Elliott Carter. Ursula was one of the four genius pianists who had prevailed upon Carter to create what has to be the most challenging piece of keyboard music of the past century – perhaps of all centuries. Twenty-eight years later, Carter’s Night Fantasies remains fascinatingly inexplicable; four magnificent performances by the commissioning artists (Oppens, Charles Rosen, Gil Kalish and the late Paul Jacobs) have scaled its crags, and so have others. Each attempt fulfills its 25 or so minutes of tremendously full, eager, important piano figuration differently; each fulfills the composer’s visions of “fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night”; each leaves one with another shading of the sense that thinking of the deepest, most sublime order has taken place.

Why ask for more? This is the one music by Carter that most moves me with the sense of a noble, creative mind at work. If some of his other music doesn’t do this – let me leave it at this, then. Ursula filled the Zipper Auditorium the other night with astonishing unwindings. Afterward, there was another Carter, more easily likable, Caténaires (Chains), pure trickery, a fast one-line piece with no chords, just a chain of notes, amusing and delightful. The shock of being amused by Carter was enough, I guess; I preferred the astonishment, this time, of the longer work. Garrulous Wuorinen, ponderous Bolcom and a couple of Joan Tower trivialities – nothing else remains from this remarkable concert that so challenges the memory of this one sovereign work.

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Light and Dark Fantastic

There was music by Beethoven a night later, handsomely dispatched by András Schiff in the second grouping of his ongoing encounter with the “32″: a cluster of “early-middle” sonatas – Opp. 26, 27, 28 – from the time of the first couple of symphonies. The three sonatas of Opus 26 and 27 are all “irregular” in structure: the first with its Funeral March serving as the slow movement (a what-if sketch for the “Eroica”), the Opus 27 pair with their “Quasi una Fantasia” notation. If anything, the Opus 27 No. 1 is strangest of the group, with its opening movement, which keeps breaking off. Clearly, Beethoven was having some kind of high time playing with sonata structures, in no hurry to come to grips with the tread of history. There’s a splendid, if apocryphal, scene in the old Abel Gance Beethoven movie: Jilted one more time, the composer (the great Harry Baur) sneaks into the organ loft while his sweetie is being married to someone else, and hammers out the Funeral March from Opus 26.

There is something deliciously wayward about Beethoven’s state of mind at this time in his life. These “Fantasia” sonatas, even including the much-overprized “Moonlight,” have about them the sense of a carefree young experimenter in a lab. The specter of deafness hasn’t yet taken hold; the E-flat “Fantasia” Sonata, the sonata paired with the “Moonlight,” is a wild and wonderful work, musically all over the place, as though Beethoven had spilled all its pieces and is in no hurry to reassemble them. The closing theme is like one continuous chuckle.

For no reason I can easily pinpoint, I found these performances – the charm of the “Fantasia” works and, above all, the relaxation of the “Pastoral” Opus 28 – the most satisfactory of Schiff’s performances so far. Listening to early Beethoven sonatas in concentrated doses demands a certain amount of bucolic exercise, and it has, I admit, taken a while to bring this valuable series into focus.

“On the Edge of Santa Monica” and just plain on the edge: If ever a musical event fit that description, last weekend’s “Jacaranda” get-together surely did. Iannis Xenakis’ Nomos Alpha began it: Tim Loo’s solo cello howling helplessly into dark corners, beyond definition or resolution, music so beyond human management that a second solo cello must needs be called upon to untangle its principal in its final few measures. It was no disgrace for Loo to enlist Erika Duke in this manner; the madness lay in the overly great expectations by Xenakis himself in projecting such intense but unperformable music. The intensity of the music would have justified the participation of a half-dozen cellists, if necessary. Not much of Xenakis’ music invokes the sense of magic; this did. So, of course, did the evening’s final work, Stimmung, of which I have written often and with delight. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “hippie campfire” (love that!) for voices intoning magic names ended the evening even more mysteriously, gloriously, on a heavenly set capped with a Sirius mockup and six singers robed in angelic white. You had to have been there.

Obiter dictum: “Night Music” goes dark next week after 16 years. I will write about the last of this year’s Monday Evening Concerts, which I helped to save a couple of years ago as part of my job. The decision to close down my column was not mine. The notes of protest have, of course, been wonderful; they come because we all realize that music – all music but especially the endangered kind – needs people to speak for it, certainly more than one voice per community. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to write about music – periodically for the Weekly, and regularly in a blog (www.soiveheard.com) that friends are setting up, for KUSC (which was on the phone first thing), wherever. My first print was in 1944; I’m not gonna stop now.

More of the same: The new guy has come and gone after his two-week Philharmonic guest shot, leaving behind echoes of adoration and tumults of anticipation – next Disney gig: November 24 – and memories of a sound spectrum ranging from the infinitesimal (the tail flicks of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun) to the cataclysmic amorosities of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé. It was a program of sheer ecstasy on many levels, and, on one at least, beyond any challenge: the sheer delight in the phenomenon of a master music director, at the head of a supremely responsive orchestra, with a program of music specifically designed to bring out the best in that orchestra, playing for a hot-ticket audience at the edge of its collective seat, ready and willing to swallow it whole. You have to remember Esa-Pekka Salonen’s comment, on first seeing Gustavo Dudamel in action: “He’s a conducting animal.” There have been times these past two weeks when young Dudamel has turned us all into listening animals.

And so, they – we – got what they came for. And yet … for myself, I would have been happy with a lot less than the complete Ravel ballet, of which the first half-hour is taken up in mime and gesture and musical noodling, pretty to be sure, before the music coalesces in the great climactic dances known as the Suites 1 2. The sounds are lovely, ethereal, full of everything we admire in Ravel; I can’t help thinking that the time might have been put to better use, that there might have been the chance then for further acquaintance with our new guy: A Mozart symphony, perhaps? (He has conducted nothing less than Don Giovanni, at La Scala.)

Well, he leaves us now not exactly a stranger. His command of the balances, the lights and shades, in the Romantic orchestra is phenomenal; last week’s Berlioz and this week’s Ravel, with the lovely control of wordless chorus (the Pacific Chorale) against orchestra, demonstrate an amazing – what they call, simply, an “ear.” That showed too in his sympathetic work with soloists, especially in Leila Josefowicz’s supple, dazzling dispatch of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto this past weekend. These were great concerts on their own, and greater in their promise.

nbsp;The D-minor Demon

There’s a D-minor Concerto for Strings by Vivaldi that has haunted me since boyhood. Serge Koussevitzky used to play it often in a ponderous, dense style with the full Boston Symphony string section; oh my, how those double basses would resonate in Symphony Hall! Then there was a single-disc recording led by Alexander Schneider, with, of all things, a harpsichord on, if I remember, a Mercury disc; that was the start of awareness, for a whole generation of collectors, that there was such a thing as authentic Baroque musical performance, or something like it. That concerto – No. 11 in the “L’Estro Armonico” collection – has always been a landmark for me, and I try never to miss a performance.

We’ve come a long way since 1950, I guess it was. We later passed through a time when the “authentic” Baroque violin couldn’t use vibrato, and was expected to sound sort of gray. We’ve come out of that too. Fabio Biondi’s Europa Galante, the 11-member “authentic” Italian ensemble that played Baroque-era music in Disney Hall the other night, performed on contemporary-looking violins (plus a great-looking old lute) and played with style, strength, clarity – and vibrato. They performed that D-minor Concerto I was telling you about; they whizzed through its convolutions and paused only briefly in its melodic moments – as Vivaldi’s own forces surely might have done. They also played a set of dances by Purcell that included the “Aire” that Benjamin Britten used for his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Nothing sounded ancient and dry; everything sounded fresh and “authentic.”

Three of the works were by Vivaldi, which was fine because of the marvelous robustness of his style and the genuine sadness he could muster in his slow movements. At the end, there was a set of single movements by eight composers, each of them a dance imitative of some national style of the late 17th century, all of them charming and clumsy in an endearing way and, for reasons beyond any serious musical sense, utterly enchanting.

nbsp;Ever on Sunday

Grant Gershon began his monthly Sunday Master Chorale program, at Disney, with a set of choral songs by Poland’s Henryk Górecki honoring the Virgin Mary, composed in 1985, 10 years after that minimalist composer’s Third Symphony, but seven years before it became what Gershon accurately described as a “fund-raising anthem for NPR stations coast-to-coast.” Card-carrying Góreckiites expecting a replay of the anguished white-on-white tunes from that work may have been dismayed at the Disney Hall concert on Sunday night; others, myself included, found the music touching in its simplicity. For Górecki to have composed so ardent and loving a setting of these sacred texts in a politically charged atmosphere seems to me courageous enough.

Gershon’s good work with his chorus is widely known and honored, perhaps more for their participation with other major projects than for their independent concert series. I had not realized until Sunday’s concert, for example, that they have embarked on a systematic survey of a truly important repertory project, performing the late Masses of Joseph Haydn, one per year: grand and grandiose works of Haydn’s final years, full of the wisdom absorbed in his London visits, therefore solidly aglow with the choral spirit of Handel, and at the same time marvelously rich with the melodic and harmonic wisdom of Haydn himself, this grand old innovator in the glow of mature wisdom. Sunday’s concert ended with a Mass in B flat, titled the “Theresa Mass” for reasons nobody knows. Its date is 1799. Haydn had already composed his last symphony, the “London,” with its amazing shifts of harmony like nothing he had attempted before. Some of these turn up in the long quartet for soloists in the “Gloria” in this Mass; the harmonies in the “Benedictus” are also lush and lovely, looking across the century gap toward, perhaps, Schubert. It’s a wonderful piece, lasting about half an hour; wouldn’t it be great if there were a church in town where music like this could be performed in its proper setting? (No, not the Cathedral, too big and too much echo.) Anyhow, I’ve got to stop neglecting these people; they’re an okay chorale.

He’s real, he’s ours: Gustavo Dudamel.

You could almost say they were made for each other, even to a similarity of hairdo – Hector Berlioz, who astounded musical society with his Symphonie Fantastique at the age of 27, and the Philharmonic’s maestro-designate, Gustavo Dudamel, who at the same age delivered Berlioz’s almost-masterpiece to a capacity, cheering Disney Hall audience last weekend.

The Symphonie Fantastique, concocted by Berlioz as a kind of woozy allegory for his unrequited passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson (whom he later married and came to regret), makes its way uneasily through the repertory. Devotees of French music – the formidable Nadia Boulanger, for one – have told me that they would prefer that Berlioz hadn’t existed at all. Too much of his heart appears on his sleeve, in this work and in some others, violating the easy generalities that one likes to posit about the French musical spirit. Perhaps it’s necessary, therefore, for a young spirit – a preternaturally wise 27-year-old musical spirit from another continent – to shake things up a bit. Enter Gustavo.

Dudamel’s exuberant, but also admirably wise, performance honored small details – the balance of brass tone against strings in the “Ball” movement, for example – that I hadn’t noticed in half a hundred previous live encounters. His performance had surge and impulse and, in the glorious vulgarities of the final movements, a command of orchestral balance that preserved sonorities. All repeats were honored, allowing for Berlioz’s formal design to take its proper shape. In his few times here, Dudamel has mastered the shape of Disney Hall, so that some of the magical acoustic moments in the score – the conversations between the shepherds in the slow movement, with woodwinds spread far apart – were captured in proper dimension. It was, all told, a performance of the work in real proportion, not only thrilling in the grandiose moments but eloquent and captivating in ways that might have astonished the composer himself.

Esa-Pekka Salonen provided a shadowy presence for his successor-to-be in the form of his 20-minute orchestral work Insomnia, which opened the program; Prokofiev’s jaunty First Piano Concerto, a showoff piece nicely performed by the young Simon Trpceski followed, music useful only to show young Trpceski’s power to bang on the keyboard. (A Debussy arabesque, a charming encore, showed off much more.)

nbsp;Second Fiddling

Earlier in the week, Dudamel was pressed into service in one of the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society programs, as second violinist in Mozart’s wonderful A-major Clarinet Quintet. As with the orchestral concert, this drew a full, cheering house, for any chance to see, no less hear, the town’s latest wonder boy, but perhaps not so much to hear chamber music and obey its rules. As it happened, there wasn’t much to hear; a second-fiddle role in a Mozart Quintet doesn’t consist of much in the way of solo ops. Philharmonic concertmaster Martin Chalifour had asked the crowd, please, not to applaud between movements “unless you absolutely have to.” Apparently, the crowd absolutely had to, because there was applause after every movement, ruining Michele Zukovsky’s sublime performance in the Clarinet Quintet and the whole of Mozart’s C-major String Quintet as well. Anyone who applauds, or even breathes, after the slow movement of the Clarinet Quintet just hasn’t been listening.

Which brings up a question I’ve been meaning to ask, or a complaint I’ve been meaning to air: What has happened to chamber music in our town? Chamber music is the result of playing together over long periods by ensembles, who develop a oneness of style and become known for an attitude toward performance, the same way that symphony orchestras hone their tone and their personality by working under a specific conductor. However skilled the individual members of the Philharmonic, I do not hear this quality in the Chamber Music Society concerts I’ve attended at Disney Hall. The Mozart Quintet performance with Dudamel is a case in point; he was in town, therefore available, and so it was a good PR trick to add him to the Mozart program. Immediately, that’s no longer chamber music. Janine Jansen, visiting violin soloist from the Netherlands, sat in on the program the week before; again, that becomes celebrity booking, not chamber music.

I mourn the passing of long-time-constituted string quartets, and chamber-music series with permanent memberships, playing repertory. It’s one more of the losses we suffered when LACMA shut down the Monday Evening Concerts, because one of my last memories from that series was the Parisii Quartet coming in with late Beethoven quartets. I long to hear the Cavatina of Opus 130 the way they played it the last time here. The Guarneri Quartet has disbanded after a distinguished career; I never got to hear the Alban Berg. Memories of the Sequoia Quartet still haunt me; I am tempted by new names in the New York ads, but I don’t see them here. There is hope: The Calder Quartet sound better all the time, and they have begun to play late Beethoven quartets. I just hope that the Colburn School, their local base, will have the good sense to hold on to them long enough to develop a repertory, and reveal to generations of bright-eyed students, pushing into those splendid new buildings on Grand Avenue, the miracles of Opus 130 and the Mozart Quintet, and when to applaud and when not to.

I wish I could say the same about Schumann’s Third (“Rhenish”) Symphony, which filled out the program – the way Styrofoam fills out a package. I have no Hanslick quotation for this sorry smudge of a work, although this from a British paper of 1856 – “trivial in idea and poor in resource” – will do. There are nice sounds here: horns and winds in E flat, their most congenial key, but no rhythms or motion to send them along. The other Schumann symphonies conquer this motion problem with prettier tunes; this one starts out as a sad and noble failure and remains that way.

Ms. Jansen returned 24 hours later, on a Philharmonic “Chamber Music Society” night, with five colleagues, in an even more daunting task – to try to turn a real clunk from Tchaikovsky’s pen, the string sextet called Souvenir de Florence (12 years later than the Concerto and nowhere near as rewarding), into half an evening’s worth of happy listening. It didn’t work; whatever delight Tchaikovsky may have gleaned from his Italian journeys did not translate into anything nearly as lively as his Italian Caprice of many years previous. All that saved this gloomy, meandering work, in fact, was its superiority to its program mate, the wretchedly thick and dreary B-flat String Sextet by Johannes Brahms. Where was Herr Hanslick when we needed him?

Amen to That

My deep-purple words written under the spell of Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen in our last week’s visit were written under the spell of music of similar color at the last “Piano Spheres” concert; those who have teased me about them, and were not at the concert, have only themselves to blame. Beyond their just deserts, they have been accorded a reprieve, since that astonishing work formed the major substance of last weekend’s “Jacaranda” concert “at the edge of Santa Monica,” and if you missed it this time, it’s there on a New Albion disc by the same performers, the piano duo known as Double Edge. With honest respect to Joanne and Mark at “Piano Spheres” – wonderful, brave players – the Double Edge performance, on disc and at the First Presbyterian Church last Saturday, ranks among my sublime experiences. Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles formed Double Edge in 1978. They have also played with Steve Reich’s Musicians almost since the beginning of his time. It tells you the stature of the Jacaranda people that they brought Double Edge out here for their own Messiaen celebration, and also for a major William Bolcom work.

Bolcom’s 1971 Frescoes is, like most of his best works, a “jumble of half-remembrances” that poke at you delightfully – this time from an assortment of keyboards, in other works a variorum of other kinds of etceteras. In a sense, the work set the tone for the entire program, which meandered agreeably past a couple of shorter Messiaen works – the evocative horn call from Canyons to the Stars and an early set of variations that had the feature, unique for Messiaen, of letting us know at every moment exactly where we were in the music. Once again, the “Amen” Visions projected no such message, however. I cannot yet reach ground zero in its vastness; someday I will.

Shared Saturdays

After all those years of solitary Saturdays by the radio, suddenly the Metropolitan Opera airings have become public experiences, to common delight. People meet in the theaters where these new telecasts are shown, and talk over the previous week’s production. It’s only logical, therefore, that these events have now moved into the marketplace, all the more so since the quality of the projections and the sound is, or can be, so much better than a peanut-gallery seat at a lot of live opera hereabouts.

I saw the last two productions: Peter Grimes and Tristan und Isolde. The Grimes was a new production by John Doyle, who did the L.A. Opera’s Mahagonny and Broadway’s Sweeney Todd and Company. Those, I thought, were mostly fine; the Grimes completely wrong. Instead of the expanse of British fishing village extending toward sunrise, we got a flat, vertical wall up front pierced with windows and doorways – Suffolk agrave; la Louise Nevelson, betrayed by Britten’s horizontal expanse of music. There were great performances, by Anthony Dean Griffey and Patricia Racette and by the soaring, murderous orchestra under Donald Runnicles. After the devastating first-act curtain – “HOME, you call that a HOME???” – a squeaky-voiced soprano broke the spell to lead us on a backstage tour.

Deborah Voigt was the Isolde, as expected. The Tristan was the handsome and clear-voiced Robert Dean Smith, the last of four tenors to outlive a sad succession of illnesses and accidents (one of them hilariously caught on film) that had plagued the Met over the week, and he was perfectly fine – better by far than our John Treleaven. Jürgen Rose’s sets and costumes were full of Eurotrash geometrics and shifts of focus; give me David Hockney any day. But oh, that stupendous Met Opera Orchestra!

Composer Harrison Birtwistle

Two of the world’s most endearing originals showed up at the most recent Monday Evening Concert – their music did, at least. One was Ralph Shapey, long gone but long remembered by us exndash;New Yorkers for his fiery spirit: a small, ill-tempered but somehow lovable fighter for a square deal for new music. That music was equally ill-tempered, tough-minded, seldom gracious, always big and argumentative in just causes. Cellist Erica Duke Kirkpatrick, pianist Liam Viney and, above all, percussionist Amy Knoles argued the cause of his Second Evocation, a bristling, abrasive piece, pure Shapey. Britain’s Harrison Birtwistle was the other one, still very much with us on the one hand, but actually not nearly enough. His The Axe Manual (a tribute to our own Emanuel Ax, get it?) gave the evening a bang-up ending.

Why hear we so little of Sir Harry? I ask the question every time one of his immensely expressive, massive works makes it through the cracks: his imposing Earth Dances or the sublime piano concerto Antiphonies, composed for Uchida. There are huge, original operas, while our local company celebrates Puccini. On Monday evening, The Axe Manual held the crowd – or me, at least – enthralled for nearly half an hour with just the interplay of piano (Aleck Karis) and Ross Karre, all over the place with his percussion monster: mostly woodblocks, temple blocks, vibe and marimba.

Best of all, the piece was an exercise of pure wit, of the Harry Birtwistle a small and selective world has come to know and love, handing out small but pertinent observations on the world around him and on the music he is being handed by a spirit of comparable consequence. I think that this is what music is supposed to be. Why did it have to stop?

Next night there was “Piano Spheres” in the same Zipper Hall (and what a fine meeting place that has become, with the Colburn School’s student cafeteria now functioning as a valuable adjunct). Once more, the apparently endless celebration of the Messiaen centennial (12-10-08) exerted its hold, with Visions de l’Amen occupying most of the hour, and the services of Joanne Pearce Martin and Mark Robson on two pianos – the school’s Steinway and Fazioli, which, I was coming to realize, were beginning to sound somewhat mismatched.

What am I to do with this music? For the better part of an hour, it had me pinned against a wall of seductive flame, flayed alive with these violently twisted strands of human emotion, drawn seductively across willing flesh. This was music beautiful beyond human permissiveness. Its ingredients were pure; not a false note disturbed the serenity of its surface. Its cadences were exactly well-placed, yet every step forward seemed sinful, a violation of the most basic laws of beauty.

The music surged ahead, not especially dissonant, a sequence in added sixths as in some most sophisticated jazz riff. Played on an organ, or in dense handfuls of notes as in Messiaen scores for piano, everything sounded rich and over-colored. Early in the program, there was a tiny Messiaen solo, Morceau de Déchiffrage, which Robson copied (“déchiffrer”) from a catalog page; funny, it had all the sweet beauty of the composer’s music, with no more than the required number of notes. Robson’s solo program also included Ravel’s wondrously scary Gaspard de la Nuit, the evening’s best music and best performance.

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Stand and Deliver

At the end of the Philharmonic’s performance of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony at Disney Hall last Thursday night, conductor Semyon Bychkov had the whole brass contingent stand to deliver their final peroration, their instruments, newly polished, waved back and forth to the point of blinding the audience. Forgotten was the merely excellent reading of Rachmaninoff’s “Paganini” Rhapsody, with the red-shoe-clad pianist Stephen Hough and the orchestra early on. This was what the crowd seemed to have come for, and the audience went off its collective rocker: whistles and yells. You’d think that Shostakovich and his Soviets had just won the war – some war – all over again, and maybe they had.

I was there. At summer camp on a July afternoon in 1942, we gathered around a radio to hear Toscanini’s broadcast of the new symphony of Soviet determination; heard Koussevitzky’s overheated performance in Boston a few months later (with an extra cooling-off intermission after the first movement); noted with pride the appearance of a real live composer on the cover of Time.

It took a few years of artistic growth on the composer’s part, a few more symphonies, a certain settling in the world’s values, to establish the fitting reputation for Shostakovich, cultural hero and composer of far finer symphonies and string quartets. The Seventh Symphony survived as the right music for the right time as, perhaps, “Yankee Doodle Dandy” was for its. Better, though, it survives, on the excellent press that has accompanied it from the time its first note went to paper, and on its sheer bulk. The vivid pictorials of its first movement render immaterial the awfulness of the ensuing scherzo and elegy (and the tune for double-bass clarinet in the scherzo is rather charming, actually), and that riot at the end of the finale is always good for getting an audience to its feet. History ordains the survival of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony. An eager conductor, which Mr. Bychkov certainly was, and an outlay of brass polish certainly help.

Berlin’s Simon Rattle

Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review, a quarterly collection of thinking and, therefore, writing that I find indispensable. I don’t know her musical credentials, but her piece in the latest issue, on Simon Rattle – his Mahler performances with the Berlin Philharmonic, his masterly putdowns of unruly New York audiences, his rehearsals and, in general, the marvelous musician that he has become – is a splendid read. In this age of the blog, when anyone with a computer can self-identify as an authority in any field of choice, it’s heartening to come across this wonderfully expressed interaction between a person of broad intelligence and music with the greatest power to stir and to terrify of any I know – and I mean the Ninth Symphony by Mahler.

Not very much of this power is in any way recordable; you have to be there – to experience, for example, the way a dedicated musical leader can hold an audience in stunned silence at the end as Mahler, in the person of a solo cello, guides us toward oblivion. But Rattle’s performance, on a two-disc EMI set, is marvelously detailed and spirited, and it’s up to you to provide the setting: headphones late at night, perhaps, cat close at hand. It is Rattle and his orchestra, almost single-handed so to speak, who are keeping alive a recording industry devoted to superb new versions of orchestral repertory played by major performing forces on discs you can actually buy (somewhere, at least, if only down dark alleys). More power to them.

Counterpart

Out of the gathering of large masterworks from Beethoven’s late-life onrush – the quartets, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the piano sonatas – one work seems to tower above the rest in terms of sheer emotional content and the composer’s struggle to reach out beyond the boundaries of his own artistic conscience. That work is the A-minor String Quartet (Op. 132), which the Calder Quartet grappled with manfully, and came close to conquering, before a fair-sized crowd at Zipper Hall last weekend. To me, this is the work that stands out in Beethoven’s legacy, as Mahler’s Ninth stands out in his. The order of events may be different. Beethoven ends on a note of diffident triumph; his grotesqueries have come earlier. But both works move to a point where the curtain is drawn back and the star-filled firmament is revealed. The young Calders haven’t been playing this music for long, and they will need to firm up their conquest in the years to come, but they played Beethoven’s slow movement, his “Hymn of Thanksgiving,” with just the right balance of ecstasy and melancholy, and I was able to lose myself in this sublime music, as required.

Earlier they performed some Mendelssohn, a capriccio and a quartet, both in A minor, as is the Beethoven. Classical-era composers, the generation before Mendelssohn, tended to steer clear of that key; something about it seems cold and menacing. There are no Haydn or Mozart quartets or symphonies in A minor, only this one quartet by Beethoven and a couple of his early violin sonatas. Mozart sets the pivotal scene in The Magic Flute, when Tamino learns that Sarastro is a good guy, not a villain, in A minor; other than that, there are an early A-minor piano sonata and a late A-minor rondo for piano, the latter chromatic and harmonically distraught. But these pieces of Mendelssohn have nothing to do with the classical A minor. They are flip, parlor pieces, almost insulting to their key, like supermarket marmalade spread on fine pastry.

Good-manners note: Wendy Lesser might be impressed by the way the Calders circumvent the danger of applause between movements, even with a mostly young audience, which this one was. It’s the trick of holding the bows aloft for a few extra seconds at music’s end, which nicely defuses the impulse to interrupt the flow. It worked, very nicely.

Leanness Envy

It was all-French at the Philharmonic, from the orchestra’s assistant conductor Lionel Bringuier’s first major triumph on the podium up front to the insidious rattle of Francis Poulenc’s castanets against the back wall. Bringuier looks wonderful in action, but can any body that slender really support life? His beat is modest, its power – to unleash the vast torrents of sound, within Disney’s willing acoustic framework – apparently endless. Ravel framed the program: the elegance of Le Tombeau de Couperin at the start – with the solo oboe of Ariana Ghez somewhere up among the galaxies – and a devastating La Valse at the end. That guy can certainly manage an orchestra: Bringuier, I mean; Ravel too.

I love Poulenc’s Two-Piano Concerto, perhaps more than I should. It hands out the most gorgeous melodies, some that Mozart, or at least Mendelssohn, would willingly acknowledge, and then trashes them forthwith under a barrage of orchestral roogie-roogie including the aforementioned castanets. The level of bad taste borders on the exquisite; I could not defend a note of this infectious, high-spirited delirium, nor could I sacrifice a single minute of its mere 20. Frank Braley and Eric le Sage were the fine soloists.

Albert Roussel’s relatively unknown Third Symphony, composed in 1930 on a commission from Serge Koussevitzky, should have been the program’s most substantial stuff, or so I thought from memories of previous hearings. Not so, alas; of all the music this marvelous evening, this protracted attempt at laying a wash of modernistic dissonance over the outlines of a classical symphony ended up neither modernistic nor classical but merely very tired. An overlay of rather ordinary percussion, meant, I am sure, to move the music forward, never did. “Undeserved” and “obscurity” don’t always go together.

Obiter dictum: The L.A. Opera’s opening-night Otello, which I reviewed, had required a substitute Desdemona; Chilean soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, scheduled for the role, was ill. She returned later in the run, and – at the urging of my friends “Trader” Joe Coulombe and Alice, this city’s most ardent operaphiles – I saw her last Sunday, the final performance. Bless Joe, bless Alice, and bless Cristina, lithe and beautiful, wonderfully responsive in voice and body to the inner life in this most harrowing of all of Verdi’s tragic roles. This was, indeed, the superbly focused Otello I had missed the first time around. A week with Otello and Opus 132 makes this a pretty good job in a pretty good town.

At security, we were met by Adam Crane, the Philharmonic’s intrepid PR director, barely recovered from the stressful routines of the bigtime press conference of two days before – Esa-Pekka’s final-season announcement and the concomitant freeloaders’ lunch. What keeps him nourished, Adam told me as we wandered through the backstage labyrinth, is the stimulus of gigs like this morning’s: escorting juvenile first-timers through the hall, and basking in their wonderment. Veteran Philharmonickers stopped by to chat with the kids about the mysteries of their art: bassist Richard D. Kelley, cellists Danny Rothmuller and Ben Hong, hornist Brian Drake, and Perry Dreiman, master of the Big Bang. Then came the Magic Door. It gets me every time: the moment in the guided tour when Adam opens the door from the backstage turmoil to the radiantly lit, eerily silent Hall itself, and I too become a juvenile first-timer, time and again.

The Toyota-backed youth concerts are an active and admirable series, too little noticed, especially since they represent a major expanse in the careers of the orchestra’s assistant conductors. The audience was near-capacity, and it gave off such waves of delight that this must needs be something of an outsider’s report. This week’s docket consisted of a curious bit of entertainment whose off-putting title, The Composer Is Dead, was the worst of it. The composer did, indeed, arrive in a coffin, announced by a florid epitaph sung, keened and, you might say, flounced by one Bennett Schneider, to the intent of fingering the true murderer within the orchestral ranks. Section by section, the orchestra members denied involvement – a kind of quot;Young Person’s Guilt to the Orchestraquot; – with the finger finally resting, to nobody’s surprise, on the day’s actual conductor, the sturdy and certainly blameless Lionel Bringuier, Oh, yes, the ——–
AUTHOR of the accusing text was none other than Daniel Handler, otherwise known as Lemony Snicket. San Francisco’s Nathaniel Stookey seems to have had no compunction in accepting the blame for the bundle of orchestral blats and wheezes that passed for a score.

It was soon over. Backstage to shake hands with conductor Bringuier and join in a photo op, the lads and Mamacita were models of awestruck diplomacy. We might have lingered, but I had invited the crowd to dim sum. Nobody had ever been to that before, either.

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Nevertheless …

All the above wasn’t the weekend’s truly major event. Radamisto was. It’s interesting to speculate on the effect George Frideric Handel’s first major opera must have had on the noblemen of London’s Royal Academy back around 1720. The superb performance by Musica Angelica, honest and true to what I think Handel’s operas should sound like, was startling enough: the arias with their rhythmic patterns broken up into chunky, irregular patterns; the slithering chromatic lines that even Brahms might acknowledge; the ensembles that break off midway into conflicting actions. On a stage with no scenery, using orchestral forces with only a tenuous claim to quot;authenticityquot; – strings with modern bowing except for one six-stringed bass to add weight, an electric harmonium in lieu of organ – Martin Haselbock still drew from his ensemble a powerful and convincing argument for the dramatic power resident in this amazing repertory, much of which still awaits proper and intelligent rediscovery. If this was Handel Opera No. 1 in Musica Angelica’s agenda, to suggest something in the way of a series, count this as one approving vote.

The real magic of the performance lay in the singing ensemble, a group astonishingly able to cope with the vocal divisions in this extraordinarily tricky music in a manner ranging from excellent to supernatural. (quot;Divisionsquot; is/are the process of singing two, four or even eight notes on a single musical beat, and it is the life-throb of bel canto virtuosity, from Handel’s time through early Verdi. These folks, all seven principals, had it down pat.) Beyond that, there was further astonishment in the Radamisto of the Spanish countertenor Jordi Domenech, busy in European houses but here making his American debut: a singer of greater range and power than any countertenor in my memory, tall and burly, somewhat burly also in tone but a genuinely exciting young singer. Among other cast members, only soprano Elissa Johnston has sung here, as soloist with most of our local orchestras. An impressively loud baritone named Florian Boesch actually blew his voice out of whack at the end of his big-bad-menacing aria; it could happen to anyone, and Herr Boesch has a voice I’d like to hear as Sarastro someday. At the other end of the scale, a dear small bundle of Celine Ricci scored some square hits on high notes I didn’t even know were there.

What is Radamisto about? Better not ask; I started in on the synopsis, and got to where quot;Zenobia, exhausted and desperate, begs her husband to kill her so she will not fall into Tiridates’ hands. He is reluctant, and fails to strike an effective blow and she throws herself into the river …quot; To Musica Angelica’s credit, they provided a nicely printed libretto, and dimmed the lighting at Schoenberg Hall only slightly so we could read along. That’s what’s known as managerial intelligence. Philharmonic management, please note.

The lovers afloat

There is this problem I have, trying to describe almost any production by the Long Beach Opera. Elektra in a Malibu beach house, Boris Godunov in a corporate boardroom … and now I’m up against Orpheus and Euridice in a Long Beach swimming pool. Please believe, at least until I get the chlorine out of my lungs.

This version, words and music, is by Ricky Ian Gordon, who earned a measure of fame last year, out Midwest somewhere, with a well-praised opera on The Grapes of Wrath, which is due at one of our local companies next season. His Orpheus is not the imposing score of Monteverdi or Gluck; the text is a cycle of sad poems in memory of his “partner of the time” with the Orpheus character transposed to a solo clarinet, the poetry made into a lyrical set for soprano, and various gatherings of dancers more or less ad lib. In that modest form, it won an Obie in New York, as it well deserved. Long Beach Opera’s Andreas Mitisek, who obviously carries aloft the inexplicable banners of company founder Michael Milenski, dreamed up the addition of a few more instruments – mostly the Jacaranda concerts’ Denali Quartet – plus the notion of a swimming pool as a stand-in for the River Styx. The two lovers ride around in a rowboat that, at times, is propelled by diabolical forces, and Euridice falls out. In the grand Long Beach tradition, the whole thing sounds a whole lot better than you’re ready to believe. The Orpheus was Todd Palmer’s clarinet – lithe, capricious and, er, liquid. Elizabeth Futral was the Euridice, a wonderful, elegant, vocally pure singer. Didn’t she take a milk bath in a Handel opera during her last time here?

Mr. Gordon is modestly talented. His tunes have a way of moving up and down with an airy lilt that almost makes you believe that anyone – you and I, for example – could write them as well, and that puts us at our ease. His “opera” lasts an hour; a couple of minutes more and we might have felt our leg being pulled. I can see where some of The Grapes of Wrath might be okey-dokey for this kind of music, but a lot might not be.nbsp;

Flattened Spheroid

Christopher O’Riley, encased in a program note of lurid self-congratulation, took over last week’s “Piano Spheres” recital for the injured Susan Svrcek, and endowed it with a generous serving of his specialty numbers, his piano versions of a broad swath across the contemporary pop repertory: Radiohead, the late singers Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, and on, I presume, down. Twenty pieces of almost exact size, lined up like eggs in a carton, made up his evening. As with eggs in a carton, you couldn’t easily tell ‘em apart.

Piano transcriptions of pre-existing repertory are a common enough phenomenon. The fine Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi has made a couple of CDs of Beatles numbers that are full of wisdom about the music. So are Franz Liszt’s transcriptions of Bellini, Donizetti, even Mozart operas. To believe Mr. O’Riley’s explorations into some of the great pop music of today – Radiohead’s “Arpeggi,” for example, which was when I first became aware at this concert of what was happening, or what was not happening – in Mr. O’Riley’s view, there’s apparently nothing more to transcribing music than just keeping the notes out of each other’s way. Mr. O’Riley, for all the glowing citations on those two pages of fine print, and the eager crowds that pushed into Zipper Hall at the start of his concert – in numbers drastically reduced at halftime, by the way – played the other night like a dead fish.

nbsp;Really Riley

“Please enjoy this new CD from our Sri Moonshine label,” read the note from Terry Riley, to which I happily comply. The disc is Banana Humberto, and it is a packaging, 50 minutes’ worth, of pure, exhilarating joyousness, the kind that hits you when making music is the happiest thing you can do in the world and you’re doing it head-on. Terry plays here with the bassoonist Paul Hanson, the electric-violist Tracy Silverman (remember? from John Adams’ Dharma at Big Sur?) and Paul Dresher’s Electro-Acoustic Band, Bay Area-based. Their music … what can I say, beyond my personal report of being grabbed, shaken, tickled and desensitized?

Terry is mostly at the piano, motivated into cadenzas compounded from Eastern scales and polyrhythmic patterns, now and then slowing to a blues moment and, in a dazzling finale, a stupendous plunge into deep, rich Latino coloration. It seems to be Terry himself, reminiscing at Mach 10, on everything great and good and colorful that has ever crossed his horizon, and daring us all to come along. It tells us all that, at Terry Riley’s age and beyond, the power to be delighted, and to pass it on, is one of the greatest possessions we can hold on to.

On that note, be sure not to miss Terry’s recital on the Disney Hall organ on Sunday, May 25. He heard the organ for the first time when he was here during the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist” festival, and was immediately moved to compose a full evening’s work for it. Nothing more important will have happened in this millennium so far; maybe I just mean musically, maybe I don’t.

Robert Millard

Verdi’s Otello at the Music Center

“We are not the sole owners of our past,” wrote Jordi Savall, music’s great and original spirit, in a note accompanying his marvelous appearance at Disney Hall last week. His concert, with his ensemble of singers and players upon lovely old instruments, was devoted to music from “Hesperia,” an ill-defined area between the Italian and Iberian peninsulas whose musical fascination lay in its having housed a number of diverse cultures – Arab and Jewish, for example – who were able to live in peace and thus develop fascinating, hybrid artistic existences. Out of this remarkable melange emerged, among notable figures, Christopher Columbus, who, for all his reputation as an opportunist in his dealings in commerce, was also a serious observer of culture who kept large and important notebooks. One notebook page cited by Savall, which I find particularly fascinating in its power to lie across certain notebook pages of my own, is a leaf from the writings of the Roman poet and politician Seneca – yes, the old guy whom Nero does in in The Coronation of Poppea – prophesying the existence of a New World, which Columbus obviously took to heart.

Savall’s researches, which resulted in a marvelously diverse program of music relevant to the world around Columbus’ explorations, have always been more than mere concerts. With Hesperion “I, his own gathering of instruments, and the dedicated singing of his wife, Montserrat Figueras – whose voice seems to embody the spirits of the past even as its pure vocal elegance fades away – the serendipity of his concert programming always is about something. Even the impersonal setting of Disney Hall, with its austere electronic loudspeakers standing around, did not, this once, seem an intrusion. Something about Jordi Savall and his music making manages to conquer time. This recent program about Columbus-era music comes with a fat picture book: not inexpensive, but indispensable. The next project, glowingly reviewed in the latest Gramophone, is a book and a set of discs (on the group’s own Alia Vox label, handled in the U.S. by Harmonia Mundi) inspired by St. Francis Xavier and his excruciating journeys around Africa to India to bring about massive Christian conversions and the music that happened along the way.

nbsp;High C’s on the High Seas

It could be that Shakespeare’s Othello and his storied warriors were prowling other corners of the Mediterranean at about the same time as the Columbus gang; more important is that they showed up here last week more or less simultaneously with the Verdi version. Those of us with long memories cannot easily relinquish the L.A. Opera’s very first night, an Otello of 1986, with the curtain stuck on that most precipitous of all operatic openings. The new production was not thusly plagued; the curtain rose promptly, but on a curiously proportioned crowd scene, rocking back and forth on designer Johan Engels’ curved stage floor, which became an authentic visual plague as the opera wore on. (Example: the Cyprus Court Scene in Act 3, with the Governor’s throne unsettled in center stage and again seeming to rock back and forth.) Two massive, square tunnel openings, leading to nowhere in particular, flanked the stage. Some ill-defined lighting upstage in Act 3 may, or may not, have served as a vista of distant skyscrapers.

Ian Storey, fresh from Britain, was also fresh and invigorated in the role of Otello; it took very few lines of opera, however, just the curled, jet-black tones of his address to Roderigo not far into Act 1, to recognize who was to own this performance: the venom-tinged, insidious Iago of the unmatchable Mark Delavan, in his long-overdue local debut and in his effortless full embodiment of operatic evil at its unfurled fullness. Soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domas, the scheduled Desdemona, fell ill two days before opening curtain; the way these things work in the contemporary, well-oiled operatic machine, the Met was able to spring Russian soprano Elena Evseeva, a well-practiced Desdemona, just in time and then some. Barring no more than a glitch or two, Mme. Evseeva fulfilled her duty and perhaps a bit more.

To add to the weekend’s exhilaration, Falstaff, the other masterwork of Verdi’s ripest genius, was triumphantly and delightfully mounted by the newly reconstituted Opera UCLA, not at cavernous Royce Hall but sensibly at Schoenberg. Peter Kazaras was the stage director; Neal Stulberg led the exuberant orchestra; the Falstaff, Jeffrey Madison from the University of Minnesota, was singing the role for the first time in his life. O brave new world, and then some!

nbsp;Partial Recovery

It would be unfair to measure the success of James Conlon and the L.A. Opera’s “Recovered Voices” program on the measure of masterpieces restored from obscurity. The good work of the program should rest, I think, on a leveling of the field by filling in a repertory undeservedly lost through political elimination, whereupon these restored works would then gain or lose their place on the basis of quality. On this level, I would suggest that half of the double bill restored to circulation at the L.A. Opera this week was eminently deserving of the superb production (including Conlon’s musical leadership and the work of a superb cast) and half was not.

The deserving short opera was Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg (The Dwarf), which already has had some circulation in Europe but not in the Western U.S. Based on Oscar Wilde’s “Birthday of the Infanta,” a taut, ironic, actually rather vicious and therefore delightful short story, it has been given a gorgeous setting here, worthy of the Velasquez painting that inspired it, a perfect gem of a production by Darko Tresnjak on a stage set up by Ralph Funicello and Linda Cho.

Sharing the evening is Victor Ullmann’s The Broken Jug, another work – along with his Emperor From Atlantis – riding the deserved fame of its composer’s concentration-camp history, but in need by now of facing the reality that life in a concentration camp does not automatically bestow the halo of genius.

I have to marvel: Little more than a week after the Flying Dutchmen from the Concertgebouw held me spellbound with the Mahler Fifth, music toward which I have been known to express strong reservations, here comes the even-more-oft-despised Sixth, and once again I have succumbed. This time, Mr. Eschenbach was the triumphant warrior in the cause. He allowed no such sissy paraphernalia as a score in front of him on a podium. He attacked the music with flailing fists and flashing glare – if you’re my age, you had to be reminded of Dimitri Mitropoulos, similarly bald of pate – and drew from our Philharmonic sounds hard-edged and nicely defined. He came here preceded by stories of not getting along in Philadelphia, where he served that city’s orchestra as music director for a time. Tough.

The Sixth is not easy music; it stands in for Mahler at a time of personal tragedy. You have to be prepared, as with any member of species mastodoni, for the precipitous stop, the sudden wounded outcry. The range of emotion in the work is astonishing; this, especially in the last movement, is part of its weakness. The moods swing back and forth toward what you think may be a final definitive statement, but then we are tumbled back into the swirl. The thwacks with a large hammer – Fate exerting its blows against the Protagonist – give the work its fame, with percussionist Dreiman exiting and entering to manage some offstage effects as well as the biz with his oversize croquet mallet onstage. (Mahler’s original score called for three hammer blows, including one that fells the Protagonist to end the entire work. The later edition, which is now commonly used, calls for only two, presumably to allow the poor guy another chance at Life. Also – I might as well tell you, since nobody has sworn me to secrecy – several Philharmonic folk slipped word to me that they feel that the hammer was too small. Talk about your misguided economies!)

nbsp;Thinking Smaller but Big

Midway in the slow movement of Mozart’s B-flat Piano Concerto (Kochel-Katalog 595, the last of the 27 concertos that bear Mozart’s name), the music subsides to a near nothingness. The orchestra maintains a steady, throbbing harmony, nothing more than a backdrop for a one-finger melody for the pianist – a kind of operatic aria, except without words. Mozart’s mature piano concertos are full of these moments of enchantment – check out K. 466, 467, 488, and prepare to swoon. Each of these moments becomes like a wordless stand-in for one of his great operatic characters: Susanna or Cherubino probably most of all. What great and constant companions they all become, even through a pianist’s single finger!

Last Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, there ended a great and memorable undertaking, Jeffrey Kahane’s complete traversal of all 27 of Mozart’s works in this genre: early, delightful, clattering works with the keyboard and the small orchestra doing not much more than imitating one another in exchange of neat 18th-century tuneful patterns, moving through a miraculously short lifetime toward the late works, in which soloist and orchestra fall to profound discussions for which no words could suffice. Who could find, or need, the words for the one-finger interlude in K. 595? Or that giddy, syncopated episode that skips through the many tonalities in the finale? Or the marvelous comic-opera finale to K. 466, also on last Sunday’s program? Or, further back in our concert-going history, the deep melancholy in the slow movements of K. 482 and 488, and the miraculous way they resolve – sending shivers down our collective spines – in just the last few measures? Does anything in any of those Brobdingnagian Mahler symphonies match the brain-cleansing impact of those extraordinary works of musical conversation, none longer than half an hour, none requiring more than pairs of woodwinds and a couple of timpani? Fortunately, Mahler knew enough not to try.

This was the last of Kahane’s concerts in this series, conducting from the keyboard the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which he has brought to level of a richness, clarity and high spirits worthy to collaborate in a Mozart project. In three years of Mozart immersion, he, too, has become a deeper, wiser – and, vital for Mozart, wittier – exponent of all this matchless music. We are all much the better. The orchestra continues, in Glendale’s Alex Theatre and at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Under Kahane, it has become one of the area’s great treasures; his performances of Haydn symphonies are also noteworthy. Many of its programs are carried on KUSC; its fame, I gladly report, spreads even further than that.

I envy anyone his first look at Amsterdam. You step out of Central Station and there is the perfect urban landscape: old buildings in grand array, trolleys in front, everything numbered so that you know exactly where to go. Never mind that it’s raining or, at least, damp. That was my Amsterdam arrival, two years ago, and the passion remains. The Concertgebouw, that stuffy, elegant home-away-from-home of a concert hall, all plush and velvet, is a short trolley ride away. Lord, I love that city, and the orchestra that is at home in that building.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has been in Los Angeles before, in 1982 at Ambassador Auditorium of fond memory, where it sounded clean and bright in mostly classical programs under Bernard Haitink. At Disney, 1,000 seats larger, it played louder, darker music for Mariss Jansons – Brahms and Mahler – and everybody loved the rich, deep brass, so different from our own bright, sharply defined sound. (I love them both.) What I found particularly magical was the wind tone. Dutch clarinetists are known for a particularly forthright way of aiming their instruments high, so that a lot of sound comes out – almost like old jazzmen, one friend noted. Since the two programs included Brahms’ Second Symphony, Strauss’ Don Juan and the Mahler Fifth, there was plenty of chance to hear this particular wind quality. Whatever the case, it made for marvelously lively, in-your-face music making, especially valuable in the case of the Brahms, which does, after all, have its lugubrious passages. On the other hand, the performance of Debussy’s La Mer struck me as somewhat beached. Our guys do it better.

The Mahler got to me, most of all. You can, of course, link the Concertgebouw Orchestra all the way back to a tradition of Dutch Mahler performance that includes extreme tempo fluctuations – far more than are printed in the score – and considerable use of that weepy manner of string attack that is now smiled down on as indulgence. There may still be old-timers in the orchestra who played under Willem Mengelberg – who, after all, knew Mahler and conducted in Amsterdam until his banishment in 1945. Recordings exist, some good ones from the late ’20s and early ’30s with some knockout brass and wind playing, and some poor stuff elsewhere in the orchestra, that at least try to preserve the droopy sliding from note to note in the strings that so charmed your grandma. Janssons will have none of this affectation. He is a strong, straightforward leader with a musical beat to match. Like ours.

nbsp;
His Cup Runneth Over, Also Cracketh

The current Philharmonic program book lists an impressive credential for the conducting career of Itzhak Perlman, to set beside his distinguished stature as one of the greatest of living violinists. His engagement under both hats at Disney Hall last weekend raised some interesting questions, however, concerning the gulf between the phenomenon of extracting any old loud and audience-pleasing sounds from an orchestra in a concert hall by waving a stick at it, thereby eliciting cheers and a standing ovation, and the subtler phenomenon of producing beautiful and balanced sounds relevant to the music under examination. I have unleashed many words of praise toward Mr. Perlman’s artistry during our many years within each other’s earshot, but I have seldom if ever heard our Philharmonic as ill-used as it was under his baton last Saturday night – the second of the three-concert run, please note, and therefore not to be condoned as a sight-reading session.

Bach’s E-major Violin Concerto began the evening on a high level, with Perlman in his familiar role as soloist, the concerto with the solemn, rhapsodic slow movement and the tricky finale that works out mathematically exact. But then the violin was put away, the baton brought out. Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony ensued, with the orchestra oversize, the string tone coarse and outweighing the winds, allowing none of the airy, small-orchestra twinkle so important (and so lovely) in this music. The Brahms Fourth ended the evening, again with the crowd on its feet – cheering a great violinist’s illustrious career but surely not this one unfortunate excursion, with the strings harsh and the winds unbalanced with the texture of … well, of leftover Brahms. Perhaps even a night of Romantic French organ music, not my favorite noise, would sound good after this …
nbsp;

Brouhaha

And so it did, in the very same concert hall the next night. The first notes that Olivier Latry drew from the Disney Hall organ – an arresting fanfare introducing something or other by a certain Tournemire with just an acid touch in the harmony to identify it as French – nicely cleared all that Brahms from the air.

He began with an assortment of trivial pieces by the French Romantic organists I have deplored in this space more than once – Durufle, Alain, Langlais, that crowd; went on to one more-substantial piece of singular religious hysteria, Messiaen’s L’Ascension, and ended with an improvisation of his own that was by all odds the best thing on the program. Someone handed up a sheet of paper with an inscription: something, I gather, from a letter by Messiaen. After a moment’s pondering, Latry evolved a twisted theme from that inscription. It grew and grew, reached a climax in about 10 minutes’ time, and came to a shapely and elegant, feathery ending. Church organists revel in this kind of trickery; this was one of the best I’ve heard, certainly better than anything on the printed program. Latry is titular organist at Notre Dame; that’s his instrument you hear groaning in that glorious edifice at noon every day – a job, he told the Disney crowd, he performs for glory and no money. I never did understand the economy of that country.

This was the third time around in recent years for Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem: André Previn in 1991, Antonio Pappano in 2000, now Maazel. A bit much? I would trade any one of these for a performance with the groups properly spaced through the hall: the boys off in some loft to provide the celestial ceiling as two dead soldiers talk, in friendly terms, of their deaths. Nearly everybody at Disney last week was clumped together, with Lionel Bringuier’s chamber orchestra squeezed into the back of the principal orchestra and only the wonderful Nancy Gustafson given space (in the organ loft) to spread her angelic wings. Surely our gorgeous new concert hall must afford better use of space than that!

About the War Requiem: With all my fondness for Britten’s music – the exquisite strands of enchantment in his opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the haunting brutality of Peter Grimes, the small perfection in the chamber operas – there are works that just don’t make their way, and this is one. Yes, I am haunted – isn’t everybody? – by the one last line as his two soldiers meet in the Later On (“I am the enemy you killed, my friend …”) but not by the overpowering ironies that Britten attempted to winnow out of Wilfred Owen’s poetry. For once in all of Britten’s huge and admirable output, this is a work that keeps its distance. And since that is also pretty much my take on Maazel’s conducting, this time and on many previous encounters, it was not exactly my favorite week at the Philharmonic.

The Church at the End of Time
As Paul on the road to Damascus, so am I on the high road of reconciliation to the music of Olivier Messiaen, and you’re just gonna hear about it for one more week. Amazement abounded in Santa Monica’s abundant rain last Saturday in the form, need I tell you, of the Jacaranda concerts’ latest chapter in its multiyear Messiaen bash. First Pres was jammed; everybody was there except Mark Swed, who was in Oregon, where Peter Serkin’s Tashi, the first group ever to play the Quartet for the End of Time popularly in the real world, were having at it in an anniversary event. They couldn’t have played any better, with any more profound dedication, than Jacaranda’s folks.

Patrick Scott’s program notes for the quartet – detailing the prison-camp life out of which the music took shape, the early performance history, and the inner lights that cast their glow upon every aspect of the music itself and from the emboldened soul of its creator – constitute an enriching document. In themselves they demonstrate how this remarkable series stands apart from most other concert ventures: simply by maintaining this close identity between the music on each program and the genuine dedication and love of the people involved in it.

There is no better way, of course, to present the music of this extraordinary work, this series of audible vignettes in which Messiaen lays before us his deep personal vision – “immaterial, spiritual, Catholic” – at the heart of the Apocalypse. Angels and birds intertwine in announcing the “End of Time” and the “Eternity of Jesus”; they further unite in praise to the “Eternity of Jesus, to “His Immortality.” These moments of praise are among the most poignant, the most painful, in their meaningful beauty, of all sections of the quartet’s eight movements. A solo for cello and piano (Timothy Loo and Gloria Cheng) transcended all in sheer radiance this time around.

Jacaranda’s program, the usual gatherum, began with organist Mark Hilt’s playing of Bach’s ever-popular D-minor Toccata and Fugue and went on to three movements only from Berg’s Lyric Suite followed by all of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite for piano duet. The splendid Denali Quartet, Jacaranda’s resident ensemble, nicely dispatched the Berg movements, with Elissa Johnston to sing the Baudelaire verses that may or may not belong to the sixth movement; Gloria Cheng and Mark Alan Hilt played Ravel’s juvenilia like the grown-ups they are.

Or to Put It in Another Way
My comment in this space last week – about cuts in Wagner operas – was inspired by common expectations that performances of these music dramas are normally curtailed, at least in American opera houses. Just before the recent Tristan und Isolde at the Music Center, I ran into David Hockney, the designer of the current splendid production, who told me with some wonderment that all cuts in the current production had now been restored. Whether such restorative service proves an out-and-out enhancement to such passages as, say, the first 17 minutes of the Act 2 duet, which consist of Tristan and Isolde tossing metaphors back and forth on the true meaning of love, before they even get to sit down together, I leave to you.

I don’t know whether Esa-Pekka Salonen had planned the work as a pendant to the Philharmonic’s “Concrete Frequency” observation earlier this month; it was not so identified, and it was announced as a late addition – with the awesome virtuosity of the piano soloist, Marino Formenti, who had learned the score, with its cascading kazillions of notes, in less than three weeks. It certainly worked in that context, however. Salonen has recorded quite a lot of Messiaen’s music, including this work, but in Los Angeles he has kept that involvement somewhat under wraps. Perhaps (heh, heh) he was waiting for me to catch up, because that is what seems to have happened. I have struggled against the proclamations of eternal glorification in Messiaen’s grandiose scores for years. I heard the Canyons premiere (in New York’s Tully Hall, of course) and wrote a clunky review, in another paper, about the pianist’s (Yvonne Loriod, the composer’s wife) bright-orange gown being a nice match for a Utah sunset, and not much more. Tuesday night I began to hear what Messiaen is really all about, what he is trying to say and by what means he is saying it in this phenomenally multicolored, hugely expressive work.

The mix is superbly achieved, by musical means in vast, exuberant quantities but poured out in controlled lines, about great archways shaped by heavenly forces and vast numbers of birds up close, so that they actually do make those brassy noises. He is our Handel, and his music shouts out the Hallelujahs for our times. We cannot sing along as we can with the other Handel, because Messiaen sings outside the lines, but that’s okay; interwoven with the flamboyance, there is an urge to believe, and that is the quality in Messiaen that finally reached me this past week. Those guys in Santa Monica with their “Jacaranda” concerts – there’s one this weekend – have always struck me as a little unhinged when they talk about planning year after year of odd and oddly titled works by this overly motivated Frenchman; after Canyons, I wanted to hug them both. Oh, and by the way, is anyone driving up to Bryce Canyon anytime soon?

The Same LanguageMessiaen nourished his musical language on Wagner; throughout his teaching career, his class schedules listed lectures on Tristan und Isolde, and he would have been happy here this past weekend – with the irresistible surge created by the local opera under James Conlon’s leadership and with the color scheme evoked by the sets devised by David Hockney, however faded in the 20 years since they were new. These are not necessarily evocative of your or my vision of a Wagnerian world, nor do they connect in any way with anyone else’s notion – not even Olivier Messiaen’s – of a particularly Wagnerian ecstasy. They are the world of a great and individual master of color, given a uniquely evocative musical drama to imagine into light and shape on a huge stage, with music by a composer he adores and aches to share with us. This matters more – somewhat more, anyhow – than questions of ordinary singers, banal staging, and an orchestra denied the weeks of rehearsal time that Wagner demanded and deserves. (It also matters more, although this is an argument for another day, than the ludicrous notion, practiced elsewhere in town, of breaking up and marketing this most continuous of all operas into three separate packages with someone else’s visualizations – including a nudie show.)

John Treleaven is the Tristan, I heard him in November in Munich; he’s on a DVD from Barcelona, and I’d swear I’ve heard him somewhere else: maybe Seattle, maybe here. (Ah, yes! The first “Tristan Project,” 2004!) In any case, you’d think that such a ubiquitous Tristan, born in Isolde’s Cornwall, would have something to offer, but no. I hear a dry, characterless tenor that hits most of the notes okay, but nothing more. No more of the ardent, defiant lover of acts 1 and 2; none of the drained, helpless shell of a hero at the end, whose penultimate “Ahhh, Isolde…” should drain every one of us. Linda Watson has a pretty voice, but she too discerns no heights and therefore rises to none. Her “Liebestod,” sung in a circle of green light, with the dead Tristan rising to hold her hand at the end, is just the latest in my lifetime of witnessing cute ways of solving a staging-biz problem better left alone. Thor Steingraber’s direction is mostly inoffensive, and I suppose it’s late in the game to note that the lovers sing of “hand in hand” while cavorting around half a stage apart.

The best of Tristan- and, indeed, of all Wagner – is, of course, the orchestra and its leadership, and in this regard the news continues great. Conlon is all over the place, to our great benefit. His orchestra continues slightly undersize and, by the standards of Wagner’s own demands, under-rehearsed, but he has gotten it to play at top capacity, and it sounded great on Saturday. Before all that, he was up in a public space, chatting up Tristan and Wagner in general until about 10 minutes before downbeat; he has an important article in the program, and more writing on his Web site. At the end he drew the biggest cheers, which was only right.

Anyway, it was time to hear Earl’s deep, dark, wonderfully intelligent songs; now it’s time for our orchestra to look at his Violin Concerto. It bears the curse of being written for a public virtuoso, Itzhak Perlman, but I remember it as being better than that. Narucki, whom I’ve been admiring for years and never get to write about, has blossomed into a strong-voiced, intelligent singer. Keep her around. This, I am delighted to keep on saying, was a beautifully planned and presented Monday Evening Concert, worthy of the tradition, and well attended, as it deserved. Let it also be noted that except for the visiting star singer, the performing forces were all local. Hurrah for us!!

Opera IrresistibleI had been holding off on the new entertainment in town, the live-opera telecasts from the Metropolitan Opera in HD-Television in movie theaters. I had my reasons: 10 a.m. is no proper time for opera-going; I have my DVDs at home and a decent flat screen, blah blah. Saturday morning, I let myself be taken by a friend to Verdi’s Macbeth at a theater nearby, and wow! I’ll admit we had extra-good seats; Lady Macbeth (Maria Guleghina) went bonkers practically in my lap. But there is the technology for a damned exciting and serious musical experience, and what I saw this first time was an exciting production of an opera I had almost forgotten about, on an amazingly clear screen.

What I missed, especially in this work, was someone on the screen handing out information about, say, Verdi’s two versions of Macbeth and how this one was drawn from some of each. Some of the chat during pauses and at the intermission was cued to an operaphile’s lowest intelligence. (By the same token, I would need to know about next week’s Tristan und Isolde here at the Music Center, in which there will inevitably be cuts, as always in Wagner. Where? By how much?) As opera becomes the latest show at your neighborhood 12-plex, where it looks and sounds terrific, something of that noble caring, I fear, will be lost. Am I the only one to care?

Brave New TrashThe “Concrete Frequency” concerts, at least the “classical” programs – and how that term has endured a beating this past week! – ended with a bang with two brain-rattling programs, each repeated, over four days, admirably stocked with works that defy easy description, to you or even to myself. Let me try.

Luciano Berio’s Sequenza for solo trumpet (Gabriele Cassone) welled up out of darkness to begin the first of these concerts – a reminder, I suppose, of the days when it was safe to make solo music on city streets. That reminder was reinforced by a segue into the marvels of Charles Ives’ Central Park in the Dark, a full panorama of what that magical space afforded, circa 1906. (A low bow here also to preconcert lecturer Robert Fink, whose presentation of this piece was especially vivid.) There were those who found reason to exult over Morton Feldman’s exasperating, little Turfan Fragments; I was not of their number.

The three dots at both ends of Pierre Boulez’s …explosante-fixe…, which began the next program, already signify that the work, like so many of his, is or was a cumulative work, compiled from an initial impulse dating back to 1971, the time of Igor Stravinsky’s death, with other musical motives later added, inspired by the deaths of others and so on. This has been Boulez’s way, and along that way he has produced music of exceptional beauty (if, at times, staggering complexity). That, it seems to me, is what you really need to know about a work like this. Three solo flutists front the orchestra and combine their playing into an insistent musical motto. They are backed by an ensemble of mostly winds and brass, just a couple of strings, and Emmanuelle Ophele’s MIDI flute, in a 37-minute dense and fascinating conversation. At the end, the texture thins out; we begin to hear the sounds of a small wind ensemble such as Mozart might recognize. Then the winds hold a single note, an E flat. That, in European terminology, is the note “Es,” or the letter “S” for “Stravinsky,” and we come out aware that we have been guided, masterfully and beautifully, by the Philharmonic under David Robertson, conductor visiting and valuable, toward that goal.

Came intermission; a screen dropped down, and many more players joined the orchestra. The last of all the works in this minifestival examining the relation of music and city – a gloriously cynical choice, so don’t think about it – was the collaboration of filmmaker Bill Morrison and composer Michael Gordon in Dystopia, a musical film about urban trash, brand-new and commissioned by the Philharmonic. In Decasia, their previous work (available on DVD), these guys created a lyrical, spooky rhapsody out of visual fragments of ancient, decayed film. Their source this time, for Dystopia, is real action stuff, of trash under treatment in various Los Angeles yareds: on moving belts as workers salvage usable items, in great truckloads of construction debris being dumped into oblivion. Again their visual material has been cut to a great tingler of a score that, somehow, comes across as the finest musical recapturing of a trash truck in action that ever was. Ever.

Edgard Varèse arrived in New York in 1915, age 32. His journey from his native Burgundy had taken in most of Europe’s cultural capitals, where his scores had been played, admired, and many lost in a couple of fires. He had attended the notorious premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, as would become obvious in some of his own music, notably Amériques, his first major work composed in what would become his home territory for the rest of his life. That work begins with a shameless rip-off – the first of many – of the Stravinsky shocker that New Yorkers had not yet heard in its pristine form. It soon becomes overlaid with a hammering, perhaps of workmen building a New York skyscraper: perfect music to cap the inaugural concert in the Philharmonic’s “Concrete Frequency” series last weekend, the latest admirable attempt by the orchestra’s programming management to draw a message from the concert-going experience, that these splendid concerts fit together to form a meaningful series.

The matter at hand is the city, and its impact on the lives and the culture of people who live in cities. And so we find Monsieur Varèse transported to his adopted land, at the beginning of an era in American history when great buildings rose in the cities, and American audiences also began to become aware of their own cultural importance, not just a veneer imported from European sources. Amériques – huge and scary, often reckoned the loudest symphonic score ever written, took a while to find its champion, but did so in 1926 in the person of Leopold Stokowski, whose performance awakened a chorus of New York critics with terms such as “boiler factory” and “a fire in a cat dormitory.” Its scoring was well-respected in David Robertson’s eloquent – yes, eloquent – Philharmonic performance in the matter of doubled brass, sirens of various tonalities and the exotic noisemaker known as the lion’s roar. There are passages when those sirens get going – softly, menacingly – when your skin really gets to crawl. And there are others where you’re sure the young composer had spent his formative years bathing in The Rite – specifically, that passage as the Old Sage makes his entry near the end of Part 1, where you always wished the music would never stop and this time it doesn’t.

Robertson, Santa Monica-born, whose current conductorship at the St. Louis Symphony has enlivened that city in the matter of energetic, new-music programming beyond anyone’s expectations, conducts two more programs in this beautifully planned series, not easily defined but all having to do with people and cities (with nothing on the programs as easily defined as An American in Paris). A splendid, witty host at both microphone and baton, he had a lot to say about the music on hand, and how it served the occasionally tricky program theme.

That included the opening work, The City, Pare Lorentz’s half-hour film for the 1939 World’s Fair, touting the small square house up the next block of square suburbia, with equally small square folks and their neighbors – the Americana dream of the time, now a relic with Aaron Copland’s music a sometimes-sardonic comment. A print of the film was shown in splendid, surviving black and white; the music, in similar coloration, was played live and in sync: all of it just swell. Would not Copland’s Quiet City, even without (but better with) its Jerome Robbins choreography, have served a better programmatic and musical purpose?

And then there was Frank Zappa, whose music earns space on distinguished programs through his avowed nonconnection with Varèse, consisting of one phone call to his wife, set forth in ecstatic Jabberwocky in a famous article – practically a credo – in a 1971 Stereo Review easily downloadable. “I never got to meet Mr. Varèse,” he proclaimed, on the strength of which I have seen him barge into Varèse concerts, memorials and symposiums and claim podium space, mouthing vitriol and potty-talk, offering music to match. (I never got to meet Mr. Beethoven; surely there must be some career mileage for me too.)

Zappa’s spot on the Philharmonic’s cityscape was Dupree’s Paradise: the name from a bar in South L.A., the music – seven minutes’ worth – from not much of anywhere. A jittery rhythmic motive wound its way through other short fragments for a few inconclusive moments and was soon gone. The program listed an impressive gathering of winds, brass and percussion, not many of which actually showed.

Far more remarkable, if less noted in audience response, was George Crumb’s 17-minute soundscape A Haunted Landscape, music by a composer once greatly admired who keeps dropping out of sight these days. Bartók is somewhat the influence, those nocturnal pieces where single, mysterious instrumental intrusions ruffle a dark, sustained sound surface. Crumb has written wonderful music in this genre, and this work of 1984, an enthralling lingering at the edge of silence, is music worth restoring to our active presence. So is its composer.

Mozart as Torture

Never in this lifetime did I expect to commit those words to paper in that order, but there they are. On New Year’s Day at 12:01 a.m., I joined what must have been several thousands, phoning in to begin their Medicare prescription plan for the new year and get their new pills for zero copay. Rather than being connected to a clerk in Wichita or Bangladesh, I found myself in the arms of . . . Mozart: specifically, a hacked-up, tattered version of the “Kleine Nachtmusik” Serenade, which then segued to a similarly fragmented, bleeding chunk of the first movement of the “Hunt” Quartet (K. 458), the sequence then repeated, and repeated, on into the wee hours. Since any pill-popping Mozartian knows both these works by heart, the agony of hearing them thus butchered ad nauseam – interrupted only by assurances that “our associates are serving other customers in turn” – was bloodletting enough. During the 60 or so minutes that I waited on the line before just giving up, I endured the torture through some 50 repeats of these segues. Can anyone on this planet explain what purpose was better served by filling my tortured ear with these sewn-together scraps of Mozart than by playing the marvelous music whole? Two days later, by the way, I mustered the courage to try the call again, and it went straight through.

December wasn’t much; you get so many sing-alongs. One night, a young man of scholarly mien, Jonathan Biss, tried out his fingers, but not apparently his heart, on the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto at Disney. Afterward, he sat in front of me, and many people, rather rudely it seemed to me, crawled all over both of us, to holler out words like “magnificent” and hand out discs for Mr. Biss to sign. What did people really experience that night, beyond a lot of fingers moving quickly over a keyboard? Will they crawl over the next pianist, more discs in hand, when the next set of fingers go clickety-clack? And, meanwhile, why doesn’t someone take Mr. Biss, who is good-looking and rather young, out of circulation for a while, to allow him some time to think about that magical moment when Beethoven yanks us from G major to B, and the others that ensue?

Anyway, it’s January, not December, that I wanted to talk about. The Philharmonic has a fascinating adventure called “Concrete Frequency,” which, like most clusters of demanding musical experiences that interlink in some inscrutable way meaningful only to the program instigators, will also demand some kind of symposium to explain its meaning to the outside world. Such a symposium will be made accessible, admission free, on January 5, and since Frank Gehry is one of the explainers, you can at least count on charm, if not on enlightenment.

The point, as I understand it so far (subject to change), will be to explore the links between the structures of cities, the structures in architecture and the structures in music. These, we all know, are fashioned out of many materials: steel, concrete and psychological. Disney Hall and its surrounding structures have shaped the urban psychology of this city no less profoundly than the Forum shaped Rome. It would be late for “Concrete Frequency” to rub our awareness in this; it will be fascinating to trace the way the consciousness of buildings has guided the pens of composers like Aaron Copland, Edgard Varèse, and Charles Ives, in whose Central Park piece a consciousness of the space between buildings has also worked its magic.

All this is crowded onto the January page of my wall calendar, barely leaving room for the rest of an uncommonly ambitious start for our musical life. Along with the Philharmonic’s five or six actual concerts in that series, there’s a related festival of classic films concerned with lives being shaped by big-city existence (as if there are any that aren’t!) – harrowing experiences like Taxi Driver, when you do actually feel the walls closing in. They’re at the ArcLight.

Then there’s the next Monday Evening Concert on the 7th, with the excellent, fearless singer Susan Narucki and our own local group XTET. Hail, too, the return, on January 19, of one of L.A. Opera’s most stunning productions, the David Hockney setting of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, created when Hockney had become intoxicated with the Chandler Pavilion’s new Lumilite lighting and worked out a blend of illumination and painted surface to create a visual hypnosis that nobody working at the house has achieved since that original 1987 production. John Treleaven and Linda Watson are the lovers; I heard them last month in Munich’s goofy production, and . . . hmm. But James Conlon conducts, and that’s hurrah.

Hurrah, too, for Olivier Messiaen, an easy step from Tristan‘s flaming passions to the sunset glow of his Utah mountainscape, as From the Canyons to the Stars fills the January 15 “Green Umbrella” and the indefinable majesty of Quartet for the End of Time continues the “Jacaranda” concerts’ homage at the month’s end.

And Ending Here

The inevitability, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final season, ’08-’09, as the Philharmonic’s music director – then continuing as friendly neighbor – has been planned as a gathering, in part, of the great musicians who have been close to him in his years here and before. That would include Kaija Saariaho, whose La Passion de Simone will surely, after several postponements, finally appear, with Dawn Upshaw as soloist. Guesswork would include on that list other musicians – composer Magnus Lindberg, cellist Anssi Karttunen, perhaps that marvelous chamber ensemble Toimii, which played a few years back at Ojai. We already know that Yefim Bronfman comes, in May, to play Salonen’s new Piano Concerto; the lucky ones among us have already gotten to hear its power, breadth and magnificence via one kind of download or another. And as for the final, ultimate, last of all (until the next time, at least): The heavy money so far seems to favor the Mahler Eighth . . . known, for good reason, as the “Symphony of a Thousand.”

One matter of celebration doesn’t exactly concern Salonen’s departure, but it surely involves some kind of departure in the ranks of high culture. Specifically, it involves The Soloist, a film by Joe Wright based on articles by Steve Lopez that ran in the L.A. Times in 2005, which if you didn’t read you should have. They told of Nathaniel Ayers, homeless, schizophrenic onetime expert player of many string instruments, whom Lopez befriended and eventually enabled to attend a Disney Hall rehearsal (of the Beethoven “Eroica,” no less!), meet Esa-Pekka Salonen, get his autograph and play his own cello in the hall. Jamie Foxx plays Nathaniel in the movie; Esa-Pekka plays himself.

Does this all sound, mayhap, as if the next continental shift will be from the sacred realm of the Music Center at First and Grand to the profane expanse of Hollywood and Vine? Consider this: The two opening offerings next September for the Los Angeles Opera season are as follows: Puccini’s Il Trittico, with the separate parts of the “triptych” staged by Hollywood directors William Friedkin and Woody Allen; and The Fly, U.S. premiere of the opera, music by film composer Howard Shore, libretto by David Henry Huang, directed by Hollywood’s David Cronenberg, conducted by Plácido Domingo.

Still to be decided: which major downtown culture palace gets the popcorn concession.

Long faces greeted the last new year. Record stores went broke; so did the manufacturers; so did symphony orchestras; so (sob!) did music critics. Long faces were soon replaced around here, however, with one that was round, cherubic and positively agleam, when Gustavo Dudamel came to town. He ascended the Disney Hall podium on a January night and soon found the Philharmonic at his feet – and the rest of the town as well. Within weeks, the orchestra’s predator-in-chief, Deborah Borda, had snatched the legendarily talented 26-year-old Dudamel from the contract-dangling fingers of half a dozen other greedy American orchestras, and made him our own. The triumph of her move was set aglow later in the year, when Dudamel returned with his own hugely talented Venezuelan youth orchestra, and confirmed what he had already made abundantly clear: He’s good, and he’s ours. Starting in the fall of 2009, that is.

That all opened the good-news floodgates for the rest of 2007, or so it seems. Assembling memories of the year – in no particular order except as they come to me – I seem to find more happy talk than sad. You may notice that my list sometimes digresses from that of my colleague, Mr. Swed of Brand X. At least we remain friends; it sure wasn’t that way with his predecessor.

Mark includes the Los Angeles Opera’s Mahagonny on his “worst of” list. I place the DVD version, just out on Euro-Arts, near the top of my “best of” list. It’s the same performance, but the video producers have kept their cameras focused on the cast, perhaps a little too much on conductor James Conlon, but mostly away from the excessive Las Vegas-style neon lighting that filled, and let’s say cluttered, the stage. You’re brought much closer to the marvelous Audra McDonald and the almost-as-good Patty LuPone; I found the whole gang of Mahagonny thugs, even the lesser characters, more clearly outlined on the nearly empty stage – and so, indeed, the whole marvelous work – than in the two times I saw it live at the Music Center.

On other stages, there was the sweet tenderness of A Flowering Tree, brought from the Vienna original to a slight reduction in San Francisco, with Peter Sellars’ working-around of an Asia-scented legend of lovers separated and rejoined, and music by John Adams. The very simplicity of dancing out the story was what drew tears; it was also wonderful how Adams, working with so many aspects of legend, could so easily locate their proper expressive levels. Something the same can be said, at a higher pitch, for the glorious fantasy that Korean composer Unsuk Chin has devised for her operatic Alice in Wonderland, which I journeyed twice to Munich to revel in. There, the staging was by Germany’s grandly fantastic stage wizard Achim Freyer, who is slated to deliver his version of the Ring to our own Wagner-deprived opera company someday soon.

Hearts of Darkness

Here at home, there was Leos Janácek’s stinging, painful domestic drama Jenufa, with Finland’s Karita Mattila making her long-overdue local debut, by far the most convincing evidence of the greatness potential within the L.A. Opera . . . a potential occasionally challenged by such gloomy matters as the ensuing Don Giovanni, with its sporadically splendid singing enclosed in a gloomy black box with coffins and similar gloomy paraphernalia lying all around.

Gloom and glory intermixed to greater effect in the Philharmonic’s two so-called festivals woven into the calendar: a Brahms series of symphonies and chamber music, with the eloquent Christoph von Dohnányi underlining the ponderous, old-world eloquence in all four symphonies and Esa-Pekka Salonen rustling the dead leaves to find the enduring strains of life in his Sibelius heritage – and finding it, paradoxically, in the least-approachable, darkest pages of the Fourth Symphony. I found new reasons to love this thorny, recalcitrant work, and even more reasons to forgive crusty old Uncle Brahms after rediscovering the enchantment in his Clarinet Quintet, which held me utterly in its spell on the Chamber Music night.

As easily as the collectible CD seemed to vanish from the marketplace, the few remaining new issues seem to wax all the more desirable. There’s Harmonia Mundi, France-based but giving off smiles and good hope from its local Pasadena HQ, continuing its superb and irreplaceable series of Mozart operas conducted by René Jacobs with a Don Giovanni throbbing with its intrinsic vitality. At another outpost, there’s the brave enterprise known as Innova, dedicated to new music, based among the frosts of Minnesota, and coming up with that performance of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians I wrote about recently, played with loving enthusiasm by a student group somewhere in Michigan and getting everything right. And then there’s a BBC disc to break everyone’s heart, the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, in a recital recorded in London’s Wigmore Hall in 1998, in the full flush of the rhapsodic artistry that death would end less than 10 years after. The disc includes songs by Peter Lieberson, Handel and Mahler; Roger Vignoles is the excellent pianist. In one Mahler song, there is the line “Ich bin gestorben . . .” Another mezzo dead before her time, Kathleen Ferrier, recorded that song in her prime with what I hear as the same foreknowledge. I keep their discs together on a shelf.

Those are my list, those and the extraordinary insights into music’s place in the world in Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise. There are a couple more clinkers from 2007, if anyone cares. I haven’t yet recovered from Richard Strauss’ Domestic Symphony at the Philharmonic last week, or the gall of Zubin Mehta, trying to pass it off as music. I was also no more enamored by the Philharmonic’s “Tristan Project” than I was the first time around, for reasons including Bill Viola’s videos, Peter Sellars’ staging and the gall of peddling it as three tickets. The L.A. Opera is marketing it as a single ticket next month, with David Hockney’s sets. I heard both principals in Munich last month and they were okay. Just okay.

One more thing. I downloaded Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new Piano Concerto from the New York Philharmonic broadcast, so that it counts as a best-of-2007 event. It’s also scheduled here for May 29, so it also counts as a best-of-2008 event. Is it worth two listings? Boy-o-boy, is it ever!

In Munich one week last month, Kent Nagano conducted three operas on that many nights. Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland in Achim Freyer’s staging was as delightful the second time around as when I’d seen it last summer. Tristan und Isolde began with Isolde on a modern yacht and ended with the lovers, alive and holding hands, witnessing their own deaths. In Eugen Onegin, the antagonists Onegin and Lenski arose for their duel from the same bed, and the Polonaise was danced by cowboys stripped nearly down to the altogether. Never have I heard a house erupt so vociferously in unanimous boos

Nagano looms large in Munich, and intercontinentally as well. His realm embraces much of the city’s orchestral life, as well as the superlative ensemble that fills the pit at the State Opera every night. He spoke with affection and amusement about a flourishing gathering called “Attacca,” whose members play regularly and seriously, but cling proudly to their amateur status, and play strictly for the experience of sharpening their perceptions so as to get more out of concertgoing. Nagano spoke with particular paternal pride of the Jünge Deutsche Philharmonie, the youth-orchestra model toward which all this current talk here at home – inspired in part by the recent visit of Gustavo Dudamel’s Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra – is hopefully directed.

One immediate project has been to form an “Akademie” made up of a mix of Philharmonie members and young players from Nagano’s Berkeley Symphony, which he has led since 1978 and has always used as a kind of laboratory. A particular goal for the Akademie is to break through all the fuss about the necessity of using authentic “period” instruments in performing old music and seek ways of honoring the expressive values in Bach and his contemporaries with contemporary performance techniques on brand-new violins and flutes. Their first concert, in fact, took place this week in Berkeley, an exploration of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos; the next “Akademie” in Berkeley is set for January 31.

More good news: Unsuk Chin’s Violin Concerto, which Nagano, his Berkeley Symphony and violinist Viviane Hagner introduced in the Bay Area a couple of years ago to great acclaim (including mine), will soon be recorded by ECM – same conductor and soloist – along with a new orchestral work by Chin that Nagano has commissioned.

The “Emperor” Unclad

During my visit to Munich, the new Jewish Culture Center was the scene of performances of The Emperor of Atlantis, the brief satirical opera composed by Viktor Ullmann in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, smuggled out by a friend after the composer’s death, now in worldwide circulation as a precious relic. The performance, co-sponsored by the Bavarian State Opera, was a further landmark in the warming of relations between the city’s Jewish community and the state-run culture machine, publicized, of course, up the bazooty. As was usually the case, the air at the performance – and later, the press – resounded with words like “masterpiece.” Many wept, as if the Wailing Wall had hove into view. One exception was the dour-faced critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Egbert Tholl, who proclaimed, “Falsche Scheu,” in very large type: “False piety,” and I think it was about time these words appeared.

Ullmann was a respected composer, born in what is now the Czech Republic. At Ojai a couple of years ago, Marino Formenti played one of his big, impressive piano sonatas. His short opera The Broken Jug is scheduled for four performances by the L.A. Opera in February as part of music director James Conlon’s passion to restore Nazi-banned repertory. That work is a polished comedy by an accomplished young composer full of between-wars musical influences; its fate was that of any work by a Jewish composer after 1938. Ullmann was sent to Theresienstadt in 1942 and continued to compose, subject to the complications of his new restricted life.

The chamber and piano works from Ullmann’s camp days continue to show the eclectic eloquence of his prewar music, but Atlantis is a poor work, a pastiche of secondhand Hindemith and Weill. Its circulation since its Amsterdam premiere in 1975, the reactions it naturally stirs up around the facts of its existence, and the newsworthiness of its performances have indeed created this aura of false piety, through which the true qualities of Viktor Ullmann are ever more dimly visible. I cannot escape the impression of a work written in haste, perhaps even in desperation, drawing on familiar satirical clichés in a struggle to get the work out to the world as the clock ticks away. A creditable performance in Munich, under Bavarian State Opera auspices, on premises a stone’s throw from Mr. Hitler’s own favorite Gärtnerplatz-Theater, and with a college-age orchestra led by a smart director named Daniel Grossmann, still did not advance its cause.

On Other Shores

The cover photo for the San Francisco Opera’s The Rake’s Progress – the late James Dean in his convertible, nuzzling his horse (or hoss) out on the desert – led me to expect the worst, but that scene had apparently been dropped before I got to town. Aside from a delightfully tricky swimming pool devised by Cirque du Soleil director Robert Lepage, into which people seemed able to dive and then disappear, little went on that might have flapped the easily flappable Igor Stravinsky.

It was a lovely, straight performance under San Francisco’s soon-to-depart music director Donald Runnicles, sweetly sung by William Burden and Laura Aikin as the lovebirds, darkly done by James Morris as Nick Shadow, and carried to a hilarious turn by Denyce Graves as the bearded Baba the Turk. Carl Fillion’s stage set could not erase memories of David Hockney’s magical sets and costumes the last time around in San Francisco; nothing could. At least there was no horse.

Back home, I rack my brain and my far-flung gray cells to locate a memory of music uglier in overall sound, more exasperating in its inability to resolve its stated premise or reach its proposed point, more singularly inept in the mere housekeeping of its orchestral sounds such that inner orchestral voices become audible one from another, than the Domestic Symphony of Richard Strauss that befouled the air of Disney Hall last Thursday. Some of the fault may be laid to Zubin Mehta, who as usual approached the podium as though awakened from a bad dream, but I defy anyone, from Salonen on down, to turn that ghastly farrago into music. Following the Dvorák Cello Concerto, wondrously played by Johannes Moser, did not, of course, help.

With a brassy blast onstage and an ethereal sigh from violas as if from another planet, the Monday Evening Concerts proclaimed their return in full force at Zipper Hall last week. Last year’s concerts had been a tentative set of “what if?” programs under guest curators, designed to see whether this basic and essential venture in musical exploration could survive the shock of being rudely cut loose by its grossly misguided LACMA management. Now we know; last week’s was one of the great programs in Monday Evening Concerts annals: important music wisely chosen by a management firmly in place, performed by a nicely selected ensemble mix of local and international players. Of the three remaining programs in this season’s docket – the next on January 7 – the same may be said.

This one began with music by Romania’s Horatiu Radulescu, played by the Alsatian violist Vincent Royer, who in two extended works – one in partnership with our own Kazi Pitelka – took his instrument into mysterious, spectral realms while crowning those almost-silent areas with dark-toned, near-brutal melodic patches. “Spectral” is, in fact, the current term for this intensely inward music; it has many practitioners, including the late Gérard Grisey, whose works the Philharmonic has played. In his view of musical sound as a spiritual substance, Radulescu can also be seen as something of a disciple of the late Karlheinz Stockhausen – who died last week – although the task of cataloging the vastness of that German visionary’s influence on his several contemporary generations is likely to occupy decades.

So, of course, does the music of Igor Stravinsky, whose In Memoriam Dylan Thomas provided a brief oasis of almost-tonality. The Monday Evenings gave the work its premiere in 1954; I produced its radio premiere, simultaneously, at Berkeley’s KPFA. (Funny: There hasn’t been a day since, when I can’t hear old Edgar Jones singing on demand its five-note theme, yet I think of it as a melodically austere piece.)

Then came the music of Iannis Xenakis, another Romanian: first, the breathtaking solo percussion piece Rebonds, played by the astonishing Steven Schick; then Eonta, “chamber music” (it says here) for piano and five brass instruments. Two trumpets and three trombones have at the piano for some 20 exhilarating minutes. They play into the strings, aim their instruments upward to reverberate, against the ceiling and against the back wall, out into the crowd; they generally misbehave. The pianist – the phenomenal Eric Huebner, fearless, red-haired local-boy-making-good in the realms of new music – enters the fray with something like 20 fingers at the ready. The piece is an explosion of pure, nonstop energy. Xenakis wrote it for the Japanese virtuoso Yuji Takahashi. His sister Aki has also taken it over. That’s okay; there are notes enough for two.

With a Name Like Stucky . . .

The next night’s Green Umbrella concert was a long-overdue tribute to Steven Stucky, on the occasion of 20 years of his stewardship of the Philharmonic’s new-music programming (under several titles). I don’t know of another orchestra so handsomely endowed with the advisory services of a major musical figure so broad-minded in the quality of his musical outlook, so generous in the breadth of his involvement in the contemporary arts.

Stucky’s contributions to Tuesday’s program ran more or less backward: a piano quartet and the Dialoghi from the last couple of years at the start, the Boston Fancies, which go back to 1985, at the end. (Did I hear them then? And did I mishear them then as work by a glib conservative whom I could never befriend musically? How we have grown!) What I heard last week was the work of a skilled craftsman, master of musical expression through getting the right notes in the right places and – in the matter of the Boston Fancies in particular – leaving notes out when they weren’t required. These are spare, utterly charming pieces, for reasons I didn’t realize in 1985. The recent Piano Quartet is a big, eloquent piece. Its composer is a contemporary master, whose presence does us proud.

There was other music on the program, by Stucky associates: James Matheson’s Songs of Desire, Love and Loss, which, I deeply regret to say, I’ve completely forgotten after one hearing, and Susan Botti’s setting of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” which, I confess with equal regret, I remember all too well. That’s because her manner of song – composition and performance – closely resembles the upward-and-downward vocal pathways of Meredith Monk, which is a name that always makes me leave the room.

The Specters (cont.)

At Jacaranda on Sunday, there was more to be heard from spectral realms as this worthy concert series finally reached its goal for its multiyear plan, its celebration of the music of Olivier Messiaen. The landing was soft: a gathering of pieces from Messiaen’s tender years, packed with pretty ideas but hardly the substance of the visionary elder master and his explorations into the insubstantial – yes, spectral – world he would later explore so eloquently. Still, there was a lovely, warm-hearted Vocalise for cello and piano, and a couple of bird-in-landscape piano pieces from Messiaen’s 21st year that gave full notice of the scene painter of later years.

Some splendid programming of works from earlier pens – Liszt, Debussy, Ravel – gathered with the usual acumen of the Jacaranda guiding spirits, conditioned the audience’s ears for revelations to come. Steven Vanhauwaert (van-ha-WARE) was the pianist, a young man from Belgium who has carried off several local piano-competition prizes and played on Sunday afternoon as though he deserved them all. Timothy Loo, a Jacaranda founding spirit, was the excellent cellist in Debussy’s convoluted, quizzical Cello Sonata. The crowd at First Presbyterian was smaller than usual – the winds over Santa Monica blew chill that afternoon – but the brave were well-rewarded.

I like the L.A. Opera’s La Bohème, as I usually do. Hearing Puccini’s infinitely appealing score at Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion the other night, in a generally excellent performance under Hartmut Haenchen, who had also led an okay Don Giovanni the night before, I found myself amazed once again (for perhaps the 500th time) at what a sure piece of dramatic workmanship it all is. The cast is young and exuberant, and plays well to each other. I’ve always liked Herbert Ross’ indoor-outdoor set, which looks like someplace where people actually live. I noted the anachronism – the half-finished Eiffel Tower in the background, which sets the date at around 1880, and Musetta’s fancy car in Act 2, from around 1930 – but I wasn’t in the mood to let such things bother me. I missed the scene from the third act, however, with the bicycles.

Alas, I awoke the next morning with a lousy cold, as I usually don’t, and wondered if something I’d previously written, among the dozens I’ve written about the opera, might hold my place this once. I think this one does:

What makes an opera work? If I were to guide a friend through the devious answers to that question, my final goal would be an understanding of the human interplay with Mozart’s music in The Marriage of Figaro, tempered with awe at the interaction of harmony and tragedy in Berg’s Wozzeck. There would be other major mileposts along our way – Verdi’s Otello, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and parts of The Ring, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. We would start with La Bohème, and we would stay there for quite a while.

The very opening: It takes two brief musical phrases – Marcello’s music ill-tempered and choppy, Rodolfo’s response lyrical, soaring – and we know these two characters as well as they know each other. Later, Rodolfo’s graceful curve of a tune will recur during his first outpouring to Mimì (“Che gelida manina…”).

The guys plan their outing, to spend some new-found cash downstairs at the café. A melody winds its way softly through the orchestra, distinctive in its antique harmonies, which I had learned in Charles Cushing’s class at UC Berkeley never to use (parallel fifths! automatic D-minus!); it might be an old Christmas carol. The same tune, more joyous and aggressive, will usher in the festivities in Act 2. It will reappear, chill and bleak, at the start of Act 3, where it will transform into a haunting tone poem about a dismal corner of wintry Paris at daybreak. I love Puccini’s atmosphere pieces, usually at the start of operatic acts: the Roman daybreak in the last act of Tosca, life along the river at the start of Il Tabarro, dawn breaking over Nagasaki near the end of Madama Butterfly, even the offstage choruses resounding through the Chinese night in Turandot, leading up to “Nessun dorma.”

Aroma Therapy

Mimì knocks and enters; soft strings fill the room with her aroma. Her radiant, quiet tune becomes her first song to Rodolfo (“Mi chiamano Mimì”); it will identify her throughout the opera, will turn sad under her farewell in Act 3, and will shatter and drift away as her life ebbs at the end. Listen, in this first encounter, as she and Rodolfo move toward each other, shyly and with broken phrases, then a more substantial vocal line as their hands touch.

The second act of La Bohème is surely Puccini’s shortest: under 18 minutes in my favorite recording (not telling). It’s amazing how much takes place, with the interplay among the Bohemians down front, the biz with Musetta and her sugar daddy, the street kids and their balloons, the panorama of surging Paris life, including parading tin soldiers, on Christmas Eve. It’s all like cinematic writing before its time, and you can’t resist.

It’s easy enough to poke holes in Puccini’s art, and heaven knows that I’ve done my share. I saw the (2002) movie of Tosca, fell in love with Angela Gheorghiu in the title role, and still came home with the empty feeling of having wasted two hours on music that constantly must strain for its dramatic effect, whose harmonies curdle the senses with their drab insistence, whose characters derive no life from their music and remain cardboard even in moments of high passion. La Bohème is different; it teems with life, it reaches out in its youthful urgency and pulls you in. It survives restaging, as in the not-bad Baz Luhrmann updating. Its storyline outlives generation gaps, but its music retains its appeal even more fiercely. There is a moment in the last act, after the mortally ill Mimì is brought back to the garret to die, wherein if I’ve heard it 500 times I have wept real tears 500 times. The forgiveness scene at the end of Figaro also affects me that way, as does the moment in Die Walkre when the doors blow open and moonlight pours in; if this one masterpiece off Puccini’s workbench reaches me on that level, then Puccini can’t be all that bad.

“Don Giovanni,” the question ran, “is it the world’s greatest work of art, or merely Mozart’s greatest opera?” The late Winthrop Sargeant raised it, but left it dangling, in the old Life magazine in its juiciest days as pop-culture avatar. The Don Giovanni question – greatest vs. near-greatest – had already been argued for more than a century, and continues to resonate – currently at the L.A. Opera – today and beyond. Whether calling for superlatives or not, and the current production certainly merits a couple, the opera came into the world unlike anything previously seen or heard on an operatic stage, and the strength of those differences remains awesome, 220 years later.

No opera before its time, and few since its time that come readily to mind, begins by holding its audience in relentless grasp over perhaps 20 minutes of continuous energy: the overture that breaks off for Leporello’s first music, which then is interrupted as the Don is pursued to midstage by Anna, then by the Commendatore’s intervention, the duel, the old man’s murder and the Don’s escape – all without stopping at a full cadence. It’s one of Mozart’s unparalleled methods for simply suspending our breath over extended time spans.

That is one of my favorite Don Giovanni moments, and it’s one that at least allows us time to follow its unfolding over several minutes. Another, in the second act, comes as a more sudden shock. Five of the characters, all of them angry at Giovanni for one reason or another, believe they have him cornered in a dark courtyard and are prepared to inflict five varieties of bodily harm upon their supposed captive. But that supposed victim turns out not to be Giovanni at all, only his schmuck of a servant, Leporello, disguised in his master’s cloak. The harmony has been sailing on in an agitated but steady C minor, but then Leporello reveals himself. The group onstage recoils in shocked surprise and, as the harmony reflects this in a sudden jolt downward from C to A flat, we too recoil. Mozart’s operas are full of these harmonic shocks, every one delicious in a different context. By Beethoven’s time, that kind of harmonic shock begins to appear in instrumental music as well – as early as the Opus 2 piano sonatas.

Anyone who really gets transfixed in the experience of a Don Giovanni performance is bound to end up disturbed. Our instincts lead us to expect a certain classical symmetry, overlain in Mozart’s case by a passion that shows itself in an amazing richness of harmony. In this opera, Mozart goes further. Music breaks off, leaving us in suspense. Another magnificent moment occurs when the wronged Elvira, who has apparently been trudging the streets of Seville bewailing her betrayal by the Don to anyone who will listen, comes upon Giovanni and Leporello while grinding out her torch song. Impolite to the last, the men break into her song, turning it into a freeform ensemble (and a magnificent one at that). The whole concept of operatic form moves forward at this moment; even Beethoven a generation later, who admired Figaro and Così, found Don Giovanni immoral.

Reruns

It is, which means that it maintains the crude power to inspire great performances. The first truly great complete operatic recording of anything came with a Don Giovanni performance at the 1936 Glyndebourne Festival, originally a schlep on 23 shellac discs, now still available – the last time I looked – on three CDs. Fritz Busch conducted, and the precision of his ensemble work remains untouched; John Brownlee was the suave Don, and Salvatore Baccaloni, before he became overly aware of himself as an Italian clown, was a beautifully antic Leporello. Ina Souez, who ended up running, and singing in, a gay bar in San Diego, was the incomparable Anna. After 70 years, the sound is amazingly clear; this set is to me the rock upon which any Mozart collection should be based.

But there have to be others. Of the three Mozart operas that Peter Sellars has monkeyed with and reset into contemporary landscapes, the Don Giovanni, relocated to New York’s East Harlem, with Lorraine Hunt’s Elvira to set your transistors afire and Eugene Perry punctuating the “Drinking Song” by hurling bottles against a brick wall, becomes an exact updating of the work’s pristine violence. At the other end, but comfortably in place, is Harmonia Mundi’s new recording under René Jacobs, wisely and beautifully sung throughout, the paradigm of Mozart performance in our time. Owning all three (especially with the Sellars on DVD) is no excess.

Director Mariusz Trelínski has located the opera somewhere on the edge of sanity, with little in the way of stage furniture – except for an open-sided coffin that rises and falls midstage and at the end divulges the moldering corpse of the Commendatore – hardly the “statua gentilissima” of Lorenzo da Ponte’s script. Boris Kudlicka’s stage is a large black box, pierced with openings for doors and windows, the black walls occasionally becoming mirrors to turn a handful of stage actors into a mob. There is gadgetry galore – a zany ballet to personify the “thousand and three” victims enumerated in Leporello’s “Catalog Aria,” a dancing forest around the Don’s latest hanky-panky. Giovanni works his oily seduction on the innocent Zerlina, while pushing her firmly onto a bed of garish crimson.

Costume designer Arkadius has decked out his principals – the heroines and their swains who occupy the Don during the course of the opera – in a consistent color scheme: paired yellows for the bumpkin lovers, formal black-and-green for the nobles, a rich, mournful blue for the jilted Elvira. The period is Mozart’s own, wildly exaggerated with the women’s gowns on panniers nearly as wide as the stage itself. The musical matters, under the excellent German conductor Hartmut Haenchen, accomplish much the same for the ear. Uruguay-born Erwin Schrott returns as Giovanni, lithe, insinuating, menacing with a voice of similar character. The women who bring about his downfall form a first-class ensemble: Alexandra Deshorties as the majestic if somewhat frazzled Anna, Maria Kanyova as an Elvira totally unhinged in the clash of love vs. hate. As the comic servant Leporello, Kyle Ketelsen delivers some expert and hilarious footwork, with singing to match. Stylistically, in fact, both servant and master seem adrift in a whole ‘nother opera – the one by Mozart.

As we waited for Alex Ross to show up to talk about his new book at the Los Angeles Central Library a couple of weeks ago, the hypnotic sounds of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians came over the PA system: one masterpiece filling in for another. Here is Ross on that music: “The seeming stasis of the sound encourages the listener to zero in on seemingly inconsequential details, so that the smallest changes have the force of seismic shocks and something as simple as a bass line going down a half step sends chills up the spine.”

This is the writing of someone who knows how to listen, and the subtitle of Ross’ The Rest Is Noise is “Listening to the Twentieth Century” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30). That particular passage is the best explanation of listening to minimalism in its simplest manifestation that I have ever come across, by all means better than any I have ever attempted. (I must endeavor, difficult as it may be, to avoid a tone of jealousy here, so as not to undermine a friendship that began in 1992, in adjacent seats at the Met during an otherwise forgettable Philip Glass operatic premiere – music, by the way, that Ross more or less disowned in last week’s New Yorker.)

What Ross has done here, with wit and a grace of language that belie the expanse of his task, is to fold last century’s music – all of it: rock amp; roll, Webern, Ellington, Salome – into a tidily outlined social and political history. The range of his musical vision is his great enabling force; go to his blog, also called “The Rest Is Noise,” all one word, and summon up his huge and magnificent essay from 2004 “I Hate Classical Music” (subtitled “Listen to This”) and follow the evolution of this vision over years. It’s not classical music that he hates, by the way; it’s the need felt by those of pedantic turn of mind to isolate certain kinds of music as “classical” and other kinds of music as not.

Choosing a favorite episode would probably mean writing out the whole book, but some do linger. One is surely the best – and saddest – account to date of why there is no Sibelius Eighth Symphony, and why the aging composer’s musical pen was stilled for the last three decades of his life. Of all the critics outside of Finland who took up the Sibelius cause, none wrote more worshipfully, to the point of actual pestering, than The New York Times‘ Olin Downes. In letter after letter, cable and telephone call, Downes maintained a steady importuning to the bedeviled Sibelius on the matter of the Eighth Symphony. Downes even brought his mother into the act, a woman of some persuasive skill, who sent along an eloquent reminder that immortality could only befall composers of Nine Symphonies. In 1927, Downes actually journeyed to Finland in an attempt to exact that hoped-for Eighth Symphony and, of course, accord it a world premiere on American soil. The only result was to add to the old composer’s irritation. For another 15 years, the game went on: a promise, a postponement, another promise. Came World War II, with Finland joining the Nazi cause, and the game was suddenly over.

One other memorable vignette, also a study in decline but with softer lighting, is the Leonard Bernstein summation all critics attempt to write, with varying success. The last four pages of Ross’ Lennie chapter succeed as well as any I’ve seen or tried: a concise rise-and-fall of the New York Philharmonic years, the Broadway years, the “stupefyingly powerful” Mahler advocacy, “freighting [the symphonies] with the themes he should or would have addressed in his own music if only he had the time or the energy or whatever it was that he ultimately lacked.” That’s what I’ve been trying to say, all these years.

18 and Counting

The town of Allendale, in western Michigan, is definitely “not on anyone’s touring schedule, except maybe John Deere,” says Bill Ryan, who heads the new-music ensemble at Grand Valley State University in Allendale. Last year, he and his ensemble were turned on by news that the world was celebrating the 70th birthday of Steve Reich; they decided to take part, and in no small way. The goal they decided upon was Reich’s formidable, hourlong Music for 18 Musicians, a work widely regarded as the masterpiece of “pure” minimalism (no argument here).

To say the least, Ryan’s ensemble was diverse, ranging from some students who had already memorized the score from the 1999 Reich CD to a few students who knew nothing of Reich or his music. “After a month of rehearsals,” says Ryan, “I began to realize that pulling off a good performance was not only possible but well within our grasp.” The next step was a pilgrimage, Ryan and five band members journeying to New York to attend the Reich@70 Festival at Carnegie, solicit coaching from some of Reich’s ensemble members and ask a blessing from the great man himself – all of which transpired. After a dizzying couple of days in New York, which some in the group had never seen, Ryan and his five returned to Grand Valley U., “exponentially enhanced.” The results are clearly audible in the sharp-edged, hugely energized playing on the Grand Valley State Music Ensemble’s new disc, on Innova, of Music for 18. Yes, they actually use 20, and somebody in the Reich band told them that that was okay.

Martha Argerich is a force of nature, pure and undiminished. Perhaps it’s true that she cancels out of many of her engagements; she has been ill a lot in recent years. But when she does appear, in the condition she was in last Thursday night at Disney Hall – boy oh boy, does she perform! She drove through the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto on all eight cylinders, leaving nothing by the roadside and turning that near masterpiece into a show of maximum strength and delight. I never knew the work, from Prokofiev’s flamboyant years in America, was that good, and I’ll never know again, unless I hear the EMI disc, which is also by Argerich and conducted by Charles Dutoit, as it was last week.

This was, incidentally, the next-to-last event in the Philharmonic’s Festival of Youth Orchestras, in which some of our local bands stood cheek by jowl, so to speak, with visitors from Venezuela and Finland – an unfair comparison, actually, since both those countries are miles ahead of ours in developing this kind of ensemble. They were here, if anything, to tell us to get a move on in this crucial area. There is already some good news on this front, however. The Philharmonic has sent advisers out to work as mentors for a three-year stint with eight local “partner” youth orchestras. Four of those local orchestras, furthermore, rang down the curtain on the current festival with a free concert at Disney Hall. This is the next step after symposiums, and it’s how things really have to start.

Thursday’s concert presented the UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) Verbier (Switzerland’s festival in the town of that name) Orchestra, which was founded in 2000 by, among others, James Levine. (You knew immediately that some kind of bank or corporation was behind this, from the number of gents in suits, the number of areas in Disney roped off for private receptions, and the number of people applauding between movements.) Dutoit, Argerich’s former husband, was the congenial conductor for her sublime performance of the Prokofiev, for the Berlioz “Fantastic” Symphony and, as an encore, for Chabrier’s sure-fire España Rapsodie. Argerich on her own contributed one of those marvelous Scarlatti sonatas (in D minor) that are really takeoffs on a strummed guitar, and in which I swear she took every repeat twice (hurrah!). Then she played two parts of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, and we all held our breath that she’d play the whole set – but no. I don’t know anyone who plays Schumann better than Argerich.

Many people, however, conduct Berlioz better than Charles Dutoit. Many orchestras perform the “Fantastique” with greater suavity of tone. Dutoit’s reading of the “Fantastique” was speedy and loud, and Berlioz’s shepherds on their hilltops merely sounded like two oboists counting time, and his severed head failed to bounce.

Messianic Zeal

I missed the first of this season’s Jacaranda concerts through sheer stupidity – attending instead the Philip Glass opera in San Francisco. Last weekend’s concert held enough satisfaction for two events. The series’ connoisseur programmers, Patrick Scott and Mark Alan Hilt, are engaged in a multiyear celebration around the 100th birthday (1908) of Olivier Messiaen in the broadest sense. This time, the program was all-Debussy, music by the composer furthest out of the ordinary world at his time and, therefore, closest in spirit to Messiaen’s. Later programs in 2007-08 will venture as far afield in search of Messaien influencers as Bach and Liszt, not to mention Tchaikovsky, Xenakis and Stockhausen.

The Debussy program included familiar treasures – the shimmering wonderment of the G-minor String Quartet, one of the earliest works, and the Violin Sonata, the very last – and some music less well-known. Outstanding among the latter were two sets of Songs of Bilitis, songs to poetry of Pierre Louÿs, lines to be sung with rapture, and wonderment, mostly, at the miracle of the female body – one set for singer and piano, another for reciter with flutes, harps and celesta rolling forth sounds one might expect to hear among heaven’s angels.

Over the years, Jacaranda has gathered a steady performers’ group with its own nicely interlocking style. Chief among them is the Denali Quartet, founded by cellist Timothy Loo with violinists Sarah Thornblade and Joel Pargman and violist Alma Lisa Fernandez: a spirited ensemble that has braved the rigors of Ben Johnston’s just-intonation harmonies and the craggy rhythms of the totality of Revueltas in one sitting. Splendid pianists have come through the ranks, including ophthalmologist-turned-virtuoso Scott Dunn and Gloria, Mark and Vicki from the PianoSpheres roster.

It’s not too soon to talk about a “Jacaranda style.” It has to do with taste: the personal values of a couple of highly educated music lovers, which happen to interlock with a considerable audience who find common cause, don’t applaud between movements and welcome a reasonable alternative to the I-10 on a Saturday night.

Chances are that the Philharmonic’s new music director, when he takes over the podium a couple of years from now, will not ask the orchestra to perform in patriotic jackets, nor will he ask the players to fling them out into the audience after the last encore. He is unlikely to demand that they twirl their instruments between solos, or toss them skyward at the slightest provocation. Yet these were some of the shenanigans in the final moments in the second of two concerts last week by the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and its – soon to be our – switched-on conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. With a capacity crowd in the hall tearing down the virtual goalposts and another onstage matching them cheer for cheer, you had to be there to experience the pandemonium. By any standard – social, political, musical – it was totally deserved.

There was a lot of talk about youth orchestras here last week. There was a symposium in which important people – the mayor, Philharmonic people, education people – spoke about the obvious benefits of full-fledged symphony-size orchestras as an extracurricular activity, moving on to forming serious ensembles, like the Bolívar and the Sibelius Academy that was here two weeks ago and the UBS Orchestra still to come, with players ages 18 to 24. We have such orchestras here, like the sleepy American Youth Symphony, whose free concerts at Royce Hall draw big, sleepy crowds; what we don’t have – yet – is a firecracker leader to inspire such an orchestra with a sense of its own importance, to its community, to its players. That will take a few more symposiums.

Here comes Dudamel, and the best news is that he’s real, a serious and dedicated musician who’s seized by the music he’s performing, and that he’s already a practiced hand in forming great and spirited young orchestras. His orchestra numbered something like 200, against our own Philharmonic’s 106. Just the sight of all those chairs on the empty stage was enough to turn you – or me, at least – dizzy. Dudamel led the big works on both programs – the Fifth symphonies of Beethoven and Mahler – from memory; okay, he’s recorded them both and is entitled to know them by heart. What’s important is the way both these works have come to live within him. The baton technique, mostly a forward thrust, is clear and not particularly graceful. His left-hand motions are more fascinating: also not graceful, not swooping, but with each finger delivering a separate message.

Of the two symphonies, I was more won over by the Mahler; I’d held off hearing the disc. Disney Hall offered no resistance to the mighty onslaught of 11 double basses, eight horns and similar bloated figures across the board. There was a fine, light humor in the pacing of the scherzo, and an even lighter touch in the folksy moments of the finale. The notorious – yet noble – adagietto was, to my taste, paced exactly right.

Beyond the inevitable wayward horn here and bassoon there, the Beethoven performance seemed to these ears somewhat waterlogged by the weight of it all. Even with the double-bass contingent whittled down to 10 – from the previous day’s 11 – I found the sound of four horns (for Beethoven’s two) and I-forget-how-many bassoons (for Beethoven’s most interesting scoring, his bassoon pairing) just a shade murky, no matter how excellent the performers and how spirited the splendid young conductor’s choice of tempos. But that crescendo out of the gloomy reaches of the scherzo, and the impact of the trumpets announcing the triumphant arrival at the golden frontier of C major, could not have been more thrilling. That’s why we need orchestras, and conductors, and Beethoven.

Olé

The ersatz conviviality of the Bernstein West Side Story dances had begun the first program (of two); now, following the Beethoven on the second, it was time to dig seriously into where these marvelous music people had gleaned their effervescence. Music by Mexico’s Arturo Márquez and José Pablo Moncayo and Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera – all throbbing with hot rhythms and that major/minor delicious uncertainty that colors the lifestyle south of the border – completed the printed part of the program. Then the lights went down for a few seconds; when they came up again, the whole orchestra sported the Venezuelan finery that I’m sure you all saw on YouTube.

Then who should show up but John Williams, to tone things down a peg with the Star Wars theme. (Surely, even he knows better music than that.) Then Gustavo – excuse me, Maestro Dudamel – got his podium back for three more numbers, including a replay of the Bernstein “Mambo” number from the night before, with the crowd getting happier and more insistent and the jacket biz . . . For all I know, they may still be there.

In the audience sat José Antonio Abreu, the distinguished gentleman who, with a group of musical advisers, dreamed up the National System of Youth Orchestras – known as El Sistema – that has now given Venezuela 130 youth orchestras comparable to Simón Bolívar, countless children’s orchestras and more than 30 adult orchestras, many of them peopled by children out of impoverished neighborhoods, given their instruments by the state. Put this together with the chorus that came up a few years ago to perform Golijov’s St. Mark’s Passion and you have a compelling picture of a national musical subsidy that needs a lot of study in this country. Perhaps more than symposiums, even.

The six blows of Thor’s hammer – the metaphor is Donald Tovey’s, not mine – resounded through Disney Hall on Friday night, and then we were done with Sibelius. Esa-Pekka Salonen had chosen the Fifth Symphony to end his three weeks of “Sibelius Unbound”: all seven symphonies, most of the tone poems, a single shard from the theatrical scores, not the violin concerto . . . I experienced no epiphanies, unless you count the Sixth Symphony, which I had never heard before in live performance, and the Third, which I still haven’t heard live, having made the unwise decision to journey to San Francisco for Philip Glass’ new opera, about which more later. (I atoned by finally unwrapping my disc of that symphony, and wishing that I hadn’t. What a weak work!)

It’s easier for me to write about music close to my heart than it is the music I deplore. I came to these concerts in the firm belief that if anyone could turn around my long-standing dislike of these symphonies, it would be Salonen and our orchestra, with the magnificent clarity of their playing in that hall and with Salonen’s own newly acquired eagerness to plead the cause of his musical patrimony. (In our first interview here, he was all for dismissing the Sibelius heritage as an albatross.)

Instead, I heard the grand, rolling tune in the finale of the Second Symphony, almost a second national anthem after Finlandia, obscured through the buzz of strings. I heard the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies as almost nothing but buzz, with, in the Sixth, its maddening capriciousness in chopping off a promising idea, or even a whole movement, where logic might ordain a proper continuation. The Philharmonic’s program notes dub this work the “Cinderella” of the symphonies; might not “Rumpelstilskin” be more appropriate?

Then there is the Fourth Symphony, lean and hungry. I suppose it is some kind of perversion to find this the most satisfactory work of the seven, but hear me out. First, it sounds the best; its relatively spare orchestration allows everything to be heard, loud and clear. That “everything,” furthermore, I find exceptionally attractive, stirring in a way that I don’t often find in Sibelius. One of many instances is that magnificent brass tune that bursts out, after a long accumulative process, to cap the slow movement, followed immediately by wisps of melody that quickly come together as the theme of the finale. On my critics’ bookshelf, I find little writing about the Fourth Symphony, but I like this, from Constant Lambert: “The work as a whole is notable for its intensity of mood, its grim austerity of color and its elliptical compactness of form, qualities in no way popular with the multitude and in 1912 definitely out of fashion with so-called advanced composers.”

So be it; you have to work hard to be moved by this grim, A-minor symphony. I am, and I find it worth the effort. Those receding mezzoforte chords that end it, in bristling, orchestral, that’s-all-there-is tones, are among the most gripping musical sounds I know.

Old School Ties

Came also the youthful orchestra from Salonen’s alma mater, the Sibelius Academy, with members ages 18 to 26, lively, attractive and just as good as the previous installment I’d heard in Carnegie Hall about 10 years ago. They landed with a full program: a brief Chorale by Magnus Lindberg – a variation on Bach’s “Es ist genug” – Prokofiev’s Fifth Piano Concerto with soloist Juho Pohjonen, 26, and Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Suite of four tone poems. Salonen conducted. Everything came off capitally; the young Pohjonen – though not so young as reported in the Times – is the latest in a long dynasty of steely-fingered Northerners, and excellent of the breed.

Also adjunct to the series was an evening by the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society, with an evening perhaps somewhat more forgettable. Looming largest among the dispensables was the G-minor Quartet by Edvard Grieg, music for tea parties to be played behind potted palms, excruciatingly long-winded. Sibelius’ one quartet was also played; I had planned to exculpate it as a juvenile work until I learned that it dates from between the Third and Fourth symphonies. Shorter and infinitely more amusing works by Carl Nielsen and Aulis Sallinen filled out the program, all neatly played by Philharmonic members.

Glass, Darkly

Something analogous to a death wish draws me over long distances to Philip Glass operas: the Columbus opera at the Met, a Bob Wilson CIVIL warS segment in Rome, a Doris Lessing sci-fi piece in Houston and now Appomattox at the San Francisco Opera. As you can glean from the title, this latest work concerns the ending of our Civil War, the meeting of the generals at the Virginia town of Appomattox Court House and Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U.S. Grant. If you need to bone up, there is James Thurber’s “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” which tells approximately the same story. Approximately, that is.

Christopher Hampton wrote the libretto, which covers considerable ground before and after the surrender: the last days of combat, some of it brutal, the virtual rape of Richmond by Grant’s army, racist behavior, including some raunchy speechifying against blacks up to the present time. Riccardo Hernandez designed the sets, among them a striking angled ramp that divided the stage and allowed director Robert Woodruff some spectacular action during the Richmond scenes. Glass’ music rose to that occasion too, with snarling dark winds and percussion. Most of the time, however, it was pretty much just another Philip Glass score: noodle noodle. You wonder why I went. So do I.

Common knowledge has it that the 32 piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, composed over 26 of his 57 years, encapsulate the most revealing portrait of his creative life. By the same token, it has been said, performances of these works can also stand as a set of opinion pieces on Beethoven’s artistic life by every pianist who takes them on – and, by that token, by Beethoven himself on every pianist who braves their demands. By my latest count, we have access to 15 recorded sets of these implicit essays, plus the one that is currently taking shape under the fingers of András Schiff, in Disney Hall, several other halls, and on ECM discs.

No, I haven’t heard all the other 15, just some. They offer varying testimonials of the vulnerable genius, the legendary creator who found his piano his most willing companion to accept his earnest and sometimes violent musical thoughts, beyond the expressive power of the string quartet or even the small symphony orchestra. There’s a great scene in the Abel Gance Beethoven movie, the best of the lurid bunch: Ludwig at his piano composing the storm music for the “Pastoral” Symphony. There’s a fevered outburst on the piano, then a segue to a lightning flash, another run, another flash; it’s nonsense, of course, but that’s what’s really going on in Beethoven’s mind in the “Patheátique” Sonata or the “Appassionata,” or the fugues in Opus 106 and 111.

There’s some of that in the finale of the very first sonata, Opus 2 No. 1, which Schiff captured quite appropriately in the first of his Disney Hall concerts. On the whole, from the evidence of this first live concert and other performances on disc, I find his playing uneven – sometimes dry and overly precise, more like his excellent Bach recordings; sometimes marvelously relaxed and serene, like his Schubert on a wonderful DVD. What I’ve liked most of all so far was his performance of the slow movement of Opus 2 No. 3, which is, indeed, a foreshadowing of Schubert. What has puzzled me the most, so far, was his decision to drop the da capo, the specified reprise, in the Menuetto of Opus 2 No. 1, especially since he has otherwise been meticulous about observing repeats. He explained this decision in one of the lectures he once gave on the Internet, but even that strikes me as frivolous, especially as he doesn’t make similar omissions in other sonatas.

At home, I listen to my EMI discs by Alfred Brendel, the second of the three sets he has recorded, wise and spacious. Then, of course, there are the performances by Artur Schnabel, whom everyone of my generation revered for his wisdom, his poetic quirks and the cantankerous insights in the footnotes of his printed editions. Times were when there were the Schnabel discs and no others, and now Naxos-UK has issued them in Ward Marston’s excellent remasterings. I still refer to them, most of all for the sheer poetry Schnabel could extract from the slow movements of the late sonatas. But the fact remains that elderly fingers did not always fulfill his visions, and such passages as the finale of the “Hammerklavier” Sonata can be painful.

Old Pals

I have been too long away from the California EAR Unit. This sovereign new-music group, born at CalArts, more recently dispossessed at LACMA when that institution foolishly abandoned serious programming, is now at REDCAT, where last Wednesday’s program was mostly the same old same old, with mostly the same old personnel. Louis Andriessen’s 1986 Dubbelspoor led my favorites’ list: quiet for Louis, a lovely sequence of crystalline tones led by the glisten of Amy Knoles’ percussion magic. I also liked Raphael Biston’s .oscil, music for “bent” timbres and interesting sudden bursts. From Australia’s Lisa Lim and CalArts’ Ann Millikan there were large, rather unformed pieces, whose bloviating program notes tended to promise more than what occurred; and from Franco Donatoni, onetime teacher of Esa-Pekka, a short concluding piece that teemed with his customary bustle.

Philip O’Connor’s clarinet and Eric Clark’s violin are new to the group since LACMA; Amy, Erika Duke Kirkpatrick’s cello, Dorothy Stone’s flute and Vicki Ray’s piano are the steadies from as far back as I can remember. That’s remarkable; the EAR Unit is one of the country’s foremost long-term ensembles serving music’s cutting edge. Its members do other things, of course: studio work, teaching. But they continue as well as the EAR Unit, and they are part of what outsiders have come to recognize as the unique ferment here in Los Angeles. They call it the “Continental Shift,” and other envious names.

The Dark Side

Deplorers of Sibelius’ music, among whom I occasionally number myself, list the Fourth Symphony as the Great Exception, the expressive marvel that uses the fewest notes to state the most profound matters. So it is; this icy, barren work of half statements and unfinished thrusts engages our participation, obliges us to complete these paradoxes in our own imagination, and results in the link between listener and creative artist that is the goal of all great art. It isn’t just a matter here of the composer leaving blank spaces for us to fill in; it’s more that he engages us to join him along his rock-strewn creative path, which he has, this once, made enticing. For this latter process, there was the enormous assistance of Esa-Pekka Salonen and his orchestra, this past Thursday, appropriately turned gray-toned for the occasion.

The Seventh Symphony ended the program, as it did Sibelius’ symphonic career. In between came Steven Stucky’s Radical Light in its world premiere. It’s a 17-minute crescendo and decrescendo, insubstantial up against other recent Stucky works, all of which I tend to admire for their attractive presence on a middle-ground, conservative plane. Less happens in the new work, perhaps, but its orchestral language is bright and appealing, with moments of jeweled twinkle that will attract friends, myself among them.nbsp;

Many weeks before the whoopee at the Philharmonic attendant upon the accession of the 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel – who returns, by the way, next month with his own Venezuelan youth orchestra – the even younger (21) Lionel Bringuier had also captivated the local judges and earned an assistant conductorship amid enthusiastic huzzahs. At last Tuesday’s Green Umbrella concert, this slender, bespectacled Niçois got to show his stuff before a grown-up audience – he had already led a couple of kiddie events – and made it clear that he had a lot of stuff to show.

The program was tough, challenging and rewarding: music by Finland’s Kaija Saariaho, the profound, often mystical classmate of our own Esa-Pekka, and Luigi Dallapiccola, the Italian who had evolved a style blending his innate romanticism with his allegiance to Schoenbergian atonality. Bringuier led Dallapiccola’s whimsically titled Little Night Music – lapidary, enchanting, so many gleaming crystals set into a dark and shifting landscape – and Saariaho’s Graal Théâtre – a violin concerto lasting half an hour, dense and dark, loaded, says the composer, with subtle allusions all the way from Arthurian knights to Beethoven. Jennifer Koh was the adept soloist; Bringuier’s leadership was poised, unmannered and clear. Orchestra members I spoke to, who had been bowled over by his showing at the auditions a few months ago, repeated their praise. At the same time, the junior reviewer from the L.A. Times, obviously in need of inventing a critical stance, decided that this was a performance superior to Salonen’s (with Gidon Kremer) on the Sony disc, and that is so much baloney.

About Dallapiccola: During my time in New York – the ’60s, say – his music was a constant companion, at small chamber-music concerts and at orchestral events as well. His powerful opera Il Prigionero showed up in several productions, including one in 1960, conducted by Leopold Stokowski at the City Opera that I can still run on my internal video – it shared a double bill with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, would you believe! His music was, for me, a kind of reconciliation: intense, emotional beauty expressed in an espousal of the most forbidding contemporary principles. There are wonderful songs, choral works – Salonen has recorded his Songs of Prison as well as the opera – a big piano work inspired by Finnegans Wake, and chamber works. His legacy is small; he died too soon, just as students from all over were beginning to make the pilgrimage to study with him. Reviving this one work, whose Italian title, Piccola Musica Notturna, glides so beautifully off the tongue, should be the first step of many.

Also under the Umbrella were two shorter Saariaho works: Six Japanese Gardens for percussion, ably dispatched by San Diego’s Steven Schick, and NoaNoa for solo flute, ably played by the Philharmonic’s own Catherine Ransom Karoly. Both were “enhanced” – “cluttered,” I would say – by video projections by Jean-Baptiste Barrière. This the guy from the Times nailed spot-on: “Basically the 1960s light-show experience.”

The Winds Do Blow

“Sibelius Unbound” has begun at the Philharmonic, and there will be time in the next weeks to chart whatever discoveries, rediscoveries and reasons for changes of long-held opinions these interestingly planned programs may afford. So far no good, however: Trudging through the murk of the Second Symphony’s orchestra – woodwinds shrieking through the swirls of violas and cellos casting a fog over the insipid tune crafting – can hardly be reckoned an enlivening experience under any circumstances. Heard following the icy clarity of Salonen’s own Wing on Wing, as it was at last weekend’s concert, it lapses into utter grayness. I grew up in Boston, where Serge Koussevitzky played the Sibelius Second almost as an anthem, and where Sibelius’ name continually appeared beside Beethoven and Brahms on fave-composer lists.

Salonen may never earn a place on those lists, but his emergence as a serious and original composer should be, for all of us, a matter of pride. “For all of us,” I say, because he himself has made it clear that life in Los Angeles and the benevolent deal the Philharmonic has cut him, equalizing the two sides of his career, have made it possible to work as an independent composer, not merely as a conductor who composes. I love the whimsy of Wing on Wing; it is a fantasy about Disney Hall itself and its architect. It is about the Philharmonic only in that its idiosyncratic demands are no longer beyond the powers of these 106 players, and Salonen can take credit for that.

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s winds are its treasure. Blended into the elegance of its small string section, they create the perfect facsimile of the 18th-century orchestra of our imagination. Alongside his series of Mozart piano concertos, in which these wind players’ ongoing conversations with Jeffrey Kahane at the piano were one of the marvels, Kahane has also been devoting quality time to the symphonies of Haydn’s last years. Last Sunday’s concert at Royce Hall ended with No. 99. I might have been inclined to suggest, ever so softly, that Kahane might consider a more relaxed tempo here and there, but his Haydn performances are irresistibly lively, and, as I was saying, just their sound is a wonderland of its own. So it was with No. 99, with its tricky key changes in the first movement, and the sublime melody that sort of sneaks in to catch us by surprise and wonderment in the second. All repeats were observed. You wanted there to be more.

Augusta Read Thomas provided the evening’s novelty, Murmurs in the Mist of Memory, a 15-minute, four-movement piece for strings composed in 2001, inspired by four Emily Dickinson poems but working up a nice eloquence on its own. André Watts was the evening’s soloist, unburdening himself of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in the noncommittal manner that has been all I’ve heard from his playing in the recent past. Many in the audience, need I add, stood and cheered; the spectacle of 10 fast-moving fingers is all it takes, sometimes.

Finally, Jenufa; finally, Karita Mattila: Our opera company has never more brightly shone. Leos Janácek’s opera probes deeply into human agony before extracting its triumph. Its flow, past moments of unspeakable horror, seems to echo at all times that of the human heartbeat. Even its Czech language seems readily comprehensible; that is the earnestness of Janácek’s music. It is also, of course, the penetrating dramatic intensity of the cast at work at the Chandler Pavilion, led by Mattila – who is not Czech but Finnish and who is at every moment transformed by her role into an irresistible entity. In her ability to wrest forgiveness from cruelty, Janácek’s lyric mastery makes his Jenufa one of opera’s towering personages; the further wonder is the way Mattila inhabits that character so completely: her moment of near madness at the loss of her child, the profundity of her acceptance as she looks beyond the sins of the man who has loved yet wounded her. I rank her accomplishment among my most profound experiences from any stage: alongside Kirsten Flagstad’s Isolde, Laurence Olivier’s Oedipus.

There is much of value, as well, from James Conlon’s musical direction, splendidly motivated and knowing. Long before the first notes sound, when most conductors might be vouchsafed a pre-downbeat martini or two, Conlon is already out front, chatting up the pre-performance crowd with his strong and valuable insights on the opera and its origins. Olivier Tambosi’s stage direction, previously seen at the Metropolitan Opera and on the DVD from the Liceu at Barcelona, is exactly right for this opera: long, austere lines of action, a stage largely open and uncluttered. (I could, however, learn to live without the large boulder that fills in most of the second-act space; it may have symbolic significance, but I found it blank and ugly.)

Eva Urbanová is the troubled stepmother, the Kostelnicka whose well-intentioned murder of Jenufa’s baby becomes the fulcrum of the unbearable human tragedy. Jorma Silvasti and Kim Begley are the brothers Steva and Laca, put on Earth to make life for Jenufa both complicated and interesting. Jenufa runs once more, this weekend; beg, borrow or steal your way in and share the pride in our opera company at its finest.

Gloria in Excelsis

Gloria Cheng finished her Piano Spheres concert last Tuesday with the piano smoldering on the Zipper Hall stage and the near-capacity audience in about the same state. Iannis Xenakis’ music will do that to you sometimes. His 1973 Evryali certainly did: a portrait of “the eldest of three hideous Gorgon sisters . . . with hands of brass, sharp fangs . . .” Cheng’s program was, as usual, a fascinating tour around the sphere of today’s pianistic possibilities: from the trickery of Helmut Lachenmann’s anti-musical Guero – in which the performer extracts dry-point clicks and clacks by attacking the keyboard with a credit card (Amoco or Mobil, we were informed) – to the visionary quietude of a Takemitsu Litany and an exotic jungle fantasy by a young Messiaen. Of lesser interest was a brand-new, bone-dry sonata by UCLA grad student Dante de Silva, still in the academy in more ways than one.

That sorry venture was nicely balanced, however, by an elder, wiser one by John Cage, whose 55-year-old Water Music got the proceedings back on track. “Water,” as you might guess, actually consisted of a bowl of the stuff, plus some whistles, a radio, a pack of cards and some gadgetry for “preparing” the piano; all thoughts of Mr. de Silva’s run-of-the-mill formalities were nicely demolished, as our Gloria neatly restored the Piano Sphere to its proper dimension. A couple of knockout works by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter filled out the program. Piano Spheres, one of our most cherishable concert enterprises, is again in orbit.

All in the Family

For four years now, there has been an annual bash in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. The Carlsbad Music Festival, organized by native-son composer Matt McBane, this year ran for a weekend in an auditorium in the town library, drew large and happy crowds. Three ensembles performed: So Percussion, Real Quiet and the Calder Quartet. All the music was by Americans, mostly young, all young at heart: Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, David Lang, Phil Kline and, of course, Matt McBane. The Monday before, there had been a preview concert at Zipper Hall at which all three ensembles performed. In Carlsbad, Matt’s sister sold tickets and discs; his dad ran the spotlights and mikes.

Aside from that family aspect of the festival, you had to admire the notion of a young composer taking upon himself the task of getting his music heard, and the music of people around him. So Percussion and Real Quiet are upcoming ensembles making their way, via small record labels. The Calders have pushed into more established territory, but they also came to Carlsbad to play Terry Riley’s music (which I had to miss for time pressures). I particularly liked Real Quiet – cello, piano and percussion – which must, of course, create its own repertory. The sense at Carlsbad, therefore, was of a festival of people involved with inventing music, not just playing standard stuff. The other good thing was that the audience, of native Carlsbaddies, were listening to all this new music without worrying about its newness or oldness or familiarity. I liked that.

Oh, and by the Way

The Salonen contingent was back at midweek; if there is a more thrilling resonance than the sound of the Philharmonic playing Berlioz in Disney Hall, it remains undiscovered. Two snippets from the Roméo et Juliette symphony served as wraparound for the opening-night gala, with Renée Fleming to sing Ravel and Puccini as the luscious middle. Also tucked into that half-length program: a curious Luciano Berio reworking of a Boccherini (!) martial fantasy, insubstantial but delightful.

Oddly enough, another Berio reworking, this time of the final, unfinished Contrapunctus of Bach’s Art of the Fugue, began the next night’s first subscription program, an interesting setting for winds and brass ending with a dissonance of Berio’s fashioning. Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen followed, solemn, dark and resigned music from the end of a sorrowing composer’s life, perhaps somewhat out of place as a season’s opening music. Even so, the meathead in the audience who tried to end it with premature applause – twice – strengthens my hopes that someday there will be IQ testers at the doorways of concert halls. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony glisteningly performed, outstanding among feel-good symphonies, ended the evening properly.

There sits my life, and everything else that I would miss in this world is the direct result of what’s in those boxes, those files. From them I have earned the right to shake hands with Esa-Pekka Salonen and hug Frank Gehry, to lunch with Ernest Fleischmann and bask in Zubin Mehta’s scorn. I have earned the right to sample the mysteries of the tasting menu at Matsuhisa and been guided by Jonathan Gold, in person, to discover the indescribable delicacy of steamed live shrimp at Full House. On my own I have mastered a couple of passable pâtés, and a jalapeño corn bread that gets me invited to illustrious homes.

It’s a life nourished, replenished and reinforced from younger, vital sources. Ryan, on his way to journalistic brilliance, saw to it that I got to James Brown’s concert at the Bowl and the Mingus Epitaph at Disney; I guided him through Monteverdi at the Opera. Raymond’s sound engineering, in a garage I used to think was mine, produces recorded rock of a depth and variety beyond any cliché I might have entertained about that genre. Barbara, who turns her shaggy dogs into sweaters, flew here from her farm in Indiana to drive me around after spinal surgery. Sixty or more people show up here on New Year’s Day, eat and drink well, and stay to talk into the night. I love them all, and love that it happens.

The room where I do most of my pondering is a second-story add-on that I put in about 12 years ago. There are windows on all four sides, and a balcony facing west. The stairway is lined with CD shelves, but not all the discs have been unwrapped. I love silence. A friend told me that the room is like a tree house, and that’s exactly right; it’s also the right size of the manageable remainder of my life at 83. Almost every afternoon, around 4:30, a flock of wild parrots goes streaming, and screaming, past my south-facing window: a streak of brilliant green flecked with bright red. That’s the most identifiably Californian thing about my life here that I would miss. The rest is identifiably my own. One of these days I might decide I could do without all or part of it, but not for some time.

Of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung, Andrew Porter wrote, “[It] is a piece that sounds ridiculous when described and yet proves enthralling in performance,” and I agree. The work, composed in 1968, consists of a B-flat chord sustained for about 75 minutes by six singers seated on pillows in semidarkness. The single harmony is “enhanced” by the recitation of magic names, short poems and rhythmic motifs that pass from member to member – all at a low volume that trails off now and then toward near silence. Some variation of vocal color is achieved by the singers’ improvising with vowel color.

On the new Harmonia Mundi disc, the members of Paul Hillier’s Theater of Voices take a few liberties with vocal shadings and other tricks. The “New Cologne Vocal Soloists,” heirs apparent to the group for whom Stockhausen composed his piece, performed the work here at LACMA, much more straightforwardly, and thus more dully. Ideally, the work belongs in a small church, and we will hear it thus next April 12 in, you might guess, one of Santa Monica’s “Jacaranda” concerts.

The Hillier version makes for a wonderful disc. The music is quiet; it sometimes dips below the level of silence, but you must let it envelop you; don’t wander off. Hillier himself has wandered off. When I last lunched him, he was at the University of Indiana. Now he’s in Copenhagen and conducts a chorus in Estonia, from which he sends back marvelous recordings, contributing to one of the sadly few truly class-act classical labels in this parched world of ours.

Harmonia Mundi’s new Don Giovanni keeps alive one corner of that desert, however. It is now possible to marvel at all three of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas in these remarkable performances under René Jacobs, each of them an achievement in ensemble, vocal interaction and impetus that redefines the nature of this miraculous repertory for our time. That Jacobs has been able to bring this off in all three operas – Figaro and Così Fan Tutte no less than this new three-disc Don Giovanni – adds to his achievement. His singers make up no all-star casts; it is their brainpower that enchants here first, their tonsils later.

That said, this is an emphatically good Don Giovanni, superbly put together and intelligently packaged, with some cogent notations by Jacobs himself. Johannes Weisser is the splendid, insinuating Don, Lorenzo Regazzo his all-too-wise manservant, Leporello. Two Russian sopranos, Olga Pasichnyk and Alexandrina Pendatchanska, are the hysterics in Giovanni’s life, Nikolay Borchev and Sunhae Im the rustic lovers Masetto and Zerlina – a tidy and nicely balanced cast. One small problem easily resolved: The arrangement on discs follows the opera as given in Vienna, with a couple of arias from the Prague performance (including Ottavio’s “Il mio tesoro”) moved out of place to tracks at the end of the same disc where they would ordinarily occur earlier. Just push a couple of buttons and you’re back in Prague.

Another

I sit here with a book on my lap so heavy as almost to stop circulation, yet so beautiful that I have to hold it close. It is Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM (Granta Books), which could be just another record-company blurb, but isn’t. For one thing, it comes boxed and sells for 95 bucks; for another, unlike any other record-company blurb you’ve ever seen, it’s worth its selling price.

As I flip the pages, I listen to music: Valentin Silvestrov’s Symphony No. 6, played by Andrey Boreyko and an orchestra in Stuttgart, a huge and powerful work running over an hour. Silvestrov is a composer I know only because of several discs I’ve heard on ECM. I notice that an orchestra from St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) is coming here soon, and the program consists of Schubert, Schumann and Prokofiev. Why are they traveling 6,000 miles to show they can play music we already know? Why aren’t they playing Silvestrov or Schnittke, or perhaps some Russian composer we don’t yet know here at all? They would knock us out of our seats with the slow movement of the Silvestrov Sixth (get the disc and hear for yourself). But no, we get the Schumann Piano Concerto, with a burnt-out soloist who hasn’t been around for years.

Manfred Eicher started ECM in 1969, with far horizons in his line of sight. From these many pages, I see him as a serendipiter from the date of birth, with impulses that sooner or later had to find their way to disc. From our one meeting so far, at an Oregon Bach Festial in, say, 1984, I remember his all-seeing eyes most of all. (Arvo Pärt was also there, and I mostly watched him.) From Eicher more than any other one person, I have learned the breadth of the musical field – how, to cite one small example, you could fuse the very hot saxophone of Jan Garbarek to the medieval singing of the Hilliard Ensemble and forge a whole new art. (Mnemosyne, one of their several albums, is on my desert-island shelf.)

Anyhow, this gorgeous, fat, heavy book, with the same photography that makes every ECM disc a treasure even if you’re deaf, and with editing and profound essays by the superb British critic Paul Griffiths (whom I wish we had more of, or even one of), stands at once as a tribute to the visions of Manfred Eicher and a panorama of the contemporary, creative musical mind. The music that Manfred has brought to my attention – with a little help, by the way, from his New York right arm Tina Pelikan, one of the few press people whose calls I return – makes for an impressive list: Pärt, Garbarek, Holliger, Saluzzi, Tuür, Zehetmaier, Mansouri, and on and on. Getting their act between hard covers is only their next logical step. Trouble is, nobody in the record biz these days can afford their damn book.

“But, of course, he’s no Pavarotti.” That was Thomas Wachtell in 1984, head of a bygone organization called Music Center Opera, discussing Plácido Domingo and defending the company’s decision – which I had deplored – to cancel the annual visits by the New York City Opera and pooh-poohing the recent guest shot by London’s Royal Opera in which Domingo had sung the lead in Turandot. “That’s a minor role,” said Mr. Wachtell, who also found occasion on the same KUSC interview to inform the listening world that “Alan Rich has the integrity of a cockroach.”

The Pavarotti of Tom Wachtell’s imagining was a symbol, already both more and less than the magnificently gifted and (yes!) artistically responsible musician whose New York debut (Rodolfo in La Bohème, with Mirella Freni, November ’68) I heard with delight as critic for the fledgling New York magazine. There was intelligence in the way Pavarotti knew how to shape, and to shade, the curve of an Italian lyric line, and there are recordings to bear this out.

The Nemorino he creates in the 1973 L’Elisir d’Amore (London/Decca) is more than the rural booby of most productions. The “furtive tear” he describes is partly his own, and he sings for every lover whose crucial words have failed him. Add to that the confrontational fury in the banquet scene in his Lucia di Lammermoor of the year before (same label) and you have a supremely capable, musicianly tenor, with a voice of melting purity and a fine sense of how to direct that voice in the cause of high drama. Add to that Pavarotti’s remarkable sensitivity toward words – rare in opera singers of any stripe, almost nonexistent among Italian tenors – and you have the complete artist Pavarotti once was and could have remained. I love his singing of the word “primavera” in the so-called “Cherry Duet” in Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz, a slight, pastoral opera that he and Freni render irresistible on a two-disc 1969 EMI set; it simply pulls “springtime” right into the room.

Yes, Giorgio (1982) began the downward slope. The film was not only a disaster; it was a typical exploitational disaster: a celebrity pasted into a cornball script. Herbert Breslin was the producer, not quite the most disliked of all front men in New York’s classical-music world – let’s leave it at that. Breslin then went on to produce Pavarotti himself, not so much as a valued member of an opera company with a distinguished repertory and a growing intelligence toward the care and feeding of that superb but inevitably fragile voice and artistic conscience, but as a moneymaker willing to submit to the needs of the musical chop shop that builds the “Three Tenors” repertory and similar kibble.

Perhaps Pavarotti would have slanted his career toward the cheap side by himself; he wasn’t given the chance. His last opera appearances constitute a study in pathetic overreach. His last time here, a concert at Staples Center with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, was full of bravery and full of music that, even through the strident amplification system, now and then sounded like Pavarotti. That’s all you could ask for – that, and the memories.

Yes, Aaron

Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise will be published next month; the Aaron Copland chapter was sneak-previewed in a recent New Yorker. Let me reiterate: This will be the best book on what music is about – really about – that you or I will ever own. This last week of classical concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, with Leonard Slatkin rounding out his three-year stint as principal guest conductor, was also full of Copland and other serious matters; strange, how closing weeks every year seem to offer the season’s most substantial programming.

Copland’s Third Symphony, the final work, was begun in 1944. It starts tough: quite a lot of grinding dissonance and heavy scoring, almost as if to compensate for the lighter scoring and the sweet harmonies of Appalachian Spring of the year before. The Ross chapter makes a lot of Copland’s closeness to the Soviet composers, and it’s possible to hear in his first movement some of the harmonic restlessness in the Shostakovich Fifth, which was new and much discussed at the time. (Ross goes on to discuss a composers’ meeting – or, let’s say, collision – when a delegation of Soviets, including Shostakovich, came to New York.) As with its Soviet maybe-counterpart, the Copland symphony culminates in a flag-waving finale, which incorporates his previous Fanfare for the Common Man. I think I prefer Appalachian Spring.

That work of high enchantment, in fact, began the program two days before – not in the feather-light original version for 13 instruments, alas, which would probably have blown away in the Bowl’s breezes – but in the somewhat too resonant full orchestration; oh, well. Edgar Meyer was on hand, with the first of his bright and bouncy double-bass concertos, which he plays with huge displays of having the world’s best time. Both his concertos show off their composer’s diverse musical backgrounds: lovely, cantabile slow movements right out of 19th-century romanticism, great larrupin’ finales right up there with Mister Copland and some fairly awesome finger-snappin’. There was a whole encore of that too; its name was “Pickle.”

Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee continued the Tuesday program, delightful, small coloristic pieces with the inspiring visuals shown on the video screens; Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue ended it, in a tentative, stumbling performance by Michel Camilo. Thursday’s crowning glory was the return of the too-long-away cellist Lynn Harrell, drawing audible poetry from the wondrous Dvorák Concerto, music the color of the oncoming twilight, with Eric Overholt’s horn solos the shape of the surrounding hills. That’s what you take home from the Hollywood Bowl, as from no place else on Earth.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s return to the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl began a week of cultural overload such that you’d ordinarily expect in mid-January. Yet here we were in summer’s waning days. Well, for starters, it wasn’t just any old week at the Bowl; it was the kind of challenging, provocative week that the place deserves at least once every summer – or more. There was even – would you believe – opera with the video screens used not just for mug shots of second clarinetists but actually for a purpose: to carry the translation of the text, just as in a real opera house. When did you ever see that before at the Bowl? (Ans.: never.) Someone in the Philharmonic’s video department has finally awakened to the reason those screens belong up there.

I have long admired Diavolo, Jacques Heim’s company of airborne dancers, athletes and, for all I know, masters of the game of Quidditch, who interact in bodily conversation with each other and with inanimate structures to create a language of dramatic movement beyond easy definition. On a warm Tuesday at the Bowl, cheered to the skies by a large and warm-hearted audience, the operative word was “interaction,” and the result was thrilling.

The music was Salonen’s 2001 Foreign Bodies, “fiery masses of sound,” says the composer. Out of Tina Trefethen’s large cube – placed center stage, pierced with several holes – arms, legs and then whole bodies twisted their way into view, matched by the music’s twisting, furious undulations. As the 10-member dance company re-formed downstage and continued their interactions, the cube behind them broke apart into large pie-shaped segments of lustrous metal and plastic on which the dancers zoomed up, down and around, propelled by the music’s built-in urgency. Lights onstage and overhead picked out spots on the structures, which then reflected back to surfaces along the Bowl’s walls and ceiling. The whole spectacle was an interlock of moving dancers and structures uncannily matched by Salonen’s marvelous score. I can’t remember ever seeing the Bowl’s performing space turned into something quite this sensually alive – oh, maybe when Gustavo Dudamel conducted the incandescent music of Revueltas at his debut there two years ago. When else?

Eventually, the parts of the cube pushed back into their original shape and the music wound down – it lasts some 20 minutes, and you can hear it on the same Deutsche Grammophon disc with Salonen’s Wing on Wing. I wonder at the future of this remarkable piece of performance art. It’s a masterpiece in Diavolo’s repertory and a gorgeous illumination of the Salonen work as well. It belongs with Salonen and the Phlharmonic, not to be danced with some creaky ballet orchestra and not with a recording. It needs to be on a stage as part of a concert, in the same place as a featured soloist in a concerto. Somehow or other, it belongs in a repertory, even if that repertory has yet to be invented.

Mahler’s First Symphony, by Salonen and the Philharmonic alone, filled out the program, with the called-for offstage trumpets at the start really far offstage – a trick that always makes you think that Mahler actually composed with the Bowl in mind. It was a grand, broad performance, properly vulgar where such seemed to be called for, properly heaven-storming at the end.

No Sex, Please

Two nights later, there was Boris Godunov, not the one with the familiar Polonaise and the Love Duet but Mussorgsky’s original, no-frills creation: austere, somewhat dry in orchestral sound, its rhythms and melodic shapes deeply rooted in its composer’s naive national identities before his “rescue” by his more sophisticated colleagues. This is the version that Valery Gergiev brought to Orange County earlier this season with his Kirov company and his trunkfuls of seedy scenery, the worthwhile part of their misbegotten “Ring-around.” Mikhail Kit, who was the Wotan in some of the Ring performances, was also the Boris in one of their two performances of that opera and, as he was at the Bowl, an aging but eloquent singing actor. It would be good to see him for once on a properly designed and directed stage set. One assumes that for Salonen this Boris project must be something of a trial run for some project as yet unannounced. Los Angeles’ local companies have yet to produce a Boris Godunov in any version.

Nobody will ever agree on the proper Boris. Unquestionably, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff’s reorchestration of the opening scenes, including the “Coronation” choruses, makes a swell but wrong noise. Mussorgsky’s dark, edgy original, with its irregular rhythms, peers behind Rimsky’s finery to reveal a more troubled Russia with its impoverished masses, and endows the ascent of Boris with the right cynical coloration. The Polonaise and all the love-duet stuff were Mussorgsky’s own inferior capitulation to spicing up the action; leave them out and you’ve got more than three hours of almost continuous men’s voices. Most performances of Boris are some kind of conflation of Mussorgsky’s own two versions, with scenes left in or out: a scene at St. Basil’s Cathedral from the first version, a scene in Kromy Forest from the second. Since both scenes end with a Holy Idiot bewailing the fate of Russia, you can’t have both, and at the Bowl we got St. Basil’s. Salonen’s performance, with Mr. Kit heading a capable cast of visitors, most of them from the Maryinsky Academy of Young Soloists and the massed but sometimes wobbly forces of the Pacific Chorale, followed the pure Mussorgsky original. Judging from wisps of overheard conversations from prematurely exiting Bowl-goers, it did not fulfill everyone’s idea of a swell night of opera at the Bowl. At the very end, as if on cue, there were coyotes in ardent conversation above the parking lot. They knew something that the rest of us must guess.

Opera Indoors

Fidelio is back, to start the L.A. Opera’s 21st season, with music director James Conlon and his orchestra getting – and meriting – the evening’s biggest applause. The opening scenes with the country lovemakers are no less silly than ever; the opera doesn’t really start until they’re gotten rid of. But that’s Beethoven’s problem, not ours; Fidelio is must-see and must-hear, and this production is an honorable dispatch of this problematic but supreme opera. It is the work of Italian director-designer Pierluigi Pier’Alli, brought over from the Queen Sofia Palace of the Arts in Valencia. His stage is full of menacing verticals , and some strange mechanical images that make it look as if the hapless Florestan is imprisoned in some sort of huge factory. On the other hand, the staging at the moment of rescue, one of operadom’s sublime 60 seconds, is thrilling indeed.

Best of all, this is a Fidelio that sounds as it’s supposed to, and that’s rare. Rather than the usual beefy Wagnerian tenor, there is the youthful and young-sounding Klaus Florian Vogt; his first “Gott!!!” ringing out of the darkness seemed to herald a new era in Fidelio tenors, and all for the better. The Leonore/Fidelio, similarly, is the youthful Anja Kampe, with a rich, true voice that could cut right through all those horns in her first big aria and a figure that could pass for a lad in the Rocco household . That, by the way, is presided over by the magnificent basso Matti Salminen, and it’s a great casting choice to see him towering, a couple of feet taller, over the Pizarro of Eike Wilm Schulte. Good over evil; that’s what opera is all about, after all.

Verdi’s Requiem, concert music in operatic language, ensued on the same stage a few hours later. Great singers were on hand; the work demands no less. One, the phenomenal German bass Rene Pape, was making his long-overdue debut: Tall and handsome, with a voice of similar qualities, he is the Marke, the Sarastro, the Gurnemanz of everyone’s dreams; we here must continue to dream. Arturo Chacón-Cruz was a last-minute fill-in, the latest in a line of baby-faced Mexic
an tenors and excellent of
the breed; soprano Adrienne Pieczonka and mezzo Stephanie Blythe completed the vocal quartet. All performed handsomely.

From Plácido Domingo’s conducting I heard nothing but cues correctly obeyed, little from the L.A. Opera’s orchestra or chorus that told me of Verdi’s wonderful lyric lines, the “Lachrymosa” that sweeps across the heavens, the “Hostias et preces tibi” at which no listener should be able to sit dry-eyed. You do not shape a Verdian lyric line by simply waving a stick at a stageful of performers. The performance, I suppose I have to add, was sold out, at a $250 top. Go figure.

Where She Danced

Götz Friedrich’s television production of Richard Strauss’ Salome is finally available on DVD, from Deutsche Grammophon. In 1974, it defined what opera could accomplish on a television screen; it does so again. Watched on a screen of any size, it vaporizes physical dimensions and hangs suspended as a breathtaking painting of its time – the masterpiece that Gustave Moreau, say, strove toward – in which the personages of the Strauss and the Oscar Wilde drama live their fetid existence and stride to its loathsome climax. Everything about color and sound and location seems exactly in place; above all, there is no awareness of camera and microphone. On my many shelves of DVD’d opera, there is nothing like this one. It doesn’t even matter that I have been known not to care for Salome very much; I can’t stop watching this one-of-a-kind masterwork.

Teresa Stratas is the Salome, her head imprisoned in a jeweled skullcap so that there is nothing but face, on which the full motivation of this willful, vengeful, poisonous child plays out. It is an amazing performance, to watch and to hear; she was 36 or thereabouts, and it is a full capturing of the adolescent monster of the Strauss score. Better yet, she is perfectly matched against her mother of the play, the Herodias of Astrid Varnay – she who once broke hearts with her Sieglinde and her Brünnhilde, here delivering the fiendish cackle that defines and fulfills the bloodlines of her unspeakable daughter.

But everything works here, from the slobber of Hans Beirer’s Herod to the helplessness of Hanna Schwarz, as the doe-eyed Page who must watch as her beloved Narraboth kills himself in helpless adoration of the unattainable Prinzessin. Karl Böhm, who has supped often at the Strauss table, does so yet again as conductor; with the Vienna Philharmonic to do his bidding, who could ask for anything more?

The Fat Man Sang

Luciano Pavarotti figured little in Los Angeles’ operatic life – one La Bohème at the Bowl in his early (a.k.a. serious artist) years – but he did give his time and talent generously in pension-fund concerts at the Chandler Pavilion and elsewhere. About the “Greatest Star” headlines that have flashed across the skies in recent days I have been digesting second thoughts, while reliving the pleasures in the artistry of some of his authentic “greatest hits” – the tender, enveloping warmth of his L’Amico Fritz for one of many. More next week.

Thursday was chamber-music night on Grand Avenue: indoors with the Calder Quartet in Zipper Hall, outdoors with the Kronos Quartet, plus Wu Man and her magical pipa a short walk down at the Water Garden in California Plaza. The timing was sufficiently staggered so that you could take in both programs. Both were produced in association with the Western Arts Alliance Conference that was going on all week, which meant that the audiences included numbers of incredulous-looking members in suits along with the rest of us ordinary Californians.

The Calder Quartet – violinists Ben Jacobson and Andrew Bulbrook, violist Jonathan Moerschel, cellist Eric Byers – grows in depth and expressivity, as chamber ensembles must. Their residence at the Colburn School continues, with more public concerts scheduled next season as Colburn becomes a full-time graduate school; their affiliation with Juilliard also continues, establishing them as our first bicoastal quartet. Their participation on Thursday was only half a program, but it included a beautifully shaded, sleek reading of the Ravel Quartet, full of nuance and insinuation and lovely half-lights. Their other music consisted of a curious segue – the adagio from a late Shostakovich quartet blending into the final movements from the Second Quartet of Christopher Rouse: music the guys have played before and probably the best music by Rouse I have yet heard. I had to forsake the rest of the program, a set by the Billy Childs Jazz-Chamber Ensemble, to make the trek to the Kronos.

That, as always, was full of fun and mystery, a program of many short and exotic pieces, studded with attractive names – Terry Riley, for one, and something I heard through the capricious sound system as “Laguba Laguba by Berman from India.” The incredible energy behind Wu Man’s playing of her equally incredible, towering stringed instrument came across as always, but was sometimes laid waste by the sound system that seemed to coagulate everything. The image I got was of strands of pasta unstirred in the pot and stuck together. Amplification at California Plaza has never been kind to the sound of strings, solo or in small groups, and much of the exquisite tracery of Wu Man’s instrument – or, for that matter, the splendid work of the Kronos behind her – had to be taken on faith. Still, these admission-free concerts, which this summer have included such splendid explorations as an evening on the Harry Partch instruments and, still to come on Sept.15, a gamelan program, are part of what makes this city tick.

Rach Attack

Of all the really bad music that survives in unaccountably frequent performances, it is the Third Piano Concerto of Rachmaninoff that seems to me the least deserving. Bad enough that its ascendancy to even greater fame in recent years has rested on a film – Scott Hicks’ 1996 Shine – which itself is based on a pack of lies. The concerto itself is a scrapbook of big, noisy pianistic ideas, each a catchy moment in itself but none of them with the cohesion that drives the attention forward. The Second Concerto of a decade before is so much the better work, not only in the richness of its basketful of grand tunes but also in its impulse as a piece of music, moving forward toward a climactic point and then properly letting go.

Still, Number Three seems to possess some degree of survival power. A good-looking pianist at work on its clattering nonentities indeed fulfills many peoples’ ideal of what musical performance is supposed to look like, in a way that a less demonstrative musician – Jonathan Biss in the Beethoven Concerto, say, earlier in the Bowl season – might not. The video screens of Nikolai Lugansky’s finger work during his performance, last week at the Bowl , of the Rach Three – as it has come to be called since that movie – did, every now and then, take on the look of pots of pasta aboil. (Sorry, I seem to be stuck with that metaphor; it comes of writing hungry.) Furthermore, Mr. Lugansky did fulfill that ideal: a good-looking pianist at work, strong-minded as well as -fingered, capable of wading through all that you-know-what and emerging with trousers dry. Kirill Petrenko was the evening’s conductor.

On his own, Mr. Petrenko led the Philharmonic through the First Symphony of Shostakovich, a work full of adolescent nose-thumbing but many grown-up charms as well. The symphony seems to be about growing up, in fact; by the time we reach the slow movement, the composer has begun to preface every new idea with a “but seriously?.?.?.?” and it suddenly becomes very beautiful, very tragic in a 19-year-old’s way. Later there comes a portentous solo for timpani – perhaps the first such animal in the repertory – and a diabolical ending soon afterward. How to resist? Some people put down this First Symphony; I don’t think you can really know the inner Shostakovich unless you take this small, imperfect but genuine work to heart. I did, and it seemed to clear the air quite nicely.

Stephen Hartke’s The Greater Good is something we’ve long awaited: an American opera of genuine musical stature that uses the elements of opera in proper balance to create dramatic ebb and flow consistent with a storyline. The opera is out on a two-CD Naxos album, recorded at its premiere last year at the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York. It runs two and one-half hours; it could use a little trimming here and there, but what new opera couldn’t?

The story is Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif,” one of that French master’s magnificent ironies. Boule de Suif (“Ball of Fat” or, perhaps, “Butterball”) is a prostitute of considerable renown. Fleeing from Rouen in a packed stagecoach after the Franco-Prussian War, she alone has food, which she shares with her hungry, aristocratic fellow passengers. The coach is stopped and held prisoner by a Prussian officer at an inn. The passengers implore Butterball to venture her talents upon the officer to gain their freedom. At first, she is proud: She is not for hire. Then she relents. Next morning, the passengers embark; Butterball joins them, worn and bedraggled from a hard night’s work. They snub her: a common whore. The coach rumbles on.

The text is Hartke’s own, drawn from Philip Littell’s dramatic adaptation. The marvel of his music is its impulsive sense of ensemble, a bristling counterpoint in which the personalities of the individual passengers, crowded together in that rattletrap of a coach, burst forth. The orchestra is well used, a dissonant, sardonic commentary nicely balanced against the continuous fabric of interwoven anger and self-important pride. Now and then, a solo voice breaks through with some kind of aria; there are lovely, sad moments in the second act as the imprisoned passengers dream of home. One woman waxes rhapsodic over memories of snow “. . . except that it gets dirty right away.” An old man fusses about losing his bank accounts to the occupying Germans; an old woman misses her cat; a nun quietly recites her rosary. Boule de Suif herself is the voice of calmness, as she thrills the crowd with accounts of her conquests, her methods. Later, as the group is marooned at the inn and must pass the time in storytelling, the music loses some momentum; here is where some trimming might be in order. But there is one delicious moment, as the Butterball magic enfolds the susceptible Prussian officer and the creak of bedsprings (squeaky high woodwinds) filters down to the waiting crowd below.

The recording is from a live Glimmerglass performance conducted by Stewart Robertson, efficient and clear, every voice exactly right for what is needed, the audience presence to add a degree of resonance. Someday I’ll get to visit this enterprising little company in their tiny home in upstate New York with its amazing, adventurous repertory, next door to all the baseball stuff. The cream of it gets to the New York City Opera; I don’t know whether there are plans for this work by Hartke, who is on faculty here at USC, but there should be – in New York and for companies here as well. It will need superb musical and stage leadership to achieve the superb ensemble sense that you can hear on this recording.

It’s time also to mention the activities at Naxos over the past few years, totally contra the deplorable decline in recorded repertory elsewhere, in amassing a catalog of American music on disc. They include an “American Classics” catalog with every disc, and it’s an amazing document. It lists, for starters, practically everything important in the American symphonic repertory – Diamond, Harris, Schuman, Piston – newly recorded on Naxos. They go ‘way back, with the Gottschalk collection I went bananas over a few weeks ago, and a disc of charming, amateurish music by the great diarist and self-styled critic George Templeton Strong. They offer more of Charlie Ives than any other label has ever carried, more of Sam Barber, and a 50-disc collection of serious music by American Jewish composers, underwritten by the Milken Archive.

French CzechStéphane Denève was last week’s Hollywood Bowl conductor, a Frenchman of impressive mane who had also won hearts at a Disney Hall concert last season. He had good reason to do so again. Dvorák’s Eighth Symphony is a heart-warmer, and Monsieur Denève has learned its secrets. Mostly, they consist of allowing the orchestra to relax and allow its textures to lie open, so that flutes and oboes can make their way through the strings. That’s what Brahms never learned, and why all the symphonies of Dvorák are so much more fun to hear than Onkel Johannes’ four ponderosities, however impressive their thought content.

Sergey Khachatryan was the soloist, crowd-pleasing before he played a single note of Prokofiev’s G-minor Violin Concerto, and crowd-pleasing all the more once he began. The stream of good-looking violinists is never-ending; it’s some kind of syndrome, I suppose. Young Mr. Kh . . . towers above the crowd; he was very, very good. That particular concerto towers too; it is a serious, intricate and genuinely intelligent work (despite its having been written for Heifetz, who, sure enough, played only on the surface of it on his recording).

All these good things happened on the program despite the wretchedness that began it, the Leopold Stokowski orchestral transcription, from the organ original, of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue. One must wonder: What brand of organ did Stokowski have in mind when he transcribed its sounds to the uncomprehending realm of the symphony orchestra? Perhaps a barrel organ at London’s Battersea Park? A Mighty Wurlitzer at Radio City Music Hall? I have had my reservations about the repertory and the sonorities rampant within the world of the pipe organ in my lifetime, but the sheer sonic brutality of that opening music the other night inspires me to bind myself to every pipe organ within reach – as some of my friends do to trees – to shield them from such abomination.

Someday I will have my own music school, and the course I will teach will be devoted to Mozart, one movement at a time per semester. I would start with the slow movement of the D-minor Piano Concerto (K. 466), which was on the Hollywood Bowl program last Thursday, and I’m not even sure that one semester would be time enough to expound on the reasons for being in love with this music.

You have to start with the setting. The colossal grump of the first movement has receded into shadows. Now comes a single solacing voice, the piano, with its little tune like candy wound around a stick; smiling, the orchestra echoes. Not much later (measure 40 if you’re following along), the true magic occurs: the piano alone in the simplest of one-finger tunes, over the lightest of orchestral throbbing. It could be Susanna at her marriage to Figaro, or Pamina handing off the Magic Flute, but Mozart doesn’t need words this time . . .

Okay, you’ll have to wait and take the course; just know for now that this is the kind of thing that happens in slow movements of Mozart’s piano concertos – try also K. 467 or 482, and 488 will break your heart. Shai Wosner, a young pianist from Israel with very long fingers that showed up well on the video screens, was the evening’s commendable pianist, not yet in the suspended animation that the slow movement demands – check out the Alfred Brendel recording for that – but certainly a young man worth watching. He used the Beethoven cadenzas in the first and last movements; not many pianists do, because they’re scary. They are oversize, adventurous rhapsodies on the music that the young Beethoven, recently arrived in Vienna and anxious to make his mark, had fashioned for a memorial concert organized by Mozart’s widow.

This was the last event of Nicholas McGegan’s four-concert “Grand Tour,” and it brought the vagrant Mozart home to Vienna for his “Jupiter” Symphony, the last of the three he composed in a miraculous burst of energy in six weeks in 1788. The program began with a set of sneeze-length Contradances that Mozart ground out to bring in bread and butter, sometimes recycling tunes from operas. The “Jupiter” was properly grand, with all the big repeats respected – when did this last occur at the Bowl? – and the contrapuntal finale taken at a considerate pace so that the monumental pileup at the end – all five themes in a simultaneous contrapuntal tangle – could be savored and marveled at.

The turnout was close to 10,000, twice the usual crowd for a Thursday Classics event. Not a single aircraft polluted the sky this night. Something about the size of the Mozart orchestration, even at its maximum in this “Jupiter” Symphony, seems exactly the right size for the Bowl. There is no more Mozart on this summer’s schedule, however.

Rumi Squared

When I got to the Disney Hall box office Friday night, there were only two tickets left, at $150, and several screaming expostulators. If nothing else, this first-time-on-Earth appearance by the “Rumi Symphony Project Cycle Number One” represented some kind of public-relations triumph. They put it on, you came, and boy-oh-boy did you yell yourselves hoarse over Lord-knows-what.

That title itself should raise eyebrows. Major Rumi projects have fared badly here before; the 1998 Philip Glass-Robert Wilson slide show to open the rebuilt Royce Hall ranks as one of the area’s major fiascoes. Now the venerated Persian poet is being honored for his 800 years; the symphony, however, is an art form of a mere 250. Why connect the two? Apparently today’s bridge builders aren’t that easily fazed. In amassing his “Rumi Symphony” project (not all that symphonic, since only nine musicians were involved last Friday), a certain Hafez Nazeri has proclaimed his inspiration from the words of the great poet. He is aided in this in that he is the son of Shahram Nazeri, the internationally acclaimed Iranian vocalist, singer and improviser to the poetry of Rumi, who, according to a press release that – although I haven’t tested it personally – is probably meant to glow in the dark, has been hailed as the “Persian Nightingale” and “Iran’s Pavarotti.”

What the younger Nazeri has done, from the evidence of Friday’s concert, is to absorb some of the melodic and harmonic idiom of his Persian heritage, spread it around a mix of indigenous and symphonic players (led off in a throbbing solo by Philharmonic cellist Ben Hong) and compose big Western-style music with this material. There’s nothing new about this; check out Rimsky-Korsakov’sScheherazade, a successful if cornball Persian symphony. Maybe Nazeri didn’t use as big an orchestra as Rimsky-Korsakov, but Rimsky didn’t have microphones. Most bothersome was that he had, somehow, enlisted his father’s participation in this ersatz Orientalia. At the start of the program’s second half, however, the elder Nazeri took the stage alone, and for about 15 minutes sang his own, and the poet Rumi’s, freeform, rhapsodic music, which broke free of all the contrivances, the fakery of the rest of the evening’s music. Neither Pavarotti’s nor a nightingale’s, his voice was dark, rich, throbbing – the sound of a whole man’s soul. For those few minutes, an elderly man stood alone on a darkened stage, sounding forth with eloquence and pride the lyric poetry of his heritage, made us all happy to be there, and turned what might otherwise have been simply filial insults into some kind of art.

A mighty man is he, this Nicholas McGegan. You might not think so at first; he’s a fellow slight of build, and he has a way of approaching the Hollywood Bowl podium a little like a demure bunny rabbit, but the might is there nevertheless. It’s in his music: his Handel recordings on Harmonia Mundi with the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and the terrific planning and music making manifest in his current stint at the Bowl. In that paradisiacal retreat in the Cahuenga Pass, he’s come up with a splendid and workable idea: four concerts on successive classical Tuesdays and Thursdays, outlining a sort of Grand Tour, with the young Wolfgang Mozart as the Grand Tourist who travels from one musical milieu to another – London, Venice, Paris, Vienna – surrounded by other people’s music in each place but also working on his own. This grows, from the baby talk of a First Symphony composed in London to the passion and original genius of the final “Jupiter” Symphony in Vienna. (Curiously enough, a tune that turns up in the slow movement of that First Symphony becomes, with or without Mozart’s contrivance, an important element in the “Jupiter.”)

The first program, which found the child Mozart being toasted in the Handel-dominated London, enlisted the aid of the fine British tenor John Mark Ainsley in a couple of Handel arias (“Where’er you walk,” “Waft her, angels”) of familiar but ravishing beauty, and also a couple with awesome coloratura that, alas, inspired some pretty dismal imitators in the men’s room at halftime. (I don’t get paid to review bathroom coloraturas.) At the end, there was music from Alfred by Thomas Arne, whose final number, McGegan told the crowd, “encapsulates all the virtues the British admire and like to think they possess.” Whereupon all 6,000 of us stood and sang “Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves” and departed happy.

Vivaldi was the marquee name in Venice in 1770, when the 14-year-old Mozart brought in his Mitridate, Re di Ponto; McGegan’s second program leaned strongly toward the native son, with only two short orchestral bits from Mozart’s opera. Concertmaster Martin Chalifour performed two of Vivaldi’s solo concertos, of which one, in C major, also called for a solo lute as accompaniment in the slow movement; that work too (No. 190 in the catalog) stood out above the Vivaldian grasslands by virtue of some interesting dissonant harmonies. Chalifour also led the ensemble in two of Vivaldi’s concertos for four violins, from the notable “Estro Armonico” collection, whose intertwined writing for soloists probably had a direct influence on Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos.

I write in midseries, with Paris and Vienna still to be heard; so far, the turnout has been above average for midweek attendance, even though these programs do not call upon the full orchestral forces – and surely sound better through the amplification for exactly that reason. It’s about time that Bowl management occasionally faced the idea that this can be a place for brain-involving programming such as this miniseries, not only for music of the pleasant past but also – just now and then – something from our own time.

Obiter dictum: I hope you won’t confuse McGegan’s “Grand Tour” with Classical Destinations, a dreadful package from EMI (CD, DVD and a book from Amadeus Press) of error-ridden musical essays setting composers in their native lands with simpering narrations delivered by Simon Callow in the affected appreciationese that, I am sure, is partially responsible for serious music’s tragically low estate these days.

The French Touch

Two operas, composed 232 years apart but no less fresh to the ear, emerge from the smoky ruins of the record industry. Clocking in mere moments short of three hours, with every repeat and da capo meticulously honored, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Thésée in its gorgeous rendition from the Boston Early Music Festival, on CPO, might possibly challenge an unbeliever’s patience. At well under two hours, a long-hoped-for recording of Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue on Telarc should be cause for some rejoicing despite predictable flaws.

To Thésée, then, the masterpiece of the sublime opportunist who weaseled his way into the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and practically invented the art of opera, dance and all the fancy production values they required. You love it or you don’t. There is a love story: Theseus and his Aeglé. The jealous Medea tries to interfere and is almost successful. Five minutes before the final curtain, the goddess Minerva, dea ex machina, drops in (literally) in her chariot, with full brass band, and resolves everybody’s problems. Before this, there has been three hours’ worth of splendid music, sent forth in wonderful Baroque sonorities by the Boston Ensemble led by the lutenist Paul O’Dette, who has played here many times and whom we all know to be the best there is. So are Howard Crook, the countertenor who sings Theseus, and Ellen Hargis, the Aeglé.

We all know and love Paul Dukas’ 1897 tone poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice for more, I hope, than the cut-down version in Fantasia. His fantasy opera about Ariane and Bluebeard, written 10 years later, uses a text by Maurice Maeterlinck, a strange affair not easily unraveled. Ariane is the Seventh Wife, who outlives her predecessors to live on with her mysterious seducer. He, meanwhile, barely survives an attack by villagers outside his castle, angered by his evil deeds. The opera was admired in its time by no less than Arnold Schoenberg.

Now it’s here, in a recording led by the omnivorous Leon Botstein, with the BBC Symphony sounding somewhat tentative and the recorded sound a little murky, but enough to convey the remarkable richness and range of color in the scoring. The sounds are late French; I want to say Franck or d’Indy, but the music is better than anything I know by either of them. It’s a fascinating score all by itself. The singing, by Lori Phillips as Ariane and Patricia Bardon in the important role as her Nurse, is just okay. The whole venture satisfies my curiosity about the work but makes me want all the more to hear it live someday.

Something, I am sorry to inform you, stood between me and the paroxysms of delight with which the other 12-or-so thousand happy spectators greeted the efforts of Michael Tilson Thomas of San Francisco in his two concerts leading the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl last week. Simply put, that something is my inability to take him as seriously as he, given his enormous talents for self-promotion, seems to expect. That said, I hasten to add that I enjoyed those two concerts considerably for what they were: a lot of very classy note playing performed by a very classy orchestra under a good-looking conductor who’s great fun to watch. What they were not, however, were any kind of serious measurements of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven or – so far as they go – the lesser but worthy works of Bernstein and Copland that showed up on the second program.

I have said this before of MTT in action, indoors and out, and the suspicion remains: The principal subject of his performance is his performance. You could admire the detail in the Beethoven, at least in the first two movements, and still miss the magnificent sense of accumulation that makes both these movements the overpowering experiences that they are. In the scherzo, he observed Beethoven’s stipulated first repeat but not the second, thereby distorting the time scale. The slow movement went by so fast, with so little differentiation between its contrasting sections, as to trivialize its sublime impact. Before the finale, MTT went through some kind of ludicrous “now get this” motion on the podium, and then delivered nothing really worth the getting. The vocal forces were a mixed blessing. Eric Owens sang his exhortation mostly off key; a helicopter wiped out all of Jessica Rivera’s soprano solo later on; Philippe Castagner’s tenor solo was the evening’s distinguishing moment . . .

That, and some minor but attractive bits of Beethoveniana that MTT had dug up to fill out the program: stuff that the composer had churned out to keep the pot boiling in between his more substantial endeavors. Actually, some of Beethoven’s music for the August von Kotzebue drama King Stephen, which began the evening, is interesting as a sketchpad for tunes in the Ninth Symphony; other sections are interesting as proof that he could craft a ho-hum tune along with the rest of the Viennese tune spinners. And one little piece called Bundeslied, for singers and winds, is proof that Beethoven could dash off an authentic four-minute charmer better than the rest of them, and that MTT’s skill as a digger-outer is beyond challenge.

Someday the clouds will part around the name and achievements of Leonard Bernstein, and music like the Symphonic (why that?) Dances From West Side Story will probably figure among the genuine works of his genius, pushing the pretentious symphonies, choral works and other overreachings into deserved obscurity. These splendid, energy-laden Danceswill, by that token, be removed from the purview of symphony orchestras, and restored to the realm of the smaller, theater-size bands who can do them better justice than all the noise MTT stirred up the other night.

There followed Aaron Copland’s turn: six (seven with the encore) of his wonderfully flavorsome settings of old American songs, rich, rugged music sung by Thomas Hampson, who owns them for this generation (pace Marilyn Horne). Then came more Copland, the quiet, reverent, deeply patriotic Lincoln Portrait that once, nevertheless, got banned by our nation as “lefty” (at the 1953 Eisenhower inaugural). Gore Vidal was the reader, an eloquent and significant choice. Seated in his wheelchair, the grand old hell-raiser rose to the occasion with a delivery of Lincoln’s words pointed and meaningful. At the end, he stood and walked off. MTT followed, not on water.

The Man Who Loved Mozart

The video of Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute seems to be hard to find these days; surely a memorial reissue is mandatory. Among the hundreds of opera tapes and DVDs now at hand, this one stands magically apart, an operatic film purposely made, not just shot from the wings, about a performance by people, totally absorbed in and in love with their work, finding their place during the course of an excellent performance of Mozart’s enchanted and enchanting play-with-music. The performing space is part of the magic: Sweden’s little Drottningholm Theater, the size and shape of spaces Mozart himself knew. Never mind that the theater was taken apart and reconstructed for the filmmakers; never mind all the other artifices, including the fact that Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, which we usually hear as The Magic Flute, is here given in Swedish. The real music is still present, where it matters. Above all, this is a filming of Mozart’s work that also, with consummate ease, becomes a document of an audience having a wonderful time there, from the delighted face of the little girl (Bergman’s daughter) during the overture to the occasional backstage glances as the camera tiptoes around the theater while the magic unfolds onstage. It becomes a film of how we would like to see an opera someday, as a disembodied spirit freely roaming – through the theater, through the stage, through the mingled souls of everyone involved – only they won’t let us. Lucky Mr. Bergman.

Smiles of a Summer Night is Bergman’s Così Fan Tutte: the game playing, the cynicism, the superior wisdom of the social inferiors, the awareness at the end that those final matchups aren’t really going to work. (Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, are even more careful than Bergman to leave this point unresolved, to the continued bemusement of two centuries of opera directors.) Bergman adorns his plot with more characters than the opera’s six, but the parallels are inescapable. Both works are, unto themselves, perfect.

The Philharmonic hires well. Last week’s classical concerts at the Hollywood Bowl were entrusted to the orchestra’s second-tier leaders, assistant conductor Joana Carneiro and associate Alexander Mickelthwate. They represent an orchestra’s crucial support system, the young conductors, recently out of conservatories or competitions, sometimes with a few years on podiums with orchestras in the boonies here or abroad, sometimes not, who stand closely by. They conduct the kiddie concerts, perhaps a “Green Umbrella” or two. They attend rehearsals, make themselves useful doing all kinds of backstage chores, wait for the principal conductor to fall off the podium so they can re-enact the Cinderella story. Almost any major conductor you can name – Salonen, Tilson Thomas, all the way back to Toscanini – has at least one such episode in his vita.

Carneiro and Mickelthwate represented a nice contrast: the former born in Lisbon with a fair list of conducting dates in Portugal as well as here; the latter German, who in his first year here made his conducting debut on 30 minutes’ notice, replacing an ailing conductor in a murderous program of Shostakovich and Adams. Both young conductors came to the Bowl last week with programs that could pass as self-portraits: Carneiro with a Hispanic mix, rendered impure but all the more enchanting with the added accents of the Frenchman Ravel and a couple of soloists out of Brazil; Mickelthwate with the German romantics and a Korean soloist to draw the crowd.

The steamy, slithery harmonies of Ravel’s Spanish Rhapsody glided effortlessly into the warmth over Cahuenga Pass on Tuesday; so did everything that followed. Carneiro’s musical impulses are admirable, and the orchestra was producing elegant, seductive sounds for her all night. Arnaldo Cohen, Brazil-born, now at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, was the pianist in a sleepy performance of Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain – but I think the piece itself is sleep-inducing – and the fabulous Luciana Souza, whom we know and love for her singing of Golijov at Ojai and on a new DG recording, caused the very air to sizzle in the all-too-brief vocal passages in Falla’s El Amor Brujo. Most fun of all, I have to admit, was the closing, inevitable Boléro of Ravel, with the video screens, for once, really keeping up with the instrumental changes in this maligned, amazing work.

Thursday night’s inevitability was Sarah Chang again entangled in the Bruch Violin Concerto, the third pairing in my Philharmonic files, plus one I remember trying to forget in Orange County. Is it a matter of stuck wiring? Is it the Korean national anthem? (It does draw the crowds.) This was Mickelthwate’s final date as the Philharmonic’s associate conductor; why lumber his last program with this drab misadventure midway? He moves on to become music director of the Winnipeg (brrr!) Symphony, and when he returns (as he promises), it will be in the distinguished role of guest conductor. His tenure ended with a spacious unfolding of Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony in all its crippled but somehow affecting eloquence.

Bubbles (1929-2007)

I’ll bet anything that when Beverly Sills found the typo in the first line of Bubbles, her autobiography – “I sang my first aria in pubic” – she let it stand; it would be just like her.

One afternoon in 1979, we floated around on rubber horsies in her pool on the Vineyard. She’d just taken over the City Opera from Julius Rudel, and was full of tidbits about the mess he had left her: new productions booked without set designers, that sort of thing. Balancing a small tape recorder in a breezy pool isn’t the easiest of journalistic tasks, but I managed. I got it all into my article for New York Magazine, and Rudel exploded. Beverly phoned. “Oh, was that an interview?” – I could see the eyelashes coyly fluttering. “I guess I just didn’t know.”

That was a low point, and there were a couple of years after that when I felt I needed clearance from her implacable manager, Edgar Vincent, just to say “hello.” I prefer to dwell on the high points; there were many, though we started off slowly. I fished out my Herald Tribune review of her Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare at the New York City Opera, September 28, 1966, which is generally reckoned as her career turnaround, and there isn’t much: “Beverly Sills is the Cleopatra of everyone’s dreams and her handling of some ferocious coloratura is all the more remarkable . . .” I was too much the scholar for the extended gush, too aware of how Handel’s score had been mishandled in the edition prepared for the New York City Opera.

I really fell for Beverly Sills in a college gym in Medford, Massachusetts, some four years later, as she came marching down the center aisle, waving an enormous Tricouleur and trilling Donizetti’s bugle call that begins his Daughter of the Regiment. Sarah Caldwell had put that performance together, as conductor and director, and those two ardent, blithe spirits – plus a gang of right-minded collaborators – had invented a way of creating opera out of voice and spirit and performing space that remains unique in my opera-going memory.

Sills would go on to a fabulous career under other conductors and directors, and make us aware of a repertory of great opera – of the bel canto era most of all – that we might otherwise not have known. When she sang with Caldwell’s company in Boston, or later together in some memorable La Traviata performances at the Met, there continued to be an interweave of musical understanding, of the nature even of a simple phrase, that elevated the artistry of both beyond anything they accomplished by themselves. Tragically, little or none of that great togetherness has been preserved.

We had too little of Sills’ artistry here in Los Angeles. The brief visits by her City Opera incurred resentment from local forces over booking time at the Music Center, and the deal was finally torpedoed with an outburst of ignorant proclamations that I hope will never again come to light. Other, happier, memories are there for the keeping.

Maurice Ravel composed his Piano Concerto as a handshake to the American audiences who awaited his first tour of this country. His first movement teems with his new love of the American vernacular; the jazz licks are straight out of Gershwin, maybe a line or two of Paul Whiteman, something of the blues with their flatted sixth note. Then something even more wonderful happens: The solo piano starts the slow movement with a tune fashioned out of pure moonlight. One by one, the winds take it over; when the sheer poignancy has set our souls to rest, the jazz returns for a happy awakening and farewell.

But it’s that slow movement that lingers. At Ojai, Pierre-Laurent Aimard played it just as that famous pink light of dusk engulfed the Valley, and there was no separation between sight and sound. That memory followed me into the Hollywood Bowl a few nights ago, and made it impossible to cope with Andreas Haefliger’s piano made hard-toned and jangly by the amplification, and the music itself made square and unlovely by the pianist’s notion that it existed in small, regular boxes of sound rather than streams of moonlight. The jazz in the outer movements was okay, however, just okay.

So here we are at Bowl time again, that amazing cornucopia of classical music, 10 weeks’ worth, ranging from the inevitable Bruch Violin Concerto with Sarah Chang to Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting music of his own plus a complete Boris Godunov – and all served up, for the choosing, in catered Cytherean luxury or in dollar seats somewhere in Nebraska. No place in the world offers so much for so little. The amplification, with its flaws, is, I am assured, state-of-the-art. There are TV screens so that what you can’t hear you can watch. The fireworks couldn’t be more swell.

Leonard Slatkin conducted the first two weeks of classical concerts, as he has for the last two years. I opted out of Respighi’s Pines of Rome, which followed the Ravel; it came too soon after my trip to Munich, and collided with my jet lag. Actually, the best music making I heard during Slatkin’s stay came the following Tuesday, on a clever program he had arranged – and identified as a nostalgia trip to programs of his childhood at the Bowl (and mine too, at the Boston “Pops”) – that consisted entirely of short pieces, half-and-half trash and precious. “Precious” indeed was the Scherzo from Henry Charles Litolff’s Concerto Symphonique No. 4, with Christopher O’Riley as soloist. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

The piano virtuoso Litolff was another of those obscure Romantics, like the organist Julius Reubke I wrote about some months ago, who gained the admiration and support of Franz Liszt. He turned out several operas, and a small repertory of overstuffed, fustian but curiously attractive piano pieces, which soon vanished from the repertory. This one Scherzo from the fourth of Litolff’s five “Symphonic Concertos” goes clattering up- and downhill, never pausing for breath, spinning huge clouds of virtuosic tracery. There’s a huge legacy of delightful, bad music like this from around 1850, and I love almost every note; the Gottschalk disc that I chortled over a couple of weeks ago belongs on this spider web-draped shelf. This eight-minute tidbit by Litolff – in which O’Riley seemed to be splashing around delightedly – is one of the best. Sad, that only this one movement from the whole concerto ever gets played, and even that not often; I long to hear it all, and never have. How this genre declined, by the way, was tragically demonstrated by the next work on the Bowl program, Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, cobbled together from music from a wartime movie, a compendium of flailings from all the terrible piano concertos – and there were many – concocted in the century since the time of Litolff.

Worth Keeping

Keepers of the Night, which drew good crowds to Glendale’s Alex Theater over the Friday-the-13th weekend, was both an opera-for-children and an opera-with-children that did not insult the musical standards of grown-ups. Many of the latter around me on the night I went, important musical personages all, seemed both surprised and delighted at the charm, sophistication and deep beauty of the music. Inasmuch as the work’s creators, the composer Peter Ash and the librettist Donald Sturrock, bear the stigma of their previous work on Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, one of our opera company’s gloomier escapades, more’s the surprise.

The plotline isn’t much; Shakespeare is not far off, as earthling couples mingle in the affairs of not-quite-earthly (all right, birdly) forest creatures. Everyone undergoes some degree of bewitchment, with the wondrous result, becoming increasingly wondrous as the second act moves on, of a series of ensembles of truly bewitching, complex harmonies. Evocations of Britten’s own “Dream” are hard to dispel; you want to rush home – at least I did – and play that wondrous score until well past midnight.

There were, however, insurmountable obstacles, born of mingling a cast of professional singers with even the genuinely talented kids of the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, in an acoustically imperfect setting – which the Alex stage most emphatically is. On the one hand, here was Suzanna Guzmán, wonderful to hear and hilarious in her many-legged spider getup. (Eat yer heart out, Tobey Maguire!) Up against her were the four children of the bewitched family, almost inaudible except for Brother Dominic, the one in the group whose voice had changed. Microphoning would probably have worsened the imbalance; what to do?

Surely there is a 400-seat in-the-round space somewhere in the area where repertory like this can take hold and flourish. All told, this very worthy work, in an imaginative production conducted by the Master Chorale’s Grant Gershon and directed by Corey Madden, needed the chance for a better life. Keep it.

The grandiose pillared portico of Munich’s National Theater – built in 1825, gutted by our boys in 1943, reopened in 1963 – bespeaks a city that honors and is honored by its opera. Tristan and Die Meistersinger had their premieres there; the shadows of the Richards, Wagner and Strauss, linger at the podium. New operas remain the tradition, even in this city of dark streets and terrible, dark food. So does the tradition of greeting new operas with “storms of booing” (as one critic reported on Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland last week) and then taking later performances to heart. Old European theaters are built with resonant wood floors, even more so than Disney Hall, and a responsive crowd – like the one around me at the third performance of Alice – can stomp out a fair imitation of several thousand timpani, fortissimo. So it was.

Unsuk Chin, 45, born in South Korea, now living in Berlin, is a wondrously versatile composer. Her Violin Concerto, which Kent Nagano brought out with his Berkeley Symphony two seasons ago, is complex and fiendishly difficult to play and to hear. It also happens to be the first truly great work of this millennium. Many of her chamber works have turned up here on “Green Umbrella” concerts; they are easier of access, and some are actually fun. Alice bestrides the broad range of her musical manners. David Henry Hwang’s libretto – in English, and produced in Munich with German supertitles – actually takes in quite a lot of Lewis Carroll’s proto-sci-fi fable, with the twist of enclosing it all in a dream sequence. Achim Freyer both designed and directed, and under both hats he has gone off like a sozzled skyrocket from the libretto’s suggestions. In press interviews, Ms. Chin has intimated that Freyer’s madcap designs have gone too far from her own visions of the Alice story. “Far” they certainly have gone; “too far” I would challenge. This is the best Lewis Carroll since the movie of my childhood that had W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.

On a stage raked at close to a 45-degree angle, Freyer’s Wonderland characters poke their way out of holes, creating a hilarious geometry. An undulating green line turns into a clarinet-playing Caterpillar. A line of urchins wearing soup pots bang upon them in obeisance to a single can of Campbell’s (Mock) Turtle Soup. Most of the characters are masked in some way; only the venerable Gwyneth Jones as the Queen of Hearts, stentorian as ever, comes on in full blush. The composer salutes her presence in the opera with a sly quotation from Turandot, one of Jones’ signature roles. A ballet of gadgetry – disconnected arms and legs, an enormously distended Cheshire Cat, distorted face masks for Alice and her White Rabbit pal – keeps the stage in constant motion.

There is music to match – music, that is, full of stylistic twitches that seem to touch breathlessly on an evocation of Baroque here, a jazzy blast there. Percussion dominates, with additional performers on side stages to complement the huge ensemble down front. Musical events, like the events onstage, whiz by with wondrous speed. Most of the singing takes place offstage, or through masks; only Sally Matthews, in a virtuosic stint as Alice, and Jones as the Queen actually perform onstage, companioned by Freyer’s marvelous array of puppets, marionettes and humanoids of all shapes and sizes.

Nagano conducted. He has for some time been an active advocate for Chin’s music. Two years ago, while still music director of the Los Angeles Opera, he had Alice placed on the agenda here, and there were excerpts played, as a sort of teaser, at the Ojai Festival. Then Nagano departed to become Generalmusikdirektor at the Bayerische Staatsoper; instead of Alice, we got Grendel. A spokesman for the L.A. Opera told me last week that the company is “still committed” to Alice; his boss, Mr. Domingo, stands by the somewhat weaker statement that there is “still hope.” With the company’s ongoing relationship with the great Freyer – The Damnation of Faust in the past, The Ring to come – and with the triumph of Alice still resounding, it strikes me as pure damfoolery not to take the obvious next step.

Bill’s Double Bill

Talk about Grendel: There was another chunk of biz on the Munich stage that put that sorry affair’s infamous Wall to shame. It happened in Salome, when Alan Titus as John the Baptist, not merely rising from his prison cell as a single menacing personage, arose embedded in a huge Gibraltar-like structure, marvelously fetid and menacing, all the more so on a set that was otherwise all squares and straight lines. Hollywood’s own William Friedkin was the director, and the Salome – svelte, blond, insinuating, overpowering – was Angela Denoke; write down her name and remember it. Preceding the Salome was Wolfgang Rihm’s Das Gehege, a dark and cynical monodrama involving a woman (Gabriele Schnaut) who frees a caged eagle, challenges the bird to seduce her and stabs him as he approaches. As with his superb Bartók-Puccini double bill at the L.A. Opera in 2002, Friedkin came up with a way of subtly linking the two works: The same actor (Todd Ford), in the same angel-of-death getup, was cast in the mute roles as the Eagle in the Rihm and the Executioner in Salome, and Friedkin’s program note, in Leberwurst-dense German far over my head, explained their relationship.

Talk about folks from home: On my last night, the program was billed both as Wagner-Gala – meaning dress to the nines – and Oper für Alle – meaning come as you are. I chose the latter, although it actually referred to a huge video installation out in the Platz, where thousands more assembled under misty but not quite rainy skies. Inside, our own Plácido Domingo was Siegmund to Waltraud Meier’s Sieglinde in the first act of Die Walküre, with the fabulous bass René Pape, whom I hadn’t heard before, as Hunding. On his own, Pape sang King Marke’s lament from Tristan; the dressy crowd applauded happily, and the cheers from the happy Wagnerites outside filtered in through that grand portico. Someone who knows these things tells me that this was the hottest ticket of the entire European opera season . . . and me without a necktie!

What can a composer say about his or her music that the music itself cannot say better? The question is voluminously argued, with results that fill libraries. Lately they’ve been filling DVDs as well, with results of varying quality.

Here are two DVDs of recent issue or reissue. Both are documentaries on composers about whom I have expressed a qualm or two over the years (which people seem to remember vividly), along with words of high praise now and then (which nobody except me ever seems to remember). In any case, let that pass for now. One documentary is Frank Scheffer’s Elliott Carter: A Labyrinth of Time, on the Ideale Audience label; the other is Christopher Nupen’s two-part Jean Sibelius documentary, “The Early Years” and “Maturity and Silence,” on Allegro.

The Carter title should itself give off fair warning; through no fault of the venerable composer – now nearing 100 – the program is a labyrinth of metaphor. Somehow a convoluted metaphor involving the passage of time becomes entangled in Scheffer’s script with the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings and the collapse of the tower in the Cocteau film Sang d’un Poète, which Carter seems able to neither explain nor pronounce. The congenial composer is seen at his ease inscribing notes and slur lines on paper, one at a time, in his comfortable apartment, and then turns up for no good reason trudging across the Brooklyn Bridge (quite a trudge from West 12th Street). Illustrious figures, including the pianist and scholar Charles Rosen and the formidable Pierre Boulez, offer eloquent attestation to the stature of Carter among today’s composers, with which I have no argument. I do wonder at Rosen’s evocation of the Carter Cello Sonata as the “synthesis” of his compositional techniques, considering that the work dates from 1948 and, thus, predates virtually all his “significant” works.

Oh, well. We look in on Carter and his wife, the late Helen, bustling around their comfy apartment. “I make the beds,” he says. One genuinely wistful note sounds at the end, considering the, let’s say, prickly regard that his music enjoys in some circles. “Where do you see your music’s future?” he is asked.

“People will become much cleverer and sharper,” answers Elliott Carter. “Then they will like my music.”

You will succumb with far less difficulty, may I suggest, to the passionate beauty of Christopher Nupen’s Sibelius study. I did when it circulated on laserdisc; now it returns all that deeper, richer and more powerful. There is no metaphorical nonsense here, except what the music itself wants us to know. The biographical details are detailed and lavish. Musical performance matters are in the hands of the excellent Vladimir Ashkenazy, and there are two remarkable visual effects. One comes at the end of every work, when the camera captures the orchestra from behind as the string players hold their bows skyward and it’s like a Sibelius ocean. The other is the remarkable plastic face of Ashkenazy himself, so eloquent as a conductor that you wonder why he wasted all those years in his admittedly excellent career as a pianist.

Every detail of the entire range of Sibelius’ symphonic career is carefully and honestly explained in Nupen’s painstaking prose; he has had some first-rate researchers. I’m only sorry that he has stopped short of the tone poems, which, as you know, are a Salonen specialty. As it is, I urge you to acquire this exceptional DVD – 151 minutes on one disc! – as preparation for our Philharmonic’s Sibelius splurge this fall (along with the chapter in the Alex Ross book I mentioned last week, which will also be out by then).

Now, about those 151 minutes . . . The last 30 of these are a kind of Christopher Nupen teaser, bits and pieces from some of his other documentaries of fond memories. There is one 30-second bit that you will play over and over: Jacqueline du Pré alone in a railway car, hugging her cello and plucking out something or other in sheer ecstasy. There’s more besides, but those few seconds are worth everything.

Action Shots

For Glenn Gould Hereafter (Ideale Audience), Bruno Monsaingeon has gathered a lot of old performance videos, much of them a young and tiresome Gould motor-mouthing, but set against some exhilarating piano performance. The worst is that this is another of these superimposed scenarios, a passel of obnoxious characters in communion with Gould revenant. The best of it, besides the music, are the miles upon miles of Canadian autumnal scenery. Twenty-five years after his death, Gould’s niche remains unchallenged. Would the Goldberg Variations figure in today’s vernacular had he not, as an exuberant but endearing brat, arrogantly updated them in his sexy 1956 recording? (To his credit, he then went on to learn their essence in time to record them once more.) A vast legacy remains on compact disc of the strengths, the originality – and, indeed, the occasional maddening wrong-headedness – of Gould’s musical thinking. It will, I fear, soon disappear; grab it now or never. On the Monsaingeon DVD, there’s lots of music in dribs and drabs, but not a single complete work and, therefore, no real evidence of what this dazzling, fascinating, irritating young genius really thought or really could do.

Spend a truly uplifting hour with Carlo Maria Giulini as he rehearses the Stuttgart Radio Symphony in Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, and another hour as he performs the work, on an ArtHaus DVD. The year is 1997; Giulini is 83, 13 years departed from Los Angeles. There are deeper lines in that handsome, Italian face and a little more around the middle, but the eloquence, the graceful movement in the arms, the pleading in the eyes: They are still there. “Please,” he tells the winds, “I can’t say it too often. We must sing.” And another time, again to the winds: “You give too much ‘puh.’ I like more ‘aaah.’ ” At the very end of the first movement, there’s a fascinating exchange, as Giulini adjusts Bruckner’s marking between trumpet and trombone, the smallest dynamic detail. It’s what a conductor defines as a minor detail, and you and I hear as a great performance.

“MaryAnn Bonino comes into the room,” I wrote in this space in 1992, “and her smile is like the lighting of a hundred crystal chandeliers.” Last Friday at the Doheny Mansion, there was still that light, but also a sad shadow Bonino was there to announce her stepping down as head of the Da Camera Society, which since 1973 has brought world-renowned performance artists to play in settings worthy of them, the series known as “Chamber Music in Historic Sites,” which greatly enhances the audible and visible prestige of this area. The series will continue under the able leadership of the young Kelly Garrison, organist at St. Basil’s and a Bonino protégé these last several years. Garrison is a charming fellow, but nobody played a room like Bonino and her smile. Her future projects include writing histories of the magnificent Doheny home in the Adams District, where these concerts began and where many of them still go on, and of the Dohenys themselves, one of this city’s great families, who brought the likes of the fabulous tenor John McCormack to serenade their guests. In other words, Bonino is dropping out while staying put.

Youth Has Its Sing: Google your way to the Alex Prior Web site and hear 14-year-old Prior, still this side of voice change, deliver Puccini’s tenor socko “Nessun dorma” in the boy-soprano range, a bit wobbly at that. He throws in an extra “Vincero!!!” at the end to even out the cadences, but the audience in the Kremlin – at least the bigwigs around Russian President Vladimir Putin – looks unmoved. Brit-born Prior is studying (what? all kinds of things!) in St. Petersburg, where he has composed ballets and symphonies, and is now working on an operatic version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Hey, Jay!: Perhaps this is the time to look in on Jay Greenberg, another teenage prodigy, who stole the heart of a New York Times correspondent a year ago with his, well, prodigality. Alas, there is nothing on the Greenberg Web site since last August. Can it be?

Curious Replacements Along Parallel Pretexts: The excellent Peter Davis, whom New York magazine fired recently on the pretext that it didn’t need a music critic, has now been replaced by Justin Davidson, former music critic of Newsday, on the pretext that Davidson will also write about architecture (and the unspoken pretext that he owns a Pulitzer and is a couple of decades younger than Davis). Even from over 2,400 aeronautical miles, this smells. And while we’re at it, I wonder at William Friedkin’s hilarious staging of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi being dumped by the L.A. Opera after one time out, with the opera handed over to Woody Allen to direct in the 2008 season. Of the operas that make up that triple bill, I should think that the gooey, lachrymose Suor Angelica would far more need the Woody touch.

The New Gibberish, Anatomical Division: (David Mermelstein, on Esa-Pekka, in The Wall Street Journal):

“One notices that his apple cheeks are giving way to jowls.”

Evidence of the Disappearance of the Symphony: At its annual meeting last week, the 65-year-old American Symphony Orchestra League voted to change its name next September to the League of the American Orchestra. Whether the move will immediately enfranchise other orchestras not quite symphonic to join the league isn’t immediately known, but it’s significant that the voting took place in Nashville.

Leakage: The same day’s mail brought the galleys of Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise, as avidly awaited in circles close to me as that Potter affair seems to be in others also not far off. The publication date isn’t until mid-October, so I am bound to silence, or something close. Within the bounds of friendship, in this case, I don’t see anything wrong in suggesting that “avidly,” in the matter at hand, might well be tantamount to “deservedly”; after all, you’ve surveyed the level of his writing in Ross’ columns in The New Yorker and in his blog named like the book. Furthermore, there is some leakage afoot. Ross has allowed the prepublication in the magazine of an entire chapter, as a teaser you might say; it happens to be the first chapter my eyes fell upon when the galleys arrived, the dark, elegiac piece on Jean Sibelius, largely on his symphonies, bearing the title “Apparition From the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius.” There is strength and eloquence here, and the fascination with history going back into wonderful caverns of atmosphere such to make any listener – myself included – rush out to rehear these strange, multicolored works. How can an orchestra, or a league of orchestras, shirk the modifier “symphony,” confronted with such heritage? And, of course, the book hits the market just as our own Philharmonic starts the new season with its own Sibelius Cycle, a survey of exactly that music. Do I hear some wheels interlocking? Do I care?

And still they come. There’s no way of knowing where the latest classical disc releases may be had – something-or-other dot-com seems to be the easiest manner of acquisition – but some producers continue to behave as if the market were happy and flourishing, and there are releases out there worth your attention at full price. One of those apparent optimists is the French firm Harmonia Mundi, always a class act, whether at its home base in ravishing Arles or at its local branch in picturesque Burbank.

Philippe Herreweghe is one of the company’s star conductors, Belgian-born, now 60, a musician of exceptional probity and depth, particularly so in the way he can maintain a rich choral texture with the whole musical fabric resonant and clear. His Bach recordings on Harmonia Mundi are remarkable. The Mass, the Passions and a number of the “plus belles” cantatas reach that splendid middle ground: the clarity that casts clear light through the marvelous intricacy of Bach’s choral writing, mingled with the wondrous soft light that makes the mysterious beauty of Bach continually just beyond our reach.

Now there is a new Herreweghe release, perhaps even more mysterious: two discs, 88 minutes of choral music by Heinrich Schütz, German genius of the early Baroque. A contemporary and one-time pupil of Monteverdi, Schütz was a master on his own of the same kind of sudden harmonic coloration that can send the chill up the spine as a key dramatic word is illuminated in sudden dramatic underscoring. He composed exclusively for the church. In Dresden in the 1660s, about 10 years before his death, he began to prepare for that event by creating a setting of the huge text of Psalm 119, a series of motets to be sung at his funeral. It never happened; the manuscript was scattered, and only collected and performed in the 1970s. Whatever the funeral attendees may have missed in 1672 is our gain today.

The music is long, solemn and gorgeous. The chorus is Herreweghe’s 26-member Collegium Vocale of Ghent, with brass, strings and organ from the Concerto Palatino. Listen with a folio of Hieronymus Bosch on your lap, and keep the lights down.

The mood of this music continues, more or less, into the Third, or “Rhenish,” Symphony of Robert Schumann, not quite two centuries later and, appropriately, also on hand in a superb new Herreweghe performance on Harmonia Mundi – this time with l’Orchestre des Champs-Elysées. The best of this music is the movement that seems to capture, and hold in suspension, an ageless solemnity looking back to old Schütz, Bosch and beyond. Schumann’s First Symphony, which shares the disc, is not at all solemn, is much more fun, and dances happily under Herreweghe’s affectionate leadership.

Pianists Named David

From Virgin Classics comes some spectacular work at the piano by a photogenic young man named David Fray, who came before the microphones at 20, just out of the Conservatoire, and plays the Allemande from Bach’s D-major Partita so slowly (11’34″ with repeats) as to enchant the program annotator almost to the point of gurgle. (Let him be advised that Glenn Gould plays the same movement at 6’27″ without repeats, which comes to 12’54″ with.) Young Mr. Fray clatters his way through two major Bach works and the Notations and Incises of Pierre Boulez. His fingers, from the pictures, look about 2 feet long, which may be why they sound so distant from his heart.

David Fung makes his recording debut on Yarlung, a local label; aside from a set of inconsequential Tan Dun pieces, his program is standard debut stuff: Mozart, Schumann, Rachmaninoff. Yes, he plays them very well. No, this is no way for a talented young pianist (which I presume he is) to make any kind of mark. Who does he want to hear this disc? Interested critics or adoring relatives? If the latter, give them Mozart, Schumann and Tan Dun. If the former, at least the other David played Boulez, and even got to pose with him.

‘Tis of Thee

Back in the days of the LP, it was an act of considerable heroism for Goddard Lieberson’s Columbia Records to devote time and money to recording serious American music. Today, nearly every important event takes place in front of a microphone and a competent engineer, and now there is Naxos to build its considerable catalog of Americana from new and recently archived performances. And while Lieberson’s label nourished itself primarily on the luxury of New York performances, the Naxos catalog reaches far, wide and, now and then, risky.

Here, for example, is a perfect delight of a disc, of music from that grand pioneer Louis Gottschalk, who charmed the crowds here and abroad up through Civil War days with flamboyant, virtuosic display pieces. From last year’s Hot Springs (Arkansas) Festival comes a whole disc of Gottschalk’s orchestral works, and it’s a hoot. It includes the hilariously lovable Célèbre Tarantelle and Night in the Tropics, guaranteed to lift you off your seat on first hearing, and Gottschalk’s own arrangement for five pianos, nine horns and 112-piece orchestra of The Young King Henry’s Hunt (don’t ask). There’s even an opera, 13 minutes long, something Cuban. The Hot Springs forces are led by a certain Richard Rosenberg, and you haven’t heard any of the soloists, so you don’t need to now. The performances are as good as they need to be at the price; don’t forget, this is Naxos.

Even more worth your while is a disc of works by Charles Wuorinen, the New York composer who has worked for a time in the shadow of atonality but has more recently emerged into a more congenial, if intensely brainy, musical style, moved energetically forward by lively contrapuntal adventures. Two works on the disc are remastered archive recordings by the Group for Contemporary Music of superfond memory. They are for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, which was also the constitution of an ensemble called Tashi, and that – hold on – is the name of the first of the two pieces. (The other, for the same scoring, is called Fortune.) These are big, stirring, somewhat nerve-racking pieces, wonderful listening. In between comes a percussion quartet, played by a group from New Jersey, and that, too, is a dandy. So, in fact, is the whole disc.

Only György Ligeti could have dreamed it up. And while his Poème Symphonique actually had had its premiere several decades ago (in 1962) and many thousand miles away (in the Netherlands), it proved exactly the right curtain raiser for this 61st run of the wondrously indescribable festival-like-none-other that ennobled a long weekend up among the orange groves and horse farms at Ojai earlier this month. After a couple of years of worrisome relaxation, this was one of the best of the festivals, a return to the good old Ojai days of musical high adventure, some exasperation, deep satisfaction and sheer, delightful insanity. The Ligeti piece on opening night summed up quite a lot of that.

Let me describe what happened. One hundred metronomes – the old-fashioned, wind-up variety – were set up on 10 tables surrounding the outdoor audience area in Libbey Park, and were all wound and set off by operators, simultaneously, at tempo settings specified by the composer. (The entire score consists of one sheet of instructions.) The sounds of tick-tock filled the air – best heard on a sublimely warm, starlit night such as the gods afforded the entire weekend at Ojai. Gradually, after maybe five minutes, the rhythms began to fragment, as one metronome after another succumbed to mechanical realities. By 20 minutes, a real drama had taken hold; you began to think of all those movies, most of them bad, about the end of the world – On the Beach, maybe – and the band of survivors dying off one by one. Two metronomes survived, then one, then silence; you beat back a sob. Who but Ligeti could dream up such meaningful madness, such genuine tragedy, and then attach such a pompous title? His Poème Symphonique remained with me all weekend.

There was more Ligeti at the festival’s end, the Piano Concerto of 1986, that creative period late in his life, when great, exuberant works such as this seemed to erupt effortlessly. Two stunningly able musicians bear Ligeti’s banner forward, and they were both at Ojai: the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the conductor Peter Eötvös (UHT-vuhsh), and their collaboration in this concerto (and in the Ravel concerto to close the weekend) was the stuff of dreams. So is Ligeti’s concerto itself. I love the way he turns the harmony crazy every so often by dragging in unruly, untunable instruments such as the ocarina; his rhythms, with their illusion of several speeds happening at once, are crazier still. Somehow, this all seemed to embody everything unique and singularly wonderful about Ojai. There was another occasion when Ligeti’s music dominated the festival: 1989, when Pierre Boulez was the conductor and the Arditti Quartet played. It rained the whole weekend, and the Philharmonic musicians played in heavy jackets. This time around served as expiation.

Bang

Even Tom Morris joined in. The festival’s able artistic director, formerly of Cleveland, showed up among the percussion ensemble in Stravinsky’s Les Noces in the Friday-night concert and, as far as I could tell, didn’t miss a beat. Stravinsky’s epically vulgar foray into Russian prenuptial manners deserves more hearings; it would make a splendid thunder in Disney Hall. And so it did at Ojai, with an all-star cast including Kevin Short, our recent Porgy. Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion began that program, with Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich at the pianos, and in the middle was quite an exciting work by the multitalented Eötvös, his Sonata per Sei for pianos, percussion and sampler keyboard, something of a memorial piece to Bartók but a knockout work on its own.

Percussion, as I was saying, supplied the beat for most of the festival. One of the morning concerts was taken over by Nexus, the Toronto-based quintet, with a program heavy on novelty (bird songs) and light on the serious repertory. Okay; the coordination, plus charm, in Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood was highlight enough for any morning, and I also happen to be a sucker for old-timey Tin Pan Alley songs on the xylophone.

Aimard’s solo recital filled the other morning concert with his remarkable brain – and fingers to match – operating at full force. First came an uninterrupted sequence: Quiet, reflective, short pieces from late in Schumann’s life segued into two parts of Bach’s final Art of the Fugue segued into short bits by Elliott Carter. The whole 25-minute sequence was more cohesive in the hearing than the telling could convey. Then came Charles Ives’ “Concord” Sonata, whose cohesion, if any, was impaired by the introduction of ponderous descriptive material between movements, ponderously delivered by a local resident. I don’t want to believe that this was Aimard’s idea; his performance of the Ives, at Ojai and on disc, has a rich lyric progression. He succeeds in integrating the work’s obsession with the “Beethoven Fifth” motif into the flow better than any musician I’ve heard; why, then, this artifice? The printed program notes on the work were more informative.

One more concert I found less admirable: Chinese Opera, more Eötvös but less scrutable; not Chinese and not opera, he claims; then what? It’s a set of rowdy tone pictures of European theatrical directors worthy of the composer’s admiration. Filling most of that program was Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, not in its redolent, haunting orchestral colors that have nourished our souls with memories of Bruno Walter’s conducting and Kathleen Ferrier’s final “ewig . . . ewig,” but in a “portable” chamber-orchestra version prepared by Arnold Schoenberg among others. Monica Groop, well-known in these parts, sang admirably; a new tenor, Sean Panikkar, with a bright gleam of a voice, sounds like a real find; Douglas Boyd drew whatever sounds from the excellent St. Paul Chamber Orchestra that the arrangers allowed to remain. Mahler, however, it wasn’t.

Ojai, however, it was. Dawn Upshaw, a festival semiregular (and goddess) returns next year, and the music director is native son David Robertson. About time.

Obiter dictum: Concerning the music-critic merry-go-round reported upon last week: Pierre Ruhe reports that he has been rehired by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in “materially” the same capacity as when he was fired as critic. I’d watch that “materially.”

The opera company that rose to distinction with Don Carlo, Poppea and Mahagonny during its excellent season lurched toward triviality at season’s end, first with last month’s overproduced, overstuffed Merry Widow and now with Luisa Fernanda. In a press briefing a week before the premiere, general director Plácido Domingo expressed the idea of founding a bicoastal troupe devoted to zarzuela, the endearing Hispanic musical theater studded with popular masterpieces, of which Federico Moreno Torroba’s Luisa Fernanda, out of his 80, is one. Domingo stopped short of proclaiming a glowing future for such a fragile, small, winsome entertainment adrift in a 3,000-plus-seat grand-opera house at $200-plus tickets; such a dream demands fulfillment in a setting smaller and friendlier to the art and its audience. However, since his personal history includes years in his parents’ zarzuela troupe in Spain and in Mexico, I suppose it was inevitable that he’d be impatient to share this chapter of his personal history, however inappropriate the venue. Hence the current Luisa Fernanda in Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion, a small, pretty bird where elephants once trod.

Domingo has cast himself in a leading role, one of Luisa’s rival suitors, thus placing others in this unbalanced cast at a disadvantage – most of all his almost voiceless rival, tenor Antonio Gandía, who actually makes off with the girl at the end – but assuring capacity ticket sales for the seven-performance run. There is nothing in Torroba’s pretty score, which dates from 1932, that you haven’t heard in some of this city’s best restaurants. Domingo was in fair voice on opening night, and so was Yali-Marie Williams, a mettlesome, strong-voiced soprano who took over for the “indisposed” star in the title role. Some old friends – the splendid mezzo Suzanna Guzman for one, always a welcome sight and sound – appear in minor roles. The sets, by old-time zarzuela hand Emilio Sagi, who also stage-directs, have already made the rounds of Madrid’s Teatro Real (as you can see on an ArtHaus DVD) and Domingo’s Washington Opera. They are a curious mix: rooms furnished with rows of plain ladderback chairs, with faint shadows of dancers behind a scrim, and a huge tree at the end that is pretty but cramps the whole stage, some striking abstractions, some washed-out emptiness. I gather that the zarzuela tradition does not embrace fancy scenery.

What I Do and Why

The small annoyances pass while the darker clouds gather. The news about classical music is not good; let’s face it. For every successful programming adventure by orchestra managements here or in San Francisco, for every signing of a dazzling and promising new talent, there is news of record companies going under, of orchestras cutting back on projects. The perpetrators are in trouble, and so, now, are the judges, as though Mr. Bush had decided that we could get along with only four or five justices on the Supreme Court – or maybe none.

New York Magazine has just fired Peter Davis, one of its only two classical music critics since it began, as a Sunday supplement to the Herald Tribune, in 1963. (I was the other.) It can get along without a critic, says the editor. Okay, New York has others to look after its busy musical life, including The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, whom I aspire to be someday, but what about Atlanta and Minneapolis, whose major papers have lost or drastically cut back on coverage?

The loudest argument advanced by editors is that classical events usually occur only once or twice, so that they’re gone by the time the review appears (in a daily) or long gone (in the paper you hold). That puts yesterday’s Philharmonic concert in the same league with yesterday’s Dodgers game – and it doesn’t really work there either. The sun shines brighter when the Dodgers win than when they don’t. Classical music aerates a community; we’ve had explosive proof with Disney Hall. It comes cloaked in a certain air of mystery, which the critic is there to penetrate. Because it has a strong impact on emotions, it also generates a lot of nut cases who, these days, have access to the Internet, so that we have both not enough music criticism – or, let’s call it, “writing around music” – and too much in the form of blogs. Alex Ross’ blog, TheRestIsNoise.com, is, however, required daily reading, for its own wisdom, for its generosity in linking to many of those others out there, and for the photos of his gorgeous cats.

This goes nowhere toward addressing the growing problem. A community’s musical life needs a spokesperson – no, more than one, it needs a couple who can disagree, as I do with Mark Swed , who loves Luisa Fernanda – whose credentials have been checked to include some degree of musical education. It disturbs me greatly that Peter Davis in New York, Pierre Ruhe in Atlanta and Michael Anthony in Minneapolis – guys of exceptional musical intelligence – are having their wings trimmed or lopped off. What bothers me even more is the double talk from their former employers, to the effect that the musical life in their respective communities – at a time when the falling off of ticket sales, new-music creativity, school activity, and every other sign you can name of music’s need for strong, intelligent evangelism at the center of each and every community – can somehow survive without the words of serious critical leadership.

Being a critic at its best means, to me, becoming worked up over an experience and simply bursting to share it. The words often begin to come in the car on the way home. After Karel Husa’s Music for Prague, I knew by the time I passed the La Brea turnoff that I had to use the B word for the first time in my life. (The one other time was a quote.) But my favorite experience – perhaps ever – came last fall, when I got so angry over Chris Pasles’ ignorant putdown of the L.A. Opera’s Poppea that I circularized my mailing list imploring people to ignore it, spread the word and go. The opera company sold out the run, and I think I may have helped. That’s what critics do.

The elderly white-haired gentleman sat on the stage and smiled. “This is one of the world’s greatest composers,” said Steven Stucky by way of introducing his old teacher from Cornell University days. “He is the world’s greatest composer,” repeats KUSC’s Jim Svejda about his Czech mate, week after week, in a heartwarming litany. Now, at 85, Karel Husa himself had come to visit, to listen and smile some more at Music for Prague 1968, his best-known work, racking up 7,000 performances so far. Strange to relate, the Philharmonic had only gotten around to performing it last week, for the first time.

Strange? Strange that the most famous score by the world’s greatest composer – or so proclaimed – has taken nearly four decades to reach our local forces? That it has never been recorded by a major orchestra? Or on a major label? I’ll give you a hint: It isn’t very good.

The work was originally written for school band, with a lot of sharp licks that can lift a band into a fair imitation of seriousness. That, I suspect, accounts for a large part of the work’s circulation; large, meaty chunks of serious-pretending band music, especially with a deeply personal program attached, make for socko programming. Mr. Husa was born in Prague, studied here and there, settled permanently in the U.S. in 1954 and obtained U.S. citizenship four years later. Fourteen years later came the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Mr. Husa suddenly became, in press releases at least, a heroic exile – from the country he had willingly forsaken long before. He composed this half-hour of orchestral meandering with a meaningful title attached to ensure fame: patches of nontonality here to secure his place in his own century, big militant noises there to attempt a handshake with fellow sufferer Shostakovich, a Bartók rip-off (merely embarrassing), and, at the end, a Czech anthem and some bells to proclaim some semblance of nationality with every cliché well in place.

I extend my homage to Esa-Pekka Salonen, who extracted enough agreeable noise from the work to elicit the normal Los Angeles standing ovation. (Rude question, which I, at almost Husa’s age, feel entitled to ask: Were they standing out of obeisance to all this “greatest” hype, or for what they heard in the clogged, constipated music?) I find it curious how little of Husa’s music shows up across the orchestral landscape, in the U.S. or abroad. His fame is maintained by small pockets of dedicated enthusiasts – my colleague at KUSC, or another local spokesman, Byron Adams, author of the simpering Husa article in Grove’s Dictionary. I cannot question the authenticity of their devotion; I just wonder what in hell they hear.

Elsewhere on Thursday’s program, there was much to hear, much that gave pleasure; this was next-to-last in the remarkably rewarding “Shadow of Stalin” series, devoted this time to lives just east of the Iron Curtain. First came Gyouml;rgy Ligeti, earlier music from his pen than most of us know, delightful and sweet. Yet this Concert Românesc had raised waves, banned by Bucharest authorities after one rehearsal; today, it sounds like a louder and more inebriated paraphrase of one of Enesco’s Romanian Rhapsodies, and a lot more fun that Salonen, aided by a couple of offstage musicians, rode to glory.

At the end came Witold Lutoslawski – another of Steve Stucky’s teachers, and a familiar and much-admired visitor here in his last years. His Concerto for Orchestra preceded those years. It dates from 1954, and shows a composer in his early 40s, writing with the ebullience and the wit that stayed with him to the end, but working within limits carefully defined by a watchful Soviet rule. The music is strongly outlined, folk or folklike, splendidly bright in coloration. You already know, from this early flight, where this composer will soar once his wings are set free.

Positive VibrationsI cannot find enough words of praise for the Philharmonic management for the outlay of imagination, and its realization in special projects like these “Shadow of Stalin” concerts and the “Minimalist Jukebox” of fond memory. They convey the message that the Philharmonic exists as a positive force in creating a culturally aware, informed public. The success has been overwhelming. You could have argued in the first year at Disney Hall that people were being lured by the new hall. Now it is four years later, and you should have seen the crowd on May 25 for a concert of excerpts from two Shostakovich operas and some other grinding Soviet stuff – by no measure an easy-listening program. You couldn’t get near the place; the crowd was mixed in age; at the end, they stayed to cheer their collective heads off – not dash out to grab a taxi as in New York.

The concerts themselves were put together with high imagination. It was a nice touch to have an old, original art-nouveau theremin on the stage, standing beside the one that was actually performed upon, during Gavriil Popov’s Komsomol Patron of Electrification. (I’m sorry to have missed “Pravda,” the all-nighter, with the orchestra of 10 theremins, but I had a note from my doctor.) There were valuable film clips, and a fabulous climax with a complete screening of the Eisenstein masterpiece Alexander Nevsky with Prokofiev’s music performed live by Salonen and the Philharmonic, energized by the screen over their heads. Is there a more spine-crushing sequence in all film sound than those crashes of Prokofiev’s motoric, propulsive music in Nevsky against the bodies and steel of Eisenstein’s opposing armies? And wasn’t it further amazing to hear the splendor of that horrific noise resounding in Disney?

I wrote about Popov in 2004, at the appearance on disc of his one unadulterated symphonic work before Stalin’s ax fell, a First Symphony lasting some 50 minutes; I still hope to hear a proper live performance. The film score, as its title suggests, was somewhat more unruly in style, but there are flashes of a lyric style of considerable depth. Of the major musical talents that emerged during the time of Stalin and then fought to emerge from his shadow, Popov’s throttled genius constitutes a Russian tragedy all its own.

The first was Street Scene, the most ambitious and closest-to-opera of Kurt Weill’s Broadway productions, indeed excoriated in some quarters for its pretensions at its 1946 opening (I was there). Yet these ambitions seemed not to daunt a brave ensemble from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, which mounted a lively, nicely staged, stark and vigorous facsimile of both drama and music at its home theater at Cal State University. Stephanie Vlahos, who has sung roles with the L.A. Opera, did the staging; Alan Mautner led the full-size student orchestra; Victoria Profitt designed the set, not the awesome streetscape I remember from 1946, perhaps, but not at all bad.

Street Scene is a long and powerful show; opera companies here and abroad have taken it up, to good advantage. One cut too many in the second act of this performance sped the action from the murder to the murderer’s capture somewhat hastily. On the other hand, the program book itself carried a series of interesting essays on the characters in the drama, written by the student cast members themselves and offering a set of insights into the tonalities of the performance. Nice idea!

Over on the Westside, the Hamilton High School Academy of Music busied itself with nothing less than Les Miz in nine single-cast performances (with only one trip to the ER, says cast mom Gail Eichenthal). Founded nearly 20 years ago as a magnet within Hamilton High, the academy remains phenomenally active within many performance fields; earlier this season, it furnished the strings, percussion, recorders and hand bells for the glorious riot of Noah’s Flood under James Conlon at the cathedral (on the last day it rained).

I’ve seen Les Misérables before, but never with so much pleasure. It wasn’t only a matter of lusty, young voices singing the daylights out of themselves; it was that, plus the tremendous joy of their doing that with one another, discovering early in the run what marvels occur when voices blend. Lots of Les Miz is secondhand trash, but those guys, the Messrs. Boublil and Schonberg, knew how to compose musical ensembles, and that’s what their show is full of.

Joshua Finkel directed, Jim Foschia led the all-student orchestra, John Hamilton was the chorus master, and when those revolutionist-choristers piled up against the Paris barricades and fought off the right-wingers, you couldn’t ask for better musical theater at any price. And while it’s wrong to pick out individual names of participants in student productions, if Eichenthal’s kid, and the young gentleman who managed the passions of Jean Valjean, and the fabulous meanie who did the Inspector Javert – including a quite convincing suicide leap – survived the nine performances sounding as terrific as they did on the second night, we’ve got some great singers in our theatrical future.

Eloquent Endings

There is this amazing music by Franz Schubert: Song of the Spirits Over the Waters. The words are by Goethe, a metaphor of souls intertwined with watery images. Schubert struggled four separate times with setting the words to music, and finally came up with a richly colored, dark and resonant piece for eight solo men’s voices and five low strings – violas, cellos and a double bass – an impractical scoring seldom heard in concerts considering its extraordinary beauty. Trust the loving serendipity of the Jacaranda guys Patrick and Mark to bring the work forward, which they did to close the last of this season’s concerts, Saturday night at Santa Monica’s First Pres before another sold-out crowd.

It was another of their intricately planned, imaginative programs: all Viennese this time, starting with the Romantic landscape already under clouds (Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, handsomely dispatched by Mark Robson), stepping back into sporadic sunshine for a Mahler group sung by the splendid bass-baritone Dean Elzinga. Beyond Mahler came a plunge into Schoenbergian non-tonality with the Opus 19 Piano Pieces played by Gloria Cheng and the wartime melodrama Ode to Napoleon, again with Elzinga. Came then the Schubert: “Soul of Man, how like water you are…,” a clearing of the air, a benediction.

Next season, announce the Jacaranda people, is the centennial of Olivier Messiaen, and this will initiate a two-year hommage: something of his on every program, and much other music by composers reached by his music and/or his spirit. There will also be eight concerts, more than ever before. The growth of this superbly planned and managed series adds to the sense of strength and enterprise – and, therefore, of pride – in all of this region’s musical life.

Jeffrey Kahane’s return to his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, after a doctor-ordered dropout, drew a happy welcome; he, too, is the object of great local pride and, let him not forget, he owes us – at his pleasure – one final Mozart concerto bash.

This time, instead, there was a pleasant new work – if along LACO’s typical blandness propensities – by composer in residence Gernot Wolfgang, Desert Wind, involving jazz accents and some bright statements by horn (Richard Todd) and oboe (Allan Vogel) soloists. Somewhat livelier was Astor Piazzolla’s delightful, jocular Vivaldi rip-off, his own Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, with violinist Lindsay Deutsch spinning her own magic webs around Piazzolla’s pseudo-Baroque patterns and the music zeroing in close to its original source material at the charming close. On her and Vivaldi’s own, Deutsch contributed one original “Season” and could, for my money, have danced all night.

From Behind the CurtainIn 1987, the great opera director and bridge builder Sarah Caldwell conceived a plan: a yearly exchange between Soviet and American composers, each group coming through the Iron Curtain with music and musicians previously unknown on the other side. The plan lasted exactly one year, but in Boston that year, we learned several new names and some fascinating new music. The Boston Symphony played symphonies by Alfred Schnittke; there was chamber music by Sofia Gubaidulina. Both composers – dowdy, gray, as if in their first time out of the mineshaft – were among the many in attendance. The Soviet Information Agency had set up a listening room with tapes. Gubaidulina’s music – including a wonderful concerto for bassoon and low strings, which deserves new performances – amazed us all. Now that both composers and their countrymen are old friends on Western programs, it’s amazing to realize how recently hearing their music seemed so difficult, even dangerous.

That’s what’s behind the Philharmonic’s title, “Shadow of Stalin,” for its current, fascinating concert series. Even after Stalin’s death, Iron Curtain composers needed to resort to certain subterfuges to cover up their most serious creative impulses. Both Gubaidulina and Schnittke composed film scores for their major income, along with other “happy” music on Khrushchev-era socialist-realist lines, in order to be able to scoot into dark rooms and compose works such as we heard on Tuesday’s program. Gubaidulina’s 1979 In Croce is an amazing work for cello (the Philharmonic’s Ben Hong) and organ (Mark Robson), ecstatic and ecstatically played: hypnotic, intense, an unceasing 19-minute mantra. Concordanza, an earlier (1971) work for chamber ensemble, held the attention in other ways: gritty, unyielding, unsmiling, like my early memories of the composer herself.

Schnittke’s Fourth Symphony of 1984 ended the program, a work built out of bell sonorities and, at the end, brief snips of wordless chant, convoluted and, to my mind, not likable. A big-boned performance under the Philharmonic’s associate conductor Alexander Mickelthwate stated its case; other works by Schnittke – including a boisterous First Symphony that includes a rock band, a marching band and a jazz band, all of them bursting into a garland of quotations from symphonies of the past – strike me as considerably more endearing.

EpitomeTwo major creative spirits collaborated in the spellbinding music that hammered at the beams of Disney Hall on Wednesday, and at the collective souls of the sellout crowd within those walls. One was the spirit of Charles Mingus, bygone but endearingly alive, whose variorum collection of music – some his very own, some snuck in from revered other sources – bore the collective title of Epitaph. The other was Gunther Schuller, jazz and classical scholar, musician under many hats, coiner of the term “Third Stream,” who had assembled and edited the Mingus collection for a performance in 1989, then subjected the work to 18 more years of expansion and “creative evolution.” With his help, Mingus’ widow, Sue, has organized a 31-member jazz ensemble whose musicians, Schuller notes, “play jazz that is even more advanced than what Mingus wrote,” and turned out a three-hour chilling masterwork, which in its frequent great moments simply astounds any aware listener with the strength and resolution of its complexity at one moment, its quiet, wrenching beauty at another.

I write, bear in mind, as a newcomer and enchanted discoverer. I remember walking away from my friends’ records of progressive jazz – Mingus among them – in college days, when I should have been receptive. Now I enjoy being transformed, of discovering – in my head and in my spinal column – the hand of a real composer, as plates of genius brass clash against one another in the Mingus “Better Get It in Your Soul” or as horizons darkly vibrate in his “Chill of Death.” There was much to be learned, too, in the variety in the Mingus grab bag: the serene, dark lyricism of an Ellington number, the guileless charm in a Jelly Roll Morton blues. This was an event full of varied racketing; Charlie Mingus, who spoke of Epitaph as a “symphony,” surely smiled his approval.

Mixed BagTime has run out on Time Cycle. Lukas Foss’ adventure in contemporary chic – fluky rhythmic patterns, odd placements on the stage, the players called upon to whisper – served the needs of the Bernstein crowd in the 1960s to pass as new-music supporters. It was the centerpiece of Thursday’s curious collection of new and not-quite-new music, and its struggles toward with-it status turned it into the evening’s most old-fashioned music. Even the delightful bluster of Samuel Barber’s authentically hoary Toccata Festiva, which began the program, with its bingety-bang organ cadenza nobly dispatched by Simon Preston, was at least an honest work of its kind. Not even Dawn Upshaw’s brave management of the Foss vocal tricks could render that music honest.

But Upshaw was also there to sing the music of Osvaldo Golijov, and that is the heaven-made collaboration of our time: a wonderfully perceptive composer whose lyric sense is shaped and colored by a particular “rainbow of a voice” (his words). Golijov has orchestrated three of his songs into a cycle lasting nearly half an hour; the songs, in three languages, summon up the full range of a singer’s versatility. The middle song, “Lúa Descolorida,” is familiar from Upshaw’s performances at Ojai, and it racks the soul: the lament of a tortured conscience under an unforgiving moon. A charming Yiddish lullaby begins the cycle; sad poetry of Emily Dickinson ends it. A DG recording with Upshaw is out this month. When you hear it, and fall under the spell of that “rainbow,” you’ll know why I had to forgo the West Side Story dances at the concert’s end, the very bejesus out of which I’m sure Maestro Mickelthwate conducted.

Of a couple of dozen productions I have attended of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, the one currently at the Music Center (through this weekend) is by some distance the finest and the most enjoyable. It contains the most of George’s music, in an opera often cut, properly treated by both vocal and orchestral forces under John DeMain, who, it might as well be admitted, knows how the music goes better than anyone else alive. The staging, by Francesca Zambello, has no blind, deaf or dull spot; it takes off at a breathless pace at the rise of the curtain and doesn’t perceptibly stop for breath (or allow any of us to do the same) for its approximately three hours’ length. That’s about the same number of hours as last week’s Merry Widow, by the way, whose demands on your time, you could swear, came to twice as long.

“Porgy lived in the golden age,” begins the novel by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, which gave us the stage play and, eventually, the opera, “. . . an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten but not yet destroyed.” Peter J. Davison’s stage sets have speeded up time’s processes somewhat. His Catfish Row, updated to the “early 1950s” from 1928, is a true slum. Doors hang from their hinges; the roller coaster on Kittiwah Island, where the Picnic Scene takes place, is a scrapheap. The spirit of the joyous community remains, however, and Porgy has inherited its gold. He is one of opera’s grandest personages, no less complex for his humble origins. The role was sung with noble resonance by Kevin Short in the first of the two alternating casts, the one I saw on opening night.

The Bess that night was a slithery, slinky bundle named Morenike Fadayomi, with pure, radiant high notes that lit up the house. She’s a versatile actress all the way from “happy dust”–sniffing floozie to adoring bedmate. You have to wonder, as Porgy becomes rooted in the serious repertory alongside Figaro and the Ring, how generations of singers come to deal with the work’s special vernacular. Years ago, the first recordings of this music were by white Metropolitan Opera stars, and the trials of hearing their “Bess, you is my woman now” were fairly excruciating. Now Ms. Fadayomi, born in London, raised in Nigeria and Switzerland, performs Aida and Mimi in Germany, yet sings Bess on our stage as if born to the part. I heard nothing but superb and wonderfully idiomatic voices that night, including Angela Simpson’s showstopping “My man’s gone now,” Ashley Faatolia’s delightful walk-through as the Crab Man and Jermaine Smith’s incomparable rubber-legged routines as Sportin’ Life.

Matters of idiom aside, this was, simply put, a night of truly great opera, made especially so by Francesca Zambello’s stage-sure direction, in which even the cherishable small moments – the comings and goings of the street peddlers, the placing of scolding wives on various levels of Davison’s rickety set – left their ineradicable mark. The staging of the hurricane, with the terrified chorus clumped together in center stage and the scenery blowing every which way to the tremendous thuddings in the orchestra (probably amplified, but so what?), was something to carry home and relive. It made it possible to forgive Ms. Zambello, at long last, for her absurdity-studded 1991 staging of Berlioz’s The Trojans, in our opera company’s greener years.

Mort on MortI’ve known Morton Subotnick longer than any star in the new-music galaxy. In the 1950s, he was a freelance clarinetist in San Francisco, studying with Darius Milhaud at Mills and feeding me precious backstage gossip from the San Francisco Symphony during its bad old days under Enrique Jordá, for my crits on KPFA. I ran into him in New York one day, when he was composing big electronic works for Nonesuch Records – symphonies, almost – with names like Silver Apples of the Moon. He told me about his new job at a school back in California with funding from, of all people, Walt Disney, and we had a good laugh over that.

I visited one of CalArts’ new-music festivals, and over coffee, Mort told me why life in California was better than anywhere else – partly because nobody took the critics seriously. He was composing what seemed to me pure magic: music for instruments and computers, with the instruments activating the technology so that music retained its relationship to a live performer and wasn’t just a matter of staring at loudspeakers. I looked in on his classes, watched some of his students’ work with mixed audio and visual media. I think it was Mort more than anyone else who convinced me that the air in California was what I, too, wanted to breathe.

More recently, Mort has produced some excellent educational CD-ROMS, in a series called “Making Music.” Kids get to construct scales, rhythms, melodies. They learn about variations, at various grades of complexities. I have to confess: I’ve spent an evening or two “making music.”

At the season’s final “Piano Spheres” concert in Zipper Hall, Vicki Ray’s program ended with Subotnick’s The Other Piano, a piece for piano with surround-sound processing. The work is “other” to Morton Feldman’s 1977 piece called, simply, Piano; both run approximately half an hour. Vicki played, while Mort, at his laptop, captured her notes and formed harmonies that floated through the hall out of surrounding speakers. The music was mostly slow and dreamlike, not at all Feldmanesque, purely the other Mort. We, sitting there, floated, surrounded, inside the sound. Talk about your magic.

The Other Piano will be released this summer on a Mode DVD in 5.1 multichannel: something to do the dishes to, or to lose yourself in.

“It doesn’t take much time,” he says, “and it doesn’t take many words. Whether it’s a new conductor, like Dudamel, or someone we’ve worked with for years, words are the most useless part of the communication process between the conductor and the orchestra. Take Giulini. Everything he wanted to tell us about the music, the interpretive magic of everything he played, was in the look in his eyes. André’s great failing was exactly his inability to make eye contact. His best work came when he was conducting from the piano, in a concerto or in chamber music; then he could reach out to the other players, but not from the podium.

(Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

“Zubin? You had to keep your eyes on him every moment! We had trouble with Esa-Pekka at the start; it took him a while to learn about eye contact, but now he’s got it.

“People don’t acquire talent; they’re born with it, and then they acquire technique. The reason Gustavo has come on so strong with the whole orchestra is his fantastic ability to connect with everybody. That’s because he has acquired so much technique so soon, and knows how to use it. He seems to do everything so easily, so naturally. And he did this the first time, at the Bowl, with almost no English in his vocabulary. He’s only now making his way. We’ve all loved him from the start.”

“In April 2004, the Bamberg [Germany] Symphony held its first-ever Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition. I was one of the judges, along with Jonathan Nott and a member of the orchestra. We received 300 videos, and chose 16 hopefuls to come to Bamberg. One was from Venezuela: Gustavo Dudamel, who led his Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra, and already there was something exciting about that video that stood out from all the others, a passionate young orchestra that seemed to be playing at the edge of its seats. The competition program consisted of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Ruuml;ckert Songs, the Schubert Fifth and something contemporary from each competitor’s country. No, we didn’t inflict 16 complete Mahler Fifths on the orchestra or on ourselves; we could stop a performance when the points had been made. Only the finalists led complete performances.

“There were four finalists. Esa-Pekka joined us for the finals. By then there was simply no question that Gustavo was not only the winner; he was the kind of natural, instinctive musician that comes along rarely. His age has nothing to do with it; he had that ability to make musicians give something that they could not give otherwise.

“That November, Deborah, [vice president, artistic planning] Chad Smith and I traveled to Venezuela to see this phenomenon on his native turf. That’s when the wheels started turning. It’s an amazing thing that Deborah has accomplished in these past few weeks, by the way, literally flying in over the heads of agents and orchestra managers to sign this guy and make him our own. I think it helps that he likes it here.”

To those unfamiliar with the airborne wonders of Lehár’s operetta under more reasonable auspices – the EMI recording with Schwarzkopf, to name one of several – I can only offer assurance that this is, indeed, a work of utmost elegance and pointed, sly humor, worthy to stand in the company of the best of Johann Strauss, and with a measure of tenderness that can even surpass that other Viennese master. To rev it up into this noisy burlesque of itself insults the work and its audience – whose response on opening night was considerably short of ecstatic, by the way, for all the recent journalism about the need for opera to dumb itself down. The greater pity is that the two principals of this production, the witty and genuinely intelligent Graham and the company’s longtime stalwart, Rod Gilfry, give off the sense that they could be the nucleus of a properly accented Merry Widow, which this noisy, waterlogged mess was not. They were in the wrong place the other night, and so was I.

Tristan Redeemed

Earlier in the week, I completed my 15-hour immersion in Tristan und Isolde, hearing Wagner’s transcendent masterwork for the first time at Disney Hall in a performance worthy of its name. Christian Franz had sung here before, through microphones at the Hollywood Bowl in Wagner led by John Mauceri, hardly reason to anticipate the rich, ringing, beautifully modulated Tristan he brought to Salonen’s ensemble, live at Disney. The more remarkable: He was flown in only in time for a day’s rehearsal with piano, to replace the ailing (and inadequate) Alan Woodrow, with a brief walk-through of the staging. The beauty of the blending of his bright, consistent tenor into the luminous torrents of Christine Brewer’s soprano is a memory that will remain; so will his racked death cry of “Isolde” as darkness finally closes in.

I am no further transported by the curious circumstance of Tristan-as-Project, or by the visual ecstasy, so widely proclaimed, in Bill Viola’s bubbles, after these many hours under the spell of the sound of the opera under Salonen with his orchestra, of Brewer and, finally, a tenor worthy of her. This matter of worthiness is at the core of my mixed feelings about the “Project,” and it concerns the height of the pinnacle upon which this one world-shaking, world-shaping work rests. It doesn’t diminish Bill Viola’s art by very much to believe as I do that it is unworthy of Tristan und Isolde; most art is.

Goldberg Unvaried

Johann Gottlieb Goldberg lives in history, not so much for any music he composed, but for the set of variations his teacher, J.S. Bach, wrote for him – or so the story goes – to play for his insomniac boss. The splendid Italian ensemble Il Giardino Armonico corrected that discrepancy at their Disney Hall concert last week by performing an attractive C-minor sonata (for two violins and viola) by the real Goldberg that contributes mightily to the man’s credit.

To the ensemble’s credit, as well, was an enterprising selection of works, almost none of which I had ever heard before in a long life of hearing Baroque music. Giovanni Antonini, the seven-member group’s director and recorder soloist, contributed three wonderfully madcap concertos for his instrument, by Telemann, Nardini and (need I add) Vivaldi – a perfect way, all told, to sweep the hall of its last Wagnerian echoes.

For Whom Mr. Bell Toils

From Washington comes encouraging word of a rise in musical taste among the general public. It seems that the Washington Post hired the violinist Joshua Bell to perform as a street musician, incognito, to test his recognizability, or the abilities of a transit-bound big city to respond to good music. One morning not long ago, the violinist stationed himself, with his expensive instrument, at a well-traveled spot near one of the city’s Metro stations, at morning rush hour. He wore the basic attire of a street musician. A TV crew and reporters were discreetly stationed nearby.

The program bestowed upon scurrying Washingtonians was generous and varied: Bach’s Chaconne, Schubert’s Ave Maria, Ponce’s Estrellita, the Chaconne another time. Post reporter Gene Weingarten had asked the conductor Leonard Slatkin what he thought the hour’s take might be for a world-famous violinist playing under such conditions. Slatkin’s guess was $150. Joshua Bell’s take came to $32.17, which, considering the playing I’ve heard from him lately, seems at least 17 cents too high.

Slava (1927–2007)

I met Mstislav Rostropovich twice. The first time was at a White House recital, when I was most impressed with the way Rosalynn Carter got all the Russian names right. The second was out here, when five minutes into our chat, there were already hugs. He called me “Alanchik,” which I still use for special messages. We talked about cellists becoming conductors, and he brought up something I’ll bet nobody else has ever thought about. I’ll try to remember his wonderful Russian word order. “After all, who knows how good play cello Toscanini?”

There’s one video that I often resort to for uplift: Slava and Carlo Maria Giulini performing the Dvorák Concerto (and also the Saint-Saëns, but never mind) on EMI. The man who could draw that long A-flat-minor melody in the first movement of the Dvorák into a conversation with all the gods of music is the man to spread the words of the peacemakers to the world at large. Slava was both.

Not content with merely presenting the inscrutable masterpiece, the opera that changed the course of artistic thought forever, the Philharmonic offered further ennoblement under the rubric of “The Tristan Project.” First injected onto the Disney stage in 2004 with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde kibbled into three separate acts, three nights, three tickets (with some appropriate additional music added each time as curtain raiser), this time around there were also two very long nights of the complete opera at single but raised ticket prices. Enhancing the performances has been a “realization” by the eminent video artist Bill Viola, projected (that magic word again) onto a screen above the orchestra, with another screen up back for the folks up front. Peter Sellars is credited with the staging, which consisted mostly of getting people on and off the stage. Best of all, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic served as pit band. On to New York the whole shebang now goes, for a two-night stand in Lincoln Center’s crippled acoustics at higher prices.

Any questions? I have a couple. I wonder first about the artistic integrity in offering an opera – Tristan in particular, so musically interlocked – on three separate tickets. Opera companies, including our own next season, get by without such curious practices. My next question has to do with sight versus sound: Wagner’s music in the gorgeous realization by Esa-Pekka and his orchestra in Disney Hall, rising to fulfill every curve of Frank Gehry’s design, versus the flat images of Viola’s video translations, which stop at the edge of their frames. It becomes a clash of dimensions; even a stage set – David Hockney’s for the L.A. Opera, which we’ll see next year, with its fabulous lighting – suggests an infinity that reaches out to embrace the music. Viola’s – and I am trying hard to circumnavigate the fact that this second time around, I am not all that crazy about his Tristan visuals anyhow – does not.

Beyond his staging, Sellars contributed a titillating program note, two pages of small print retelling the Tristan und Isolde story with a homoerotic overlay that posits a lovers’ relationship for Tristan and King Marke, with Isolde brought in to silence the gossip columnists. This should delight Sellars’ academic colleagues at UCLA, known for their outing of notable personages in the artistic galaxy. In any case, basso John Relyea’s dreary performance of Marke’s interminable “How could you?” litany, upon the discovery of the lovers’ betrayal, suggested that Tristan, whatever affair he was in, was well out of it.

Aside from Christine Brewer’s larger-than-life, impressively accurate Isolde, in fact, there isn’t much joyousness to report about the singing. Canadian tenor Alan Woodrow, the Tristan, has the bright, plangent tone of his countryman Jon Vickers, but in both performances I saw last week, his wanderings from pitch made him almost unlistenable. (Past deadline, Christian Franz replaced him in the final performance; more next week.) Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter was gorgeous to hear in Debussy’s La Demoiselle Élue on one of the single-act nights, but she was miscast as Brangauml;ne in the opera itself, and her song of warning in the second act did not, as it should, merge into the moonlight that flowed, radiant and seductive, night after night, from Salonen’s magical orchestra.

Finland 2, Norway 0

Salonen was also on hand last week to curate the final event in this season’s Monday Evening Concerts at Zipper Hall and welcome its composers, Norway’s Rolf Wallin and Finland’s Kimmo Hakola, the latter a former classmate of Salonen’s from that legendary class at the Sibelius Academy, a veritable hotbed of compositional originality.

And indeed, it was a chamber concerto by Hakola that won most hearts in this large crowd, a brightly scored work for 11-member mixed ensemble starting off Furioso, ending Misterioso and encasing a middle-movement Amoroso so aswirl in amorous harmonies that nobody seemed to want it to end. After intermission, a few more hearts were won with Capriole, another Hakola charmer, shorter and full of strange turns – including a reminder of Finland’s part-Mongolian ancestry. Two works by Wallin, a collection of miniatures more attractive in their titles than in sound, and an ongoing and ongoing piece for improvising singer – the phenomenal Sidsel Endresen – in a computerized soundscape, won fewer hearts all told.

Performances through the evening of unfamiliar music were remarkable; the group included the full membership of the Calder Quartet, pianist Gloria Cheng – without whom half of Los Angeles’ music making would disappear – and visitors clarinetist Carol McGonnell and cellist Claire Bryant. Thus ended, with great success, a concert season that many feared would never happen. Organizer, administrator and everything but dishwasher Justin Urcis tells me that the next season begins, at Zipper, on December 3.

Inescapable Anne

Here’s a where-has-he-been-all-my-life name for you: Grigori Frid. Born in Petrograd in 1915, he was apparently an influential Russian composer throughout his life, through many regimes. His monodrama for singer and small orchestra, setting passages from The Diary of Anne Frank, Grove’s Dictionary tells me, is popular in many German houses. Deservedly so, as last week’s performances by the Long Beach Opera made clear.

The work itself lasts about an hour. Andreas Mitisek, the company’s artistic director, extended the evening with the help of a Holocaust survivor named Laura Hillman, who lives nearby, who has published a memoir, and who, of course, would now be the age of Anne Frank had she lived. Mrs. Hillman sat onstage and read excerpts from her book interspersed into the 21 passages from the Diary that Frid had set to music. His music, reminiscent of some of Prokofiev’s bright, edgy film scores, was flung out by an expert nine-piece band. The songs and bits of dialogue were delivered with charm, grace and the stuff of heartbreak by a remarkable Armenian-American soprano, Ani Maldjian.

The whole thing took place not in any kind of auditorium, but in a basement space adjoining a parking garage at the Sinai Temple in West L.A. The walls were crude; the ceiling was low; the performing space was something you could almost trip over. You could, in other words, transport yourselves to Otto Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. Very clever: This was a transporting evening in more ways than one.

Back in 1992, the host of KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic – what’s-’is-name? – let himself be hypnotized by the Third Symphony of the Polish composer Henryk Górecki, and passed it on to the rest of us. For several weeks, it seemed as if that was all you could hear, morning after eclectic morning, on the station. The recording, a Nonesuch number conducted by David Zinman with Dawn Upshaw singing the doom-haunted lyrics, some of them taken from walls in Nazi prison camps, seemed to stretch out this quality of vaporous melancholy compared to sturdier versions on Polish discs, but it certainly established Górecki’s reputation in the U.S. When he came here a year or two later to conduct a performance of the work at USC, the performance was even slower, more melancholy. Whatever his compositional inclinations may have been before the Third Symphony’s rebirth as a minimalist anthem – there are a few perky chamber works around on import labels, and a lively harpsichord concerto has had a few performances – his name exists tied principally to that one slow, quiet work…

Until now. Here at hand is one more work, also bearing the number 3, lasting nearly an hour, and bearing the subtitle “… songs are sung,” slow and quiet, purely instrumental this time, and of a dark, elegiac, penetrating beauty almost painful to hear but so demanding to be heard that you pray it will just keep going. It is the Third Quartet, played by the Kronos Quartet (who commissioned it, as they had Nos. 1 and 2) on a new Nonesuch disc. Górecki finished the quartet in 1995, but held it back from the world (“I don’t know why,” says the eccentric, reclusive composer) until the Kronos performed it late last year.

It is music to sit quietly to, and give yourself to, in undisturbed solitude. Four of its five movements are very, very slow; you might think of Shostakovich, perhaps of his 15th Quartet, but there isn’t the tragic undertone of that Soviet work here, rather a deep, heartfelt meditation. The one fast movement is the third (of five), and what surprises there isn’t the change of pace but of harmony. The music becomes very sweet, folkish. At the end, the music reverts back to its earlier mood, completing a cycle and, perhaps, inviting a second hearing. “When horses die, they breathe,” runs a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov that the composer cites. “When grasses die, they wither; When suns die, they go out; When people die, songs are sung.”

When Record Labels Live . . .New Albion was a San Francisco label that specialized in interesting new music, and did so very well, first with Bay Area composers – Terry Riley, Ingram Marshall, the Wind Chants of David Hykes, Lou Harrison – later with world composers. Foster Reed and his small company exemplified what record companies are supposed to be doing to fill in the blanks that the big guys always leave unfilled. Now the company has relocated to New York’s Taconic Hills, but a recent package of releases indicates that its pace of good work continues.

A disc (Incantations) of the music of Giacinto Scelsi strokes some of the same nerve centers as does the Górecki, but with a different rod. First off, you have to know that Scelsi’s English wife, Dorothy, was distantly related to the Royal Family, and their wedding reception was held in Buckingham Palace. (She later left him for good, and he lived his last years in a palazzo of his own, in Rome.) He was the Italian who chose to compose between the notes, exploring the microtonal areas reachable by the voice or by strings and brass instruments whose tone might be “bent.” An hour’s worth of solo “song” on this new disc – unaccompanied, or joined by mirror images on tape – starts off unsettling but not for long. The singer, Marianne Schuppe, has such remarkable control that you begin to hear her vocal lines, and her incredible range, as a musical language all its own, haunting, powerful and, in its own way, very beautiful.

So is the sound of one grand piano on another disc, surrounded by 10 musicians armed with long strings fashioned out of the stuff of musical bows, which are threaded under the piano strings and played by being pulled up and down. The sound is that of an idealized ensemble of supercellos, intensely resonant and richly harmonized; other players attack the strings with piano hammers and guitar picks – anything but fingers on the keys. This is the Bowed Piano Ensemble, based at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, whose inventor, composer and leader is Stephen Scott. Their fourth New Albion disc, The Deep Spaces, is an utterly charming selection of songs to poems of Wordsworth, Byron, Mary Shelley and the like, sung by Victoria Hansen.

Schubert UnfinishedOnce in a while, something splendid falls through from one of the big companies too. Such a windfall landed last week from EMI, the latest in its sporadic Schubert series combining Ian Bostridge singing lieder and Leif Ove Andsnes accompanying and performing some major piano work on his own. This one is full of storm and frustration. The storm is in the crash and clangor of the C-minor Piano Sonata, the first of three imponderable, huge piano works from Schubert’s last year, with its final movement like a nocturnal journey through a demon-infested dark forest with an Erlking behind every tree. It is also in a violent, ironic long song, “Grave-Digger’s Homesickness,” which Bostridge hurls forth, over lightning bolts from Andsnes’ piano, in a manner to remind us that he is also the ——–
AUTHOR of an excellent book on witchcraft.

Just as fascinating is a small collection to end the disc, of songs and piano pieces that Schubert left off without finishing. There are dozens more of these in the Schubert catalog; the six that were chosen are especially frustrating. They all build up a head of steam, they all modulate interestingly into some other region before Schubert leaves off. Most fascinating is “Johanna Sebus,” a song to a Goethe text about a bursting dam and a child faced with the task of carrying her mother and her goat to safety. Will they make it? Alas, we’ll never know, at least not from Schubert.

One day in 2005, Ernest Fleischmann, former honcho of the Philharmonic and now of the musical world at large, invited me to lunch, a frequent and pleasant occurrence. This time there was good food, plus a command. On no circumstance, came the order from Ernest On High, was I to miss the upcoming Hollywood Bowl debut of the conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Truth to tell, I had entertained every intention of missing that event; a late-season Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, with the trek to Cahuenga Pass long since grown tiresome, and the new opera season downtown beckoning, was something far down on the appeal scale.

But Ernest Fleischmann is, among his great attributes, a keen evaluator of young conducting talent. In his days of so-called retirement, he has spent much time as judge at major European conducting competitions. It is through his acumen that the Philharmonic had latched onto the services of Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Now, in the past couple of years, he has returned to us from happy hunting with a pair of estimable trophies: the 20-year-old Lionel Bringuier, who starts his first season as the Philharmonic’s assistant conductor this fall, and Dudamel, who made his North American debut at 24 at the Bowl on that night to remember.

Word was out; the place was crawling with agents from conductor-hungry orchestras. Onstage too the atmosphere was electric. “We knew right off that this was a special talent,” cellist Dan Rothmuller remembered when we talked at Monday’s press conference. I wrote about Dudamel in this space, about “fiery, consuming energy,” about “the extraordinary electricity that warmed the otherwise chilled crowd that night.” He returned for a Disney Hall concert of equal merit a year later, and now earns his own spotlight as music director–designate, with his actual tenure beginning, at age 28, in the fall of 2009.

You should have been at that press conference last Monday, to take in those smiling faces. Ernest was off in Berlin, but everybody else was on hand to say the right thing. The triumph, of course, was to have grabbed the hottest young conducting property right from the hot grasp of the other top orchestras that are desperately seeking conductors right now: New York, Chicago… the list goes on. (One devastated critic in Chicago – onetime home, after all, of the Black Sox – has already written a weeping “Say it ain’t so” article.) The greater triumph, as the spread of honcha Deborah Borda’s smile made clear, is for the Philharmonic, with this one bold swoop, to have won the right, and the mechanism, to reshape and to redefine the relationship between the classical repertory and its audience – today’s and tomorrow’s. You can fill up young Dudamel on caviar from Patina, but in his adorable opening speech, he also let on his passion for the hot dogs at Pink’s. He fended off some questions about a possible leaning toward the popular arts, but I would guess that when it comes to establishing a relationship between the so-called serious and pop, young Gustavo is at least as interested in tearing down fences as in mending them.

Esa-Pekka Salonen has moved the Philharmonic far along this conciliatory path, and it’s significant that he chooses to remain among us, to continue to capture the essence of this place in his music. I thought the huge turnout when he showed off his composition methods at the Apple Store a few weeks ago was a fair indication of the heightened stature he and the Philharmonic have attained here. The piece itself, the nine-minute Helix, was the right kind of serious, unflinching contemporary music to engage a young audience’s interest and pride. I imagine Dudamel’s manner of community outreach will be somewhat different. The important thing is that both musicians seem to me to be participants in an extraordinary rejuvenation within an art form whose demise some naysayers have all too glibly foretold. What delight to be riding along!

No Place Like Home

Jacaranda is home again. Renovations are done at Santa Monica’s First Pres; the place looks good and sounds great. Last Saturday’s homecoming concert drew as close to a sellout crowd as never mind. There’s your success story.

The program was all-American and all-remarkable. Two really rough-cut works trod with emphatic step. One was Frederic Rzewski’s piano setting of “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” from his North American Ballads, played by Scott Dunn, piano music that leaps off the keyboard to create a rural and menacing setting. Ben Johnston’s Fourth Quartet is also imbued with a rural atmosphere. Johnston, now 80, is the least known of our individualists, off in the woods somewhere devising tuning systems, teaching now and then, poking around in old hymnals and in Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone theories. This Fourth Quartet is probably his masterpiece; fiendish to play for its rhythmic complexity and because it keeps running off into odd scale patterns, it is also built around the old-timey hymn “Amazing Grace.” Jacaranda’s Denali Quartet handled it fearlessly, and made most else on the program – even Steve Reich’s Eight Lines for pianos, flutes, clarinets and larger string band – seem a piece of cake by comparison.

There was more and sweeter cake too, a piece by Morty Feldman: Who has even heard of his Between Categories? It’s for violins, cellos, pianos and chimes: two sets of each, answering each other, mostly pianissimo, across the front of the church: Imagine! Only those Jacaranda guys, Patrick and Mark, could have dug up a piece like that . . . and made it work. (It did, like a distant cloud passing far overhead.)

Scott Dunn began the program with a handful of Scott Joplin rags. Wonderful, rich, wistful pieces – “Solace” often has me in tears – these really constitute our American counterpart of Schubert or Chopin waltzes, and ought to be given equal prominence on concert programs. First, they need to be given substance; Dunn, an excellent and imaginative musician, lessened their value by omitting every one of the repeats. Something like that last refrain of “Solace” (remember it from The Sting?) needs the time to break our hearts. Cutting it short like that broke mine.

Christopher Rouse burst upon the scene in the 1980s, with a barrage of orchestral works bearing titles such as Bump, Phantasmata and Infernal Machine and, in sheer decibel power, living up to their names. Later on, he was to master the more eloquent modes of expression; a cello concerto (commissioned for Yo-Yo Ma and the L.A. Philharmonic) and a couple of string quartets expanded the range of his expressive powers while exploring the gentler regions of the audible spectrum. In his 90-minute Requiem, however, which received its world premiere in the capable hands of our Master Chorale and attendant participants under the enlightened leadership of Grant Gershon at Disney Hall a weekend ago, the volume knob was back at 11, and Mr. Rouse was back in his old stomping ground.

The idea here is to intersperse the Latin verses of the Requiem with poetry reflecting on those verses – English, or the Italian of Michelangelo: a plan reminiscent of Benjamin Britten’s in his War Requiem. A solo baritone, the eloquent Sanford Sylvan (Mao Ze-Dong and Klinghoffer in the John Adams operas), sang haunted poetry: Seamus Heaney on a child’s death, Siegfried Sassoon on suicide, Michelangelo on his own immortality. The chorus bursts through, most often ferociously and buttressed with the customary Rouse battery of multiple percussion. A children’s chorus sits immobile, and joins in after 80 minutes with celestial, forgiving harmonies as the baritone soothes an audience’s injured eardrums with a prayer for peace.

The skill here is exceptional; not a nut or bolt is out of place. Some people I have heard from – fellow critics, music students, ardent concertgoers – have been stirred by the piece. I was not. I enjoyed the contraptions, the splendidly concocted blasts, and the way Gershon’s vocal and instrumental forces kept everything in balance in that superb hall. I enjoyed all that exactly the way I enjoyed the sheer physical impact in that marvelous new Korean horror film, The Host, and if I had my choice of which work of art to experience again, I’d go back to the film any five times instead of once to Mr. Rouse’s Requiem.

It was quite the week for new music, actually, on both sides of Grand Avenue. Also at Disney Hall, a few days later, there was a much more rewarding premiere, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Helix in its first U.S. hearing, music first written for a BBC peace celebration led by Valery Gergiev. Actually, this is the piece that Salonen had sneak-previewed at the Apple store in Santa Monica a few weeks ago to show off his use of the software program known as Sibelius. I wrote about it at the time.

The new piece is shorter than anything by the real Sibelius. What it is, is a nine-minute acceleration of a simple note pattern – a helix, in other words – and what is wonderful about it is that it is (a) a tough-minded, complex piece of contemporary orchestral music and (b) delightfully easy to follow, no more complex than (quite similar, in fact, to) Ravel’s Boléro.

South on Grand

Across the street at Zipper Concert Hall, there were two new-music events worth mentioning (if not for the same reasons): one worth every minute, the other worth few if any.

For someone who claims (in his biographical notes) never to have heard the Beethoven Ninth Symphony live, Mark Robson certainly demonstrated a wise and varied musicianship in his “Piano Spheres” concert on Tuesday night: music from all over the map, spread over the keyboard, invoking fond memories of old friends here and gone.

Framing the program was enchanting, rowdy music by Louis Andriessen at the start – his 1983 Trepidus, short, clangorous, jumpy music – and a clutch (four listed, but I counted six) of Gyouml;rgy Ligeti’s Etudes Pour Piano at the end, marvelously wise, complex aphoristic pieces from the composer’s last years. In between came more treasures of varying value: first, a set of Morton Feldman pieces from 1959, tiny, very soft, very freely composed for each hand, the Feldman we tend to forget in the light of the hourslong pieces of his last years; then, John Cage’s The Seasons, his ballet score transcribed for piano, music of greater discipline than most of his familiar scores, somewhat like Satie and, again, very beautiful. Also on the program was Mauricio Kagel’s “Piece of Filmmusic”: pure Dada, something involving a wrestling match between a semiclad pianist and a metronome, a holdover from when people went for that kind of thing.

The people of a chamber ensemble known as Nimbus have been bombarding me with reminders of their existence; Thursday night found them too at Zipper, and there was, therefore, reason to check them out. Nimbus, along with its music director, Young Riddle (that’s his name, and do you know your Harry Potter?), believes in themed programming; last Thursday’s theme was PALIMPSEST in large letters, which is the ancient practice of writing manuscripts on top of pre-existing manuscripts, with the earlier writing erased but sometimes recoverable. Mr. Riddle seems to have been attracted, perhaps unduly, by the fact that one of Yannis Xenakis’ minor compositions bore the title Palimpsest, and decided to build part of his program around the matter. He enlisted a CSUN colleague, Dan Hosken, to compose an electronic overwrite over the Xenakis and to make both works the gist of the concert.

The program began with Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra in the boiled-down version by Felix Greissle, in a performance by the ensemble that I will kindly extenuate as sight-reading. Then came the Xenakis, then the Hosken+Xenakis. Oh, I forgot, there were “mystery pieces” before each half: unannounced solo pieces (Stravinsky, Steve Hoey) to give the (very small) audience a swell tease. Mr. Riddle talked on and on, most of his words swallowed. This was easily the worst concert I’ve been to this year. No, the year is young; make that two years.

I learned above all that I had miscalculated Herr Reubke’s history – and, therefore, the shape and sound of his music – by several decades. His time had come and gone much earlier in the 19th century; born in 1834, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 24, leaving behind two large sonatas, one for organ and another for piano. Most important in that brief lifetime, he was a protégé of Franz Liszt, and the big Organ Sonata I was hearing that Sunday for the first time in my 82 years, with surprise and delight, simply glistens with the Master’s imprint.

To that sonata, Reubke attached a program, based on a complex paraphrase of Psalm 94. Pleas for Divine Vengeance and declarations of Faith and Trust resound; the entire work is built, in the Lisztian manner, out of a single theme undergoing transformation, building toward a climactic fugue, something of a ringer for Liszt’s own Piano Sonata – a resemblance in no way shameful. You had to marvel, at the power of the work and at the tragedy it entails. There is great beauty here, underlined in Jacobs’ obviously loving registration; its power builds with the assurance of a composer in command of his craft, yet less than a year from a wasting death. According to the all-too-brief biography in Grove’s Dictionary, the Reubke Piano Sonata is an even more adventurous work than the one for organ; I await with some impatience the package from Amazon.

Inevitably, BachThe shadow of Sebastian Bach fell upon most of the music making last week, either in the celebration (most of the time) or in the defacement (as in the aforementioned Reger abomination). Paul Jacobs’ organ program included one of Bach’s lovely trio sonatas, crisp and elegant and intricate and beautifully detailed under this remarkable musician’s young fingers. It also included a Mendelssohn sonata, which also hovered agreeably close to the spirit of Bach: the influence of the chorale melody, the lapsing into recitative, the charming solemnity. There was more Bach as encores, two short pieces to send us home uplifted and happy.

Next night, the Monday Evening Concert laid claim to a relationship to Bach, although a sense of strain was sometimes evident. “Bach and the Music of Today” was the overall title; Kent Nagano was listed as curator; pianist and conductor Ichiro Nodaira was out front in all but one of the works. His credentials as a performer of Bach might bear examining. He began the program with a pair of preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, went on to a rather hectic reading of the Chromatic Fantasy, pedaled as heavily as if some Chopin nocturne were the matter at hand, and ended with Ferruccio Busoni’s dreary, over-upholstered piano transcription of the Chaconne from the D-minor Partita (for solo violin), as false to the Bach original, and to the sound of its period, as the Reger noted above.

In between, there was music of – and truer to – its own time: the delightfully intricate Viola, Viola (for just those) by George Benjamin; the deliciously rowdy Fantaisie Mécanique by Unsuk Chin; Kurt Rohde’s Double Trouble, a double concerto for violas and small ensemble; and Nodaira’s own Texture de Délire, a nicely atmospheric piece for small ensemble including electronics, 25 years old but certainly more up-to-date than Nodaira’s performances of Bach. Strange, that a musician who creates such attractive music in the spirit of Bach, which this short, attractive piece from 1982 surely is/was, performs the composer’s original conceptions so poorly.

Spreading the PassionNext day came the St. Matthew Passion, its dimensions respected and its spirit as well. Under Martin Haselboeck, our local baroque ensemble known as Musica Angelica has grown in prestige and in programming ambition. Currently, they are joined with Haselboeck’s other group, his Orchester Wiener Akademie, in a tour of the Matthauml;uspassion that began in Mexico City, picks up choruses in various cities along the way, lands in Spain this weekend and ends up in Munich in time for Easter. Worth the trip? Yes.

Somewhat adrift in Pasadena’s acoustically iffy First United Methodist Church, with a cranny-filling audience of 800, the chorus – a too-small unit from John Alexander’s Pacific Chorale forced into inadequate space – faced the major problem: There was just no sound to the sound. Haselboeck solved one problem neatly, bringing soprano Christine Brandes out front to fill in the boys’ voices in the opening tripartite chorus, but the two other parts – the wonderful “Who?” “Where” back-and-forth and the later “Donner und Blitz” that sets a hearer’s teeth on edge – were as formless as last week’s Nudelsuppe.

The soloists made amends, handsomely. Brandes, an old Philharmonic friend, held the room breathless with her “Aus liebe,” as did Klaus Mertens in the final aria, his rich bass-baritone beautifully twined around the plangent lament of William Skeen’s viola da gamba – the sound Bach used one time only in each of his Passions, at the moment of Jesus’ death. An excellent young countertenor, Spanish-born Carlos Mena, took on the alto arias; if he didn’t quite break hearts with the “Erbarme dich,” I don’t know who can since we lost Kathleen Ferrier. Andreas Karasiak sang the Evangelist; Stephen Salters, the words of Jesus – both eloquently. Overall, the greater triumph belonged to the excellent Haselboeck, for his taut, beautifully shaded, forthright, dramatic reading. That man knows his Bach.

As Alfred Brendel’s recital at Disney Hall last week amplified, in no work does the voice of Beethoven – defiant, despairing, triumphant, vulnerable – resound more compellingly than in the next-to-last of his 32 piano sonatas.

I’ve never fully understood that glorious, quirky sonata of Beethoven’s declining years; Brendel’s grand, loving performance didn’t so much solve its mysteries as cast them in wonderful lights. The sonata begins prettily enough; the complexities take over with an unexpected left-hand rumble after the scherzo. On the next page (of my old, tattered copy from Doblinger’s backroom in Vienna), there are half a dozen changes of key, sometimes two within the same measure. There’s a weird sequence of repeated high A’s, like a fire alarm, and a descent like the fall of an angel. A most dolorous lament ensues. In the next minutes, the lament will lead to an orderly fugue, which will give way to a return of the lament, which will then give way again to the fugue, sort of. This time, however, the fugal melody comes in upside down (legitimate practice, if you know your Bach), and not for long. Suddenly, the music gathers a fearsome momentum, not so much from speed as from a triumphant thickening of the harmony. If you want to know what “ecstasy” sounds like in its musical equivalent, these last pages of Opus 110 are what you turn to. I know of no other passage like this in Beethoven for sheer onward musical impulse; perhaps the coda of the first movement of the “Eroica”; what else?

Brendel began his program preparing our ears and our souls for the Beethoven with an unusually stormy, mettlesome late sonata of Haydn, a work in C minor full of jerks and changes and marvelous flights into uncharted harmonic regions. After the Beethoven, there was Schubert: three impromptus, sonata movements in all but name, meticulously dealt with but, to my taste, just a shade too much so. Tears should flow during the rhapsodic second theme in the F-minor Impromptu; the spine should shiver when the principal theme jolts back into earshot. The notes were all there; the music, not quite. (My ears are full, and will always remain so, of the playing of Mitsuko Uchida on a summer day at Ojai.)

To round off, there was more stormy, mettlesome C minor – the familiar, forward-looking Mozart sonata in that key – as if to create a dark, glowering frame for the whole splendid evening.

Unresolved Dominance

Doctor’s orders have obliged Jeffrey Kahane to suspend his survey of Mozart’s piano concertos, conducting his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard, with one program (four concerti, including the popular D-minor) postponed indefinitely. One must not be greedy; what we have heard so far constitutes a joyous and distinguished event in our concert life, reason enough to anticipate the final concert, whenever.

Last month’s concert ended with the D-major “Coronation” Concerto. I had somehow forgotten the particular marvels of this late work, the interweaving of harmonies in the last movement. Their echoes remain with me, the uplift gleaned from the remarkable individuality in every one of these two dozen lapidarian works, the two dozen different ways this unique genius contrived to oppose a solo instrument and an orchestra, to create a wordless drama from that opposition, and to make it mean something different and wonderful each time. Everyone who comes under the spell of Mozart’s piano concertos does so for a different reason and falls in love with different moments. (Mine, above all others, occurs during the slow movement of the E-flat Concerto K. 482.)

Newly arrived in Vienna, the young Beethoven was stirred by his encounter with Mozart’s piano concertos, performed the D-minor at a memorial organized by Konstanze Mozart and composed cadenzas for the work. His own rather bland first concerto (published as No. 2) simmered sweetly in Christian Zacharias’ self-conducted performance with the Philharmonic last weekend. Composed in the same year, 1796, Haydn’s final symphony (No. 104, the “London”), which shared the program, was something else again: amazing, robust, adventurous music with a flight of fantasy in the slow movement that, by itself, seemed to close the door on 18th-century musical propriety with a mighty slam.

Edgar Baitzel (1955–2007)

On paper, Edgar Baitzel was the L.A. Opera’s chief operations officer; he was also its heart. I did not rate the monthly breakfasts with him as did my higher-placed colleagues, but I do remember a lunch at the start of his tenure here: 2000, I think. I guess he had done a pretty good vetting job on my tastes and hang-ups. Ever the staunch company man, he came up with a fistful of testimonials to Mrs. Domingo as an operatic stage director, a matter on which I had expressed grave doubts. Better yet, he brought to that lunch table a gift basket of promises of what the L.A. Opera would do under his leadership. One was Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, and of course I laughed myself silly at the possibility of that ever happening. (It did.) Then there was Wagner’s Ring. (Well, that promise is still alive.) There was a menu of pie-in-the-sky at that lunch, and sly Edgar Baitzel saw to it that it got served.

He was the right kind of executive for this company at that point in its development, for a most important reason (among others, to be sure). He knew music. The world is full of opera companies run by millionaires and impresarios and tenors; here was a man who actually knew what was going on on the stage – and, more to the point, what should be going on. He would have fixed the wretched look of that Tannhauml;user or heaved it off the Venusberg.

He will be hard to replace, but he must be replaced. If you ask me (and please don’t), I think that James Conlon has some of the brainpower, the imagination and certainly the musical knowledge that we’ve lost with Edgar Baitzel’s passing. Hold on to him.


At 10 a.m. on Friday, March 23, the L.A. City Council will honor Alan Rich for his contributions to the cultural life of Los Angeles.

Years of listening to his symphonies through Hollywood Bowl amplification can leave you with a distorted sound image of Tchaikovsky’s remarkable orchestral language – what old Bernheimer used to refer to as the “slush pump.” The Fourth Symphony doesn’t seem to fare well indoors either, rendered unpopular these days by its excessive popularity. It had been years since I had heard it in its proper setting, until two weeks ago at Disney Hall, which may explain why it sounded so good. Stéphane Denève was the conductor.

A string player explained what is special about the Tchaikovsky sound: a way of layering the string scoring that lets in air and light. Whatever the means, the orchestral sound under Denève, bolstered by his fine sense of shape, made uncommonly good sense of Tchaikovsky’s wayward symphonic meanderings. It filled the hall with a great and novel experience that turned his moldy old Fourth into something brand-new and even, dare I say, wonderful.

Being French, M. Denève seemed possessed of that admirable ideal of clarity and balance that we hang on all French musicians from Boulez on down. His guest shot began with a generous serving of orchestral excerpts from Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges and the last of Bela Bartók’s three piano concertos, with the marvelous Piotr Anderszewski as soloist. Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto may not challenge the fingers as do the first two; he wrote it for his wife Ditta, of lovely but modest talent. By the same token, it challenges the poet all the more. Winner of the 2002 Gilmore Award, that benefice that falls unsolicited from above, and remembered for a spectacular follow-up recital at Disney last season, young Anderszewski continues on his upward path.

The Sound Suppressed

By his exuberant extracurricular activities, James Conlon has virtually redefined the function of a major municipal opera company and its music director: not merely to present the masterworks of the repertory on a large stage in grandiose productions, but to attend to operatic creativity as it has been practiced in a far broader sense and to make this broad sphere, too, the responsibility of the major company. Obviously, there are many more directions for such a passion to extend than one person’s sympathies can embrace, but already, in his first season here, Conlon’s range of activity has been phenomenal: four main-stage productions, the Noah’s Flood at the Cathedral and, this past week, the inaugural of the long-term project known as “Recovered Voices.” All that, plus his willingness to take over as pre-event lecturer at all his activities – and the fact that everything he has done so far has been well done. This is what you call a mensch, Irish kid from Queens or no.

“Recovered Voices” actually began here a couple of seasons ago, when Conlon put together Viktor Ullmann’s concentration-camp opera The Emperor of Atlantis at a local synagogue. The term embraces not only music composed under imprisonment but music whose composers’ lives were in some way affected under Nazi rule, Jewish or (as with Ernst Krenek or Paul Hindemith) not. Last week’s concert, with singers on the empty Chandler Pavilion stage against a projected backdrop with Conlon and the orchestra in the pit, was all-operatic: selections from five operas plus a complete performance of Alexander Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy. All was music composed in German-speaking Europe, almost all in the 1920s.

Six composers, neighbors more or less, worked to restart their art in a land shattered, at least economically and psychologically, after a devastating war. Music itself had reached ground zero. Mahler was gone; the symphony, bulwark of a century of concert-hall music, had run its course. Only opera, under Richard Strauss and, briefly, Franz Schreker, flourished, perpetuating a style that claimed its ancestry from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde 60 years before, uneasily blended with Viennese kitsch and the Mediterranean weep. Some clumsy experiments with the newfangled American jazz provided a feeble enlivening force. For subject matter, these composers drew on the symbolism of the painters to the north. In the cabarets, a livelier style flourished; Marlene Dietrich danced, and the piano was played by men who would later become the first generation of Hollywood’s composers: Franz Wachsmann (later Waxman), Fritz (Fred) Hollander. Kurt Weill heard their music and Bertolt Brecht fashioned some of their lyrics, and together they created the musical drama that gives the era its real distinction.

Their music, too, incurred the wrath of Hitler’s goons, but it had leapt to international fame before the formulators of the “Degenerate Music” had pulled down the bars. The music in last week’s concert was entirely noble in the fact of its existence – Ullmann’s opera especially, whose ironic undertones have earned it frequent complete performances these days – and in its perpetuation. Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf is, if nothing else, a social phenomenon, the first opera to employ jazz, and popular for just that. (As students in Vienna, we all smoked Jonnys – cigarettes, that is.) But the jazz is corny and the sentiment worse, as a Long Beach Opera staging proved not so long ago. Korngold’s Die tote Stadt has unaccountably wriggled itself into the repertory, probably on the strength of its composer’s movie fame, although I’m willing to bet you could fashion a better opera out of his score for Kings Row than this hopeless goo.

Then there is Alexander Zemlinsky, whose one-act, hourlong A Florentine Tragedy was given complete in concert form. Zemlinsky has his champions. People were raving a few years ago when a disc of his Second Quartet appeared; I was not of their number, nor was I when the Philharmonic took up his Lyric Symphony, which merely seems the grandmother of all film scores. Florentine, to an ironic Oscar Wilde text ending in a juicy murder, is stronger stuff, especially down in the orchestra pit. Next season, we get his The Dwarf.

Not one of these works on this thoroughly fascinating and valuable program is meant to push aside any of our common fund of music. There is no set limit to the size or number of the active repertory. If I heard no new masterpieces, perhaps I heard a few more criteria for valuing the ones I already know. Reason enough.

To San Francisco I journey for John Adams’ music; it is his shrine. Last season, his Doctor Atomic at the Opera House celebrated the blotting out of the sun; this past weekend, A Flowering Tree at Davies Symphony Hall celebrated its restoration. Peter Sellars, who supplied the words for both major events, was on hand both times, beguiling early arrivals with what has become, for him, not so much a pre-event lecture as an evangelical sermon, eyes wide shut, fortissimo to pianissimo. The crowd, at least on Saturday night, exploded. Ah, San Francisco.

First staged as part of a festival organized by Sellars in Vienna last year (to honor Mozart, you might know, by not playing a note of his music but observing his spirit indirectly), the work was brought to San Francisco with the staging cut down but the gorgeous power of its narrative maintained. An impoverished maiden transforms herself into a tree whose blossoms’ fragrance enchant a prince. He marries her, but her jealous sister destroys her beauty. Both the maiden and her prince journey the world in broken state; a miracle reunites them. It is a kind of love story often retold; this version is from south India, and its overtones are not all that far from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Mostly, it deals with the motivating force of myth – transformation – and that becomes the strength of Adams’ extraordinary score.

His performing forces, which he conducted, are large: full symphony orchestra plus, of course, all the percussion you can name of Eastern and Western worlds, including an exquisite array of metal chimes that put Davies Hall’s own ugly Erector Set décor to shame. Against this barrage there is – of course, this being John Adams – an exquisite array of small sounds: recorders, small glockenspiels, wind chimes and the like that gave the effect of a whole ‘nother world. Frankly, I felt the sound spectrum of A Flowering Tree sloped somewhat more toward the large sound; the gorgeous colors, on first hearing, tended now and then to run. But only now and then. The story is told in English; a chorus comments, rudely at times, in folksy Spanish.

George Tsypin’s original Vienna production used that amazing chorus from Carácas that erupts with such pizzazz on the recording of the Osvaldo Golijov Pasión (and sang it live twice in lucky Costa Mesa). Whatever those young singers have, it apparently doesn’t translate; the one weakness last weekend was the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Nicely done up in pastel togs in a balcony, it stomped and shouted the Spanish text, preserving the notion of surrounding the Indian folktale with another folklike level, but did so routinely, and brought things down.

The solo cast, all seen in Vienna, consisted of three singers and three dancers whose movements doubled the emotions of the singers or, you might say, paraphrased their earthly experiences into their extraordinarily subtle and complex dance language. Eric Owens, whose Grendel we may now forgive, was the Storyteller, that eloquent, essential binding force in all exotic drama. Jessica Rivera was the ravishing young Kumudha of the blossoms; we know her from work with the L.A. Opera Workshop and the recordings of Golijov’s Ainadamar and his Pasión. Russell Thomas, new to me, was the passionate Prince.

Surrounding this fine vocal group, and welding themselves to its artistry in a way you’d have to see to feel, were three dancers from the Indonesian Institutes for the Arts in Sukarta. Their exhilarating strength lent an entirely new dimension to the entire passionate creation. Even though little of Tsypin’s production traveled to San Francisco – it will be done complete in London in August, and here in concert form in 2009 – the presence of dancers completed the dimension of the work most thrillingly. There was one (of many, actually, but especially one) moment of haunting beauty in the work; it stays with me still, and my eyes mist as I tell it.

The crippled Kumudha lies helpless. “My eyes,” she remembers, “were like the lotus. My arms had the grace of bamboo.” Across the stage, the sorrowing Prince wanders, lamenting, “I grieve for you, lie lost and sick for you.” Their songs, borne by mute dancers, meet midstage. That’s John Adams.

Purple, StreakedI had not intended to write about Brahms at this length. Hearing all four symphonies in five days should have clogged my pores for weeks, yet here we are. I have no fondness for terms like “meat and potatoes,” at least in musical parlance, but that’s what these performances under Christoph von Dohnanyi actually were: thoroughly wholesome, beautifully balanced, every first flute in coordination with every second. Ending the set was the Second Symphony – some folks’ favorite – and its turgid, strained slow movement with horn solo that is like a paradigm of a tune that meanders onstage with no idea where to go. (Mozart did it better in his Musical Joke.) But that symphony allowed for some good, hefty brass at the close; if the Messrs. Green and company had stood up for their last fanfares and released a flock of white doves into the hall, it would not have been out of place. Strange to relate, but after Brahms, the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony on the same Disney stage this past weekend sounded downright lovable – Tchaikovsky!!

A couple of days following the Brahms orchestral orgy, however, came an appendage to the event that nearly obliged me to swallow every harsh word I have flung at old Onkel Johannes these past weeks. Midway through an all-Brahms chamber concert by Philharmonic members came the Clarinet Quintet, a late work not often heard, music of lavender and deep purple, shot through with burnished-bronze outcries from the solo wind player. Memories of the similarly scored work by Mozart are not out of place; nothing else of Brahms – possibly excepting the trio with French horn – sends forth such immediate waves of deep, penetrating beauty. Well into the slow movement, David Howard’s solo clarinet unwound its slithering melodic line across the musical spectrum; the strings answered with passionate shivers, and their moonstruck conversation continues to echo in my skull days later. That’s Brahms.

Salonen is there to re-create some of the birth pangs of Helix, his latest orchestral work, whose U.S. premiere the Philharmonic will present on March 30. “The great Russian conductor Valery Gergiev asked me for a piece for a BBC concert to celebrate an organization called The World Orchestra of Peace. I had no idea what kind of composition I could write to celebrate the idea of peace. I called the BBC and they told me to just send along any old composition, and that’s what’s here.”

Helix, like most of Salonen’s recent compositions – like the music of nearly any serious creative artist you can name these days – is the product of a collaboration: the invention of the composer and the software that facilitates turning that invention into the printout that the world receives as a readable, performable score. “There is a terrible loneliness about composing music,” Salonen tells the crowd, “and the software creates the illusion of a dialogue, of somebody else in the room – not composing, but at least telling me that what I’m doing is doable. It makes it possible to dream up symphonies, even operas, while I’m in an airplane or in a hotel room far from home. Then, when I get back I can quickly download those dreams.”

Two English brothers, Ben and Jonathan Finn, developed Salonen’s favored software and then gave it the name of Finland’s most famous composer, Jean Sibelius. “As far as I know,” says Salonen, “I am the first Finnish composer to use Sibelius.” He has plenty of company among fellow composers, though; the Sibelius Web site teems with names: Steve Reich, Michael Tilson Thomas, Lalo Schifrin – and takes a swipe or two at Sibelius’ principal software rival, a program called Finale.

On a big screen at the back of the crowded Apple Store, Salonen gets to demonstrate himself, and Sibelius. The sounds aren’t yet the L.A. Philharmonic, but synthesizers provide a fair likeness. Several measures from the start of Helix are laid out; then, manipulated by software, the notes are altered in length, in duration and through combination. The textures thicken as combinations of notes are played off against themselves. Gradually, the music is transformed from an open-textured exercise into an intensifying, accelerating sound pattern of concentric circles. Over Helix‘s nine-minute duration, the title begins to make sense.

At the end there are questions and, as expected, a certain pandemonium. The age spread is impressive; you get the feeling that the next great symphony might come from a 14-year-old Apple whiz, or from an 82-year-old critic, for that matter. Someone asks the inevitable: How does the program affect the division of his life?

“Anybody can conduct symphony concerts,” answers Esa-Pekka Salonen. “But only I can write my music.”

Notes on an uncommonly splendid week at Zipper Concert Hall – and what a valuable asset to musical life that handsome, small room has become!

The second in the reborn Monday Evening Concerts drew an almost-capacity crowd, despite there being not a familiar name on the program. Steven Stucky, who curated, had chosen well; what was most compelling was the spread in styles, from the academic/contrapuntal (James Matheson, Sean Shepherd) to the youthful/kicky (Andrew Norman) to three short works (Philippe Bodin, Ana Lara, Brian Current most of all) in which the voice of an original composer with something important to say could be clearly heard. The performances, by members of XTET led by Donald Crockett, all of them locals, offered further assurance that if it should happen that serious composition manages to survive, it will be properly performed. I particularly liked Current’s Faster Still, the final work, an exhilarating study in changing tempos, with a killer part for solo violin (Movses Pogossian). In our previous chat, Stucky had described the piece as “Elliott Carter writing arpeggios,” which stops short of dealing with the energy of the piece, the startling jolts in its changes of pace. (Alternating Current, perhaps?) The composer lives in Toronto; he is worth watching, even from afar.

The best of Susan Svrcek’s “Piano Spheres” concert the next night dealt with worthwhile nostalgia, music from the ’50s, ’60s or thereabouts in styles bygone but still vivid. She began with our old friend Ingolf Dahl, once of USC: the Sonata Pastorale of 1959, neo-classic, jazzy here and there, thoroughly charming. A set of short works by the great loner Carl Ruggles was just as thoroughly uncharming. Later came a clutch of Polish works: a set of miniatures by Artur Malawski from 1947 and, at the end, the 1953 Sonata No. 2 by Grazyna Bacewicz, powerful, defiant music by one of the most significant composers to break through Stalinist dogma in post-WWII Poland.

On Friday, the Calder Quartet, which has been in residence at the Colburn School this season, drew the largest crowd I’ve ever seen at Zipper, and for good reason. Even more amazing, the near-capacity audience held its absolute silence during the Calder’s stunning performance of the Shostakovich Quartet No. 15, that heartbreaking work constructed of six continuous near-pianissimo movements in a bottomless pit. The crowd was young, some very young, and whoever assembled it should hire themselves out to other organizations in town who present serious concerts of quiet music. The program also included Arcadiana, a set of delicious, slinky bits by Thomas Adès – “each an evocation of paradise,” says the wicked composer, and a perfect comedown from the Shostakovich – as well as the second of Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartets, delivered rather harshly at first (why leave out the first-movement repeat?) but with the slow movement entirely the “contemplation of the starry sky” that Beethoven himself noted. These Calders, all four USC-taught and -mellowed, are ripening into one of our prime resources.

At neither of those last two important events was our Times represented. Wonder what happened to that old expression “newspaper of record.”

Zap

Sooner or later, every opera company must take on Tannhäuser; the good news is that our local company’s responsibility is now behind it. Here’s what you need to know about this production currently at the Chandler. At the Bacchanale, near the start, the stage is full of Wagner’s steamy music, with bodies to match – nude, perhaps, but the lighting makes it difficult to discern, or to care. Out from the pile climbs Tannhäuser – in modern dark suit, red jacket. He walks over to a (!) grand piano, sits and begins his serenade to Venus (properly joined, from the pit, by the solo harp Wagner actually demands). Eventually, Tannhäuser is extruded from the Venusberg and finds himself back on Earth in a snowstorm while a Shepherd nearby sings of the balmy Maytime breezes.

What we have, you know by now, is one of those update jobs – the work this time of director Ian Judge and designer Gottfried Pilz – brought on by the Wagnerian sensory overload, the obsession that his music embodies the philosophies of religion, love, hate, damnation, redemption, dissonance and harmony, and is therefore subject to “anything goes” on the dramatic stage. I can’t imagine a stage spectacle more soporific than Wagner according to the Master’s original designs, and our museums teem with evidence to bear this out. But must the alternative insult the eye? The common sense?

You’d think so, from the recent Kirov Opera excursion to Costa Mesa, and now this Tannhäuser, which delivers Wagner’s perfectly agreeable (if hopelessly naive) early stage piece in a production that violates the word of Wagner’s text as well as its sense, for no discernible reason. Must the second-act “Hall of Song,” greeted for its grandeur in Elisabeth’s interminable aria, turn out an overcrowded hotel lobby with inadequate Sitzplatz for the guests? Whose idea, the drab warehouse setting for Act 3, lit with a kind of neonlike electronic green like the first generation of computer monitors, through which the Pilgrim’s Chorus trudges like zombies?

The music is okay, just okay. Peter Seiffert is the Tannhäuser with the modern mustache and the reedy, accurate voice; you have to wonder at the pheromones in that utterly sexless voice nonetheless capable of mounting that Venusberg. Petra Maria Schnitzer is a melting Elisabeth, Franz Josef Selig, as the Landgrave, a commanding figure in the Franz Josef tradition. Martin Gantner – stooped, spectacled, balding – is an odd casting choice for history’s poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, the romantic figure in Wagner’s script, but his “Evening Star” is curiously moving for all that. Better than any of this is the rousing musical leadership of James Conlon and the magnificent whoop-de-do of the orchestra’s brass contingent when called for. I wonder, though: If Conlon is serious about building a Wagnerian town here, mightn’t a somewhat larger chorus be in order? Just asking.

“The last 80 years,” writes Ned Rorem in Facing the Night, his latest collection of terse and invigorating personal observations, “have been the sole period in history wherein music of the past takes precedence over the present .?.?. I never go to classical concerts anymore, and I don’t know anyone who does. It’s hard still to care whether some virtuoso tonight will perform the Moonlight Sonata a bit better or worse than another virtuoso performed it last night.”

Either by accident or design, I haven’t actually heard the “Moonlight” for a very long time. With the help of our local band, however, I’ve been able to revisit the Beethoven Nine Symphonies over recent seasons, each of them juxtaposed with a new and different music that obliged me to ponder differences and hear both works in a new light. This weekend and next, I get to revisit the Four of Brahms – as, by coincidence, do audiences at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall and Washington’s Kennedy Center – and have just recovered from the news that the next Disney season kicks off with all seven – count ‘em – Sibelius symphonies. I find this delightful, sort of. I have become famous for my out-of-hand deploration of the music of that Finnish master, based on a certain tendency in his music toward thickness and ugliness of sound and pomposity of oratory. Faced with the prospect of this new total immersion, I am now forced to confess that I have never, not once, heard live performances of the Sibelius Third or Sixth symphonies. It would not at all surprise me if I emerged from this Sibelius immersion waving the Finnish banner and chanting Finlandia at full voice. Something similar happened last summer, after all, when a performance of the Violin Concerto, a loathing for which I had often proclaimed, won me over completely at a Hollywood Bowl concert. I’m just as glad, however, it isn’t included on the Philharmonic’s new list.

As with “Beethoven Unbound,” the Brahms series aren’t just any old concert programs. Christoph von Dohnányi is the guest conductor, and his past visits here proclaim him as a uniquely warm-hearted visionary toward the Romantic orchestral repertory. He begins by leveling the playing field – literally, by bringing his podium and all the players down to almost the same level and thereby suggesting a kind of chamber-music-writ-large approach. This seems to clarify and make somewhat gentle what I often find unbearable in Brahmsian orchestration. I find Dohnányi’s Brahms actually almost likable; that’s a new kind of sound, for the Philharmonic and for Onkel Johannes as well.

The Brahmsian structures are awesome: not only the astonishing building up in the finale of the Fourth Symphony but the much more devious – and, in the end, far more elusive – accumulation of shape in the finale of the Second, which, after some 60 years of puzzling out, I’ve only now begun to comprehend. I also admire the marvelous trickery in the Brahms scherzi, every one a magic box of melodic invention. It’s the pure sound of the oratorical Brahms that I cannot abide, least of all in performances in the hard-edged, frenzied Toscanini manner that some critics have tried to pass off as “noble” and “eloquent.” If some high-minded brat of a composer had come at me with the opening of his First Symphony, those insolent drums and the C-minor constipation in the strings and the horns, I’d have been out the door before the 10th bar. Critics must have had stronger constitutions in those days.

Contemporary Hero

Tardily, and with some difficulty, I write of Steve Reich and of Daniel Variations, his most recent large-scale work for chorus and orchestra, which the Los Angeles Master Chorale introduced at Disney Hall in late January. The music sets words from the Book of Daniel and words spoken by Daniel Pearl, the journalist from Encino captured and slain by terrorists in Pakistan. Since the murder, a Daniel Pearl Foundation has come into being; Pearl’s parents, Ruth and Judea, were at the local performance.

All of which makes it difficult to deal along parallel lines with music and circumstance, the more so because of Reich’s much-honored excellence. Daniel Variations is a work for chorus and orchestra, about 25 minutes in length, which follows the layout of the previous You Are (Variations), as well it should; that happens at the moment to be Reich’s extremely successful method of dealing with text, chorus, and the familiar Reich orchestra of keyboards, percussion and small numbers of instruments, all amplified. Not surprisingly, the new work sounds a lot like the earlier piece. That circumstance is bound to detract from the importance of the event, but it should not detract from the excellence of the music. Future performances will surely present Daniel Variations in other contexts than this first time, coupled with You Are (Variations), and that will be the time to write about it as music.

Mahagonny Revisited

No opera company that can come up with this season’s Don Carlo, Poppea and Mahagonny in a single throw can be reckoned below first-rate. On the whole, I will stick to my words of praise for this honorable production of this one-of-a-kind masterpiece; a second visit left me, as at the first time, shaken by the raw strength of the whole. Audra McDonald’s Jenny is, in a word, unmatchable: totally insidious from her first line, oozing poison at every word. I could wish for the elimination of the “Cranes” duet in Act 3, which neither Brecht nor Weill felt wholly comfortable about, but at least she sings it with complete dishonesty. Anthony Dean Griffey is a splendidly goofy Jimmy, and it’s good that the new translation gives him a singable name: “McIntyre,” not “Mahoney.” I don’t know why I didn’t single out Donnie Rae Albert before for his Trinity Moses in the “Trial Scene”; he was terrific.

John Doyle’s staging doesn’t entirely work. He fills his stage with palookas and lets them fall over one another, and this especially undermines the ending. That is one of the most devastating endings in all opera, and James Conlon’s orchestra and chorus make it so here, but as Jimmy himself says, sometime earlier:

“SOMETHING’S MISSING.”

Mahagonny is back in town, and it’s time to take to the trees. Eighteen years ago, when the steel-edged words and music of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill were last at the L.A. Opera, they were accorded polite if stylish treatment: Kent Nagano’s musical leadership, Dr. Jonathan Miller’s brainy staging, nothing to pin you against the wall or drive needles into your shoulder blades. Things have changed, however; the difference is James Conlon, and the difference is marvelous.

The opera dates from 1930. You can click on Wikipedia and learn the state of Germany at the time, the public attitudes toward Jewish musical intellectuals and left-leaning poets, even the high-riding creators of the recent Threepenny Opera. Mahagonny was a huge hit; it played all over Germany in its first year, but its every appearance was under clouds. A great – i.e., impolite – performance of the opera, such as the one Conlon is leading at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, communicates its agitprop power. The really powerful scenes are those in which its main characters – bums, every one – proclaim the uselessness of everything a prosperous German world in 1930, or a comparable one here today, holds dear. The finale is devastating: The crowd parades with placards past the electrocuted corpse of the so-called hero Jimmy, with its procession of nihilistic messages, and with the main tunes of the opera now made grotesque by enlargement grimacing through the orchestra. Wherever the opera is properly performed, there will be cheers and boos at that moment. “It’s not really an opera, after all,” said somebody in the exit line behind me, and I wish I’d had the hour or two to explain why that person was wrong. This, in brief: It is opera, and superior of its kind, because – for one of several reasons – at that moment there is an awesome, wrenching encounter between the thudding of Brecht’s words and the hammering of Weill’s music; they are an exact match, as the words and music of Cherubino’s “Voi che sapete” formed their exact match 144 years before.

Pierre Boulez once said that if he were running a major opera house, he would burn all existing repertory and run the house on nothing but continual performances of Mahagonny. I know of worse ideas, except that after a week, Boulez’s city would be destroyed, wiped out by the hot emotional winds that howl through this extraordinary artwork. The excellence of Conlon’s conducting, which I have not heard in previous Mahagonnys here or at the Met, is his success in harnessing those hot winds, not only in the orchestra but also in much of his cast. Audra McDonald, not so much girly as a tough broad from the start, is the best Jenny ever; Anthony Dean Griffey is a splendid Jimmy; Patti LuPone (whom I haven’t had time to write love lyrics to for her Sweeney Todd on Broadway) is the Leocadia Begbick of my dreams. The director, by the way, is John Doyle, also of Sweeney.

Past Particles

Allow me some memories. When I arrived in Los Angeles in 1980 (intending to remain one year, but that’s another story), Kurt Weill was very much a living memory. The place still teemed with great old Berliners; soon they would be gone. Margot Aufricht, widow of the man who had first staged Die Dreigroschenoper, was a smiling, garrulous presence in her small house in Beverly Hills. Robert Vambéry, whose play Der Kuhhandel had become A Kingdom for a Cow, Weill’s last European production (and most abject flop), was on hand among the émigré contingent.

So was Felix Jackson. As Felix Joachimson, he had been a noted Berlin essayist and critic, and had written the text for a Kurt Weill musical, Na Und? (So What?), that had completely disappeared. The story he told was that Hans Heinsheimer, Weill’s publisher at Vienna’s Universal Editions, had advised the composer to take the manuscript and drop it off a bridge into the Danube. Maybe Weill did just that; at least Joachimson, who changed his name to Jackson, married the singing star Deanna Durbin and wrote some of her movies, loved to tell the story. I could never get him to tell me the whole scenario of Na Und?, however, just a few bits. Neither would Heinsheimer, who immigrated to New York and gossiped a blue streak about every other aspect of Weill’s life.

Anyhow, meeting all those living mementos inspired me to assemble a radio documentary, which KUSC broadcast to fair acclaim in 1982. Kim Kowalke, the renowned Weill scholar, was still teaching here at Occidental – he’s now at the University of Rochester – and he helped me with tapes of music that wasn’t otherwise available at that time. Back in Rockland County, New York, before moving out here, I had become pals with Lotte Lenya, Weill’s widow, and had miles of tape of her boilerplate reminiscences. With all that material at hand, I turned out some pretty red-hot radio, if I do say so, but not so red-hot as this new Mahagonny. These folks really know what they’re doing.

When the Monday Evening Concerts began in 1939 – they were called “Evenings on the Roof” back then – the first composers bore names strange and unfamiliar to local audiences: Béla Bartók, Charles Ives, Ferruccio Busoni. Audiences came, anyway. The composers on next week’s Monday Evening Concert also bear unfamiliar names: Andrew Norman, Brian Current, Ana Lara, and there’s a good chance you’ll be there, anyway. (February 19, 8 p.m., Zipper Hall)

I sat with Donald Crockett a few days ago, leafing through manuscripts of the six new works on that enterprising program. Professor of composition at USC, Crockett has been in charge of handing out encouraging words (and their opposite) to several generations of young composers; he will lead XTET, the excellent freelance ensemble, through the whichy thickets of that program’s new works. “One thing about new music these days,” says Crockett, “it looks good. Anyone with the right software can put out a professional-looking hot-off-the-press page of music and send it anywhere in the world. There’s a danger, of course: Just because it looks good (compared to the pen-and-ink scratches that used to pass for musical manuscripts in pre-computer days), that doesn’t mean that it is good.”

Why bother to compose serious music these days? Everybody has a hard-luck story about composers (conductors, violinists, critics, etc.) going broke, and yet they keep on. “Right now,” says Andrew Norman, “there are no ‘must writes’ on my horizon. I am just following my creative interest and trying to hone my voice and my technique one piece at a time.” Norman’s Gran Turismo places him as the one local composer on the Monday Evening program, although he is currently living his own gran turismo on a Prix de Rome in Italy. Three years ago, in these pages, I put down a piece from his student days as “juvenile fluff.” At USC, he obviously underwent a quick metamorphosis. “Early on,” says Crockett, “he came to my classes writing a soaring, Barberesque kind of romantic melody. Now his music is more complex than mine.”

Seventeen

What can you tell a 17-year-old who comes to your classroom with hopes of becoming a “serious classical” composer? “First,” says Steve Stucky, “I have to say that there isn’t very much I can add that that 17-year-old doesn’t already know, and that is a source of continual amazement.” Consulting composer for new music at the L.A. Philharmonic – where he has been a guiding light in the exemplary “Green Umbrella” concerts since 1988 – and professor of composition at Cornell, Stucky chose the music for the upcoming Monday Evening Concert “partly out of things I’ve been wanting to hear for a long time and keep putting off.

“Sure, I have to tell a hopeful composer that it’s a low-percentage game these days. Even so, the ways of thinking about music are so much richer, so much more exciting; the ways of distributing music are vastly greater than before.”

I ask him about stylistic boundaries. In 1939, Californians knew nothing about making it in the New York music scene unless they moved there. There was a stylistic barrier between East and West Coast. Is there, still?

“No; it’s just too easy to move around. There’s nothing inherently ‘Californian’ about Andrew’s piece except that he composed it here and that I happen to love it. On this program, we have Ana Lara from Mexico; the Long Beach Symphony has played her music. And you’ll also love Brian Current’s piece from Canada. It’s as if Elliott Carter wrote only arpeggios.”

Surf and Turf

There isn’t any music by Matt McBane on this upcoming program, but he’s out of the same USC academic swirl that spun forth Andrew Norman, and his life since graduation is a pretty good paradigm for making it as a serious musician these days.

“Getting out of school at age 22, I decided if I wanted something to happen, I had to make it happen. In 2003, I began talking with the Calder Quartet and with the city of Carlsbad – my and Calder member Ben Jacobson’s hometown – and came up with the idea for a Carlsbad Music Festival. Starting a festival with no prior arts-administration experience has been an incredibly steep learning curve, but I am very happy with where the festival is now. Last year, the Calders performed the winner of our first Young Composers Competition; the New York-based NOW Ensemble performed an entire program of music by young composers, and a large ensemble concert featured many of the best young musicians in L.A.: all these musicians together in the same place, sharing ideas and hearing each other’s work. Our next Carlsbad Festival will be in September 2007, with So Percussion, Real Quiet and the Calder Quartet.”

Paradoxically, in the midst of this California impact, Matt decided to move to New York. “My choice was based on a number of reasons, the biggest of which was simply the desire to live somewhere other than SoCal while I’m still young. I wanted to start an ensemble/band, and so I did. Tentatively, it’s called Abstraction; we had our first show in December, and we play only original music – by me, that is.

“Beyond that is the feeling, which many of my musician friends unfortunately share, that the Los Angeles musical establishment is still reluctant to endorse local composers, most of all the composers who haven’t yet established themselves elsewhere, and that there are more opportunities in New York for emerging composers – through commissions, competitions, grants, performance opportunities, etc. All that being said, I love L.A., am keeping my musical life there as active as I can, and plan on moving back in a couple of years. Also, I could never stay in New York for too long; it is just too damn cold here to surf most of the year.”

At the sound of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s singing, strong men fell weak, nightingales blushed with envy, sunsets went pale. The pleasures she purveyed were guilty as hell, but how she could dish them out! We all had our favorite lines of her music, and they delivered sweet dreams: a defiance from a Johann Strauss operetta, a sad resignation from the other Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, a phrase from a Schubert song no matter how twisted out of context. Fond memory, cloaked in the pure silver of a Schwarzkopf recall, was enough to stop all clocks. “Sei nicht bös . . . ,” I will write (or simply breathe), and a teardrop will fall upon my keyboard . . . or almost.

“Sei nicht bös” – the traffic-stopping moment from Karl Zeller’s Der Obersteiger – isn’t even included in EMI’s new five-disc, reduced-price collection, but I’m sure that every well-equipped household already has its copy of a Schwarzkopf Sings Operetta disc in every room. The new collection has its own charms, and its curiosities as well. The first disc is worth the price of the whole set: a collection of Hugo Wolf songs that has been out of print for years. And on that disc there is a tiny pearl, lasting little more than a minute, that is worth the price of the entire disc: “Morgentau,” a perfect song you will play and replay and replay, and then go bananas over this wonderful young singer from back in 1954, who hasn’t yet learned how to flirt and fuss and turn into the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf that she would become, to the detriment of musical integrity, 20 years later.

This new collection seems made up of a fair number of barrel-scrapings: remastered recordings, outtakes from rehearsals, and worthy recordings retrieved from the dustbin. Almost everything is in mono. Some of the material doesn’t deserve the light of day: the 31-year-old soubrette chirping her way through a Strauss waltz; Wagner’s “Träume,” breathy and overphrased. A set of perfunctory songs by Walter Gieseking, with the eminent pianist at the keyboard, is hardly redeemed by his presence. But there are also treasures worth rediscovery: the Wolf disc, or a rehearsal sequence of Bach, with Schwarzkopf in harmony with the fabulous Kathleen Ferrier. Now and then, however, you can be beguiled by the bright clarity of the rising Schwarzkopf – not all that young, at 40 and 45, but clear of voice and strong of phrase and sometimes more the responsible, serious artist than she would occasionally later become. There is evidence, too, of ground she would never cover, for all those silvery tones. Listen, on disc No. 5, to her making her tortuous way through Bach’s Cantata No. 199 (“Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut”), pretty much note by note, phrase by phrase; listen then to the artistry, the comprehension of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s performance of the same music (on a Nonesuch disc issued two years ago).

Love for Love

Hunt Lieberson’s surpassing art has blessed this region lavishly in person, in opera, choral works and solo recital, but nothing so profound, so disturbing (in the best sense) as the set of orchestral songs to texts by Pablo Neruda that she sang here in May 2005. The music was by her husband, Peter Lieberson, who conducted the Philharmonic; the poems are Neruda’s own meditations on love. “My love,” sings the lover at the end, “if I die and you don’t, let us not give grief . . . We might not have found one another in time.” Only 14 months later, the wondrous singer herself was dead.

Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs stands as one of the romantic miracles of our time. The marvel extends to Lieberson himself, whose music on this occasion breathes a renewed sense of romantic communication, reborn from anything of his I know. The blending haunts us all – husband and wife, poetry and music, a oneness both ecstatic and desperate. Shaken as we are by the intensity of her recordings – the Bach cantatas, the Handel arias, even some of the earlier Lieberson songs – we also hear a quality that goes beyond the music: a reaching, a touching. The Nonesuch recording, done live with the Boston Symphony conducted by James Levine, is beautiful and moving; if it doesn’t quite touch my memory of that May night at Disney Hall, with Lorraine standing engulfed by the orchestra and Peter’s baton the embodiment of a love beyond expression, probably nothing can.

Refreshment

The rains came on Saturday night, and so did Noah’s Flood, both welcome. Benjamin Britten’s setting of the 16th-century miracle play, not quite an opera but more fun than most, was most magically dealt with under Los Angeles Opera auspices, as the latest in the admirable outreach program designed to involve other community agencies in widespread music making. Already that has meant more new activity – newly composed school opera and revivals of bygone works like this delirious Britten masterwork – than one pair of ears or legs can keep up with. The L.A. Opera’s new music director, James Conlon, has been the firebrand in much of this, with his restoration last season of music created under Nazi captivity, his announcement of further exploration of this extraordinary repertory and the impression he generates over all that the “out” in his “outreach” has no end.

Conlon was in charge of the Britten as well, masterminding the crowd – something close to 4,000, crammed into the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels – in a rehearsal of the sing-along hymns and leading the 40-minute production in similar high spirits. Jason Stearns was the Noah; Jamieson K. Price, the Voice of God; Phyllis Pancella, Mrs. Noah decked out with a gift for bitchcraft that the framers of the original Book of Genesis had somehow overlooked. Hamilton High School’s Academy of Music supplied the mostly percussion orchestra (with a few L.A. Opera ringers); the children and adults, under Eli Villanueva’s direction, were from St. John Eudes Church, every one a scene-stealer, every one entitled.

How the decades fly past! Steve Reich turns 70, with Phil Glass in hot pursuit; John Adams glides into 60 with nary a wrinkle. Reich’s new choral work resounds at next Sunday’s Master Chorale concert; Adams’ classics retains their bloom at a couple of Philharmonic events; the mail, as usual, delivers a new CD from Glass. Whatever your personal take on their music, elder-statesmanhood has fallen easily on all three.

The memories that remain from last year’s “Minimalist Jukebox” at the Philharmonic celebrate the longevity of the creative urge: something driving, unshakable. It’s an energy built into this music; it fueled the audience rebellions when I first heard Adams’ Grand Pianola and Reich’s Four Organs in New York in the 1980s. It echoes in the pounding on my ribs that still awakens me some nights, and in the chords that hammer the Harmonielehre into life. It stoked the shared delight eight years ago, when Esa-Pekka Salonen and our (his) Philharmonic gave Adams’ Naïve and Sentimental Music its first hearing, and that delight returned when those performers brought that music to Disney Hall this past weekend – where, of course, the piece truly belongs. This time the fantasy of Adams at work on the score, driven by poetic visions from the writings of Schiller, was further realized in the achievement of the acoustic ideal for which this lavish orchestral creation was actually composed.

Schiller’s essay (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’) proposes a contrast of poetic attitudes; Adams, already skilled – as in Nixon in China – in the musical presentation of dichotomies, goes on from there. As from the clash of flint against steel, the conflagration grows; the conflict in the work’s final pages is terrifying. In his own eloquent notes Adams writes of the work as a quest for a balance, perhaps unreachable at a time when the writing of grandiose orchestral music has faded from the landscape. This, he admits, might be “a deeply sentimental act.” It could also be a naive act, “because speaking through the medium of the orchestra has always been a natural and spontaneous gesture for me . . .” True enough; what justifies the existence of a 50-minute work for huge symphony orchestra (plus a gathering of exotic percussion and a sampler or two) is the mastery, the insouciant ease, of the work itself.

Naïve and Sentimental – last heard here at its premiere in the Chandler Pavilion in 1999 and therefore not properly heard until now – is the bulwark of this week’s Adams celebrations. From the congenial throb of its opening to the crashing, intimidating barrier against daylight that it throws up 50 minutes later, the music constantly astonishes. Its orchestral colors are dense and ravishing. Peer around its edges at your peril. Its title is elusive; there is nothing naive here. Rather it is the menace of coiled serpents, eternally fascinating, a challenge and a tribute to a superlative orchestra and its conductor, from a composer who knows what they can do and delights in his power to engage their best.

Beethoven’s Second Symphony shared the program. Two centuries, plus or minus, separate the works, yet there were challenges of a sort. Here too was a brash innovator trying things out, using the woodwinds in particular to fill the orchestral landscape with new sounds, new relationships. Sir Donald Tovey, my favorite writer about early classical music, wrote about the “great bassoon joke,” and the Beethoven Second is full of them, odd little veerings into the middle of next week, heralded by a chuckle from the bassoons and landing somewhere delightful, somewhere totally unexpected. Salonen’s way with these early, even-numbered Beethoven symphonies – this, and No. 4 as well – is always admirably energetic and richly humorous, and so it was this time.

Time’s End

Writing about Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is no easy matter. The symbolism in Messiaen’s apocalyptic visions is so intensely personal that you accept it fully or dismiss it as a fanatic’s ravings. If the latter, you must then deal with the music itself, its solo lines and its deeply poignant conversations of a melodic and harmonic beauty so profound that they sometimes hurt the ear. Desperately seeking somebody’s writing to crib from to fill my report on last week’s performance by Philharmonic chamber musicians, I found almost nothing on my otherwise well-stocked bookshelves. It’s as though my fellow critics share my fear of writing about this intensely beautiful, aching music.

This cannot be. Someone must write about the power of this music on purely musical grounds: the rich, flowing melody of the cello as, with piano, it extols the Eternity of Jesus in its simple, folklike tune. Someone must smile along as all instruments join in a kind of rustic jiggety-jog. Someone, most of all, must recoil at the blinding energy of the clarinet solos – wondrously played on this occasion by Lorin Levee – which burn into the imagination as if applying the Stigmata. (Is there any other music in the world more purely, upliftingly painful – to the ear, to the soul?)

A most distinguished concert, this – with the Messaien preceded, as was proper, by the Quartet of Claude Debussy. Two weeks ago I had deplored the tendency of Chamber Music Society audiences to applaud between movements, in this most fragile repertoire. This night, violinist Mitch Newman made a preconcert speech gently slapping the audience on its collective wrist. It worked.

Tree on the Move

The splendid Jacaranda Concerts still wait out the completion of remodeling at their Santa Monica venue; last Sunday’s concert found activities transferred to the Cypress Recital Hall at Cal State Northridge. A big and loyal crowd had found its way. Five sets of fingers were involved in the kind of varied piano program that only a true music-loving connoisseur could concoct; that has been the peculiar magic of these concerts from their beginning. The room at Northridge was pleasant enough, as school auditoriums go. (CSUN soon breaks ground for a major performing arts center, to open in 2009.) But Jacaranda’s home base – Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian, with its elegant small organ and its intimate layout – is a special place, and it will be good to get back, on April 7.

The program was the usual Jacaranda assortment of varied pleasures. Any concert that includes Schubert’s F-minor Fantasy, the overpowering piano duet from his last year, which moves from plaintive outcry to its final fugue that ties you in knots, needs nothing more. Hearing this work as an undergrad had caused me to change my major from pre-med to music. Sixty years later, the playing of Gloria Cheng and Robert Edward Thies confirmed the soundness of my decision. Eduardo Delgado’s Piazzolla and Ginastera, Scott Dunn’s Copland and Ives and some Liszt transformed into high-caloric goo by Steven Vanhauwaert added to the afternoon’s absurdities and its high delights.

Get this: “New music has never been an integral part of the winter-season diet of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On those rare occasions when our orchestra ventures an acknowledgement of the contemporary composer, the subscription audiences respond with stoic endurance at best, rude disdain at worst . . . The Philharmonic has never demonstrated a thorough, ongoing commitment to music of the relatively recent 20th Century. Instead, it has made sporadic, dutiful gestures . . . Our orchestra has at best created a ghetto for any art that tries to look forward rather than backward.”

I came across these words while poking around in old L.A. Times files for something to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Philharmonic’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, the venture that, five years later, renamed itself less scrutably as “The Green Umbrella.” The ——–
AUTHOR of those wishful words, dating from October 5, 1981, was the Times‘ then music critic Martin Bernheimer, whose mission among us seemed largely devoted to stamping out the notion of music as a matter for serious cultural advancement. The shards of his clouded crystal ball are all around us: Berio and Grisey at the reborn Monday Evening Concerts, the stage works of Pierre Audi and Robert Wilson at the L.A. Opera, this past week’s “Green Umbrella” concert at Disney, the one before that, and all the way back to their founding, under the scornful nose of Bernheimer, a quarter-century ago.

These concerts began small-scale, at the Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo, where one main advantage was the access to good, cheap food. A later move to Zipper Hall cost us that. The move to Disney seemed even more foolhardy: so many seats to fill, at too-high prices, once the Disney glamour wore off. Four seasons later, the too-high prices remain, but the seats are still filled – not to capacity, but still impressively for adventurous, new-music fare. Visiting concert managers and composers confess to astonishment at the size and response of the “Green Umbrella” audiences; what was this about “rude disdain”?

Take last week’s concert. The program had to be cobbled together quickly after Dawn Upshaw’s illness, and it was a beaut: music from old Los Angeles friends and new, cheered by not a sellout but certainly (for a concert of new music) an amazing-sized audience. It began with the Chain I by Witold Lutoslawski, an old friend; he had taught Steven Stucky, who has curated the Philharmonic’s new-music activities for years, and was himself on the program. The two made a splendid mix: Stucky leaning toward the conservative, Lutoslawski with a lovely thread of whimsy. Both were represented by splendid, small-scale works, and it was Stucky’s melting, loving string quartet Nell’ombra Nella Luce (repeated from a previous Chamber Music Society concert) that most immediately won hearts. The teacher-pupil relationship persisted with music by Franco Donatoni – Hot (piccolo sax and ensemble in high hysteria) – and his star disciple, Esa-Pekka Salonen, whose brand-new Catch and Release ended the evening in comparable high spirits. For the latter work – three movements, intensely motivated but somewhat given to fly off the handle – Salonen had declined to provide a program note. I would not be surprised if the version we heard, rushed into performance to fill the programming gap, was not quite the last word.

Low Downes

The fulminations of Bernheimer were as the mewlings of pussycats compared to the verbal barricades raised by the formidable Olin Downes – critic first at the Boston Post, later entrenched at The New York Times. His hegemony at both papers coincided more or less exactly with the rise in fame (or, as Downes would have it, in notoriety) of the music of Gustav Mahler. By 1918, still in Boston, he had propounded two principles that would govern his life: that worldwide damnation lay in the music of Gustav Mahler and that only Jan Sibelius held the keys to salvation. His writing style suggested a collaboration, with the other half of the team none other than the Lord Almighty. “We believe the music itself will be shelved,” he – oops, they – wrote in 1918, at the Boston premiere of Mahler’s Second Symphony, “long before the memory of the man and his services to his art will be forgotten.” And at another event, he simply took his leave from the concert hall in midperformance, and then simply wrote, “We do not like the Mahler Seventh Symphony.” On that occasion, the great Arnold Schoenberg, horrified at such effrontery, took it upon himself to scold the errant Mr. Downes. They argued back and forth for several weeks; the correspondence, published in Schoenberg’s Collected Letters, looms large in the annals of criticism.

What they might have missed just last week! I too, in my days of indiscretion, have had my reservations about certain expanses of the overstuffed Mahler. Friday night’s performance of the Seventh Symphony was, in a word, transforming: the Philharmonic under Salonen the source of an audible substance not yet heard, in a range of color not yet seen. Gatherings of instruments whispering, now under light strokes, now under exultant percussion . . . somebody stop me! By a great orchestra, in a great hall, under a great conductor, this was one of the great performances.

High Renaissance

All things to all people: The night before, there was Sting, not with memories of Police or Stewart Copeland (until the last number) but with Disney absolutely filled with a happy crowd that seemed to know why they were there. (For myself, I wasn’t so sure, at first.) The music at hand was by John Dowland, the Renaissance fabricator of exquisite, sad songs and slow, haunting lute tunes. (He made much of the pun on his name: dolens: “grieving.”) Between songs, Sting read lines from letters, or perhaps diary entries, outlining the sad journey of Dowland’s life, which was, indeed, a dolorous concoction compounded of rejections by potential employers and lovers. Edin Karamazov, a lutenist and guitarist who has performed with Paul Hillier and Jordi Savall, played on both instruments, somewhat percussively to my taste. Sting also played his own collection of lutes and guitars. A men’s octet, the Concord Ensemble, sang along on a few numbers, not nearly enough.

The beauty of Dowland’s songs justifies their appearance on any kind of respectable program, which this actually was. The earthiness of Sting’s delivery had its own appeal, so long as you didn’t think about Alfred Deller or the Hilliards. The songs included one by the Renaissance’s Robert Johnson and another by the one from our own time, which was cute.

My relationship with Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra has been historic and loving. I attended the world premiere, as a second-balcony usher in Boston’s Symphony Hall, December 1, 1944. Backstage after the performance, on my way to change out of uniform, I met Bartók and shook his hand. The look in that man’s eyes, already ravaged by the leukemia that would take his life nine months later, remains with me always. That memory, in fact, is the core of my regard for that work as one of the miracles of its time: the extraordinary contrast between the devastation I read in those eyes that night and the magnificent strength, the affirmation – even the rich, delicious humor – of that score. The paradox of this robust, youthful music from the pen of an elderly invalid (working, in fact, in his hospital bed) goes to explain the further marvel of last week’s wondrous performance at Disney Hall, with the latest phenomenon on the horizon – a real one, for a change – leading our Philharmonic through every nuance of this marvelous score, its ancient wisdom and its contemporary, youthful exuberance.

His name, which surely must come as no surprise by now as the PR machines have been grinding away, is Gustavo Dudamel; he is 26; he hails from Venezuela, where he has been a product of that country’s extraordinarily enlightened musical-education program; and he has already had musicians and audiences throughout Europe singing and orchestrating his praises. His North American debut was at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005, with Tchaikovsky and Revueltas; last week’s program contained, besides the Bartók, Kodály’s Galanta Dances and the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto. Questions remain, therefore, about his more, let’s say, “classical” leanings. They can be answered in part by a new Beethoven CD on Deutsche Grammophon (solid, no serious errors, no reason to trade in your Carlos Kleiber recordings) and by a Don Giovanni at La Scala that was generally regarded as too much too soon.

Last week’s concert may have left a few minor questions unanswered, but handled the rest of them loud and clear; not merely the latest package to tumble off the prodigy assembly line, young Gustavo is an authentic talent. He knows what he’s doing, is greatly gifted in conveying that knowledge to the people around him and, better yet, seems uncommonly able to make those people work with him. Details in the Bartók that I have sometimes taken for granted – the strings’ “buzzing” in the Intermezzo interrotto – seemed freshly profiled. Something comes across, a sense of the joy of music making. At the end of each piece, as the crowd goes bonkers out front, young Gustavo strolls through the orchestra, shaking hands all the way through the ranks. Maybe it’s only an act, but the conviviality it creates was something you could feel. No, it didn’t make the Rach 3 any less the overstuffed bundle of trash than the work truly is; not even the excellent Yefim Bronfman could work that level of miracle.

Comparisons between Dudamel and Britain’s Simon Rattle have been frequently voiced, and Rattle has, indeed, been eloquent in praise of this remarkable newcomer. It’s not just the mop of curly hair, however; if you watch early Rattle DVDs – the “Leaving Home” series on ArtHaus, for example – you see that same eagerness to put things across, that obsession almost to reach into the orchestra and pull things out into the light, that made everything in last week’s concert, wherever you sat in Disney Hall, more vivid, more thrilling. We need conductors like that; now we have one more.

Clap Trap

With five movements in the Bartók concerto, extroverted music in an enthralling performance, you might have expected some amount of renegade applause between movements, but there was none, the ultimate homage to the young maestro and his worthy impulses. The night before, there had been chamber music in that hall: Haydn and Schubert performed by Philharmonic members, classy, subtle stuff for an audience, you would think, aware that applause between movements in chamber music is never – repeat, never – done. (There’s even a full page of Roz Chast cartoons in the program book about concert etiquette, including applause between movements, maybe a little too cute to be taken as seriously as it deserves.) Still, there was applause – hearty applause – after each and every movement, and no attempt by players to wince, scowl or otherwise register displeasure at the practice. Go figure.

I am of several minds on the matter of interstitial applause in the concert hall. I would gladly applaud movements two and four of the Bartók concerto, just on the off chance that the composer’s spirit might be on hand to appreciate my appreciation of those sections’ remarkable cleverness. But the listener who violates the silence that fulfills the spirit following a hearing of the slow movement of Schubert’s B-flat Trio, played as it was last week by Bronfman, Bing Wang and Ben Hong, simply cannot have been welcoming that music into his or her bloodstream. For such an attack of anemia at its most pernicious, perhaps a compulsory pair of boxing gloves, handed out by ushers to each auditor errant, might do the trick.

Two segments remain (February 17-18, March 17-18) of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s two-year sweep through the piano concertos of Mozart: Saturdays at Glendale’s Alex Theatre, Sundays at UCLA’s Royce Hall. The turnouts have been close to capacity; it’s not just my imagination that I’ve absorbed these concerts as a kind of communion, a closeness in which Mozart, Jeffrey Kahane at the piano, and his marvelous orchestra have been participants on an equal level, all of us with something important and wonderful to say, to hear and to believe in.

That’s Mozart, and I say this not to explain, just to marvel. At the concert in mid-December, there were three concertos: two from 1784 composed only weeks apart, one from two years later. The first (K. 451, referring to Ritter von Köchel’s chronological listing) is a jovial, rawboned work full of tricks – the piano bursting in too soon, that sort of thing. The second, K. 456, is colored with darker moods, with a slow movement, a set of melancholy variations, that suddenly jolts you by a turn from minor to major with strange and marvelous changes of light. Ending that program was K. 503, music from more troubled times, two years later. Don Giovanni and the G-minor String Quintet were now on Mozart’s worktable, and the piano concerto had become for him a more imposing kind of musical drama, its opening phrases in this case like blocks of granite colliding. (It had also begun to lose Mozart the audience that the more frivolous earlier concertos had earned.) In this work, too, there are later kinds of jolt: a tantalizing alternation between major and minor, a sudden, sublime theme out of nowhere midway in the finale.

Concerto Conversations (Harvard University Press) is Joseph Kerman’s book on the way the inner life of a piece of music stems from the confrontation of the parts within that music, with the concerto through the ages as the paradigm for that kind of wordless drama. My Berkeley classroom memories teem with Kerman’s passion for this aspect of the musical language; I’ve asserted my own kindred spirit by dedicating my latest book to him. Some pages in his own book express his particular delight in those magical Mozart moments when the solo piano makes its first appearance in a concerto after the orchestra has made some kind of opening statement: the hilarious arabesque leading to a trill at the start of the so-called “Elvira Madigan” Concerto (K. 467); the shy testing-the-waters, one toe at a time, at the start of K. 503. Concertos model human relationships, Kerman claims, and even as he moves on from Mozart into music you wouldn’t be found dead listening to – not the first of Saint-Saëns’ two cello concertos but the second, of all dead-as-doornail repertory! – he succeeds in finding in these works a dogged adherence to the dramatic principles that establish the concerto as the most subtle (because wordless) of musical forms. All told, Kerman’s book forms quite a thrilling compendium on matters of musical rhetoric, and of deviations from norms made acceptable only by their being set to music. (Anna Russell: “You can get away with anything, so long as you sing it.”)

The Major and the Minor

I write here rather often about goose bumps, about moments in music that activate the tear ducts or the shiver glands or whatever those reactive mechanisms are called – actually, something in the brain called the “left insula,” if anyone cares – and whatever they are, I bear them with pride. Something about the Mozart piano concerto is particularly dangerous ground for the care and feeding of the goose bump, for reasons not difficult to fathom. A pianist in proper tune with this music – Jeffrey Kahane, Emanuel Ax, Mitsuko Uchida – succeeds after very few notes in converting that great, clumsy music box into an instrument of pure song.

It takes very few fingers. The passages in Mozart’s piano concertos, in fact, that most readily reduce the listener’s spirit to a state comparable to a box of molten Godiva are usually nothing more than one-finger tunes: the slow movements of the aforementioned K. 467 (reduced to the status of slush, alas, by the background-music guys), K. 488 and K. 595. More readily than any of these, it is the slow movement of K. 482 that enslaves me utterly on every hearing. It turned up on Kahane’s final program last season. Emanuel Ax performed it with the Philharmonic this past November with Alexander Mickelthwate conducting. It is one of the most richly scored of all the Mozart concertos, with almost a full complement of winds, plus timpani. The work is in E flat, which for a 1786 orchestra means a full workout for clarinets and horns; their tuning makes them easier to play in flat keys.

The slow movement begins with a rather dour minor tune, with stops and starts and a stark harmonic palette. Over a series of slow variations, these sparse harmonies become gradually filled in, and one pretty variant – with a solo flute – seems to herald a warming trend. Even so, for a work whose first movement had been fairly jolly, and with horns and clarinets on hand to warm up the atmosphere, this still seems rather stern stuff until . . .

The minor tune takes on a new shape, a closing cadence of deep, tragic sentiment, breath-stopping in its simple beauty. And at its end, for just a few seconds, a cloud across the sunset, it quietly slips from minor to a sunburst of momentary major in what we call a deceptive cadence. The sky clears, the movement comes to an end; the silence allows us to breathe, to wonder, “What hit me?” Then the music starts again: the finale, with a tune that might almost pass for “The Farmer in the Dell.” That, as I was saying, is Mozart.

The collapse of Tower Records was, as much as anything, a failure of relevance. The new generation, which in the past would have become the next record-buying public and the next, now download the infinite riches of the market onto their iPods. The hi-fi crowd of my youth, with their 6L6s in push-pull and their floor-to-ceiling Tannoys and Klipschorns, now have given way to something you wear in your shirt pocket. The paradox is that the few remaining quality classical-record producers – Harmonia Mundi with their Gloryland, Anonymous 4 singing old-timey American gospel songs in wrenching harmonies with guitar and fiddle; Nonesuch with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s heartbreaking singing of her husband Peter’s Neruda Songs; major works by Osvaldo Golijov on several labels – are exactly what I would have greeted in the past as ongoing evidence of the continued health of the record industry.

The Tower collapse came just in time to end the supply of discs to the Disney Hall gift shop – which had drawn its stock of recordings from the chain – and, thus, to temporarily deny concertgoers’ access to Salonen and the Philharmonic’s new disc on DG. This was its first recording made in the hall (noise grandissimo, leading off, as you might guess, with The Rite of Spring) and it merited a champagne sendoff, but without any CDs to hand out and/or sell, there wasn’t much point. But don’t forget it: If you want to know why The New York Times assessed the emergence of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonic and the Los Angeles music scene in general as a “Continental Shift,” you might start with this disc.

The year saw the usual punctuations, struggles in the underbrush to fulfill earlier rumors and generate a new crop. From the Philadelphia Orchestra, a hard-luck ensemble ever since the opening of its new, afflicted Kimmel Center (replacing its ancient, afflicted Academy of Music), came word that Christoph Eschenbach would resign as music director after only three seasons. The report was garlanded with the usual set of news items, if more vehement than usual: Eschenbach at odds with the orchestra, orchestra members at odds with him, Philadelphia at odds with his scheduling of new music, with the cut of his jib on the podium, with the city’s cultural stature as the shadow of New York.

In the latter city, too, the shadows danced restlessly. The New York Philharmonic’s Lorin Maazel, at 76 not yet retired but no spring chicken, made it known to board members that Daniel Barenboim, only a dozen years younger, would be his choice as successor – a choice that Barenboim himself, so far, has tossed aside. More than that, rumors fly thick and fast that Zarin Mehta, the New York Philharmonic’s managing director, has his own choice, the Venezuelan whiz Gustavo Dudamel, who has been burning his way across Europe to the adoration of audiences and players alike. Young Gustavo, two weeks short of 26, has already been here once, at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005 when he did, indeed, provide a one-man fireworks display. He returns for an indoor engagement, starting January 4. Twenty-six? Didn’t our own Philharmonic have a music director that age once?

Prodigies, hmmm . . . While wishing young Gustavo Dudamel all the good fortune in the world, I pause to wish him an equal measure of lasting talent. This has been a year of prodigies going fizzle or, at least, a year when I’ve really begun to have my fill of overpampered one-time whiz-bang soloists who, as the years press down and the wrinkles come, attempt to ride the prodigy wagon one time too many and come ever closer to falling off. Joshua Bell hit me that way, and the matchup between the fresh-faced schoolboy of his latest set of publicity shots and the tired routinier wandering through the Brahms Violin Concerto was most disheartening. A few weeks later came Sarah Chang, equally adrift in the Bruch Violin Concerto. Both, as kids, had been the exciting, youthful stars of their generation; perhaps, along the way, they simply neglected to learn the musical side of their music-making. Sad.

The Year

Wherever you looked – for a time, anyhow – it seemed that George Tsypin had you trapped. First there was Grendel at the opera. Elliot Goldenthal’s garish, ponderous score to John Gardiner’s wonderful retelling of the Beowulf legend reduced the piece to Saturday cartoon; Julie Taymor’s puppetry and other stage tricks have been around before. Tsypin’s humongous wall, once they got it to work, was . . . well, a humongous wall. Tony Tommasini of The New York Times aptly reduced the novelty of it all; the Met, he suggested, must have a dozen of these in its warehouse. Came October, and Tsypin was back with the home crew: his reimagining of Wagner’s Ring – all of it, headless giants, mudbaths, schmoolike dwarfs, huge, hulking structures, everything you’d want to see in a Ring except perhaps magic fire, galloping Valkyries, an all-purpose sword and the other crucial elements on which Wagner’s plot actually turns. Valery Gergiev imposed what sounded like an eloquent vision of Wagner’s score, but onto an orchestra rendered inept by an overcrowded Orange County venue, all in the name of inaugurating a new concert hall where the performance didn’t even take place. Oh yes, and there is a gorgeous Tsypin Ring on DVD from the Netherlands Opera, directed by Pierre Audi with the same imaginative use of space and minimal props as in Audi’s Coronation of Poppea that just ended its run at the L.A. Opera.

That was the event that lingers longest – that, and the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox”; Golijov’s Ainadamar at Ojai; every note from the pen, the fingers and the baton of Thomas Adès during his two “residencies”; the “marathon” – eight hours culled from the past century, splendidly performed all by local musicians to inaugurate the new; “Jacaranda” concert season; Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show led by Salonen to start the new Philharmonic season; his Mahler Third the next night; Alan Gilbert conducting the Mahler Ninth and the audience’s absolute silence that greeted it; Lucy Schaufer’s Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and – surprise! – Nikolaj Znaider’s reading of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, music I usually abominate but which came gloriously to life on this occasion. That’s why I keep going to concerts; you just never know.

“Music is never pure,” wrote Luciano Berio of his Circles, “it is attitude; it is theater.” Berio’s great vocal adventure ended the 1961-62 season of Monday Evening Concerts, to a capacity crowd. It began the 2006-07 season last week, again with a turn-away box office. Much has happened in between; we’ll get to that.

Berio’s late, great works all mirrored his fierce fascination with the interaction of words and sound. Before Circles, there had been a piece dissecting passages from Joyce’s Ulysses through electronic manipulation of sounds and syllables. Circles, even trickier, took poetry of e.e. cummings (which was already involved with fragmenting words and phrases) and broke them up even further so that the poet’s distinctive orthography found its mirror in its musical setting. The Berio legacy is a phenomenal repertory of music-plus-language, spilling over into opera, large-scale choral music, and glorious theatrical works, of which Circles is one.

That work was inspired by, and therefore created for, Berio’s wife at the time, the late, great actress/singer/indefinable creative spirit Cathy Berberian. Last March, when the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” came up with an extraordinary new actress/singer/indefinable creative spirit named Cristina Zavalloni, the whispers started to rise: Is there a new Circles on the horizon? The whispers reached the committee who were struggling to rekindle the Monday Evening Concerts, after that valuable enterprise had been bounced (for no good reason, and several bad) by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the long story was made short last week at REDCAT. Zavalloni was back, as great as we knew she would be; she followed her spellbinding performance of Circles with another of Berberian’s numbers, a monologue made up of comic-strip punch lines. Cristina Berio, daughter of Berberian, looked pleased. Imagine, sitting still while someone just about half your age does your own mom onstage.

It was quite an evening, in fact, a benefit honoring the late Dorrance Stalvey, who had planned and managed the series for its last 34 years, literally single-handed, and made it one of the most adventurous concert programs anywhere in the country – in variety and in quality of performers. This first program bore this out: an established contemporary masterpiece, a respectable piece of new-music academe (by Stalvey himself) and a 40-minute work of genuine challenge by a composer, the late Gérard Grisey, out of the European mainstream, whose music might have lingered long on the doorstep if small organizations like MEC were not at hand to usher it in.

Three more Monday Evenings are in the works for this season, all at Zipper Concert Hall (across from Disney). The next, on February 19, will focus on young American composers.

Properly Magnified

Near the end of his Magnificat – music that sent a capacity Disney crowd homeward one night last week practically chortling in their joyousness – old Bach pulls one of those intricacy tricks that, so often with just the slightest flick of the pen, sets him sky-high above his Baroque buddies. It’s actually a very quiet passage: two sopranos and an alto in a slow tune about how God has helped out Israel in times of trouble. Two singers’ vocal lines go up the scale; the third goes down in gentle counterpoint; the low instruments throb a simple accompaniment. But there’s one more thing: Over all this, two oboes intone yet another melody, an ancient “Magnificat” chant that Mozart would also use, 60 years later, in his Requiem. That sound, high above everything else in this quiet, soft-spoken movement, becomes like a star in a firmament. Long after the entire Magnificat is over, with its trumpeting exultations and its breathless string of tiny movements that come on like a bill of particulars on why our souls should, indeed, magnify the Lord, the exquisite craftsmanship of this one tiny passage lingers in the memory.

We all have our small pantheon of special moments; this tiny jewel in the Magnificat, set amid the splendor of the whole work, happens to be one of mine. (For your information, among its companions are a certain high D in Mozart’s G-minor Quintet, the modulation back to E major in Schubert’s C-major Quintet, and Violetta’s singing of “Ah! Dite alla giovine” in La Traviata). When listening to Bach, I am aware that different muscles are called into play than when listening to Mozart (ahhhh!) or Brahms (grrrr!). There is that extra dimension: the sense of being present at the solving of an intricate problem – an “elegant solution,” my mathematician friends like to say – and having it also come out beautiful and moving.

Proof? They’re all over the place. One is the slow movement of the first “Brandenburg” Concerto, which consists of a minor-key tune that twists upon itself in a kind of tense counterpoint. Because the tune is in a minor key, and starts on No. 5 of that scale, the progression No. 5 to No. 6 will be a wrench (G to A-flat on the piano, say). Play this off against itself, as Mr. Bach does quite on purpose, and your teeth begin to hurt. Hand it off to the lower-pitched instruments and the dissonance becomes all the more grating. Here is this churchly, correct composer stirring up the demons of dissonance, circa 1720; you could stick this stuff into a Mahler symphony and nobody would notice. Nor would the devout Wagnerite flinch at the music for the Crucifixion in the B-minor Mass; that wrenching dissonance is simply Bach himself flinching at that horrid moment, and shifting from one classical key to another as if to get the tragedy off his back.

Beauty plus process: It’s that mingling, on a level field, that breeds the particular satisfaction in the Bach experience. Canadian conductor Bernard Labadie, in his latest holiday-time visit with his wonderfully spirited, crystalline-voiced small chorus La Chapelle de Québec – 40 strong, joined to a Philharmonic contingent of like proportion – made this Bach immersion a mostly joyous experience. The Magnificat made the most glorious noise; to begin, there was sterner stuff, the motet Jesu, Meine Freude for chorus alone with supporting bass, and an alternative version of the Gloria from the B-minor Mass that I might have swapped for less familiar fare. But the night was Bach’s, and Labadie’s, and those two oboes’, and they outshone everything else.

The Sixth Symphony of Antonin Dvorák disarms all protest. It snuggles into your awareness with a warm-hearted, syncopated throb, eases onto your lap and delivers an irresistible wet kiss. No other music in my acquaintance, large-scale or small, comes at you quite this way, although the previous symphony in the Dvorák canon, No. 5 in F, tries the same trick and makes it work almost as well. When I was toying with the notion of a career in writing about music, I came across words about the Dvorák Sixth – it was listed as No. 1 back then, before the definitive catalog came out – by Sir Donald Tovey, and they firmed my resolve. Sir Donald wrote about the “sublimity” of this work, “that sublimity which is utterly independent of the size or range of the artist’s subject, which trails clouds of glory not only with the outlook of the child but with the solemnity of the kitten running after its tail.”

That is, indeed, the quality in Dvorák that some people often miss in writing off his best works as a kind of Brahms Lite. The child, the kitten – and the lover of beauty at any age – were part of the sublimity that filled Disney Hall last week as the Philharmonic and its inspired guest conductor Jiri Belohlavek took on the Dvorák Sixth and gave it exactly the right accent for delivering that aforementioned kiss and all the marvels that ensued. That same conductor, by the way, turns up on a two-disc Warner Classics set of both the Fifth and the Sixth, but the BBC Symphony doesn’t quite match the endearing accents he drew from our own Philharmonic. Here those accents – the little extra light at the top of the phrase, the ever-so-slight whoosh around the glorious tune of the slow movement (eat yer heart out, Doktor Brahms!) – were so beautifully managed that you’d swear the whole orchestra had spent the week on Pilsener transfusions. Oh my, it was beautiful!

Perhaps it was this that made the ensuing music, the G-minor Concerto of Max Bruch, land with such a thud, although a team of Heifetz, Paganini and Evelyn’s Magic Violin couldn’t have breathed the spark of life into this glorified café number. I just know that Sarah Chang, for all her pirouettes and expressive face making, didn’t. Can it be that I – along with the rest of the world – am beginning to tire of aging prodigies clinging to former glory through means other than musical? The ovation on Saturday night did not carry Sarah Chang through to an encore, nor had it for Joshua Bell a few weeks ago: proof, I’d like to think, that our audiences are maturing faster than some of our performers.

Janácek and Balance

Léos Janácek’s Taras Bulba in its full scoring, organ and all, returned the evening to its proper store of brilliant, slashing orchestral colors. Marvelous, quirky, full of dark shadows – and not much to do in tone or spirit with the Yul Brynner shoot-’em-up – this, too, is music full of subtle accents, nicely comprehended by the excellent Belohlavek.

By delicious coincidence, there had been other Janácek, in quite different accents, earlier last week: piano works including the well-known and exquisite suite In the Mist and a gathering of short, utterly charming, virtually unknown character pieces, all chosen by Thomas Adès to round off his Philharmonic “residency” with a guest shot at the neighboring “Piano Spheres” series. For the intimate space of Zipper Hall, this phenomenal Brit came up with a delightful program alternatively hard-nosed and whimsical, evidence of his ability to astound an audience with the depth and breadth of his musical purview. The crowd, by the way, was the largest I’ve ever seen at a “Piano Spheres” event, further proof that this phenomenal invader from the Homeland has staked out a considerable claim here in the Colonies. Included were a couple of merely cute, lightweight pieces by Stravinsky and the Italian pedagogue Niccolo Castiglione and a brace of canons composed by Conlon Nancarrow for mechanical piano and therefore, you would think, unplayable by human hands. (Think again.) Two early piano works by Adès himself, neither more than 10 minutes’ duration but both bristling with a young composer’s eagerness to burst out into the world, provided the evening’s most substantial musical message; the temptation was to hear them, as I did, as echoes of Asyla, his great orchestral work from about the same time, which Adès had led with the Philharmonic only three nights before. Asyla invaded our complacency first at Ojai in 2000, then in 2003 as part of the Disney Hall inaugural weeks. Simon Rattle conducted both times; this was my first hearing of Asyla under another baton.

The work endures. Overpowering as the temptation may have been, at those first hearings, to overvalue the murderous hullabaloo of the one movement (of four) quite accurately labeled “Ecstasio,” further scrutiny brings the work into focus: an unruly, daring but consistent masterpiece of many moods marvelously comprehended. Its moods, and its mood changes, are deliberate and profound; they are no less valid than the wet kiss of Dvorák. It’s interesting, and not, I’m sure, accidental, that at the Philharmonic, Asyla shared the program with Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony, almost exactly a century older. There, too, an ecstatic third movement leads to a tragic ending – which, at that time, engulfed the composer as well as his music. (The podium was also shared that night: Adès to conduct his own work, Philharmonic assistant conductor Joana Carneiro to lead a tidy if noncommittal reading of the “Pathétique.”)

Both works end in darkness, Asyla with mysterious, threatening percussion off in undefined distances. “You haven’t heard the end of me,” the 26-year-old composer/prodigy seemed to be saying seven years ago. The good news is that time has proved him right.

Beyond the memories – pleasant, as far as they go – of The Coronation of Poppea with the Emperor Nero cruising his realm in a Ferrari bearing ROMA-1 license plates, and far beyond the abject journalistic misrepresentation of the pristine work in last week’s hometown press, two aspects of this extraordinary artwork demand our immediate consideration. One is the opera itself, dated 1643 in Venetian performance annals, surviving in manuscripts that show the possible work of hands other than those of Claudio Monteverdi (who bears the principal attribution), hands most likely those of students or close associates of the master much imbued with his own musical and dramatic insight. The second is the awareness that, fun and frolic as lively updatings like the Long Beach Opera escapades in the 1980s may have provided (and they did put the company on the map), the alternative – a reproduction of exactly what was seen and heard on the stages of Venice in 1643 – would surely drive a 2006 audience from the hall, myself in the lead. Somewhere in the middle, the production currently at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion accomplishes with glowing imagination to a 2006 audience what that premiere performance might have done in its time, but does so to eyes, ears and sensibilities honed by 363 years of intervening culture. It creates musical drama convincing, overwhelming, magical, four hours that whiz past like last week’s high winds.

This production of this rare, ancient and hugely powerful musical drama is an act of some bravery on the part of our local company. (The Metropolitan Opera, you will be interested to learn, has produced Monteverdi exactly once in its 120-year history: a cut-down, unstaged L’Orfeo in 1912.) The staging is from the Netherlands Opera, which sent us the Monteverdi Return of Ulysses in 1997. Both are works born from the fabulous imagination of Pierre Audi, with his extraordinary sense of the geometry of stage space and his use of fire as a spoken language amazingly, contrapuntally consistent with the sung language.

That sung language in the current cast is astonishing. Far removed though it be from Baroque ideals of crescendo, vibrato and attacca, it forms its own dramatic world: the intensity of Susan Graham’s creamy, importuning Poppea, her tiger’s claws cloaked in deepest velvet; the sheer nastiness of tenor Kurt Streit’s Nero (the most drastic “inauthenticity”; he is written as a castrato); the Wagnerian basso of the Seneca, the well-named Reinhard Hagen. An excellent, authentic touch: the nurse, Arnalta, sung falsetto as is proper by Christopher Gillett with costume to match; the comic drag nurse was to become one of Baroque opera’s most irritating clichés.

Harry Bicket’s small orchestra – long-necked theorbos (delightful to watch, like feeding ostriches), strings, harpsichord and an enchanting portative organ, a “carpet of starlight” I heard someone say, perhaps me – is nicely placed in a small recess downstage. “Stage” itself, as with Ulysses, consists mostly of empty spaces defined by single elements: a slanted pole, a ring, a sphere. It seems to bestride visually what the musical realization accomplishes for the ear: an artistic language of any and all times. You get the sense of floating in time, and in space as well.

That is part of the amazement of Poppea, something I don’t think those 1643 audiences could have grasped. Now, 363 years after the fact, we have this ethereal time/space journey, an ancient object beautifully restored to the sight and the sound of its original spirit. At the same time, we are confronted with this very modern opera. For the first time in operatic history, the characters are real, with names and listings in Plutarch (the Google of its day). They make their first entrance not in militaristic rhetoric but deep in conversation about how it was for both of them in bed last night. For the first (but not last) time, Evil (not Good) rules the roost at the final curtain. Just like Tosca, you say? No, better. This is where it began.

. . . And Beauty Too

There is a fierceness in Gerald Barry’s Triumph of Beauty and Deceit that hammers words and music into a single onward surge of energy. It was not surprising that the performance under Thomas Adès, by five excellent male singers and a contingent of Philharmonic players at last week’s “Green Umbrella” concert, left Adès himself with sopping shirt. The impact of the music, virtually nonstop, could easily be shared wherever you were in that vibrant hall.

Much was made of the work’s relationship to Handel, of whose Triumph of Time and Truth Barry’s score is a kind of treacherous paraphrase. Less was made of Barry’s countryman James Joyce, and yet the tumbling, headlong language rhythms, the rough impatience of the jig-time patterns seem at times to evoke the rough throbbings of Finnegan and of the great, atmospheric early works as well. The poetry is by Meredith Oakes, whose elegant paraphrase of Shakespeare’s The Tempest afforded Adès the remarkably free libretto for his recent opera on that play. Here her language is even trickier, indulging in delusions and rhyming paradoxes that then become wonderfully answered in Barry’s garrulous, immensely ingratiating score. If word got out that the score was actually the work of musically gifted leprechauns, it would not surprise me in the least. It would also help to explain the affinity the composer of such a work as the opera Powder Her Face might harbor for someone else’s music that seeks to elevate matters of truth, beauty, decay and deceit to a high artistic level. Both works, you see, were created in the same year.

Large-scale chamber works by Gabriel Fauré, I would have thought, might comfortably rest on one of the less accessible shelves in my musical larder, their presence acknowledged from afar. After succumbing to the absolute enchantment of one of these works, the C-minor Piano Quintet, at a recent Philharmonic Chamber Music Society concert, I rushed home to discover that yes, I did indeed own a recording of this remarkable score – along with the earlier D-minor Quintet – but that the disc, at least 15 years old and long out of print, had sat there gathering dust, never even unwrapped. Mine the shame.

There is much beguilement in Fauré: the songs, some charmers for piano, above all the Requiem, which is best heard by candlelight in a recording (there are two) conducted by Nadia Boulanger. The power in this 30-minute quintet, composed three years before the composer’s death, is a different language: an earnest, mysterious oratory, a brief and hilarious romp, a dark and somber meditation, and a final exultant resolution. At Disney, where some chamber works seem adrift in all that space, Fauré, of all people, filled the hall. Thomas Adès was the pianist; you have to assume that he hears a kindred voice in this music, however far from his own. Even more remarkable is the way the special pleading in his playing managed to motivate the rest of the ensemble, above all the very young Johnny Lee, whose violin sang most eloquently.

All told, a chamber concert nicely planned. Music by Jean Françaix began it, another French romantic, perhaps more deserving of his earned obscurity but a sweet charmer in his perky, neo-cancan fashion. Midway there was Steven Stucky’s Nell’ombra, Nella Luce, which, despite its Italian title, seemed quite French in its charming interplay of “light” and “dark” music. The music dates from 2000 and, to confound the Latin origins one step further, was first performed by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano. Against other works by Stucky that I greatly admire for their honesty and marvelous clarity, I find the Nell’ombra music of lesser substance. My memory of the concert resides, in surprise and delight, with the great work of Fauré.

Basic Bass

At the Philharmonic last weekend there was John Harbison’s not-quite-brand-new Concerto for Bass Viol (Double Bass to you) and Orchestra, and the orchestra’s own first bassist Dennis Trembly to do winning battle with its intricacies. Harbison is an old friend, although we once had more of his music – orchestral, vocal, chamber – than we’ve had lately. Dawn Upshaw sings his songs, and renders them gorgeous.

The new piece, I’m saddened to report, is of a lesser order. It is riddled with gadgetry, almost as if the composer had taken a box of “Handy Things You Can Do With a Double Bass” and scattered them through a very lazy orchestral texture. Perhaps John Harbison believes that is all you can do with a double bass, but I don’t believe that for a second, and there are too many players around, on both sides of the “serious”-”pop” divide, to make that stick. (See you at Charlie Haden’s concert tonight, December 1, at REDCAT?)

There are, indeed, all the tricks, and they are impressive. Dennis Trembly draws an expressive, long melody (properly marked “lamento”) out of his handsome instrument to start things off. Later on, there are some gorgeous, crackling displays of pizzicato. All as expected: You can’t have a bass viol on a stage and not expect a long melody here and a shower of pizzicato there. Mr. Harbison, at least, knows the territory. It’s sad that he stayed within its borders.

The Seventh Symphony of Antonin Dvorák was the evening’s great music, as it is whenever it appears. I seem to hear more and more often, to my ever-increasing satisfaction, the expressed sentiment that this is the greatest of all romantic symphonies, the one most deeply emotional, most beautifully shaped. Perhaps the continued availability of the venerable Giulini performance, one of the expressive miracles of all recordings (the two-disc set on EMI with the London Philharmonic, not the more recent Royal Philharmonic version), has helped spread the word.

More the pity, then, that the Philharmonic’s guest conductor, Carlos Kalmar, worked in so many ways to distort the power of this marvelous symphony: ignoring the specified repeats in both first and third movements, dragging down hard on expressive retards, driving the brass so brutally that you’d think you were back in the Chandler Pavilion. Maestro Kalmar’s vita boasts of mittel-europäisches blood, and his affectionate readings of some Janácek operatic excerpts at the start of the program, proved he had some. It seemed to have run out too soon.

The Big Sleep

A granddad behind a sandwich at the Music Center last Sunday was overheard bragging that he had attended 34 operas and slept through them all, and I suddenly understood why Hansel and Gretel remains in favor. Inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that afternoon, I heard no delighted cheers – not very much, even, in the way of applause. The response from the middle-size audience was, let’s say, dutiful, especially that of the very well-behaved junior members respectfully fulfilling their elders’ notion of a proper musical upbringing.

The funny animals, Maurice Sendak-inspired, with flashing eyes and all that stuff, were supposed to represent the “14 angels” of the famous Prayer. I counted only 12, and they drew so little response that I assumed that most of the kids had the same toys at home. Director-designer Douglas Fitch created a camouflage-fabric forest that came apart and came back together and looked merely ugly. Last year I expressed the desire to bundle up Lucy Schaufer, the Cherubino in Figaro, and install her among my own art treasures. At the risk of raising eyebrows, I must confess that my desire waxes hotter after her Hansel, if only to rescue her from the authentic agony the insipidity of this opera instills. I have interviewed enough 10-year-olds (as recently as this past Thanksgiving) to know that kids today have outgrown Hansel and Gretel. They need Salome.

Powder Her Face is an arrogant young man’s masterpiece, fearless and forthright. Its central character – the decrepit, decaying Duchess of Argyle, fornicating her way toward oblivion – is one in a grand line of operatic monsters from Amneris, say, to Lulu. Its creator – the formidable Brit Brat Thomas Adès, at 24 – might also be accorded a place in a grand procession of the classically omnipotent, from the fire-wielding Prometheus of ancient times to Citizen Kane and, for that matter and closer to our own time, his creator, Orson Welles. It is nine years since Powder Her Face, and Tom Adès rides ever higher.

He is charming, when we chat, in his dismissal of Powder as a work from his giddy youth, still only best known through the easy sensationalism of being the first ever opera with a blowjob onstage. He likes to wonder aloud, with typical Brit whimsy, why anyone today takes the work seriously. Defying the possible wrath of parents and trustees, the coproduction last weekend by USC’s Thornton Opera and the L.A. Philharmonic, staged by Ken Cazan and conducted by the composer with an excellent orchestra and a group of gifted student singers, revealed, as all good performances have, that this is indeed a work of lasting strength and originality. If the staging lacked some of the madcap genius of David Schweizer’s Long Beach Opera production from 2001, it represented good, honest stagecraft and made no bones about the work’s less, er, family-fare elements.

The strengths of Powder Her Face outrun its notorious aspects; they lie in Adès’ remarkably canny music. I do not foresee an independent concert life for very much of the music (aside from one nifty song for the Waitress, “Fancy being rich . . . Fancy purchasing a duke!,” that tags her as a blood cousin of Kurt Weill’s Pirate Jenny), but the mix of nowadays-pop sensibility, liberally laced with some X-rated tango slither, accomplishes some highly potent storytelling. Adès is particularly adept at this kind of narrative, with or without words. On December 2 and 3, his orchestral masterpiece (so far), Asyla, is paired at the Philharmonic with Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony, and even though neither work follows a specified narration, both have a program deeply instilled. Be prepared, therefore, for more than just another soiree at Disney Hall.

Adès is here for several events – including a “Green Umbrella” on November 28, at which he will conduct music by his friend Gerald Barry, and a varied program with “Piano Spheres” on December 5. I have the feeling that he likes it here; who knows where that may lead?

Kindred Spirit

Sharing the weekend, most appropriately, was the G-major String Quartet of Franz Schubert, music by another restless spirit in his 20s, no less fearless and forthright. Its opening gambit flings down the challenge: a welcoming chord in G major that swells and bursts into G minor. That sets the tone for the entire work, an instability of major versus minor that permeates all four movements, each in a different manner, and seems on its own to pronounce the death knell of classical stability and balance. There is a miraculous moment later in that first movement, when that opening sequence returns but exactly in reverse: the G-minor chord swelling out to G major, and all, this time, absolutely pianissimo. I wrote last week about music’s great “What hit me?” moments; this is another.

I heard the Schubert, along with quartets of Schumann and Lutoslawski, in the beguiling setting of the Clark Memorial Library in West Adams, where there is chamber music once a month, with tickets trickily distributed on a lottery system. The players were the excellent Vogler Quartet from Berlin, which had also performed in the Doheny Mansion at one of the “Historic Sites” programs two nights before. The room, wood-paneled and with a gorgeous, intricate ceiling, seats a modest 141, which makes it small for chamber music; I found the sound aggressive, sometimes even shrill (likewise MC Peter Reill). I’d like to hear a harpsichord and baroque instruments there.

Glass, Darkly

The peripatetic Long Beach Opera dropped in at the Japan America Theatre last weekend for the latest stop in its yearlong wanderings through operatic curiosities. This item bore names worth noting: composer Philip Glass and his ofttime collaborator playwright David Henry Hwang, whose previous works include such major-league thumpings as The Voyage, the Metropolitan Opera’s big Columbus fiasco. This latest effort, produced with most of the original perpetrators from its American Repertory Theatre premiere in 2003, thumped to a more modest rhythm, but made for a dreary evening nonetheless. “First Philip Glass opera to be staged in L.A.,” screamed the publicity, which is not quite accurate if you remember the 1988 1000 Airplanes on the Roof at UCLA; call it, at least, the first Philip Glass opera to be staged here at a $98 ticket.

The matter at hand was a bill of two short plays, drawn by Hwang from Japanese ghost stories and given the dual title Sound of a Voice/Hotel of Dreams: the first set in ancient times and dealing with a samurai-ghost encounter in the manner of Woman in the Dunes; the second a modern fantasy about a bordello for men at the brink of death. For both, Glass has provided a musical underpinning so thin and aimless that it becomes difficult to identify as a melodic line. Now and then, a short burst from pipa or shakuhachi serves to pin down the ethnic identity, as did conductor Andreas Mitisek’s courageous management of this threadbare substance.

Two singers were involved, both from the original production. Suzan Hanson was the ghost in the first play, the all-knowing Madam in the second. Herbert Perry (the Leporello in the Peter Sellars Don Giovanni of fabled memory) made the switch from samurai to suited businessman. Both sang with force, but in an acoustical setting that tended to swallow words – a serious problem, since the supertitle projector conked out early in the evening. Robert Israel, stalwart stage designer of the Glass entourage, provided his usual – well, stalwart – set design, consisting mainly, in both plays, of a large, empty box. And “empty” was, indeed, the word.

The past few weeks have made their mark on my critical apparatus. Johannes Brahms has been his usual nasty scold. Richard Strauss has gone on a rant and a screech. A cadence in a Mozart piano concerto left me numb, and a pileup of dissonances in a Bach cantata brought on a terrifying specter of the wages of sin. It’s all part of the job, of course, and I loved every moment, almost.

I did not – do not – love the C-minor String Quartet of Brahms, however, and cannot imagine why the excellent Calder Quartet devoted their splendid, youthful vigor to the task of turning it into music. To me this music is, in a word, cranky, the more so at Zipper Hall, where it came after the group’s splendid work in the last quartets of Mozart and Bartók. The Calder is well along in the mellowing process needed to produce good chamber ensembles (as with good wine – an apt analogy). They are in residence at the Colburn School, perfecting their art by teaching it to others and emerging for public performances not nearly often enough.

C minor is also the key of the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto, K. 482, which Emanuel Ax played with the Philharmonic and Alexander Mickelthwate this past weekend. Toward the end of that movement, there is a passage of hushed exaltation that belongs among the great “What hit me?” moments in all music. It is nothing more than a sudden shift from minor to major, set as a conversation between soloist and a few instruments from the orchestra, but if you know your Mozart, you know that a “nothing more than” moment can hit you very hard, and so this does. You also have to credit the excellent young Mickelthwate, who is now the Philharmonic’s associate conductor with one hand while conducting the Winnipeg Symphony with the other, for maintaining his composure in a program offering that miraculous Mozart concerto and the billboard-size proclamations of Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben with only the innocuous glitz of the Strauss Burleske to serve as bumper. If the Heldenleben must happen (a proposition I will argue), let it be in this vigorous, propulsive manner. Mr. Mickelthwate led the work without score; I hope he has left room in his head for better things as well.

Singers vs. Sinners

“Stand firm against all sinning,” warns the mezzo-soprano, “or its poison will possess you,” and Bach drives his poisoned needles homeward with shrieking dissonances such that his 1714 audiences might also have asked what mysterious power had smitten them. Even absent their ailing founder and leader, Reinhard Goebel, the strong-hearted ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln reaffirmed their reputation for sending forth sugar-free renditions of early music with its sinews pristine. If Bach’s cantata (No. 54, “Widerstehe doch der Sünde”) was their Disney program’s highlight, the other important message was how pokey and predictable so much of the rest of this ecstatically rediscovered Baroque stuff (Jan Dismas Zelenka, represented on the program by an endless on-and-on vocal motet) can be. Ilia Korol was the substitute leader in this, announced as Musica Antiqua’s farewell tour; Marijana Mijanovic was the vocal soloist, deep-voiced and resplendent.

Three decades before, contemporary with the birth of Bach, Henry Purcell’s music – its passions much colored by his studies of Italian music – also acquired much of the power to disturb and to amaze that would later come to Bach in a different world. At the First Congregational Church in, as you might guess, one of the “Historic Sites” series, which remains unrivaled anywhere else, the small group (five voices plus organ), Paris-based, that calls itself Ensemble européen William Byrd turned Purcell and his French contemporary Marc-Antoine Charpentier into magic on a recent Sunday.

The Purcell group, anthems composed for the newly restored Chapel Royal and most of them from the composer’s 20s, simply throbbed with dramatic force. From Italy he had absorbed the power of dissonance and sudden change. The force that we know in his later works like Dido and Aeneas is already here in, for example, the short three-voice drama Saul and the Witch of Endor, a scene in florid, Italian style in which the troubled Saul, on the eve of battle, begs the Witch to summon up the spirit of the dead Samuel. Under the leadership of the Australian-born Graham O’Reilly, the five Ensemble singers, French and with accents charmingly blended, transformed the music into an audible translation of the great rose window in the apse behind them.

Piping Hot

In 62 years of professional journalism, it has never occurred to me to write about organ music, least of all in a church, until this week. Here’s what happened. Sixty-four years ago, I had a best friend at summer camp; our friendship was cemented by a shared passion for Dvorák’s Cello Concerto, which I had brought with me on the five 78s, not being able to leave them at home. After that summer (1942), we drifted apart until about two months ago, when for a series of delightful reasons we resumed correspondence. He had in the meantime become a renowned anesthesiologist and, as a sideline, a producer of recordings of organ performances by Dr. Gerre Hancock at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. This is one of the great church organs in America, and Dr. Hancock, now at the University of Texas, ranks as one of the great organists of his time, especially with regard to his skill in improvisation. Nothing would do, therefore, but that I make my way to St. James’ Episcopal Church on Wilshire Blvd. last Sunday, to listen to Dr. Hancock’s guest recital and compare his playing with all the discs my newly rediscovered friend has been sending me. (His name is also Alan.)

The improviser’s art is music’s central magic. The repertory sustains itself around its power to state and then to vary; the organ is the supreme exerciser of this power. Dr. Hancock’s program would conclude, it was announced, with an “improvisation on submitted themes” as once did concerts by Mozart and Beethoven. The “submitted theme” this time was John Williams’ tune from Star Wars; one might have expected the worst. One would have been wrong; what we got instead was a beautifully fashioned, sophisticated, four-movement work that strayed far from the given theme, drew a splendid variety of thematic substances from its modest outline, ventured far into dark and complicated regions, and returned triumphant at the end. If this is what I’ve missed by ignoring church music for 62 years, perhaps it’s time to start listening.

At Disney Hall, the conductorless chamber orchestra known as Orpheus performed its brand of Mozart against that of the pianist Emanuel Ax; they did not match. Orpheus, which is popular for the same reasons that attract crowds to blind tenors and one-armed acrobats, is proficient at producing a well-sculpted wall of sound that is little different whether the program calls for Mozart or Copland. “Manny” Ax, on the other hand, is a marvelously sensitive pianist with a deep understanding of the expressive differences between Mozart’s intimate, subtle G-major Concerto (K. 453) and the grand celebrations that fill the C-major work (K. 503) of only two years later. The pianist knew, in other words – as whatever unnamed force that guides the destiny of the orchestra does not – how and why an all-Mozart program is so uniquely stirring a musical experience.

András Schiff also knows, and his solo all-Mozart program at Disney five days later had the planning of a profoundly dedicated musician: small works and large, including less-known pieces that invariably evoke incredulity at their harmonic daring. One small accident marred the event: a dropped cane that went rattling down a long flight of wooden Disney stairs, midway in the amazingly rich B-minor Adagio, but the pianist soon recovered, and so did we. That Adagio, and the A-minor Rondo later in the program, are the pieces that you play to convince yourself of the vast chasm between finger-friendly and deeply profound in the music of this composer whom we will never fully know. I can play those notes, and so can you; we need an András Schiff, or an Emanuel Ax (or a Jeffrey Kahane), to turn them into music.

From an incredibly busy couple of weeks at Disney Hall, you don’t need my words to honor Yo-Yo Ma’s smooth-as-silk (as in “Road”) participation with Ax in a Beethoven program (in which the piano writing was conceived to dominate the cello line anyway) or the no-brain diversion, complete with facial isometrics, concocted by superstar violinist Joshua Bell in the name of the Brahms Violin Concerto this past weekend. Sheer delight on that last program, however (although you’d never know from the limping prose of the stand-in guy at the Times), was the chance to hear the Sixth Symphony of Schubert in the hands of a conductor – Britain’s Jonathan Nott – who really knows and values that small corner of the repertory.

Here is Schubert at 20, feverishly starting new works and tossing them soon after. His wastebasket includes a fabulously beautiful beginning of a piano sonata in F sharp minor (which András Schiff once played on a TV documentary). His completed works include a four-hand piano sonata and a set of variations that everybody should play. This C-major Symphony surpasses all. Its scoring for winds anticipates Mendelssohn; its jog-trotting finale (which Jonathan Nott took at exactly the right “Viennese” pace) cannot be heard without happy smiles.

A Movable Feast

Santa Monica’s Jacaranda Concerts, displaced while their church is being remodeled, zoomed into life somewhere else last weekend, and how! The first notes of Aaron Copland’s Duo for Flute and Piano sounded through the vastness of Santa Monica High’s Barnum Hall shortly after 4 p.m. last Saturday; the final fade-out of Terry Riley’s In C drew the die-hards’ cheers just before midnight. The intervening eight hours had been filled with déjà vu mostly marvelous, a “Pan-American Music Marathon” of some of the best music, in the best performances, that the founders of this treasurable series have brought forth – to an ever-growing, supportive audience – in their past four years.

Like the splendid catered dinner from the Border Grill, the program was a nice mix of flavors and aromas, best exemplified by the inclusion of one of Osvaldo Golijov’s omnium-gatherum pieces to match his own heritage. Eduardo Delgado hammered out a couple of Ginastera’s piano sonatas; Gloria Cheng sailed by on the cloud known as John Adams’ Phrygian Gates; there was lots of Steve Reich but no Philip Glass – my choice too. Only one piece struck me as dull, the finale of Charles Ives’ Trio, and that was preceded by the previous movement, an authentic hoot. After a year of innumerable mistreatments delivered upon Riley’s pioneering masterpiece, it was encouraging to hear the work’s freshness endure and glisten, lovingly delivered, lovingly received.

Best of all, please note, these performers – string quartet, percussion ensemble, soloists, a whole gatherum for the Riley – were all local people. They work in studios, in local orchestras; many of them are from USC or CalArts. It’s when projects like Jacaranda succeed that they are encouraged to remain here rather than plunging into the New York maelstrom. Saturday’s program was broken into segments; the audience could come and go. Around the midpoint, when some of the best past Jacaranda performances – Joel Pargman’s of the Lou Harrison Violin Concerto, John Adams’ Shaker Loops by seven strings – were being returned to life, you got the feeling of a lot of people, in a congenial room, sharing some happy memories.

Obiter dictum: Daniel Cariaga, who left us last week at 71 – much too soon – was that rare phenomenon, a music critic and a gentleman. I met him first in 1980, at one of the early CalArts contemporary-music festivals. It would never have occurred to his boss at the Times, the ferocious Bernheimer, that this was an event demanding a paper’s chief critic. Danny, the second in command, was somewhat at sea during most of that weekend, but everybody admired his forbearance and his good humor, and the fact that he never wrote beyond what he knew. It would be a while before the Times got someone else like that, and the good news is that Danny did some teaching in his last few years. I hope those guys find jobs.

The young man – the slender, bespectacled, smiling schoolboy – strode to the Disney Hall podium, took his bow, turned to the orchestra. His gestures were modest, sure and eloquent; the curves and pulses of Mozart’s Figaro Overture fell beautifully into place. Whoever he was, the guy obviously knew the music and how to make it come alive.

He is Lionel Bringuier (LEE-oh-nell BRANG-ee-AY), and he has just turned 20. There he stood last Saturday before our formidable Philharmonic, unidentified by previous announcement from the stage or in print; he had replaced the scheduled assistant conductor, Joana Carneiro, at the latest Toyota Symphonies for Youth concert. He had had no benefit of rehearsal, but you wouldn’t have known this from the sparks he gave off on the stage that morning, the sense of assurance in a program of Mozart and Richard Strauss. He was at the end of a three-week visit to the Philharmonic, during which he had been hired by the orchestra to cover such situations as Carneiro being called out of town. He had also triumphed in a competitive audition to become the Philharmonic’s next assistant conductor (overlapping with Carneiro’s final year), a post he will take on next fall.

The buzz from that competition is that all who sat in judgment – conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, orchestra members, Philharmonic president Deborah Borda and several highly placed board members – have been knocked off their collective feet by this small Parisian with the huge talent. And the buzz, inevitably, devolves back to the Philharmonic’s unique history in discovering and holding on to fantastically talented, wet-behind-the-ears conducting talent, with names like Salonen, Simon Rattle, and the current season’s Gustavo Dudamel coming immediately to mind, and the name of Ernest Fleischmann as supersleuth.

Out of 110 videos submitted as applications for the Philharmonic competition, seven conductors were invited to compete in person, leading the orchestra in unrehearsed passages with a judges’ panel seated at a table behind the players. At a Music Center lunch, I wondered to young Lionel how much a competing conductor can reveal about him- or herself in such a high-pressure situation, without the chance of previous rehearsal.

“I think that if you have strong ideas about the music,” he answered in a potpourri of French and English that we had concocted for the occasion, “you should be able to show this with very little talking. To me it is important to prove to the orchestra that you are listening to them, and then they will begin to listen to you, and this begins to happen almost immediately without any necessity to speak. The quality of conducting means to me the quality of listening first; then comes all the rest.

“I was 4 when I knew that music was to be my life. That is when I began to play the cello. My parents have no musical talent, but there are four brothers and sisters, and we all play. One brother and I have a professional duo of cello and piano. By 14, I knew that I wanted to be a conductor. By that time, I had enough musical experience, however, that I didn’t want to be just a 14-year-old conductor, a kind of freak like – we won’t say any names. I was ready for a serious career.”

Yes, he is ready; that you can’t miss. Our lunchtime chat ranged far (the latest word on Formula One car racing, of which news I was a mere recipient) – and wide (the music of Marc-André Dalbavie). One further encouraging newsbit: On good authority I have it that when the victory of Lionel Bringuier was announced at Disney Hall, the members of the Philharmonic – a hard-boiled bunch, as we all know – stood and cheered.

The Finder

Ernest Fleischmann wants me to set the record straight on the story of his “discovery” of Esa-Pekka Salonen, when the young Finn leaped into the breach and replaced Michael Tilson Thomas at a London concert at which Ernest “just happened” to be in attendance. It was much more complicated; Ernest had already left London that day in 1983, and had to be summoned back from Los Angeles in order to catch up on this rising young phenom. In any case, in addition to his many years as Philharmonic honcho, assuring a tradition of stability that few musical organizations can match, Fleischmann is indeed the authoritative tracer of young conductors, a reputation that dates back a quarter-century and more.

Young Lionel first came across his line of sight a year ago, at the 49th running of the prestigious Besançon Competition for young conductors, where the young Parisian scored the same kind of jaw-dropping triumph that he later repeated at Disney Hall. With considerable career advice from Fleischmann, he has been able to develop his French and American triumphs into a career parlay: a part-time post with the small Orchestre de Bretagne, and the Los Angeles job, which will call for a couple of kiddie concerts (this time with name credit), a “Green Umbrella” program, a couple of runouts and – who knows? – a chance to step in when duty calls. He obviously understands the local priorities; he spoke at our last meeting about finding an apartment.?

Brett Dean and his music burst rather politely upon the local scene over the past two weeks. Australia born, with several seasoning years as a violist with the Berlin Philharmonic and now a full-time composer back home, Dean produces a kind of internationally amiable music, which is not at all bad. At Disney Hall he came on with a viola concerto, with himself as the able soloist, that lists the Philharmonic as co-commissioner. Viola concertos are not that common; there is a beautiful, dark-hued one by Walton that this new work is qualified to stand beside. Dean’s makes itself known in a soft, understated sort of way, and rises to a fair amount of hurly-burly in its middle movement. It has nothing to do with Australia: no koalas or birdcalls.

These – the birdcalls, anyway – came closer to the surface a few nights later in a Green Umbrella concert, all-Australian, that included not-so-amiable music by Dean, a “Pastoral” Symphony like none other, in which aggregations of native birds compete with the sounds of contemporary industrialized life, and not too happily. Composed in 2001 for Germany’s Ensemble Modern, the piece makes a stunning transition from soulful to soulless and quite overshadowed everything else on this remarkable program. A pair of radiantly alive piano improvs by the 26-year-old whiz-bang composer Anthony Pateras and some aimless note-spinning by Liza Lim (whose music continues to go nowhere with local audiences) completed the evening.

Esa-Pekka Salonen began the Philharmonic’s program with a spirited dash through Haydn’s “Bear” Symphony and a crackerjack romp through the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, a work I had, not long ago, vowed never to hear again but which, thanks to Donald Green’s red-hot trumpet, I heard with something close to rapture.

Discomania Revisited

Tower Records is gone, and nostalgia stalks the land. The first record store that ever engaged my time and my money was a small hole-in-the-wall across from Boston’s Symphony Hall. My pals Normie and Eddie and I would hike over after school, and the owner, a bustling little guy about the size of his cigar, would let us play some of his records so long as our hands were clean. His name was Jack Levinson, and his own favorite was a 10-inch 78-rpm disc of Heifetz playing “Hora Staccato,” and so we left every day with that thing buzzing in our ears. I bought my first album there: Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony, on six Victor Black Label discs. Victor had just lowered the price on some of its older 78s, from a dollar to 75 cents, and that gave birth to a new generation of collectors.

After college I moved to New York, and two doors down from my fifth-floor walkup was the Record Collectors’ Exchange, which became my next haunt. This wasn’t much larger than Jack Levinson’s, but it was crammed with really rare stuff – discs from France, from Eastern Europe, used copies of recordings long discontinued. The cigar smoke was even thicker here, and so was the lingo. People would brag about finding a particularly choice item, “gold label.” If the record label was printed with gold ink, that meant it was a prewar pressing, better-quality shellac; that also meant, of course, that Herman Lemberg would mark it up to twice the original price. I always suspected that some of those guys didn’t even own phonographs; it was the collecting impulse, not the music, that drove everybody into that smoke-filled room on West 48th Street. But that was what we knew as a record store, and its graduates went on to run the other hangout shops of the ’50s and ’60s: Will Lerner’s Music Masters on 43rd Street, Joe Greenspan’s Discophile in the Village, and let us shed a tear for Alfred Leonard’s Gramophone Shop on Wilshire – snob shops where the educated clerks wouldn’t allow you to buy a recorded performance they considered below par.

Technology spelled the doom. Starting with the LP in 1948, exploding with hi-fi and tape and stereo and the War of the Speeds – brought on by RCA’s absurd insistence that its 45s were equal to the 33s as a medium for symphony and opera – the great connoisseur medium of bygone days became accessible, inexpensive and amazingly all-inclusive. At the Record Collectors’ Exchange, you could perhaps find one or two Bach cantatas, or early Haydn symphonies, on some obscure European label at some exorbitant price; now the whole Haydn or Bach canon came in duplicate abundance.

The first time I walked into the classical branch of Tower Records in West Hollywood – not many hours after first arriving in Los Angeles in, I think, 1979 – I experienced a feeling exactly the same as at my first sight of the Grand Canyon: exhilaration tempered with helplessness (so much space, so little me). By the mid-’80s, you could paw through maybe 75 versions of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, with nobody behind the counter – except perhaps a couple of haggling Maria Callas queens – to offer guidance. As someone who, perhaps misguidedly, still nourishes a certain affection for classical music, I have increasingly found the experience of being in the presence of classical merchandising nothing short of appalling. My list is long: placement of classical departments in stores where the sounds of pop feed through, ignorant labeling in the few bins that remain, an inability among personnel to muster even a blank stare in response to a request for information.

As with most people I know, ordering discs by mail order has been the solution to the collecting dilemma since the first signs of collapse appeared in the Towers. There is a small part of me, however, that responds to the experience of getting my hands on some object possibly worth the cherish, and then rushing home to see if I was right. One place remains to afford me that pleasure: the music room of Doug Dutton’s bookstore in Brentwood. It’s small, but somebody has chosen the merchandise with great taste, and is on hand to talk about it. It is, in other words, what a record store could be, used to be, ought to be – minus the cigar smoke, that is.

The performance annals of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung abound in tales of solemn ritual, of audiences driven to ecstasy thousands at a time, of published philosophical analyses by the ream. To George Bernard Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite, the heroic Siegfried is the nihilist Mikhail Bakunin reborn; to Anna Russell, he is Li’l Abner. Nobody merely attends performances of The Ring; the operative word is pilgrimage. Whether that is exactly the first definition that comes to mind during freeway traffic on a Friday afternoon on I-405, or while experiencing a damp sandwich, standing up for lack of lobby space, elbow to elbow with a jabbering Ringling in plastic Wagnerian helmet, I leave you to decide.

Yet those four days at Costa Mesa – celebrating not the 20-year-old-and-already-shabby Segerstrom Hall but the glossy new one still being worked on across the way – added up to a Ring of sorts, if a Ring fashioned as though from the far side of the moon. “You have to remember,” a friend wisely noted during one of the endless intermissions, “that in Russia there was no 20th century.” Wagner had gone unstaged there since before the First World War, until the defiant Valery Gergiev forced a rediscovery on his forces at the Kirov Opera in the late 1990s. This Ring, brought to these shores by Kirov forces that looked like a fair portion of St. Petersburg’s population, was listed as a “conception,” not a stage direction, by Gergiev and the designer George Tsypin (he of the recent Grendel and its famous wall). Absent any more specific clues, it seemed to be a creation that had been allowed to grow of its own cumulative energy. Ideally, that can turn a stage into something very exciting, a massive improvisatory force joined toward some end. Otherwise, it can result in a mess.

This one was a mess. On a stage that looked as if someone had simply overturned the contents of some theatrical warehouse in which most of the props were damaged anyhow, gaunt giants stood by, encircling the stage, some headless (like the ones in the Long Beach Opera’s mini-Ring last January and just as useless), some with heads that lit up from inside like distorted lava lamps. Smaller, bulbous creatures with single headlamps were scattered here and there; the sharp-eyed Bernie Holland of The New York Times spotted them as Shmoos, enhancing the Li’l Abner identity. Singing actors of varying levels of proficiency trudged through a fair likeness of Wagner’s music – in itself one of the world’s awe-inspiring creations. Awe-inspiring, too, was Gergiev’s command of the rise and fall, the surge and the impetus of this incredible score – including, by the way, several passages usually cut that were left intact this time.

The problems were compounded, however: first because, though the orchestra itself – as the world has discovered on its previous visits – is a force of awesome resonance and beauty of tone, in Segerstrom Hall it was obliged to play in a pit too small and too poorly designed to show off its splendor. The mess was further thickened because the casting night after night seemed to have been carried out on an eeny-meeny-choice basis, seldom with any two singers properly matched. I heard excellent tenors (our own Plácido, for one) matched with small-voiced sopranos, a wooly-voiced Wotan past his prime with a Walküre Brünnhilde of splendid strength, a first-rate Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde against a wimp of a Hagen (in drag, by the way) who was also greatly outsung by the Gunther whom he is supposed to dominate. It would have taken the acumen of Stalin’s secret police to determine, from the various printed programs, which singer was actually singing which role on which night. I would swear, for example, that the aforementioned “Brünnhilde of splendid strength” was the same terrific soprano (Olga Sergeyeva) on three consecutive nights; the programs had it otherwise. Oh, and I almost forgot, the Siegfried who looked so svelte in his red jammies one night was replaced the next night by a chubbier hero trying to fit into the same clothes, but not quite at home there.

Not Only Godunov, but Better

The Russian forces encamped at Costa Mesa for this 17-day “Maryinsky Festival” sufficed to populate two full opera projects, plus ballet and symphony galore. Nothing in these offerings proved more valuable, however, than the four performances of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, the most prototypical and, up to now, most inexplicably neglected hereabouts of all great Russian works of art. Even in its later, bowdlerized transformations – its harmonies and orchestrations sweetened by lesser hands, its plotlines tampered with by the addition of love duets and a ballet – our local companies have shied away from Boris as if it were something other than the raw, daring, imperfect but astonishing masterpiece it truly is. In its original 1869 form, it was rejected by the ancestral Kirov company, which then triumphed mightily with bastardized versions. Three cheers and a “Slava!!!” then for the intrepid Gergiev, who brought the original Boris back to the company in 2002, recorded it and has taken it on tour.

Another few cheers, as well, for the result. There is undeniably great music in the additions made by Mussorgsky himself in his 1872 revision: the mighty choruses in the “Coronation” scene, the scene in the Kromy Forest with the Idiot’s monologue that provides the opera’s devastating ending. The five-CD Philips recording led by Gergiev is the ideal way to compare 1869 and 1872. It contains both versions; the 1869 Boris is the marvelous Nicolai Putilin, who also sang the role in Orange County last Sunday, the best single performance I heard during the entire Kirov visit.

But the 1869 Boris is more than a rough sketch. Its very terseness lays bare its personal drama. From the moment in the dialogue with the sardonic Shuisky when the specter of oncoming doom is laid bare, through to the end, the music doesn’t waste a breath, and neither do you. Suddenly, all that hanky-panky with gods and dragons from the previous nights seemed in retrospect like four nights of Ring Around the Rosie – fun, though.?

About an hour before the start of the Philharmonic’s subscription season on September 29, a friend and I were ushered into the empty Disney Concert Hall by an orchestra official. My friend had never seen the hall; I, of course, have made it my second home. Even so, I needed the reminder of that phenomenon, the extreme silence of the place at rest, the design triumph of architect Gehry and acoustician Toyota. The day before, there had been a nonsubscription “Gala” concert, which Esa-Pekka Salonen and the orchestra began with the delicacies of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, an exquisite seasonal statement that the time of Hollywood Bowl-quality sound had passed and the sound of real music had begun. That moment of silence the next night (which would soon be followed with the irresistible racketing of Mahler’s Third Symphony) filled out the message.

The “Gala” program included another treasure, one that had people wondering where it had been all our lives: Manuel de Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show. The work sets an episode from Don Quixote, and calls for live performers and/or life-size puppets in a mix with a chamber orchestra, using an episode from the Cervantes comedy that ends, as most of them do, in Quixotic chaos. This staging, by puppeteer Basil Twist – acclaimed most recently for his underwater production of Berlioz’s “Fantastic” Symphony in New York but not yet here – used the Disney organ loft and surrounding space, and did so with high imagination.

In all its 80-plus years, the Philharmonic had never once performed Falla’s small masterwork; in that span, the Mahler Third had turned up heaven knows how many dozen times. That tells us nothing, of course, about good music versus bad; I’ve never heard anyone advance notions about the Mahler Third being a good work, as I might hear about the Ninth, or Das Lied von der Erde. It belongs in the special category I’ve concocted known as Fun-Bad Works, and I suppose I should work up that list one of these days. (Let’s see . . . we can start off perhaps with Porgy and Bess or Tannhäuser.)

I love all that masquerading in the Mahler Third: the fake blood that oozes constantly in the first movement while Mahler giggles up his sleeve, and the delicious pomposity at the end, where the crowd really ought to be forced to its feet singing patriotic verses as white doves are released. It’s all a great con; Esa-Pekka rode the work to his position of eminence, but now that he no longer needs it, it has become his albatross. He leads his orchestra and the kiddie chorus most eloquently though its fraudulent measures, and through the sincere ones as well. At one time the Third served to prove his worthiness; now it is no longer worthy of him. Fifteen minutes of Ravel’s shimmering suite of childhood fantasies the night before told us far more about our marvelous conductor and the orchestra he has made for us.

Manon Second

It has taken 20 years for the Los Angeles Opera to produce romantic French opera in a musical style recognizable, respectful and altogether endearing. Like a warm and loving French kiss so perfectly placed that you never want it to end, the Manon currently at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion speaks (and sings!) in accents so impeccably Russian and Mexican (among others) that they somehow result in the absolute French manner, the absolute enchantment of the blend of twinkling jewelry (even if sometimes costume) and twinkling lovespeak (even if sometimes fraudulent) that blends into French Romanticism at its most seductive. From the regally Russian Anna Netrebko and the slimily seductive Mexican Rolando Villazón comes authentic French lovemaking/hate-spinning that can send you up walls with its realness. Even the tentative baton of Plácido Domingo, this time around, sounds real. Still . . .

There remains about this production a sense of the French-opera-for-those-afraid-of-French-opera. Cuts abound; nearly an hour of music is missing, which begins to impinge on matters of responsibility. These matters are also engaged in the spirit of Vincent Paterson’s staging (he of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Kiss of the Spider Woman), in which onstage lighting equipment and cameras move in and around the crowd scenes, switching the sense of time and place from fin-de-siècle France to commencement-de-siècle Hollywood. Someone, you get the feeling, still hasn’t learned to trust Monsieur Massenet and his very pretty opera. That someone, I get the feeling, ought to unstuff his ears and listen to the treasures at hand.

Afloat

Not having 2,000-year-old ears (in spite of those letters, folks), I cannot deliver an insider’s evaluation on the Suzhou Kun Opera Theater of China’s Jiangsu Province or its production of The Peony Pavilion at Royce Hall. It would be equally foolish, however, to seek refuge behind historic and cultural time and miss out on the enormous and infinitely accessible pleasures these people brought to our midst in three sold-out nights of intense musical drama. Clearly visible and audible at every moment were pride of ownership and the privilege of sharing. I wonder what an analogue might be: something so deeply embedded in a nationality that it can travel and be shared with such integrity. (If Porgy and Bess is your answer, we are truly beset.)

Pride and dedication drove the wonderful singers, who were not so much beautiful to hear as intense and amazingly clear. With the torrent of events these past weeks – not to mention Orange County’s Ring, which I’ll get around to next week – I was able to hear only the last of the three live performances; there is also on DVD, of course, an abridged version of another telling of the Peony Pavilion love legend. Nowhere in my memories of musical drama, live or recorded, is there anything so culturally distant from my own experience as this one live performance, yet so artistically close.?

Down the pathway beside the house on the West L.A. hillside, past the red door and down the steps, Kyozo Watanabe sits surrounded by bright, gleaming, brand-new stringed instruments: s, violas, cellos, perhaps a few double basses – enough to start up a full-size philharmonic, with enough for a chamber-music concert to spare. “There is no instrument here that I made,” says the soft-spoken, smiling Watanabe with some pride, “but there is no instrument here that I won’t make better.”

Some instruments were made in China, mass-produced of perfectly good wood – maple and spruce, some native Chinese, some from Sri Lanka – but not very good quality overall before arriving in Watanabe’s Cremona Violin Shop. “They are all what I call ‘China basic.’ You can buy instruments like this right out of the box in big stores for under $200, and give them to beginning children and make them think they are playing a violin. What I do is to add at least $165 worth of improvements: a better bridge, fingerboard, pegs, a soundboard. I can sell the finished product for only a couple of hundred dollars more, but it’s a real instrument.

“If music is going to survive, the first thing we have to insist upon is that beginning students must have good instruments. A child starting in is surely no more talented than the violin in his hands, and if it’s a bad violin that can’t respond to what he expects out of music, he simply gets discouraged and gives up. I don’t mean he has to start in with a Stradivarius. It’s just that he can’t start out with a piece of junk, or a toy.” Watanabe’s mission is to furnish the newcomer (of any age, by the way) with the first real instrument of his life in music.

Born in Japan, Watanabe commuted from Munich to the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, which, like Italy’s Cremona, is one of the world’s learning places for violin craftspeople. His wife, Miwako, was a member of the fondly remembered Sequoia String Quartet and still performs in chamber concerts here and in the Bay Area and elsewhere in the world. Watanabe himself is neither a retired virtuoso nor a frustrated conductor; his serenity and quiet humor bespeak a man who’s doing in life exactly what he wants to do.

CREMONA VIOLIN SHOP 3213 Midvale Ave., West L.A., by appointment at (310) 475-5897

The crowd at Zipper Hall last Tuesday night, for the first of this season’s “Piano Spheres” concerts, was one of those spectacles that renew your confidence in the future of energetic, serious musical programming. These concerts have been going on now for 12 years, and the audience has steadily increased while the programs themselves have become more and more adventurous – including not only great works of the piano repertory but some interesting wanderings afield. Last week’s big work had begun life as part of a string quartet; another was built around the reading of a sad and sexy poem. I heard nobody complain that there wasn’t enough piano.

That’s because the pianist was Gloria Cheng, one of the series’ great founding spirits and a superb adventurer on her own. The big work was the “Great Fugue” of Beethoven’s Opus 130 String Quartet, bipolarity in music if anything ever was, in a keyboard transcription that Beethoven may or may not have had anything to do with. Robert Winter delivered some of his typical madcap program notes and joined Gloria in a two-piano reading of similar quality that had to put everything else on the program somewhat in the shade. “Everything else” included some rather harebrained Beethovenesque variations by Saint-Saëns and the delightfully footloose Hallelujah Junction by John Adams (both also for two pianos, with the two splendid conductors Neal Stulberg and Grant Gershon on the second), as well as some morose bits by Thomas Adès in anticipation of his full participation on the next “Spheres” program come December.

Two movements from Stephen Andrew Taylor’s Seven Memorials made no stronger case for this composer than the complete performance had two years ago. Never mind: Overall, this was another cherishable concert, music for the thinking listener by the thinking musician. The season has begun.

People in Glass Houses .?.?.

They built it, and we came.

Nonchalantly tripping over the TV cables in the plaza where the lima beans once grew, brushing away the cinders from the fireworks that hailed the inaugural of their new concert hall, the folk of County Orange cornered one another, and waylaid the visitors just in from I-405. Had their Millennium now truly dawned? they wondered; could the Boston Symphony, and Carnegie Hall, and those pretenders from beyond the mountains now truly eat their hearts out in sheer envy? “No, not yet,” the answer seemed to resound, “but any day now.”

The journalistic hoo-hah that greeted the unveiling of Costa Mesa’s Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall was, of course, not a decibel less than the building’s $200 million price tag merited. Read carefully some of the meticulous prose – Daniel J. Wakin in The New York Times, for example, or Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post – and the undertones begin to rise to the surface.

.?.?. Shouldn’t Stow Thrones

“We’re in complete control of our artistic destiny,” Mr. Wakin has Henry Segerstrom, realtor, former bean farmer, telling his new tenant, the Orange County Pacific Symphony. “The hall can do anything you guys can do.” That being so, I don’t see much “destiny” in the freelance orchestra that shivered its way through a Mahler symphony on its first night in its new hall (a performance norm in recent years) and mounted three half-baked performances of Lou Harrison under the rubric of an “American Composer Festival” last spring (while the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” festival, I might as well notice, was drawing worldwide notice and worldwide participation).

Mr. Kennicott, meanwhile, has our Gubernator Schwarzenegger, whose homeland offers such acoustic and architectural splendors as the Vienna Musikverein and that city’s Philharmonic, pronouncing the Segerstrom masterpiece as “the best in the world,” which ought to be of some use in the Angelides camp. Okay. So there were those pretty-good fireworks, a pretty-good sit-down dinner, and Pacific Symphony honcho John Forsyte (not so long ago of the Kalamazoo Symphony), now flashing his supersmile, mouthing off about comparisons with Boston and New York. The next few months at the new hall offer a few serious concerts, and lots of pop and ice shows. Next door, at the old hall, there is some opera, as usual.

The promotion circulating around Costa Mesa’s new hall, in the reams of wastepaper that have landed on my doorstep in recent weeks and in the civic bluster at the ceremonies in recent weeks, might lead one to believe that the construction of this large bubble of glassy glitz signals some kind of much-needed cultural advance for its area. I wish I could believe that, because I do believe that a major musical force in Orange County, with genuine musical talent at its core and energetic, enterprising programming as its purpose, can succeed as well as anywhere else in this interesting nation. Unfortunately, in Orange County, perhaps more than elsewhere, a preponderance of overambitious, unrealistic leadership has gotten there first. What I would suggest, while there is still some land available down there, is for someone to plant a few lima beans, wait a couple of years and start all over again.

Impossible? Check out the history of “Piano Spheres” and ask yourself once more.?

Don Carlo is Verdi’s Everest, its peak shrouded, unattainable, magnificent. The Los Angeles Opera’s current version, at the Music Center through October 1, handily measures the company’s emergence as a major performing force since its previous stab at the work (April 1990, a quick, pathetic replacement for a scheduled Pique Dame), ranking, by the same token, as its best Verdi since . . . well, since ever. The gorgeous physical production, dark as nobly shed blood, looks the way the music sounds. Philip II of Spain sings of the gloomy “stone vaults under the Escorial,” and John Gunter’s designs set those vaults to a dismal dance on their own that is just right. When the King collapses back into the folds of his throne, his royal presence diminished to a meager wisp in the strangulation of the Grand Inquisitor’s menacing tones, can any of us out front in the cavernous theater not share the chill, the sudden emptying of humanness that comes with the music, the bleakness forming a vacuum that drains us all? What is there in opera to match that moment? What more ardently proves the power of that kind of music to hold every listener by the knots in the spine and manipulate our willing bones beyond the power – beyond the need, even – to resist?

Whatever the magic, James Conlon and his orchestra achieved exactly that result at their opening Don Carlo, and if I had my way, I would post their achievement – which included the stupendous King Philip of Ferruccio Furlanetto and the Inquisitor of Eric Halvarson (like a pair of haggling contrabassoons), along with the chilling Eboli of Dolora Zajick, a couple of octaves higher, and the not-bad Carlo of Salvatore Licitra, much improved from his over-promoted days as Pavarotti redux – as the standard to which any and all modern opera companies might strive. This being Verdi’s longest and most crag-strewn opera, the perfect performance exists only in the sternest musicologist’s dreams, and the deviations between this or any contemporary staging and Verdi’s original intent add up to quite a list. The language – not French but Italian – is wrong. One whole act is missing. A ballet has been omitted (thank heaven), and a number of smaller cuts, more or less important, have been observed. If you let these things bother you, you’ll probably never witness even a halfway-satisfactory Don Carlo (which this one is, and more), and thereby you will miss one of opera’s greatest treasures.

Down Costa Mesa Way

The champagne – pink, mostly – flowed freely; the Orange County damsels pushed their hors d’oeuvres, doing their best not to trip over miles of video and light cables that turned the plaza into Sargasso. Like an elderly relative dolled up for the party but seated on the sidelines, the “old” Segerstrom Hall (a mere 19, actually) dangled a few strings of neon like last year’s costume jewelry. Attention, of course, was focused on the parvenu across the way, the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, the $200 million worth of glass bubble that opened its doors last Friday night for the first of an oddly situated set of events that will turn this Segerstrom real estate into more of a cultural center, needed or not. The best of the celebratory concerts, actually, will take place in the old hall. It’s just that operas and ballets are more celebratory than mere symphony concerts, and the new hall, like Disney, has no place for a pit.

And so the fanciest wingdings go on somewhere else: in the older Segerstrom, with its grandiose but wacko seating plan. Normally, bigtime concert halls go with bigtime symphony orchestras offering bigtime concert schedules (e.g., Disney Hall). The Orange County Pacific Symphony plays a far smaller schedule despite its dreams-of-glory gestures (e.g., last season’s European trip). Even beyond the small disaster near the end of last week’s inaugural concert, an electronic glitch whose origin is still under debate as I write, the orchestra’s performance of the Mahler First under Carl St. Clair was strictly small-scale: a bad horn night, for starters. The Pacific Symphony Board does a pretty good job of pretending like big time: lots of commissioning of “safe” composers. Everyone is careful not to mention St. Clair’s predecessor, Keith Clark, although his performance of Schönberg’s Gurrelieder was one of the area’s most famous fiascoes.

The new hall is pleasantly small, welcoming about 2,000 on seats of light-colored maple and bright-red fabric. The sound of the Mahler was clean and dry; I heard everything with proper clarity, but St. Clair’s performances are hard to remain awake for even at best. The new work, a set of García Lorca texts composed by William Bolcom for Plácido Domingo, was very much wide-awake, however: passionate music with humorous asides, set down with the consideration a superior composer can muster for what a great but aging singer can produce. Quite frankly, I expected something far kindlier; these are strong, gorgeous pieces, and I can only hope that Plácido has the generosity to pass them on into the repertory.

Sitting It Out

My attendance record at the Hollywood Bowl being no cause for shame most of the season, I allowed myself the indulgence of denying my company to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, which ended the “classical” portion of the season that final Thursday. The night had turned cold; the gin had run low; there are few works I despise more thoroughly, and for a greater number of reasons. Just the thought of this bespectacled, small-minded pedant amusing his Führer by constructing this lurid travesty, assuming the small fragments out of ancient German songbooks and twisting them into beer-hall jabberings as if to reinvent a new musical language, is offensive enough. The ugliness of this vulgar work would offend me even if the text were pure, serene and biblical; it is none of these. Listen to the exquisite original medieval “Burana” songs on disc and grieve for the fate of German art.

Earlier on, the program was the young Jefferson Friedman’s tone poem constructed in honor of the famous sculptural grouping at the Smithsonian The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, the visionary creation by handyman William Hampton. Young (32) Friedman was on hand; he plans to incorporate his shiny, charming piece into a musical triptych honoring “outsider” artists and their inspirational, shimmering artworks. This one certainly does.?

La Traviata was my first opera; wasn’t it everybody’s? Jan Peerce howled and wobbled; Jarmila Novotna sobbed. Nobody noticed whether the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra played in tune; from a vantage point in the standing room at the back of a Boston movie palace, it couldn’t have mattered much. The distance between that glorious Saturday afternoon and last week’s was measurable in more than miles. It became apparent about two minutes into the exquisitely paced, shaded performance of the sad, sad Prelude under the company’s new music director, James Conlon. It began to widen with the first words of greeting from the company’s new Violetta, Renée Fleming of the gorgeous, floating tones but in more gorgeous, floating tones even by her usual standards. It burst into incandescence as that seductive hunk of Latino tenor, Rolando Villazón, shaped the first phrase of his “Un dì felice” into the musical equivalent of diamonds and rubies.

Suddenly it became clear why people fish their black tie out of mothballs on a sweltering Saturday to parade around like penguins in a stuffy lobby, spill drinks on one another, shriek like boobies when high notes resound, and dump $6 million moneybags toward the building of some 18-hour proto-Freudian production far down the line, all just to prove that the magic word “Ring” holds the same thrall over humankind’s gold as it did in Wagner’s hands 150 years ago. The power that makes otherwise rational people behave this way, including now and then the writer of these words, became once again audible when Fleming and Villazón merged tonsils in that Act 1 duet from Verdi’s La Traviata, and then went on to finish the work in like fashion. It didn’t even matter that the production was the same clunky stagecraft that Momma Domingo had inflicted upon the Chandler Pavilion in two previous seasons, with its overpopulated floor and clotted action patterns – which she had replaced one time only with an even more unconscionable updating. This time around, with musical forces such as these onstage and on the podium, Verdi conquered all.

The Other Coast

Kyle Gann (Dallas, 1955- ) is a composer (microtonal; music with complex tempo structures); musicologist (late-20th-century American music); ——–
AUTHOR of books with a leaning toward American eccentric composers (Conlon Nancarrow, La Monte Young); associate professor at Bard College; writer of PostClassic, a web log at Arts Journal; and music critic (1986-2005) at our associate publication The Village Voice. Music Downtown (UC Press, $19.95) contains about 100 of Gann’s 500 Voice articles. A valuable insight into his state of mind, and into his cloudless-clear expressive style, is his September 8 blog entry, “Ignoring Progress” (www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/), his answer to a questioner who insists that music history must entail growth in stylistic complexity, that every generation of composers inevitably builds on the subtlety and sophistication of the preceding generation.

Subtly applying his own views as an acupuncturist might his set of needles, Gann proceeds to devastate his questioner’s straight-line view of history, tracing the rise and fall of relationships between the stylistic curve of, say, the early Aaron Copland and the social conditions surrounding his ventures into cowboy ballets at one time and nontonal chamber music at another, and adapting his more curvaceous view of history to The Way Things Actually Are – in music and elsewhere as well. His path in this one brief but valuable article leads to the nearly 300 pages of Music Downtown, a tough but exhilarating panorama of a turbulent time and place in our music, still very much aboil – although its most eloquent Voice has undergone something of a diminuendo in its coverage of serious new music.

I suppose I need to invoke full disclosure along about here, not only about my own place within this organization but also about my own recent book that is also largely a collection of published articles originally printed out of the same corporate ink pot. But somehow the contrast between my So I’ve Heard and Kyle’s collection feels about as contentious as the struggle between a set of banana-cream-pie how-tos and Kyle’s uncle’s crippling chili recipe (also on the site). I scarcely know Kyle Gann, but I would proudly share a bookshelf with this and all his books.

Downtown music, as I glean from the many definitions set forth or implied in Gann’s collection, is the music that happens in the area of Manhattan below 14th Street – but spills over into Brooklyn, Queens, San Diego and any other fertile land where the spirit can thrive, where the venues are small but barely adequate to the ardor of the crowds. The music is what it is; one of Gann’s delicious definitions early on is “that it is only as good as it sounds.” But that is already distinction enough to set it apart from “Uptown” music, which exists on charts and diagrams that can be published and pored over by critics and doesn’t really need hearing at all. The ranks of “Uptown Composers,” says Gann, embrace the likes of Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. There is a “Midtown” subgroup, he adds, more likely to bear the taint of Juilliard than the Uptowners’ Columbia: John Corigliano, Joan Tower and Bill Bolcom, for example. John Cage, who died before assuming the mantle, is of course the acknowledged Saint of Downtown. I like to let myself believe that my own 15 pages on John Cage qualify me for at least part-time membership in Kyle’s Downtown club.

It’s in the matter of journalistic criticism – meaning to a New York-based writer, of course, the Times – that Gann’s venom flows full and deep. Most of his collected writing is from his earlier years at The Voice, when he pretty much had the quality-criticism scene to himself. Alex Ross hadn’t yet come to The New Yorker nor Jeremy Eichler to the Times. Uptown criticism (“the heroism-detecting machine”) raged full force. The death of Cage in August 1992 loosed a torrent of vitriol from the New York press comparable to that attendant on the passing of any Nazi tyrant. Gann, of course, screamed back, and then wrote his own John Cage obituary – the final pages in his book – which you have to read, and then go back and read again, and come away aware that, even now, in this shaky, maligned and underpopulated profession that Kyle Gann and I and a few others attempt to practice, there are things worth saying and ways in which to say them.

The annual schizophrenic week of the music season is upon us: the time of overlap that ordains the alternation of Hollywood Bowl picnic supper one night and grand opera, with mandatory matching socks, at the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the next. The transition this time has been neatly handled; nothing paves the path from the wordless passions of the concert stage to the explicit dynamics of the dying heroine better than a good, lusty concerto. Last week’s Bowl programming was notably generous in that regard. You mightn’t have gotten that idea from the local press, but it was there nonetheless.

Something about the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Bowl come together to overcome my reservations about the place and my distaste for the work itself. It has always been that way. There is a memory of a magical evening – Carlo Maria Giulini conducting, Itzhak Perlman as soloist, sometime around 1983 – that I invoke on my inner Victrola at times of stress; it’s always there for me. Last week’s performance may not have reached that luxurious eloquence, but it was splendid on its own level. Martin Chalifour, the Philharmonic’s all-knowing concertmaster, was the soloist, using his exceptional sense of ensemble to play in and around his colleagues. Xian Zhang, the evening’s guest conductor, just about half Chalifour’s height, concocted an admirable rapport between soloist and orchestra, something as agreeable to hear as to watch on the video screens (intelligently used this once). Much has been made of Ms. Zhang’s quick success as the New York Philharmonic’s associate conductor; it was somewhat demeaning to bring her all the way here to divide labors on a concerto and deliver nothing more on her own than a flashy Prokofiev ballet. More, please.

Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto was the work at hand at the Bowl two nights later, music so unproblematically likable that its genuine points of subtlety often pass by unnoticed. There are many: abrupt changes of key brought on rudely and dramatically within this otherwise polite and undramatic context; a sudden prospect of paradise as the solo clarinet takes hold in the slow movement; a delicious thumbing of the nose as the closing measures knock you off your seat. Maybe your grandmother had the Beethoven First in her piano lessons at the academy, but there’s more to the work than that, and Ingrid Fliter, that marvelous prizewinner who burst upon us last spring as a substitute for Martha Argerich (which is a career in itself), proved at the Bowl that her span of insights, her command of the work’s expressive range, was more than a mere one-shot. Our Philharmonic’s own diminutive assistant-about-to-become-associate conductor, Alexander Mickelthwate, was the capable collaborator.

On his own, Mickelthwate led the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony in a manner tense and original. Popular as the work has become – “to its detriment and maybe ours” do I hear someone whisper? – the votes are not yet counted on the “definitive” (hateful word) Shostakovich Fifth, from the broad, dark panoramas outlined in Kurt Sanderling’s hourlong Philharmonic performance, which I cherish on tapes, from the ’80s, to Zubin Mehta’s zippy vulgarity, which he still inflicts. From Mickelthwate the other night, I heard a clear, reasoned approach to the Fifth, nicely restrained so that the structural details – the simplicity in the way large, forceful themes metamorphose to jagged versions of themselves – stood out under the bright orchestration. Intrusions, including, at a crucial point in the slow movement, a garrulous pack of cruising coyotes, reminded us that summer still had some time remaining, and it was overall a fine night to be at the Bowl.

Words’ Worth

I had my own reasons for feeling this way; others had others. In last Thursday’s Times, I learned from the words of one Adam Baer that Martin Chalifour “remained keenly aware of how to perform as a team player” and shared “rhythmic landings [!] with Zhang while drawing rich-sounding [nonexistent] arpeggios from his instrument.” The slow movement, our man in Box 830 seems to have noticed, was “sung lyrically, with a touch of speed [huh?],” which sounds to me like some kind of disagreement in tempo. No, it sounds like somebody using words for no real reason.

Look around, as many do nowadays, at the news of classical music’s sad decline in popularity, at the box office and at the now-disappearing record store; sooner or later, some of the blame descends upon the pall of ignorance that envelops the consuming public. Who’s around these days to write to the 12,000 people who heard Chalifour’s moving and beautiful version of the Brahms Concerto and the Prokofiev ballet music on a balmy night – or to the nearly 7,000 who heard this marvelous young Argentine pianist (“ending long phrases not with a bang but with a Mozartean rounding-off”) and our own superb young conductor doing great Beethoven and Shostakovich – and come back in the city’s one and only culturally responsive newspaper to help them put a value on what they heard and why? The jilted listeners find, instead, the gibberish of an Adam Baer or a Chris Pasles, or a couple of other preening dilettantes of comparable brainpower who throw a lot of artsy words around at the cultural life of this growing community, and nobody cares about stuffing a rag into their word processors.

I am a member of an endangered species. Encountering dangerous members of the species makes me frightened or sick, especially at 82. I happen to think that I am better than a lot of them, on the strength of having studied with superior teachers and stayed awake in their classrooms. (The best of them, Joseph Kerman, wrote a book whose title I stole for this article. I also dedicated my own recent book to him.) The best of the active critics are Mark Swed, Alex Ross and, I guess, myself. All three of us have four-letter names. But so does Adam Baer, so this proves nothing.?

Few musical works of consequence have endured the variety of treatment, ranging from the ecstatic to the abusive, that befalls Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Even though its time in the spotlight has been relatively brief (composed around 1715, it never really attracted notice until some 200 years later), the musical world has made up for lost time with plenty to spare. The work’s shabby treatment at the Hollywood Bowl last week, dubbed “a mess” far too kindly by the Times‘ Mark Swed, was by no means the worst misuse visited upon this otherwise charming, imaginative, inventive and infinitely beautiful music.

What is there about The Seasons that invites such wanton tampering – a transformation at the Bowl into a raucous and out-of-focus salsa travesty, elsewhere mutations into a Yiddish-cum-klezmer songfest, fodder for a koto-based rock band, a tango fest, tunes to download to your cell phone? Nobody has vented this violence on any other of Vivaldi’s 600 concerti or those of Corelli or Geminiani. Vivaldi here stands forth as the victim of his own ingenuity, the ——–
AUTHOR of a one-of-a-kind set of serenely simple-minded sonnets celebrating the rural life during the passing of the seasons, and of the musical settings to accompany those verses day by day. There is nothing particularly earthshaking in the poems, nor scenic in their scene painting; dogs bark, flies buzz, thunder roars, warm feelings at the fireside are underscored by a warm-hearted tune. The pictorial elements are common stuff; they abound in poems and pictures of the time, including the deservedly famous set by Boucher. Other composers have tried their hands at programmatic effects, often with much more sophisticated musical usage – the “Biblical Sonatas” of Johann Kuhnau, for example, in which the stone from David’s sling all but hits you in your eye. Yet it’s the pretty tunes of Vivaldi that light the lights.

Kuhnau and Vivaldi make their programmatic points far better on their own than all the interfering forces the other night from Jimmy Bosch’s Salsa Dura band and the acrobatic fiddling of Pekka Kuusisto (which was, at least, cute if painfully overdrawn). It was most of all depressing to find in the middle of all this conductor Nicholas McGegan, the excellent Britisher who has led some of the most honest and forthright performances of music of this genre – on discs and even at the Bowl. For about five minutes in this grossly over-calculated concert, in fact, there was a brief visitation by the McGegan of old: the slow movement of a Handel concerto (Opus 3 No. 2), with the solo oboe of Anne Marie Gabriele fashioning a silver thread directly to the stars, and the strings around her in hushed reverence.

Come to think of it, it strikes me that the classical-music audience this summer has been shortchanged more than this once, in that several “Classical Nights” among the promised “Symphonies Under the Stars” have turned into something more like “Perversions Under the Planets.” First there was the night of Amadeus, too much of that particular dramatic travesty luridly read, too little music. There followed a dance program of shredded Bach bits. Then came this Vivaldi, and on September 12 comes a program of film bits conducted not by John Mauceri – who knows how to vitalize this kind of presentation – but by Leonard Slatkin, who surely must have other music to offer. Four “classic” nights out of 10 this summer turn out “classic” only by the most generous stretch of the imagination.

Angels in America

In these doleful days of the disappearing disc, there is infinite heartsease in the latest treasure from Harmonia Mundi, wherein Anonymous 4, that superlative distaff ensemble that first sang its way into our hearts via the abstruse meanderings of ancient polyphonies, lately turns its collective imagination and glorious intonation toward our own indigenous lore. Gloryland is their second disc, after American Angels (2003), to re-create the heritage of American gospel, revival and rural folk song; the new issue adds the artful collaboration of violinist Darol Anger and Mike Marshall on mandolins and guitar.

It’s difficult to describe the beauty of these two discs, simply because my eyes fill and I can’t see to type. The purity of the four voices – Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, Jacqueline Horner (relatively new to the group) and Johanna Maria Rose – renders the lines of the 14th-century polyphonies astonishingly clear without compromising the harmonies toward a later style. Some of that identity with very old musical textures carries over here as well; naive as those old revival singers may have been, their singing reached toward an artistry, and there are counterpoints in these old hymnals and other collections that combine into sonorities simply beautiful by any measurement. ?I defy anyone to make his or her way through No. 5, the gospel song “Where we’ll never grow old,” without picking up the needle, or pushing the button – or whatever it is that people do these days – to play the song once again, and then again.

What astounds me no less is the richness in the solo singing: the way Bronx-born Susan, to cite one example of many, sings of “The Wagoner’s Lad” with the folkish accent so firmly in control and, just as firmly, the exact harmonic “bending” of every phrase. I’ve admired this quality in Anonymous 4 from the start, and it’s gratifying to hear them carry it intact from one kind of music, across centuries and a wide ocean, to another. Beyond these highfalutin words: This is a wondrous, essential, fabulous collection. If all this talk about the end of the disc era has slowed your collecting zeal, wait out this one final spark of life. After all, these songs were meant to restore the faith.?

At 14, the precocious Wolfgang Mozart had already turned out 10 symphonies, four operas, three concertos, masses, sonatas, a string quartet and a basket of serenades. At that age, the slowpoke Jay Greenberg has ground out a mere five symphonies, one chamber work and a clutch of overtures. True, his time has also been taken up in newspaper interviews (The New York Times, August 13), in tossing a ball around for the cameras to assert his American-boyishness, and, one assumes, in listening to and jotting down juicy passages from the grand symphonic repertory out of which to build his own oncoming glory.

That commodity is already well-launched. The Times article strikes a proper tone of awe toward a prodigy who demanded his own cello at 3 and invented his own notation system to compose for it. He soaks up the musical world around him, best of all the “Mars” music from Holst’s The Planets and – sure enough – succeeds in regurgitating large clods of his own in that same musical style. Now the world has been endowed with a big chance to meet young Jay Greenberg and his music. On the Sony Classical label, once valuable for bringing us the best experimental and new music, there is now a full hour of Jay Greenberg’s expertly rewriting the mannerisms and footprints of his musical past: a Fifth Symphony and a String Quintet. “For him it is 1904,” marvels one interviewer, “and anything is possible.”

Yes, 1904. Let’s see: The young Rachmaninoff pokes around in the trash bins for discarded melodic gambits. His countryman Rimsky-Korsakov collects bits of tinsel for his hootchy-kootch Oriental numbers. Jolly old Sir Edward Elgar and his dour colleague Jean Sibelius busily stir in the musical equivalent of cornstarch to darken and thicken the orchestration of their sonic landscapes; on the Continent, Max Reger’s fugues and canons accomplish the same. Little do any of these believe that, a century later, an earnest young New York schoolboy will still be constructing overtures and symphonies with the same melodic turgidity, building the same tottering musical structures out of counterpoints that ultimately self-strangle on their own complexity and collapse under the weight of their own fragility.

The shadow of Mozart usually falls across reports of latter-day wonder-kids; it doesn’t in Matthew Gurewitsch’s Times piece on Greenberg, but I’m sure it lurks close at hand. The difference, however, is obvious. Mozart composed in the latest manner of his day, not in the manner of 1904, or whatever its equivalent throwback at the time. “I think originality is way overprized,” says Sam Adler, one of Greenberg’s teachers, in the article. There is nothing wrong, in other words, with expending the cost of a Juilliard education in learning how to recompose Brahms counterpoints in a Sibelius orchestration and, thus, assuring the world that modern music doesn’t matter. “The allegros [in the Greenberg Fifth] have the swashbuckling appeal of movie music,” writes Gurewitsch, and he’s wrong there too. The best movie music these days has moved far ahead of the swashbuckling glop that fills out most of this symphony. Even the clever score of a lightweight movie like Wordplay transcends what “movie music” used to portend. And Crash takes it miles further still; so much for movie music as metaphor. If originality be overprized these days, Sam Adler, so is the blatant practice of helping yourself to other people’s music.

Mahler Mania

Sometimes I start to think that everything at the Hollywood Bowl is just as right as right can be: that the sound quality is fine, that the lights and the teevee are splendid, and that the food guys have been pared down to minimum interference. Then something happens like the occurrence last Thursday, when the Goodyear blimp took to the sky over the Bowl directly at the start of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, and buzzed the space with its racket and its neon signage for nearly half the length of the overture – not a casual passing but a deliberate and extended interference. Even if Goodyear were the only product on the market, I would drive on rims; we are owed an apology.

Edo de Waart was the guest conductor, and Mahler’s First Symphony the evening’s major offering. The Dutch have Mahler in their bones; always have and always will. It may be because of the early friendship between Mahler and Amsterdam’s Willem Mengelberg: a unique matchup between genuinely erratic personalities. It might be something deeper that I won’t try to explain, but in Amsterdam last year for the first time in my life, I felt Mahler’s closeness. I feel it in the first movement – the quirks, the invasions by clouds of cuckoos – and in the third movement with its frenetic klezmer band that comes and goes. Maybe it was my imagination, but I think de Waart agreed with me on these particular quirks. Something in this symphony, with all its rudeness of language and its tendency to chew its cabbage a few extra times – which de Waart nicely controlled by eliminating a couple of repeats – comes very close to a listener’s ear in a properly measured performance. That’s what happened this time around.?

What is there to say about the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto? Its music evokes the full vocabulary of bland, useless adjectives: well-balanced, elegantly detailed, perfect. On my well-stocked shelves of critical writing I find no poisoned pen aimed against the work. Even that teeming battleground, Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective, provides nary a harsh word.

Yet the music disturbs the senses. At the sudden slippage into a minor key in the slow section, you justifiably catch your breath; a dedicated soloist – Hilary Hahn at the Hollywood Bowl last week – has heartfelt confidences to share, and speaks them with suddenly acquired passion. The moment soon passes, but during its time it has elevated the entire work onto a new plane. Our trampled emotions need the sheer giggling delight of Mendelssohn’s last movement – most of all that magical flight of fancy when he blends his fairyland theme with one that is slower, more reflective, and, miraculously, makes the two contrasting tunes stick together – to get things into balance once again.

Hilary Hahn has pushed her way through the hordes of sloe-eyed, cute teenage fiddlers to emerge, at 26, a musician of intelligence and consequence. Her journey has been well managed; you can trace it on discs, from the Bach she performed three years ago with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra to the remarkable intellectual breadth she brought to the grandiloquent sprawl of the Elgar concerto a year later. Splendid teachers have guided her hands in command of her instrument, but you get the feeling that the brain that guides her playing is her own. So was the marvelous sense of conversation she generated with conductor Hugh Wolff and the Philharmonic.

Burnt Offering

Sad the lot of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, which usually turns up at the Bowl on one of the fireworks nights and, thus, is relegated to the position of curtain raiser for the 1812 Overture – a lowliness of stature I would not wish upon any music whatsoever within my cognition. The piece rides around over a mass of self-contradiction; “bad, trivial, common,” raged Nicholas Rubinstein, who two years later sang Tchaikovsky’s praise to the rich Russian widow to gain funding for his Conservatory. Self-contradiction lies at the heart of the work itself: a catchall of disconnections and empty gestures, agreeable moments that never return, other moments that merely kill time, like so much Some Assembly Required that still hasn’t happened.

Why is the work popular? The first of the unassembled parts turned into a pretty pop tune (“Tonight We Love”), and the clangorous chords underlying that tune are a popular notion of what piano virtuosity is supposed to sound like. The slow movement dissolves into the kind of Mendelssohnian scampering that Mendelssohn accomplished far better. Only at the end, in the finger-busting octave passage before the return of the Big Tune (which even Vladimir Horowitz managed to fudge on most of his several recordings, to the delight of those who have lusted after his crown) does it begin to sound like the grand, romantic concerto that the overambitious 34-year-old composer fancied himself to be writing. Yet the work rides on its aura of romantic blather and, I suppose, on its fame: less deservedly so than any work of its proportions I can name.

Yet, as I was saying, it brings on the fireworks in the 1812, and I do not let a Bowl season go by without such adventure. If you don’t know, or care to know, about the Bowl’s fireworks, I cannot be of much help; you have to be there. You have to marvel at the complexity of the structures over the top of the Bowl that spell out building shapes and, on Tchaikovsky night, the flags and insignia of the warring Czarist and Napoleonic forces as they bring about an amazing visual counterpart to Tchaikovsky’s cornball counterpoint. Most of all, you sit back in astonishment at the rhythmic precision of the firings: not only the downbeats but, amazingly enough, the notes in between. “Pyro spectaculars by Souza; Gene Evans, special effects consultant” is all the program tells us about this wizardry; I suspect the emergence of an authentic art form, but maybe it’s just the kid in me.

Afloat Without Conductor

The fountain tricks at intermission at the “Grand Performances” in California Plaza downtown are remarkably similar to the Bowl’s fireworks, if on a more modest level. The air traffic overhead is similar to that at the Bowl but on a more extravagant level; buses and trucks along Grand Avenue add to the obbligato. Once every summer, at least, it is worth enduring the impossibilities of the setting to take in the annual concert by the excellent Mládí Chamber Orchestra, as I did last Saturday. At least my harsh words last year have caused management to abandon the ludicrous practice of a segue from the live music to recorded pop at intermission and at the end. Never doubt the power of the press.

“Mládí” was Janácek’s work, meaning “Youth,” and the small orchestra, which functions without conductor, played with its usual exuberance and clarity: a crisp and clean Prokofiev “Classical” and a suite from the Stravinsky Pulcinella. In between, the evening was rendered divine by Donald Foster’s clarinet in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, where suddenly all other sounds anywhere around seemed suspended and nothing else could matter. That’s Mozart for you.

Obiter dictum: Something else that did matter was the sound of the string bass of Christian McBride, at the Wednesday-night jazz program back at the Bowl, which – I admit with some shame – was the first of the series I’d gotten to this summer. McBride is the Philharmonic’s new creative chair for jazz, and the glory trail of his career runs at least as far back as 1990. What I heard the other night wasn’t merely a matter of my visit to another category. The deep pulse of McBride’s instrument was a bass of richness not before known to me; its infiltration into the sounds of the others in his band – Ron Blake’s saxophones, Terreon Gully’s drums, even Geoffrey Keezer’s keyboards – was something I could easily share. His set was one of three on the program, with Joshua Redman and Herbie Hancock, but the sound that followed me home was the bass of Christian McBride.?

There are moments in Hector Berlioz’s music when the harmonies become so clumsy, so befuddled in the sheer ugliness of their sound, that the mere progression around a simple turn of phrase starts to throb like a toothache – especially when, as with mine, the teeth are new. But then you immediately realize – or I do, anyhow – that the downright arrogance of these passages somehow makes up for these lapses of musical common sense, and that Berlioz’s harmonic peccadilloes come from his having studied music on the guitar (rather than a proper concert instrument), where he often was induced to leave out the middle notes of chords and create those empty, rude chordal tones in which the Grand Funeral and Triumphal Symphony, exhumed last week by Bramwell Tovey and the Philharmonic out of the Good Lord knows where, so agonizingly abounds. (To students in search of paradigms for the overstuffed Berlioz style at its most flamboyantly impenetrable, I recommend that last sentence.)

You will journey far through music’s realm before encountering the like of this woolly not-quite-masterwork, which the Philharmonic, along with most of us, encountered for the first time ever at these recent Bowl concerts. As augmented by a local brass contingent from Granada Hills High School and the Pacific Chorale, with the noisemaking forces bolstered by a glorious gadget (bells and other percussion, dolled up with banners and feathers and bearing the grandiose title of Jingling Johnny – or Turkish Crescent or Pavillon Chinois, depending how you shake it), the work turns out a conglomeration of march patterns, a wordless “funeral oration” for solo trombone, and a final “apothéose” of high-level carrying-on, including a choral invocation of “glory and respect to the sublime victims of the Fatherland’s fallen!!!” Apparently, they knew how to do those things pretty well back in 1840, but I’m also willing to bet that an appropriate musical setting of some recent presidential press conferences (your choice) might very well end up sounding like certain passages in Monsieur Berlioz’s Grande Symphonie.

Let me tell you about Bramwell Tovey. He’s a Brit, as you might guess, but no apparent relation to Sir Donald, the eloquent Scotsman who so influenced my own writing back when. He comes out of a Salvation Army background, which explains his larrupin’ success with the massed brass on the Berlioz half of the program, and the genuine audience-reaching charm of his introductory words to this half, which makes him an obvious candidate to replace the about-to-retire John Mauceri as the Bowl’s master-of-all-imagination. Beyond that he has a serious side, as conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony, where he has introduced quite an impressive program of new music to that chill and windswept city. He began last week’s programs (given on both Tuesday and Thursday; I heard the second) with a substantial, tightly controlled Beethoven Fifth: not at all sloppy, as I was told the Tuesday performance had been, but clearheaded and cumulative. It had a single flaw but a common one: a failure to repeat the last-movement exposition, which robs the symphony’s glorious peroration of the last full measure of grandeur.

All Seasons

Having lived through a time – pre-1948, let’s say – when Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was a musical entity known only to a few desiccated musicologists, I find it somewhat disconcerting, but surely delightful, to encounter the work showing up in a broad repertory, including a salsa version on the Bowl agenda next week and the ring tones of the cell phone of a friend otherwise unreached by the musical attainments of the High Baroque. I wasn’t aware of any potent shock of recognition sweeping through the John Anson Ford Amphitheater last Sunday night as our excellent local ensemble Musica Angelica explored Vivaldi’s landscape in its “normal” scoring, with all its picturesque seductions nicely underlined. None was necessary. Elizabeth Blumenstock’s solo violin contributed the most expressive singing of any musical event I happened upon during the week – operatic cast, solo trombone, whatever. The Angelica ensemble, succumbing to her example, played – well, without belaboring the matter, as angels might. Only a recalcitrant amplification system added a touch of the satanic: Was it needed at all?

For its annual summer-season opera, the Music Academy of the West has a long reputation for coming up with some whiz-bang repertory in performances of comparable quality, to reward the horror of what usually turns out a 90-mile bumper-to-bumper drive into Santa Barbara’s Fiesta Weekend. This year’s opera was Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims, and while there are valid reasons for arguing that the work isn’t much of an opera at all, those demurrers become less important once the music starts. The opera dates from 1825, and is basically a bootlicking piece to honor the coronation of France’s Charles X, with a lot of elegant people gathered on their way to the coronation, enduring foul-ups amorous and otherwise, finally deciding that none of them matters and singing to honor the new king. The best of the music – especially a splendid chorus-and-ensemble piece that made up most of Act 2 in the original – later got reused in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, a far better work. Why didn’t they do that one instead?

That Il Viaggio exists at all today is due to some masterful cobbling activity by the Rossini Foundation, based in Pesaro, the composer’s birthplace, which reassembled the score from scattered manuscripts and produced the famous performance I saw in 1984, under Claudio Abbado with an all-star cast. Brave souls, even of less than all-star quality, have kept the work in circulation since that illustrious resurrection, but the recording of that event remains to shame them all, and so it was last weekend. I heard pretty voices, a lively orchestra under Christopher Larkin, an ensemble cast deployed by director Casey Stangl (honest!) around Allen Moyer’s serviceable but bland stage set in the airless Lobero Theater. I didn’t hear a single trill in proper Rossinian style, or a long and lovely phrase delivered with a sense of line with shading and blossoming and shape. In the audience sat the great Marilyn Horne, who is the Music Academy’s Voice Program director in the tradition of the school’s founding divinities Lotte Lehmann, Martial Singher and Maurice Abravanel. I’m sure she knew how much ground had been covered in presenting this altogether pleasant evening of opera, and how much ground remained to be covered.?

Those of you who have been following this page for any length of time, and are easily shocked, are advised to direct your gaze elsewhere this week, because my mood, which no amount of medication in my well-stocked cabinet is able to divert, seems irrevocably fastened on an obsession to break out in praise of – if you’re ready – Jean Sibelius. That dour Finn, and his equally dour music, turn up frequently around here as matter for excoriation; so, especially, does his Violin Concerto, dourest of all. Yet that very work was on at the Hollywood Bowl a week ago; I found the performance magnificent, the setting more so, and perhaps the circumstances also contributed. All I know is that it was one of the best events I have experienced at the Bowl, going back to . . . well, how about Giulini and Perlman playing the Brahms Concerto (another work I am sometimes given to deplore) in, I think, 1982.

My box mate at last week’s concert was a smart young writer, the broadening of whose horizons I have made a summer project of my own, and let me state right away that there is no better way to enhance your own involvement with an experience – music, food, a Dodger game – than to go with someone who asks questions and really wants to know. “What is a concerto?” my friend asked at the start, and, boy oh boy, did the answer fall into our laps as if fashioned by the gods. That wispy gray nagging tune for solo violin, not stumbling as it usually does, awash in a thin orchestral gruel, made its way into our awareness this time on a cloud of bird song, the happy populace of Cahuenga Pass making tidy for the night and sharing its magic with the world. What a radiant moment! It seemed to ordain a different way of hearing the entire work – all 30 minutes of up-and-down strained melody following strained melody in no logical sequence, here a cute effect for the bassoons, there a vulgarity for brass – as though, this once, some great and happy intelligence had shaped a design. And that, my friend, is a concerto.

Nikolaj Znaider was the soloist – born in Denmark to Polish-Israeli parentage – and he delivered a phenomenal performance, technically flawless and so splendidly up-front that you stopped listening to technique and began listening for musical matters. From the awesome repertory list in his biography, he apparently knows something about these matters as well, and he’s welcome to play them in our back yard at any time. Sir Andrew Davis, the week’s Philharmonic guest conductor, obviously knows his way around the Sibelius landscape – and also around the ersatz-Sibelius sound of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, which filled in the rest of the program like so much packing straw.

Footloose

Two nights previous, one of the Bowl’s small stock of “Classical Tuesdays” had been squandered on a ragtag dance program: 14 members of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago wandering through Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 and a gathering of single movements by Bach. I must first register my predilections: I object to music being used (as in bad jokes to Mozart’s magisterial symphony) as opposed to danced to (as in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, which, along with Jerome Robbins’ Goldberg Variations, is the only danced Bach I truly admire). I also object to the kind of disrespect that thinks it’s perfectly swell to take single movements, willy-nilly, out of Bach concertos and keyboard suites and string them together as dance suites. You still hear the music, but the jolt of the segue to the haunting D-minor adagio of the First “Brandenburg” Concerto after parts of the E-flat Cello Suite is something neither Bach nor I should be asked to endure; it stands for a lousy attitude toward the music, especially on one of the few nights in the Bowl season that are supposed to be about music.

You would think, furthermore, that by the third season of those big video screens at the Bowl, they would have begun to make sense. I suspect that there is not as yet anything in the Bowl or the Philharmonic organization like a real production staff in charge of making sense out of all that obviously expensive equipment bunched up at the front of the property: the screens, the speakers, whatever. The sound is greatly improved, by the way. Whatever those big green boxes are down front, they have dealt properly with the ridiculous echo that plagued the orchestral sound in the past couple of years, and the sound from where I sit – about halfway back – is that of an extremely good home hi-fi, and I don’t expect an outdoor installation will ever get better than that.

But the video screens are just plain goddamn wasted. The dancers the other night were mostly dark shadows blended in among the orchestral players, and the coordination – the right player at the right time – is only minimally better than before. And it is absolutely absurd that on a night with singing or speech – the Tosca, the Beethoven Ninth finale and the arias in Amadeus – there are no visual texts. That lack all but concedes the day to the objections to the whole idea of Bowl concerts frequently raised, with what I detect lately as a noticeable crescendo, by my friend and colleague Mark Swed of the Times.

All told, I think I have a better time at the Bowl than Mark does. He complains about the “picnic obsession,” which is a matter to complain about to Patina’s management (or bring your own food, which I do, and which is more fun anyhow). He invokes that old bugbear “musical insignificance,” and he’s dead on; hire Leonard Slatkin if you must, as summertime top conductor, but set him loose on significant American music, which is his specialty, not just the tidbits of his September 12 program. Mark cites the comparison with Tanglewood, where people drive 150 miles (from New York or Boston) to the concerts and therefore know how to behave when they get there. I love Tanglewood too, but also remember a lot of summer music in New York’s Lewisohn Stadium, which was a short subway ride and played to the proles. I loved the sight of 8,700 people at the Bowl earlier last month, listening to Tosca and picking up some fascinating insights from John Mauceri’s spoken lead-ins. One more step, treating the opera as if there were words on a screen to go with the music on the stage, would have raised the whole evening to a state of musical significance. Tosca, which is also no particular love object in my books, deserved that much at least.?

No time in recorded history could match the sense of wonderment, the euphoria, the eager curiosity about the future that gripped the Western world right around 1900. The previous couple of decades had given the world the telephone, the light bulb, the phonograph, the automobile, and, a couple of years later, would give it the airplane; these were not merely improvements on things already in existence (as the compact disc might – just might – seem an improvement on the 78-rpm shellac disc, or the Airbus on the DC-3); they added up to an explosive expansion beyond what had previously been assumed the limits of human possibility. All the arts seemed to draw new energy from the spirit of innovation in the land; in the decade and a half from 1900 to the outbreak of World War I, the air crackled with the shock of the new.

Some of the newness may have been the logical consequence of the recent past; the whisperings and half-lights of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande clearly stemmed from the impulses that guided Claude Monet’s brush at his lily pond; Gustav Mahler’s last symphony and the first works of Arnold Schoenberg took the agonized harmonic frustrations of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde onto the concert stage. So, with more surface glitter and less inner substance, did Richard Strauss in his blood-drenched Elektra. Igor Stravinsky’s first ballet scores were recognizably the work of Rimsky-Korsakov’s star pupil. Yet the spirit of the times seemed to drive the new creators hard and fast. The merely two-year stylistic gap between Stravinsky’s Petrushka and his Rite of Spring yawns wider than the 20 between Beethoven’s “Eroica” and his Ninth. So do the two years between Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and the Pierrot Lunaire of his self-anointed apostle, Arnold Schoenberg.

Jump back a few decades – to 1880, say. The European bourgeoisie prospered; the great cities celebrated their grandiosity by building concert halls and opera houses. Virtuosos flourished – sopranos, pianists, conductors. The old masters – Beethoven, Haydn and Bach in monstrously perverse re-orchestrations – held their place; just the opening bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that supremely romantic gesture of bringing the music in gradually as if from a distant cloud, became the gambit for dozens of latter-day rip-offs, some successful. It was taken for granted, however, that by far the majority of the concert and operatic fare was to be music hot off the press. The audience eagerly awaited the latest Brahms symphony, the latest Verdi opera. Richard Wagner died in 1883, and the world awaited with bated breath the emergence of his successor, assuming beyond argument that there would be one.

Around 1900, however, the signs first appeared of a schism between “music” and “new music.” Wagner had implanted some of the attitude with his orotund pronouncements about “the music of the future.” By 1900, too, Europe’s great music-publishing houses had caught up with the past, with complete performing editions of practically every major composer, from Bach to Beethoven and on through Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz. Performers could, better than before, think in terms of a “repertory” of past masterpieces; audiences, too, developed a fondness for wallowing in the familiar. And so the world at large no longer awaited the next symphony by Mahler or the next string quartet by Debussy with the hunger for newness that had driven taste in, say, 1880. Newness had become newer, and therefore more fearsome, than in the good old days. The impact of Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring – and the dozens of similar assaults on the musical status quo – drove the wedge.

Music’s world expanded beyond its traditional French/German/Italian/Slavic boundaries in these years. Finland’s Jean Sibelius brought his country its first fame, with music basically rooted in the mainstream past but with at least one splendid work, the bleak, ascetic Fourth Symphony, that does indeed mirror the fog-shrouded bleakness of its native soil. Spain’s Manuel de Falla wrote Spanish-tinged music that went past post-card prettiness in a dark, edgy and wonderfully witty manner. England’s Ralph Vaughan Williams, though defiantly anchored in his country’s ancient musical styles, at least turned out a repertory of symphonies that did not sound fresh off the boat from Germany, as did those of his countryman Elgar. And the United States, whose handful of respectable 19th-century musicians also composed with heavy German accents, produced its first generation of indigenous crackpot/geniuses with the likes of good ol’ boy Charlie Ives, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and the émigré Edgard Varèse, who proclaimed his Americanness with a wildly dissonant piece called Amériques that had the critics disputing whether it was more descriptive of a zoo or a boiler factory.

The War happened, and then jazz happened, and the timing was just right. Great wars always leave the creative world with the need for a fresh start from some zero point. In the post-WWII decade, the musical world would flop around for a time in desperate search of fresh impetus, adopting and rejecting a variety of artistic possibilities; but in 1918 that impetus had come ready-made, or so it seemed: a fresh, immensely vibrant language, laden with fascinating interconnections to other arts (Cubism, for one), its horizons far out of sight. Like its music, its very name – jazz – was a hybrid of arguable origin. Its vitality was, however, beyond argument. Almost everybody was hooked at first.

Visiting New York, France’s Darius Milhaud raided the shelves of Harlem record shops and returned home to create his ballet nègreThe Creation of the World; Germany’s Paul Hindemith blended the kicky new rhythms into his Bach-inspired chamber concertos; Stravinsky tried his hand at a couple of ragtime pieces, both terrible. Paul Whiteman toured Europe with his big, symphonic jazz band and played George Gershwin’s synthetic Rhapsody in Blue to awestruck crowds – lively stuff, even if neither jazz nor symphony. In Paris, another young innovator, Aaron Copland, was urged by his teacher – the legendary Nadia Boulanger, godmother to a generation of American composers – to use music as a way to define himself and his world. He did so by including, in his delicious, lighthearted Music for the Theater, a generous admixture of the newfangled jazz.

Stravinsky’s revolutionary orchestration in The Rite of Spring gave off all kinds of messages about new ways to make musical sounds. Ten years later, Stravinsky created Les Noces, depicting a Russian folk wedding, with an orchestra consisting of four pianos and a huge battery of percussion; the American George Antheil, in cahoots with the Cubist painter Fernand Léger, did some of the same in his Ballet Mécanique, whose scoring included an airplane propeller. Before either of these, a San Francisco teenager named Henry Cowell astonished audiences with his piano pieces that involved reaching inside the instrument to stroke the strings or whomping down on the keys with a fist or forearm to produce what he called “tone clusters.” Later, Cowell would become mentor and role model to the most carefree and influential of the century’s innovative spirits, the Los Angeles-born John Cage.

If Arnold Schoenber
g had little taste for per
cussion ensembles or airplane propellers, he had his own visions of musical sounds hitherto unheard. Six months before Stravinsky’s bombshell went off in Paris, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire had earned a comparably hostile – if less vociferous – reception in Berlin: music in which a solo voice keened, wailed, howled and whispered poetry about a moonstruck madman, joined by a chamber-music ensemble enhancing the spooky atmosphere with music devoid of any sense of harmonic progression or key. Standing aloof from all the jazzy razzmatazz, Schoenberg sought to codify his wholesale revision of traditional musical values with his “method of composition employing all 12 tones,” which he perennially explained as the logical extension of principles reaching back to Bach. His 1923 Suite for Piano, his first “pure” piece employing all 12 tones in strict serial order, did indeed link hands with Bachian models. But it was Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg, in Wozzeck, his harrowing, immensely powerful operatic setting of Georg Büchner’s play, who proved, even more fluently than his teacher, the expressive potential of the Schoenbergian style, moving in and out of 12-tone writing, and also in and out of the Mahlerian shadows, as the moods of the intensely moody story dictated. Just by themselves, The Rite of Spring and Wozzeck were enough to prove that the new century had not lost the ages-old power to produce masterpieces.

In Austria about 20 years ago, I had the rare good fortune to chat with the legendary critic H.H. Stuckenschmidt, shortly before his death. The old man had lived through everything, all the way back to Mahler, and the thing I remember best about his conversation was that the rich, steamy orchestration of his era’s music – the assembled forces of Richard Strauss, the last gasp of German romanticism before Mr. Hitler’s housecleaning – had become part of his own language. We talked in particular about the fate of one composer, who by the early 1980s had become an unknown quantity to most of the musical world: Franz Schreker. Herr Stuckenschmidt had one special word for his music. “Oh yes,” he said, “that is quite remarkable. Full of Klangzauber.”

What a marvelous word, which the Germans make especially so by running its parts together: “soundmagic.” And now that Schreker’s music is working its way back into worldwide attention, some of that Klangzauber is also around again. His opera Die Gezeichneten (“The Branded”) was revived at last year’s Salzburg Festival, and attended by representatives of political factions who would have trampled it in the dust not long before. Now that production, conducted by Kent Nagano and staged by Nikolaus Lehnhoff – he mounted San Francisco’s last Ring – is available on a EuroArts DVD.

Schreker wrote his own libretto, in Vienna in 1915. It tells of a wealthy hunchback on an island called Elysium, off mythical 16th-century Genoa, who hates his appearance but can use his gold to counterbalance awareness of it. He maintains a gold-plated mansion, which Schreker’s orchestra limns in surging orchestral opulence highlighted with bright, jangly percussion; there’s your Klangzauber. A mysterious artist, who paints only hands, persuades him to marry her, but then jilts him for a thug. The hunchback murders his rival. Elsewhere on his island, a gang of the hunchback’s colleagues are running a brothel of underage local girls.

Surrounding the tale is considerable talky-talk on the nature of love and beauty and aesthetic limits; meat on the table in the Vienna of Freud and Hofmannsthal. Schreker’s operas were enormously popular, rivaling those of Richard Strauss up through the 1920s. He never erred, as did his colleagues, by venturing into the morass of dissonance or – horror! – atonality. But he was partly of Jewish extraction, and not given to fighting the good fight. As the Nazis rose to power in the 1920s, he was pushed off the cultural map almost overnight, and a large legacy of intense, powerfully dramatic operas fell with him. One or two have recently been recorded, however; there is a genuine Schreker revival under way. The great success of Die Gezeichneten in this marvelous production under Nagano, with some extravagances in Lehnhoff’s staging that are worthy of the excesses in the plot, will help.

What is really amazing is the richness of just the sound of the music as it roars by. There are touches of this Klangzauber stuff in Strauss: the business around the Silver Rose in Der Rosenkavalier and some lush, gooey moments in Don Juan. But this is baby talk compared to the Schreker sound and the poisoned kiss of the Schreker harmony. He builds huge, thundering orchestral bursts that crest like the frosted waves on a Hiroshige scroll. His gardens of sound can be, of course, dangerous; don’t get too close. But people who like that stuff in Strauss – no thanks – should go double-ape over Schreker.

Later Magic

You cannot talk about soundmagic without also referring to Giacinto Scelsi, the reclusive, indefinable composer who died in Rome in 1988. Indefinable is, I think, the first operative word for this remarkable Italian visionary. The new ECM disc of his music begins by plunging us into a splendid confusion of sound, a dense web concocted by a gathering of 16 string players in an anarchy that, nevertheless, drives obsessively forward. For Scelsi, the normal division of the scale into eight or 12 tones was only a beginning; each note revealed a spectrum beyond. String instruments, therefore, became his chosen medium, and his collaborations late in life with the American-born cellist Frances-Marie Uitti were like a new beginning. Uitti now lives in Amsterdam; in her last concert here, at the start of the final LACMA season, she created an audible rainbow – Klangzauber, indeed – with works of Scelsi that she played with the phenomenal double-bow technique she has devised.

The new disc, Natura Renovatur, athrob with magical sounds, alternates works by Scelsi for Uitti’s solo cello with three of his amazing pieces for “clusters” (more applicable than “ensembles” in this case) of string players; Christoph Poppen conducts the Munich Chamber Orchestra, and perhaps we can allow him back in the house after his misbegotten Morimur expedition of a few years back.

Older Magic

Being given at times to reliving past pleasures (and feeling entitled at my advanced age), I hail the arrival of a couple of discs on the low-priced (Michael) Dutton label, with music and performances I remember with great delight from years long past and rediscover with equal delight today. One is part of a collection called The Art of Constant Lambert, and I’m only sorry that it leaves out that British conductor/composer/sourpuss-critic’s delicious if naive Americana bit The Rio Grande. What it does include, however, is a suite from William Walton’s Façade, delightful little satirical and rhythmic/experimental pieces to Walton’s jazzy score, with Edith Sitwell’s poetry intoned by herself and by Lambert. Walton (in 1929, long before the “Sir”) conducts, and I defy anyone to come under the spell of “We bear velvet cream, green and babyish . . .” and then shake loose.

Another disc includes, among other trinkets, a suite from Scuola di Ballo, notes by Luigi Boccherini in a reorchestration by Jean Françaix (for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo) that sends this most ordinary music skyward. Once you’ve tapped your toes to this wonderfully spirited music, I promise, you’ll never take your Boccherini straight again. The disc also includes about eight minutes – all you need – of Stravinsky’s Tchaikovsky-derived ballet LeBaiser de la Fée, and some charming Chabrier, but it’s the Boccherini that sells it. Antal Dorati is the conductor, and I can’t think of anything better he ever accomplished than this magical quarter-hour.?

I will never tire of writing about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or of encountering new reasons for wanting to. On a benign Tuesday last week, that music – calm and openhanded one moment, furious and mysterious the next, triumphant yet watchful at the end – joined the air traffic and the heavenly bodies over the Hollywood Bowl, sent aloft by a respectful if not exactly eloquent performance by the forces massed, under Leonard Slatkin’s direction, on the stage down below. It was an Occasion (capital O): the Bowl’s first classical concert of the season – not to be confused with “Opening Night,” however, which had taken place some days (or weeks) before. You could tell this one, however, because the dwindling ranks of the classical press – freeloaders all – were beguiled pre-concert by a splendid Patina spread.

It seems to me, however, that a performance of the Ninth Symphony used to be even more of an Event (capital E). I heard it first in Boston in 1942. It was a Special (capital S, okay, let’s drop this) Boston Symphony Pension Fund concert that took up the whole of Easter Sunday afternoon and evening. It began with the “Egmont” Overture, and there was a dinner intermission after the first movement of the symphony. (Imagine!) The concert itself is not very clear in my memory, except for the way Serge Koussevitzky got the cellos and basses to play the “Ode to Joy” theme so softly that you heard it in your chest rather than in your ears, and for the fact that the Ninth Symphony came over to me and my self-important Harvard-freshman friends as some kind of unapproachable relic that one attended with a special brand of awe reserved for this one occasion and spoke about only in hushed tones for weeks afterward.

Times change. The Ninth has been with us twice in recent weeks, and when Esa-Pekka Salonen performed it to end his “Beethoven Unbound” series last May, its impact was much diminished by its proximity on the program to the Ligeti Requiem. A vast and all-encompassing Beethoven Myth began soon after the composer’s death in 1827; no other composer – no other figure in the arts great or small – has bequeathed so rich a fodder to feed that kind of myth and renew its impact over the generations. The letters left behind (the Testament, the Unnamed Beloved), the unresolved family squabbles (the nephew), the mere biographical facts (the fights with landlords, the unpaid bills, the final illness, the funeral orations) . . . all these fuel novels, movie scripts. More than that, they spin off their own stories. They give us the Beethoven cult, not that far removed from the neo-Nazis of A Clockwork Orange. Somewhere in a drawer I think I still have a T-shirt from 1970, the Beethoven Bicentennial, from a Bay Area DJ, with the message that “Beethoven was Black (and Proud).”

This is all sideshow material, however, which the facts of Beethoven’s life supply in profusion. They go nowhere, however, in reaching a reconciliation in words with the miracle that takes place as fragments of musical gesture emerge out of blankness, somehow know to attach like ovarian cells, and form the astonishing bulk out of which the Ninth Symphony is born. This process, furthermore, is being regulated before our wondering ears by an aging, ailing, neurotic dyspeptic who happens, incidentally, to be stone-deaf, who finds from somewhere within his wounded soul the power to lead this material, to shatter it and rebuild it, to transform it at one moment into a song for horns of shivering, distant beauty, and at another into howling, defiant apotheosis. The first movement of the Beethoven Ninth is one, perhaps the foremost, of the Significant Monsters of my musical treasure chest. Hearing it sort of slink by, under a conductor who obviously knows the notes but doesn’t seem to let on that he cares for them, was not my happiest Bowl memory. (Mr. Slatkin did have the good manners, however, to observe all of Beethoven’s called-for repeats in the ensuing scherzo, and in the Eighth Symphony before intermission. Not all Bowl conductors are that considerate.)

Another Show

It’s easy enough to belittle the wonderful Eighth Symphony, especially if it turns up – as it did this time – as curtain raiser (“prep work,” my colleague dubbed it) to the Ninth. The connection is only an accident of numbering; the Sixth is hardly prep work to the Seventh. The individuality of the Eighth lies on every page, but most marvelously in the game-playing with sudden key changes, the quick lunges from a solid footing in one key to somewhere in the middle of next week. These tricks abound in the first movement and finale, and they are great fun.

The last two or three minutes of the work sum up the best that was in Beethoven’s lighter side. An orderly finale has come to its supposed close along the lines of proper classical form. The opening theme had come to an unruly cadence on a C sharp that had no place in the well-behaved key of F major. Now, at what should be the end, Beethoven lands on that C sharp, and it suddenly turns into a skyrocket. Where the music should properly end, it launches into a headlong flight through a sequence of unrelated keys, while the winds in the orchestra seem to surround the process with giggles and laughter. It’s a glorious event that eventually straightens itself out. Besides drawing from Mr. Slatkin an infinitely more spirited and, I dare say, more comprehending reading, the Eighth proved itself, as it always does, very much its own work. Told by some critic that his Eighth Symphony was less a success than the longer, larger-scale Seventh, Beethoven is said to have replied, “That’s because it’s so much better.” I think he was right.?

Memories around John Mauceri come to mind as he begins his final season as the Hollywood Bowl’s Man of Much Music. They start back in 1973, as the Yalie with the golden curls, still John MOSS-ery to his classmates, is summoned to Brooklyn Academy by Leonard Bernstein to conduct the revised and much-improved Candide, which Harold Prince’s restaging had rescued from its stodgy beginnings. They advance to 1991, as the self-renamed Maestro mow-CHAY-ry charms an Osaka audience on New Year’s Eve with a few memorized Japanese phrases and a program of spellbinding pops by his brand-new Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, ending with a clap-along “Stars and Stripes Forever.” They swing down to Costa Mesa around the same time, where Wagner-deprived Los Angeles operaphiles have journeyed to hear Mauceri pull the minor-league Opera Pacific through a major-league reading of Die Walküre, and to wonder why operatic conducting of that quality never seemed to happen with our own company. (Those were the days of Peter Hemmings’ leadership, remember, when the podium at Chandler was held down – if that’s the term – by lightweights like Randall Behr and Lawrence Foster. Things are better now.)

Mauceri’s 16 years with the Bowl Orchestra – still, as it always was, an aggregation of top-quality studio freelancers whose roster can change from week to week – has considerably raised the musical stature of the place. For the weekend programs, which have been his principal territory, he has greatly enriched the concept of the light-music concert, especially through his work in what you might call Hollywood musicology. He has exhumed (sometimes literally, from tons of discarded manuscript pages) scores from past films and reconstructed a whole genre of film sound as it was practiced by the generation of big-name composers, most of them Hitler escapees, who flourished here in the days of great studio orchestras. By the standards of the European symphonic repertory – Brahms, Mahler, those guys – the surging hearts-aflame concoctions by the likes of Korngold, Rózsa and Steiner come in a few notches down on the cultural pole. Mauceri’s job was to select the nearly forgotten content from choice pages of what turns out to be a huge amount of music, clean it up some and fling it forth, with some immensely congenial commentary, in the glittering showplace in Cahuenga Pass – a perfect matchup, in case you hadn’t noticed. Bless him for that; he came to us from another world – Yale, New York, several European halls and opera houses – and stayed long enough to confront us with the beauty and, yes, the musical value of some of our own culture. And I will take a large sundae cup of Erich Korngold’s score for Kings Row, or the cello concerto he wrote for Bette Davis’ boyfriend in Deception, over half a dozen Richard Strauss tone poems I could name.

Without saying it in so many words, Mauceri has advanced the notion of film-plus-music as some kind of art form. The Bowl – the marvelous expansion of the perfect movie palace, and so what if there’s no roof – has been his lab. Those wonderful nights when he puts together collections of movie scenes, on the big screens with their music played live, are like panoplies of masterpieces, and Mauceri – in his selections and in the warmth and wisdom of his talks – has always sustained the impression that these unique blendings of sight and sound contain within them the potential of great art. That one facet of his Bowl repertory, I think I will especially miss.

John of Opera

But there is more to Mauceri, and I get the feeling that, either by accident or by design, we have missed out on a portion of his good works. In Andrew Porter’s collected writings – he was critic at The New Yorker before Alex Ross – I read, with pangs of jealousy, accounts of Mauceri conducting Verdi’s La Forza del Destino at the Met and, would you believe, Wagner’s Rienzi in San Antonio. Why not here? It was Mauceri who led the premiere of Andrew Imbrie’s Angle of Repose in San Francisco, the most deserving piece of all the music created for the American Bicentennial. I absorb all this, and get the feeling that we’re letting him leave us with the best of him unexplored. Oh well, he’s only 61, and there’s even a little gold still in those curls.

In Europe, Mauceri’s reputation rests primarily on his operatic conducting: at the Scottish Opera, where Bernstein and Kurt Weill as well as Wagner have figured in his repertory, and in Torino and other major houses on the Continent. In Los Angeles, his operatic stage has been the Bowl, where his performances have been delivered without actual staging but with a remarkable amount of stage verisimilitude even so – helped, of course, by the new video screens, which can be a nuisance in some circumstances but which at least allow us to share the vocal sufferings of heroes and villains. Last year’s opera night consisted of great chunks of Wagner, and as I remember it, the surge and thrust of the performance was quite decently simulated.

Last Sunday there was Puccini’s Tosca, music very much at home, of course, on a stage where movie music sometimes reigns. Mauceri presided, a perfect host; I would entrust any operatic newcomer to his witty, welcoming narration of the goings-on, and the further elucidation of his strong, eloquent performance. The sheer fakery of the music blended nicely with the fakery of the performing circumstances; it was all just perfectly, in a word, swell. Patricia Racette sang the Tosca; the Butterfly in the Robert Wilson staging here earlier this season, she’s a brainy, attractive singer of no particularly ravishing voice but a wide range of usefulness – a latter-day Dorothy Kirsten, say. Frank Porretta, second in a line of adequate tenors of that name, sang the Cavaradossi with its basic brutality intact and nothing more. (Is there anything more?) James Morris, the Wotan-turned-Scarpia, brought a tone of authority, plus a few that sounded rather scraped. The real drama lay, to nobody’s surprise, with Mauceri and – this time – the Philharmonic itself. They deserved each other.?

Old Sourpuss has been heard from again. “A large chunk of masonry fell off the music industry last week . . .” announced the London-based critic, observer, editor (of a book of mine, even) and all-around gadfly Norman Lebrecht in his Montreal-based La Scena Musicale, “. . . another step towards cultural oblivion.” The “chunk,” as Mr. Lebrecht saw it, was the closing down of classical operations at Warner Classic Recordings; his statement was followed within the week by stern denials. The classics, stated Warner executives in a rebuttal in Playbill Arts, “will remain a key part of the Warner music family.” Warner Classics, it turns out, is being incorporated into Rhino, which has actually managed the label in the U.S. for nearly three years. “We remain committed to classical music,” says a company statement, “and look forward to continuing to pioneer new ways to bring our content to consumers” et cetera, et cetera.

There are two sources of summer-reading diversion you can derive from all this. The one is the news that Mr. Lebrecht is alive, well and moving onward. There is nothing in the tone of his article to surprise his constant readers. His book Who Killed Classical Music? bears the publication date of 1997; both it and classical music are still going strong. Just before the start of this year, he greeted the oncoming Mozart anniversary with a piece titled “Too Much Mozart Makes You Sick,” which advanced the fear that the Salzburg darling would be so overperformed in 2006 that the truly important anniversary – the Shostakovich 100th – would be totally overlooked. “Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century,” he fulminated. “Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony. Listen to music that matters.” Beyond that last sickening suggestion, Mr. Lebrecht’s fears have so far gone unrealized; Mozart and Shostakovich have each, by midyear, received a fair share of adulation.

A Different Spin

There is another, more serious misapprehension in Mr. Lebrecht’s observations that just may have eluded him – the assumption that these record producers, whose demise he has come to equate with the collapse of classical music, matter anymore. Last March, when the L.A. Philharmonic made programming history with the “Minimalist Jukebox” programs, which opened new horizons, brought in new, young audiences, and redefined the excitement level possible at a symphonic concert in a large hall, some of these events were recorded for iTunes and, within days, made available on home computers. This was a pioneering venture by the Philharmonic, but only by minutes; the New York Philharmonic was experimenting with the same techniques, with less exciting programs (Mozart, Mr. Lebrecht). The sound quality at home could be superb; even an old duffer like me can twist a couple of cables and run sound from my computer into my stereo.

This old duffer, by the way, has lived through a lot of technology. I worked at a record store in Berkeley when LPs came along. We sold a dinky little player with a metal needle and for every three we sold we had to take back two and the sound was shrill and scratchy, but within a year there were good machines and the London “ffrr” discs, and collections of 78-rpm records were showing up in junk shops. When the CDs arrived, there was a scientist at Caltech who ran demonstrations on the superiority of analog to digital reproduction (as long as you had $50,000 to spend on equipment), but you don’t hear from him anymore.

My friend Adam Crane is the Philharmonic’s director of public relations and communications, and he is one of those people – I am not – who lives in music the way a goldfish lives in water. His goldfish bowl is his iPod, and he fills it constantly from iTunes on the Internet. Wherever he goes – any room in his apartment, his office, his car – he is never far from a port where he can plug in that iPod. I have wall upon wall of CDs; Adam has the same thing in his shirt pocket. Most amazing (so far) is that he has told me that the children of Esa-Pekka Salonen, oldest 14, cannot understand the purpose of Tower Records. They have no conception of a disc.

Right now the market is, let’s say, minimal. The Philharmonic will continue to record its concerts for iTunes – at least four next season – but will also produce discs. (One, the orchestra’s first recordings in Disney – Mussorgsky, Bartók and of course The Rite of Spring- will be out on DG in September.) So will the New York Philharmonic, and rumors abound of other orchestras – Chicago, for one – trying to climb onto one Internet service or another. Problems of copyright clearance and union players will remain. One interesting ramification: If you download a concert from iTunes into your iPod, you can purchase the whole shebang or only selected tracks. In the case of the Beethoven Fifth/Lutoslawski Fourth concert, Adam tells me, the statistics divided evenly among people who bought only the Beethoven, only the Lutoslawski, or the whole concert.

Those faint glimmers can make it look as if the dark demise that Norman Lebrecht has been concocting for classical music is still some distance into the glowing future. The folks at iTunes tell us that the proportion of classical downloaders has now risen to a remarkable 12 percent: four times the best figure compact discs ever attained. I ran into Philharmonic president Deborah Borda in the hallway at Disney. I wondered whether this new technology would someday make coming to concerts at concert halls a waste of time.

“Just the opposite,” she beamed. “You come to Disney, you go home and buy what you’ve just heard. It’ll enhance the concert experience. Not dying . . . thriving!”?

Earlier this month, the Philharmonic ended its Disney Hall season with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, music as familiar to me as the oldest shoe in my closet. I don’t wear that shoe anymore, yet I went to the concert with some eagerness. I thought this elderly and well-worn work might fare interestingly, perhaps even well, in young hands, those of the Philharmonic’s associate conductor, Alexander Mickelthwate – newly upgraded from assistant – and I also thought the rest of the program was sure to make me feel neither elderly nor well-worn. I was right on all counts.

It’s easy enough to groan, “Oh, not Scheherazade again,” although it is not, surprisingly, on this summer’s upcoming Hollywood Bowl program (a first?). You may groan, instead, for “Oh no, not the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto,” or “the Mendelssohn Violin,” and nobody will argue against granting a deserved sabbatical to these and similar portions of the standard Bowl repertory (“slushpump,” as the eloquent Martin Bernheimer used to describe it ad nauseam). Actually, a couple of big novelties in this summer’s programming might be worth your attention even without the catered dinner to help ease them down. One is the grand, noisy but rare Funereal and Triumphal Symphony by Hector Berlioz on August 3; the other I’ll get to in a moment.

Scheherazade, cleanly and forcefully set forth by the orchestra under the excellent Mickelthwate, with Martin Chalifour’s solo violin as narrator, reminded me that I hadn’t listened to it in a very long time – really listened, I mean, to its remarkable orchestral effects. The big ones, the grand clamors of brass and cymbals, are immediately dazzling; so, however, are the small ones, the tiny pinpoints from the piccolos, the muted trumpets, the vast display of pure orchestral iridescence. It made me wonder how many other pieces out of the slushpump I’ve been unjustly only half-hearing lately. I must try to go to the Bowl this summer with cleaner ears. (No promises, of course.)

Starting off the Mickelthwate program were the marvelous Le Boeuf sur le Toit of Darius Milhaud – Charlie Chaplin set to music – and the grand pomposity of Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, to my mind the best of all doomed attempts to combine the grandeur of the pipe organ with orchestral forces (strings and timpani only, wisely, in this case). Vincent Dubois was the organist.

One may suspect, in this slender young German-born conductor, a flair for the rambunctious French between-the-wars repertory; so far he has given us splendid, richly idiomatic readings of two works of Milhaud and now this one of Poulenc. It’s a repertory in danger, far better than the small number of performances nowadays suggests. (When was the last time you let Honegger’s La Danse des Morts make your hair stand on end?) Some of it kicks up heels as delightfully as Le Boeuf sur le Toit, with its deep and saucy obeisances to American ragtime and burlesque. There is also a passionate, oratorical side with religious overtones. Poulenc’s organ concerto knows its place within ecclesiastical architecture – its opening summonings tell us as much – but within that setting it behaves like a piece of music, with a beginning, a climax and a proper end. Its scoring, without winds or brass, holds it apart from the pietistic goo of Saint-Saëns or Strauss. As you’ve suspected, I don’t like organ music much (at least from after 1750); Poulenc’s concerto, that work virtually alone (alongside, perhaps, Lou Harrison’s), keeps the instrument respectable.

The Divine

One small ritual I always carry out when in Washington, D.C., is to visit a small cranny in the Smithsonian Institution’s Folk Art Museum, whose permanent installation bears the title The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. In 1950, William Hampton, a handyman at the museum, was visited by the Virgin Mary and several angels, who commanded him to build a Throne of a grandeur worthy of that title. This he proceeded to do over the next 14 years, assembling found objects (discarded light bulbs, junk of all shapes, a barber’s chair to serve as throne, chandeliers, you-name-it). He covered everything in gold or silver foil and assembled it all on a platform that Smithsonian authorities had allotted him. You stand in front of this assemblage, and it strikes you (or does me, at least) that you are facing the entirety of a man’s life, his hopes, his beliefs. I find my visits to Mr. Hampton’s life enormously moving. You can do it all now on Google, of course, but it’s better if you’re there. There aren’t that many honest things in Washington anymore.

Several writers have created books of poems and essays inspired by William Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven, and now there is music. A 32-year-old composer named Jefferson Friedman, born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, has written an orchestral piece bearing the same full title. Leonard Slatkin gave it its premiere with his Washington National Symphony last year, and he has it on a Hollywood Bowl program on September 14. Sharing – let’s say “profaning” – the program is Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Just be careful to park where you can leave at intermission.

Colorblindness: Several friends of the late György Ligeti have questioned my citing his mention of designer Calvin Klein, in my last week’s farewell, as the formulator of a particular shade of blue. That was on the transcript I was given, but a visit to the original tape – which I should have done before – revealed the name as the painter Yves Klein. My apologies all around, to the great spirit of Ligeti, and to Clan Klein.?

The sun broke through only in the last minutes of this year’s Ojai Festival, embracing the final Bach chorus in that legendary pink twilight that is part of the local legend. This was the 60th, the third under the management of former Clevelander Tom Morris – and it had its share of memorable moments, along with others.

Perhaps it’s time, however, that we stopped living in Ojai’s past, because the element most clearly lacking, at this year’s festival and probably from now on, is that thread of serendipity, mingled with unreality, that winds through every account of Ojai’s history. It is unreal that Stravinsky and Boulez walked the streets of this rural never-never land, that Lawrence Morton and Ernest Fleischmann planned and produced concert programs in a rustic town park with music too demanding even for the boldest Music Center audiences. There was wonderful music at this year’s festival, and there were wonderful performers, but after the concerts you could rush up to the record booth and buy the same music with the same performers (if you got there soon enough), as you might at Disney Hall. I was often delighted by what I heard – it couldn’t have been otherwise; who could miss, in the presence of Dawn Upshaw’s singing, or Osvaldo Golijov’s music? – but I missed being startled, as I had been in memorable years past by Thomas Adès and Magnus Lindberg and (repeatedly) by Pierre Boulez. I take it as ominous that I couldn’t find a single thing to buy at Bart’s Books, and that the new management at Antonio’s has installed outdoor live music so loud that you have to flee to the dreary indoors to enjoy the still-excellent chiles relleños.

The festival’s opening program was denied the local press by the conflicting postponed opening of the L.A. Opera’s Grendel, on whose merits I will withhold further comment. One part of the Ojai opener I had seen before to great delight, a mingling of the inscrutable creative talents of the composer Conlon Nancarrow and the German-born, Seattle-based gadget-sculptor Trimpin. Some years ago, Trimpin worked out a way of transforming the rhythmic complexity of Nancarrow’s player-piano rolls to a piston-operated keyboard, and thence to small gadgets to activate various sounding devices. At Telluride, these were wooden shoes going clickety-clack. For Ojai, Trimpin built more complex trumpetlike gadgets that children could work as toys, but which the Nancarrow pieces could also activate gorgeously (or so I judged from a demonstration the day after the concert). Trimpin is some kind of cherishable, unique near genius who needs to come among us more often to impart his precious twinkle to the contemporary creative process.

From Golijov there was the short opera Ainadamar, which we had here in a poorly staged early version at a “Green Umbrella” in 2004, but which has now been extensively rethought and stands forth as intense, disturbing drama built around the murder by Spanish fascists of the poet García Lorca, through the memoir of the actress who loved him and who speaks now against tyranny. The fusion of nationalities in the tone of Golijov’s music – a mix of the slashing Hispanic and Hebraic, which remain somewhat apart and strike sparks in between – draws an uncanny match from Upshaw: The sweet, angelic Susanna and Barbarina of her early days goes through an amazing transformation in this music; it gets into her blood and into ours.

Two days later, Upshaw returned in Golijov’s Ayre, the wondrous cycle of song-passions gathered from Mediterranean lands at many times in many tongues. Again as at a “Green Umbrella” earlier last season, her companions were the chamber group Eighth Blackbird, but this time much transformed from the mere accompanists of the previous performance. For whatever reason – more careful listening to the singer, or to the intense guitar of Gustavo Santaolalla – the performance took on a luster that the “Umbrella” event had not. For further luster, Upshaw and the group began that memorable Sunday morning with the work that is the disc-mate to Ayre (and which Golijov cites as inspiration for his work), Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs.

There was more: Robert Spano and his Atlanta Symphony slogging through John Adams’ Chamber Symphony, the orchestra’s Chamber Chorus in a dreary program that had no place, and mezzo-soprano Luciana Souza just okay in Falla’s El Amor Brujo.

György Ligeti (1923-2006)

Somehow Ligeti was on my mind all the Ojai weekend. The Salonen performance of his Requiem, from four weeks back, continues to reverberate, of course. The damp weather brought back memories of another summer years ago, the Ardittis performing both Ligeti quartets, the cold mist almost seeming to blend into the swirling, muttering, magical music. Then, on Monday, Ligeti was gone.

Herewith, a pastiche of excerpts from 1993, the last time we met, at a private concert. (The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard was to play Ligeti’s Piano Etudes, and the conversation grew out of those phenomenal, iconic works. Aimard, the way these things sometimes happen, is next year’s major musician at Ojai.) As best I could, I have left Ligeti’s diction unadorned.

“I didn’t really change my ideas, but I work like somebody in science, when he solves the problem comes a hundred new problems. Calvin Klein. I have a lot of admiration, but Klein developed . . . a certain blue and then he used only this blue. I am the opposite. My ideal is Stravinsky, went from Russian to Pergolesi to Bach to Webern finally. My music has a lot to do with jazz, but is definitely not jazz.

“You know, we have certain drawers. There is a drawer of so-called classical music and jazz is in a different drawer and pop and rock, but there are places where the drawers mix. So I have my love for jazz even I don’t play jazz. When Stravinsky wrote his Piano Rag Music, his ragtime was also very, very deep . . . In fact I dare to say that the real musical style of the 20th century, the real big thing that happened was jazz, this melding of African rhythmic thinking and English, Irish melodies . . . more important, I feel, than many of the deep learned music.

“There are some composers, some very distinguished colleagues, who really use algorithms, calculating methods. I don’t do them. I feel very close to the scientific community, to the computer people, to the artificial-intelligence people. I’m a member of the secret mafia of fractal geometry, of chaotic and dynamic systems and nonlinear equations, but I don’t use them. If a composer pretends that he invented anything, he is a liar. Nobody invented nothing. Everybody is starting from somebody else.”?

If life followed the standard operatic scenario, the Grendel that ensued on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage last week – after the chaos that delayed its opening, cost the L.A. Opera some $300,000 in added expenses on top of the $2.8 million of the original production, and occasioned the flow of perspiration both at the Music Center and at New York’s Lincoln Center (where the work is to be the diadem of next month’s Festival) – should end up as superb musical drama worthy of the majestic complexities of the George Tsypin stage set and the directorial acumen of Julie Taymor, known to have tamed Lion Kings, Flying Dutchmen and Queens of the Night. It does not.

It joins, instead, the gloomy annals of operatic world premieres – four so far – perpetrated by the local forces under the grand delusion that the future of large-scale opera lies in cramming poor music into old outlines. (Don’t worry; the Metropolitan Opera’s record is just as bad.) In the case of the drearily gesturesome Kullervo and the hopelessly second-rate Fantastic Mr. Fox and Nicolas and Alexandra, these were at least the work of operatic professionals. Grendel, however, is the first venture into opera of Elliot Goldenthal, after a well-oiled career in film scoring. Though his musical vocabulary is the kind that goes down well in patriotic oratorios commissioned by suburban philharmonic societies, he is now faced with the matter of creating personalities on the stage in the process of growth. As far as I can tell, after two hearings of his maiden attempt and reams of his orotund proclamations live and in print, I detect no idea in his work of how to join music to character.

He has taken the wonderful Grendel concept, which novelist John Gardner distilled out of the Beowulf epic and endowed with a centuries-spanning personality, and reduced him to growls and howls (which Eric Owens, made up to look like a belligerent potato, delivers far better than they deserve). Librettist J.D. McClatchy, who seems to have cornered the literature-into-libretto market lately (Our Town, Miss Lonelyhearts and Lorin Maazel’s much-clobbered 1984), collaborated with Taymor on the text, which does not confine its violence to the title character, but wanders arrogantly over the subtly lit terrain of Gardner’s fantastic text, which is in its pristine form a delightful read.

The all-knowing (if deliciously cynical) Dragon, for example, who delivers to the young Grendel the wisdom that will enable him to winnow out the matters of true importance in his life, has via Taymor-McClatchy morphed into a kind of Dietrich-plus-Erda vamp. Operatic exigencies, I suppose, demand a woman’s voice somewhere before the end of Act 1, but all this distortion proves is the willingness of today’s ——–
AUTHORs to cast aside yesterday’s integrity, and so it goes. Gardner’s splendid Grendel has, therefore, sadly metamorphosed into artistic grotesquery heaped upon dramatic dishonesty. None of the L.A. Opera’s former fiascoes went that far.

Oh yes, there is that mighty roar by Eric Owens in the title role, truly a spectacular howl for those who seek that manner of operatic thrill. As the Dragon, Denyce Graves manages an impressive vocal range; Laura Claycomb, that marvelous Zerbinetta of two seasons ago, coats her tiny assignment as Queen Wealtheow in tones of pure silver. Come to think of it, I can’t remember an opera, new or old, in which so many excellent singers have been squandered in so many tiny roles. Can it be that Mr. Goldenthal is afraid of singers? The best performance in Grendel is by Desmond Richardson, the Beowulf, who comes to end Grendel’s lifetime of depredations. He dances terrifically and doesn’t sing a note. (Nor does the stageful of clever puppets, of course, without which it wouldn’t be a Taymor show.)

And then there is that set: Tsypin’s monster of a wall, moving this way and that, spectacularly clanking up, down and sidewise, its 26 computers finally brought into sync to afford Owens and a couple of his pals something to climb up and down upon as their imprecations rock the Chandler’s night air (plus two matinees) – shiny on one side to stand for a world under ice, forested on the other to stand for . . . well, forests. At the end of one scene, Mr. Owens is asked to deliver a curtain line that is unique in the annals of opera lyrics, and may be equally so in the annals of instant criticism. The line is “bullshit.”

Mama Knows Best

On the previous night, the company’s La Traviata began not with the familiar party scene but out on the sidewalk under a solitary streetlamp, with streetwalkers plying their usual trade – this during the haunting melancholy of Verdi’s overture. Violetta then arrives on the arm of her swain-of-the-evening, in a snazzy town car – Duesenberg, or some such. Everybody goes inside, which means that the car must make its exit through the ballroom, but never mind. By then you’ve guessed that this is the stagecraft of Mama Domingo, patroness saint of the opera-plot rewrite, and you’d be right.

There isn’t as much wrong with Marta Domingo’s Traviata as with some of her past desecrations (remember La Rondine?), and the general squalor of her production, of which she is both director and designer, is offset by the general excellence of the singing and of the music itself. Her stage sets seem to consist of objects simply dropped at various places: a Deco table and chairs at midstage against some singularly ugly trees for Act 2, a bed downstage in the final scene with a blanket that makes it look as if Violetta is lying in soapsuds. Overall, however, I see no point in any attempt to move this intensely 1850s work, remarkable in its day as an opera set in its own time, out of that time. Every wisp of fragrance in the music, every current in the moral tone of its story, belongs where Verdi – and his inspiring playwright, Alexandre Dumas – set it, and an Art Deco Traviata is just willfully and groundlessly false.

But there are the Violetta of Elizabeth Futral, her pure coloratura tinged with a splendid sense of urgency; the Alfredo of Joseph Calleja, a remarkably convincing dramatic tenor new to these ears; and the Papa Germont of Dwayne Croft, forthright and sympathetic. John Fiore’s musical leadership strikes me more as tidy than inspired, but a strong tidying hand, considering the onstage mess, isn’t such a bad idea.

Concerts of all six of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos drew capacity, turn-away crowds to Disney Hall last week. Music by Harry Partch, downstairs in the small theater known as REDCAT, likewise, had people begging tickets out on the sidewalk. REDCAT is only a tenth the size of Disney, but I found both events and the crowds they drew – mostly young and marvelously receptive – similarly exhilarating. Each program had to do with a composer, at a certain defiant moment in his career, trying things out.

Anyone who believed, as many did, that Harry Partch’s hypnotic but daffy music would fade from the scene after his death in 1974, and after the weird but fragile instruments he had fashioned for realizing his stratospheric creative visions had gone under lock and key, had reckoned without the innate magic of his work, and the zeal of his believers. John Schneider – musician, KPFK program host and prime mover – has seen to the duplication of the prototype instruments, with the blessing of the Partch trustees. Nine of these replications, whose originals Partch built from 1930 to 1950, now form the ensemble that calls itself, simply, Partch; its weird and wonderful sonorities, truly unlike anything else on Earth or any neighboring celestial body, filled the air at REDCAT most enchantingly. Marvelous to watch and to hear, the physical beauty of their structure and the haunting resonance of their sounds, as they wandered among the labyrinthine designs of Partch’s 43-note octaves and the vagaries of their percussive adventures, re-created the living experience as it was when Partch and his gang were among us. Last week’s players, including such CalArts stalwarts as David Johnson and Vicki Ray, plus of course Schneider himself, helped reinforce the links with the past. A group of latter-day CalArts dancers, alas, merely contributed clutter.

I don’t know whether any of Partch’s music counts as “great” as we music critics like to define it. Nowadays we have learned to live comfortably in the spaces between the notes of the C-major scale; we know the sounds of gamelan, of medieval chant in authentic tunings, of synthesizers large and small. The shock value that I remember from my early Partch encounters has diminished; the beauty remains, but sometimes wears thin. The best of Partch lies in its power to evoke visual counterparts, and a DVD just out on Innova includes the dance-drama Delusion of the Fury, as staged at UCLA in 1969, which really does match sight to sound. The fearless arts patron Betty Freeman financed that production, and she also produced a film on Partch, at work on his The Dreamer that Remains, that never once attempts to state a case for his possible sanity. That cherishable half-hour’s worth of free fall is also on the DVD.

There were small pieces on the Partch program, too, and they revealed a gentler side not often found in his rowdier music. Several were songs, nicely sung by Schneider, to poetry by Ella Young, a dear lady who deserves to be remembered. Celtic by birth, she settled up near Big Sur and was widely known for her ability to talk with trees. I read her children’s books when young, and read them still.

That’s Entertainment

A night with all six “Brandenburgs,” I once wrote, is like having a whole box of Godiva chocolates to yourself. Now I am under doctor’s orders to entertain less caloric daydreams. Whatever the simile, the entire series – at one sitting or singly – constitutes an absorbing study of a musical mind in action: a problem conceived; a problem partitioned into six entirely separate modes of beginning and ending, traversing entirely different landscapes en route; a problem magically resolved with six different applications of creative genius.

Here is a composer at 35, still upwardly mobile in acquiring artistic command, at a time when composing for orchestras or solo instruments was still a new and untried art – and he flings forth these six killer essays in instrumental usage, which, for all he knew, were beyond the technical skill of any players of his time. Moreover, their artistic demands were rather heady stuff for the time as well. Try those wrenching dissonances in the slow movement of No. 1, for example; people weren’t whistling that kind of thing on the streets back in 1720. What other composer of the time would have dreamed of joining the soft politeness of flute, oboe and small violin to the boisterous assertiveness of a solo high trumpet – and turned the result into the irresistible proclamation of sheer exuberance that constitutes No. 2? Or conceived the dark-hued meditations of low-strings-only that cause No. 6 to stand apart?

Giovanni Antonini, whose ensemble Giardino Armonico has been the commendable background for Cecilia Bartoli’s uncommonly adventurous recital programs in recent years, led the properly small group of Philharmonic players, and tootled along with Inga Funck as the two-recorder contingent in the Fourth Concerto. (Put two recorders together, by the way – any two recorders – and the harmony begins to verge on Harry Partch; ever notice?) The performances under Antonini were of the contemporary almost-authentic style that seems to have become the proper stylistic approach, at least when old music takes place in as contemporary a setting as Disney: no more than 18 string players in the supporting orchestra strings, playing with just enough vibrato to make them audible but no more, and with tempos decently crisp, but with a genial slowdown to round off the cadences.

Among the visiting soloists were David Washburn of the L.A. Chamber Orchestra, who stole the Second Brandenburg with his note-perfect high-trumpet acrobatics, and Lucinda Carver of the L.A. Mozart Orchestra of fond memory, whose support at the harpsichord was solid in all six works, and whose cadenzas in No. 5 bore witness that in this remarkable work the whole notion of the solo keyboard concerto was born. Without the Bach Five, in other words, we’d never have had a Rach Three. Forgiveness is in order.

Claude Vivier was born in Montreal in 1948 to anonymous parents, raised in an orphanage and then by foster parents named Vivier. Honored eventually as a brilliant if disturbing composer, he ended up in Paris, where, at 34, he was stabbed to death in his apartment by a young man he had picked up in a bar. On his worktable there was found a completed manuscript, a cantata for voices and orchestra whose narrator tells of cruising a young man who then stabs him to death; the piece ends with the same sudden shock, and then silence, that took place in Vivier’s room. In the hourlong documentary that is part of Dreams of a Marco Polo, a new two-disc DVD produced by Opus Arte and distributed here by Naxos, a Canadian friend of Vivier’s reads some of the composer’s last letters, which talk of suicide in the most haunting way; there are also hints that another project, which he never began, was to be a dramatic work in which the despairing Tchaikovsky, naked and in full acceptance of his homosexuality, confronts the ways of taking his own life. The DVD set – discs and cover alike – is all in black, as it should be.

In 1971, at 23, Vivier had attracted good notices in Canada, and was sent to Europe on a stipend. There he joined the circle around Karlheinz Stockhausen (who, the story goes, was repelled by the stink of his ancient sheepskin jacket – see photo) and developed his own powerful insights into music as ritual, music as a function of color, music saturated with the scents and the sense of the East. By the time of his death, his praise had been sung by György Ligeti and by the enterprising leadership of the Netherlands Opera. The 150 minutes of Vivier’s music that fills out this extraordinary DVD set has been pieced together by the Dutch conductor Reinbert de Leeuw (who brought us Louis Andriessen’s music during the Minimalist Jukebox, and who becomes a compelling, wise presence as video host) and the Netherlands Opera’s Pierre Audi. Powerful, insinuating, drenched in a restless passion, it is by some distance the strongest music by a Canadian composer I have ever heard, the first I have heard that stands absolutely free from the shadow of that country’s southern neighbor.

Overall, the sequence has been given the name Dreams of a Marco Polo, assuming Vivier himself as the self-proclaimed restless wanderer through many worlds. It begins with his short opera Kopernikus, subtitled “a ritual opera of death,” which involves not so much the medieval scientist as it does real and mythical figures (Lewis Carroll, Merlin, Tristan . . .) around whom dazzling, blinding light images take shape. Into a “Marco Polo” collage several of Vivier’s shorter works have been blended, including Lonely Child, achingly sad evocations of a neglected childhood, set for soprano and ethereal strings. The sense of suffering builds; the final work is the piece on the table in the fateful room. “Do you believe,” the chorus intones, “in the immortality of the soul,” with that “immortality” in German – “unSTERBlichkeit” – itself like a dagger’s thrust. I find a comparable shock, actually, in the impact of this whole astonishing program.

Maestro, by the Pound

On the matter of astonishment, perhaps of shock, this would be a good time to tell you about Maestro. Let me start with the asking price: $4,975 – five grand, minus carfare. This is what you get. Maestro itself is a device for playing music, quite a lot of music in fact, which has been loaded into it in the form of the Cornerstone Collection. (Like your computer full of iTunes, in other words, except that the Cornerstone Collection is very, very big and you get it all at once.) If you’ve never had a smidge of classical music in your house, or anything more recent than a wind-up Victrola, this might be the way to establish yourself suddenly as a highly cultured individual for the whole world to admire.

Except: Just possibly, you might derive some discomfort from the fact that some of the outlay of exquisite discretion and taste that normally goes into the process of collecting – of music or art objects or fine racing horses – has already been done for you by the “classical-music experts” behind the scenes at Maestro headquarters in exotic San Diego. All the music that has been processed and iTuned is from one label – Naxos. Most of it, in fact, is from Naxos’ early years of high-quantity, low-quality catalog building from cheapo Eastern European sources, long discontinued. There’s no choosing your Beethoven symphonies from, say, Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic or Giulini and the home team; it’s the Esterházy Sinfonia for you; no Brendel or Barenboim on the Beethoven Sonatas, only Jenö Jandó; and are you willing to entrust your Mahler experience to the Polish Radio Symphony?

True, there are roadways around the dilemma, but they aren’t simple and they are not well-paved. If you happen to have discs in your own collection that you’d rather have processed to play on Maestro than, say, the Mozart of Barry Wordsworth’s Capella Istropolitana, you can bundle up your own discs, ship them off to Maestro; they’ll process them into their own Web site, return the now-obsolete silvery corpses (which you’re free to use as cocktail coasters) and pipe their content into your gleaming new Maestro player (available in silver or black). That process, by the way, is not cheap; you subscribe to the transfer service at 10 bucks per month, which entitles you to five discs. Oh, and by the way, the service also includes digital copies of the booklets – even librettos! – that you can read on your computer screen as the Maestro chugs along.

Am I the only one who finds this whole business distasteful to the point of upchuck? who’s finding in this whole Maestro presentation a disdain for anyone so minimally sophisticated as to care about the identity of the listening experience? the difference between slovenly performance values and care and pride in the presentation of music? Why have I been doing this for the last 60 or so years? or Ernest Fleischmann? or Esa-Pekka? or the man up the block who makes fine violins? or his wife, who plays chamber music? or the next generation now at work at the Crossroads School or Colburn? Surely not to produce the kibble or the wallpaper that these Maestro people represent, with their absurd promotional jargon – “the most-loved, important, influential music” – and their outrageous prices and their Esterházy Sinfonia. Stop me, somebody; this stuff, and the attitude behind it, has me really angry.

Even in his much-regretted absence, the late Lou Harrison remains a glowing presence. The paltry three concerts of his music in Orange County over the past few days that have been passed off as this year’s Pacific Symphony American Composers “Festival” left much great music unplayed, and wasted time on insignificant works. Even so, there was obvious love behind the planning, and Lou came through loud and clear. Eva Soltes’ documentary film clips showed the 100-year-old gamelan guru Pak Chokro talking about Lou, his eyes filled with reverence. A stageful of kids from the nearby Harvey Mudd College banged away on their gamelan instruments with pride and precision under Lou’s onetime disciple Bill Alves. And you knew some of the reasons for Lou’s importance among us, and why he is so sadly missed.

On the first concert, a bunch of time was squandered on Lou’s old-timey and rather silly piece of pseudo-Satie called Marriage at the Eiffel Tower, even though the astute programmer, Joseph Horowitz, had bothered to resurrect tapes of the narrations from a previous performance, delivered in the twee, buttery tones of Virgil Thomson and Lou himself. You could wish that conductor Carl St. Clair had instead been up to one of Lou’s big symphonies. We used to hear these great, garrulous (and therefore very Lou-like) works regularly when Lou was around to run his own festivals at Aptos, and Dennis Russell Davies was around to conduct. Why not now?

“His music was so spare in design as to seem naive,” wrote The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, “but it was not simple, and he was not a simple man.” Alex’s tribute, dated March 3, 2003, on the occasion of Lou’s death, is brief but speaks all about the man and his music; it’s on Alex’s Web site, www.therestisnoise.com, and it appeared at the time, ironically, when this country had finally become aroused to the significance and stature of Harrison’s music. Lou had died, at 85, on his way to a college festival of his music in Ohio; earlier that year a similar celebration had taken place at Juilliard, a major awakening of New York’s ears to his West Coast-based music. Conductors around the world – America’s Davies, the Netherlands’ Reinbert de Leeuw – have taken up the cause.

“Cherish the hybrids,” Lou used to say, and say again as a mantra, “they’re all we’ve got.” His early years saw a search for ingredients for the ideal mix: a dash of Schoenberg here, a soupçon of Satie there. Gradually we sense an epiphany, the emergence of a musical language that is Lou Harrison’s and no one else’s. The great Double Concerto of 1981 – an old friend, actually, with recent performances by Xtet at LACMA resounding in the memory – served to open proceedings last week with exactly the proper calling card. The work is pure mongrel, and wonderful of its kind. The background is, of course, the honeyed thunder of the small gamelan – and that was already a sight, five very undergrad-looking kids whomping away at the devices from a culture half a world and half a millennium away. Against this, the solo instruments play an almost continual rhapsodic line that seems to have both shape and no shape at all. There is other music like this: some Terry Riley perhaps, but there the melodic impetus is more Celtic than Pacific.

It’s probably pointless, however, to seek out resemblances; there are just so many notes in the world, after all. What has happened here, and it is more delightful than anything else, is that Harrison has accomplished an overlay of Western concerto principles onto this alien foundation, made it adhere in some strange and cockeyed way, and turned out something close to a masterpiece. This exhilarating Double Concerto is just that. It’s easy to make the distinction in dealing with new music that diatonic harmonies plus tunes equals conservative, and that abstruse harmonies plus bristling melodic lines equals progressive. But those equations break down constantly in the real world, and they do with Lou.

Sight, Sound, Sanity

Nerve centers in tune with Lou Harrison’s music should throb joyously at the stuff on the walls at Westwood’s Hammer Museum these days (through August 20). The show honors the activity of the Société Anonyme, an “experimental” modern-art museum founded in 1920 whose members included the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Piet Mondrian. The Hammer’s walls fairly vibrate with color: slashing lines, here a dizzying Kandinsky abstract, there a prismatic Klee; over in a corner a 1926 animated cartoon by somebody unpronounceably German making Disney look secondhand.

Twice during the run (last Saturday and on July 15), musical events tie in with the exhibition, and as the ——–
AUTHOR of a book once described as “coffee-table gestalt” (relation of music to visual arts, don’t bother, long out of print), I am always a sucker for this kind of enterprise. Remember Neal Stulberg? Used to conduct the Philharmonic’s young people’s concerts? Last Sunday, Neal and some of his UCLA students performed music by Les Six, the six French composers active and famous right after World War I and, therefore, in time with the art in the Hammer show. The Hammer’s auditorium is a dinky space that looks like a made-over furnace room, but it served the purpose, and the music included a violin sonata and some songs by the Six’s two least-known composers, Germaine Tailleferre and Louis Durey, and a suite of tiny pieces by all six. (The others were Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric.) Best of all, the entertainment ended with one of the great wacky films of all time, René Clair’s silent Dada epic Entr’acte (1924) with Erik Satie’s score arranged as a piano duet by Milhaud and played by Stulberg and Cha-Lin Liu. Satie himself is one of the characters on the screen – firing a cannon from a Paris rooftop, if you must know.

György Ligeti’s Requiem first makes itself known in your lower spine, moves overpoweringly upward and explodes into full awareness. Deep, dark harmonies resound from the low voices in the two interwoven choirs, further colored by the orchestra’s most solemn contingent; they form a dense web whose very lack of compass stops the breath. Now and then a peal of brighter brass shatters the mysterious trombone and bassoon sonorities; the chorus and the two vocal soloists warn of the Day of Wrath. There is no other music quite like this extraordinary summoning from this greatest of living composers – nothing I can name that so totally, so insidiously exerts so firm a hold over a willing listener.

At the 1965 Stockholm premiere, a critic wrote, “For a while, all other music seemed impossible.” I would change the quotation: “All other music but one seemed impossible.” The “other music” that night was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as it was again at Disney Hall last week, the only “other music” that can stand next to that awesome darkness and gather the strength to begin again. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performance of that symphony went some distance to reveal, and then to dispel, that darkness.

Some distance, that is. To these ears, Salonen’s conception of this most problematic of the Beethoven Nine suffers from one basic misconception: a tendency to drive emphatically forward toward the big, grandiose choral finale but to devote less weight of expression to the far more complex first movement – which to me is the greatest of all Beethoven’s symphonic movements. Time and again in last week’s performance I waited for a shaping of phrase in the first movement, a recognition of remarkable melodic outgrowth in those irresistible gatherings of strength. It simply did not happen. Someday mastery will come; some of Salonen’s Beethoven in this year’s series has been not only promising but truly remarkable – No. 4, for example – measured against his past performances.

We live in hope. The musician who could re-create the incredible intensity of this imponderable Ligeti masterwork – the violent contrasts, the frenzy and the immobility, the half-hour’s immersion in the workings of sheer genius (drawn from the Philharmonic, the Master Chorale, and vocal soloists Caroline Stein and Jill Grove) – is entitled to a little extra time to work on his Beethoven.

Unsuk Heroes, Reynolds Rap

Ever larger looms the name of Korea’s Unsuk Chin. Rumors persist that her Alice in Wonderland opera, which Kent Nagano conducts in Munich next season, still heads here eventually, as does her fabulous (but murderously difficult) Violin Concerto. Her reputation as a master of musical jokes and wordplay is already known here, and at last week’s Green Umbrella, her Cantatrix Sopranica provided 26 minutes of sheer delirium along those lines. It is a piece for singers (three) about singing: vocalises, language jokes, a delightful dig at Chinese-through-the-nose, some passionate Italianate nonsense. Beyond all that, the piece is wondrously virtuosic: two sopranos and a countertenor in exact coordination through demanding roulades and cadenzas. The music is both enchantingly pretty and wickedly to the point. Sopranos Caroline Stein and Hila Plitmann and countertenor Paul Flight made up the chorus of would-be nightingales; Alexander Mickelthwate conducted.

Sharing the program was Roger Reynolds of UC San Diego, whose Center for Musical Experiment has given us commendable multimedia works in many stripes, some of them grateful to eye and ear. Illusion, alas, proved congenial to neither. Commissioned by a handful of big-name foundations, and given here in its world premiere, the work did serve to illuminate one aspect of Disney Hall I hadn’t noticed before. The sightlines are such that you get a clear view of people walking out early from anywhere in the hall. Mr. Reynolds’ work lasted, I am told, 70 minutes; I joined the procession at minute 51. Salonen conducted, and therefore was stuck with the whole thing.

Illusion purports to tell of the run-up to the Trojan War, with texts adapted from Aeschylus and Euripides, spoken or sung or otherwise hurled at an ensemble of brass, percussion and piano performing rather thuddy music. The multimedia bit has to do with singers and actors (whom I leave unnamed, out of kindness) moving from one music stand to another onstage. At the intermission before the piece, there was a sound installation in the lobby with more of the Reynolds score. Wherever I wandered, however, it was well drowned out by conversation, mostly about the pleasures of the Unsuk Chin piece.

All in a Night’s Work

Life in 2006 is a big, gleaming round of one all-Mozart celebration after the other – as, for example, the one that ended the Jacaranda concert season last weekend. Some of it traced familiar ground: Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the “Exsultate” motet, the Flute and Harp Concerto. You might have dismissed the concerto from your anticipation: No. 299 in the Köchel Catalog, out of 626, means it’s an early work, immature, maybe not worth serious listening. The first movement, up-and-down, tonic-dominant, fits these expectations, except that the Jacaranda people devised a cute cadenza, with quotes from Mozart’s other “flute” work, the “magic” one.

But then came the slow movement, with its soft, tentative first phrases and then, out of nowhere, an episode that soars toward sublimity, a conversation of deep import, compounded of sequences of the most heartbreaking harmonies. Suddenly there is the very young Mozart, baring his own inmost thoughts and engaging ours in the process. Mozart does that to people.

The performers – soprano Maria Lazarova, flutist Pamela Vliek, harpist Maria Casale and the Denali Quartet – represented Jacaranda in full blossom. Like the Monday Evening Concerts of comparable value, the series has been rendered temporarily homeless – not this time out of managerial chicanery, but for repairs to Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian that will take about a year. Next concert: a “Pan-American Marathon” in a Deco setting, November 4 in Barnum Hall at Santa Monica High.

One question immediately surfaced, as a near-capacity audience cheered itself hoarse at the sublime artistry of Ian Bostridge and Leif Ove Andsnes, and the performers had run out of encores: Why aren’t there more concerts like this? Art-song programs, we are told, draw poorly; solo piano recitals, too, unless they’re performed by under-30 exotics – too much intelligence, too little fun. Here was refutation, a program that seemed to be motivated from first note to last by the love of music and of making music happen. It was planned, furthermore, with an uncommon outlay of imagination, with music by trustworthy composers, to be sure, but works mostly unfamiliar, some of it even mere fragments (more unfinished Schubert to pile onto the one symphony we already know).

And it was all fascinating, rewarding, a generous serving of music-making intelligence that also entailed a deep bow of respect to an obviously grateful audience. At the start there was Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, the first-ever linking by a composer of several songs into a continuous narration, thus the progenitor of song cycles by Schubert and Schumann. Later came a Schubert set, the three “Harper” songs from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, linked not so much by story as by mood. Then came a really fascinating clutch of Schubert bits: songs and piano pieces that Schubert had begun and then set aside unfinished, sometimes right up to the last couple of measures.

Why? The pile of unfinished Schubert lives on to tantalize us: whole movements of symphonies, almost-whole movements that others have completed, reams of songs and other short pieces sometimes simply throbbing with beautiful ideas. Living on the edge, Schubert often may have had to set one project aside for a chance to score a little cash with another. Like any artist, he may have felt that he had painted himself into a corner for reasons only he could recognize. In any case, here was this bag of glistening fragments to light up the Disney Hall stage, and here were these supremely imaginative artists to delight themselves and tantalize us all with a glimpse inside. On his own, Andsnes performed the next-to-last Beethoven piano sonata (Opus 110) with such command of the forward momentum – most of all in the final, ecstatic pages of the concluding fugue – as to make that work, at least this once, seem the greatest of all the “32.” He could, in fact, be right.

. . . And Just Finished (for Now)

At approximately 11 p.m. on May Day, Marino Formenti sat at the piano in the Bing Theater at the County Museum to end his recital – which had begun about four hours before – with Palais de Mari, Morton Feldman’s last work for piano, composed 20 years before. Formenti’s American career had begun on that stage in 2000, in a concert that concluded with a jaw-dropping performance of the Sonata by Jean Barraqué, a work widely regarded as unplayable. Now he was back to usher out the Monday Evening Concerts, the series that had given him and countless other torchbearers for contemporary and other adventurous music their first platform – here in Los Angeles and, in many cases, the world.

Formenti had planned this final concert as an “Homage” to the Monday Evening Concerts, and he offered a full menu: an “hors d’oeuvre” of Ives, Cowell, Schoenberg and the gang; contemporary inscrutables, including Salvatore Sciarrino and a Nam June Paik number that demanded an amplified violin dragged across the concrete floor. For dessert, there was a clutch of Boulez’s Notations and an elegant jazzy bit by the MEC’s late mastermind, Dorrance Stalvey. The smiling countenances of John Cage and Igor Stravinsky hovered close overhead.

Feldman’s exquisite half-hour of rippling near silences filled the hall like a benevolent emanation. Formenti had invited anyone who wanted to, to come onstage, sit on a chair or spread across the floor, to hang out at this ludicrously unnecessary event, suspending a series that had begun on a Silver Lake rooftop in 1939 and gone far to establish this city as a firm mover of serious musical creativity. The Monday Evening Concerts (which began as “Evenings on the Roof”) have been obliged to move before. Already a committee to assure their continuance has scheduled concerts in Zipper Concert Hall downtown on February 19, March 19 and April 16, 2007; one of those concerts will be curated by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Stay tuned.

Notes in Transit

In New York last week, I thoroughly enjoyed the newly revised Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim’s razor-edge intensity greatly sharpened by the staging, in which cast principals also serve as orchestra. Patti LuPone’s Mrs. Lovett is so vivid and original a creation that I can finally forgive her Evita; Michael Cerveris, the Sweeney, wipes out any previous image I might have had of that role. Next night, as it happened, I succumbed to friends’ longtime urging and looked in on The Light in the Piazza, which I found admirable for very much the same reasons: a show brought down to manageable size in a kind of chamber-music conception – small pit band, small chorus, splendid sense of ensemble. Adam Guettel’s music is the best new theatrical score I’ve heard since . . . well, since the original Sweeney Todd, and that goes back a long way. I left the theater thinking that if André Previn, for example, had been wiser, this is how he should have set A Streetcar Named Desire: something close to the emotions in the play, rather than all that garbage in the orchestra pit.

And on the subject of garbage, my other night in New ?York was spent at Juilliard, which was celebrating its centennial with a proudly commissioned brand-new opera by an alum: Lowell Liebermann’s misbegotten mishmash raked ?out of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. It’s depressing ?to discover how this kind of cliché-ridden pseudo-modernism can earn the fond embrace of the well-fed trustee, yesterday at the Metropolitan Opera (American Tragedy) or today ?with this piece of claptrap out of Liebermann. It’s enough ?to make you want to head back to Monteverdi and start all over again.

Act 2 of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo begins in a sunlit meadow. Orpheus and his pals – nymphs, shepherds, homeless – are celebrating his recent marriage to Euridice. Orpheus, the greatest singer of the day, spins off song after song on his “golden lyre” to the happiest of harmonies. Suddenly a dark figure blots out the sunshine, the harmony turns minor, and the melodies become halting; the Messenger has brought the news of Euridice’s death. All through the history of opera as drama – which can be said to have begun at this moment, at the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua in 1607 – music has served to underline and make thrilling the element of surprise: Susanna’s emergence from the closet in The Marriage of Figaro, Siegmund pulling the sword in Die Walküre; the general unmasking in Falstaff. This is where it happened first, the soft, subtle but unmistakable shift from major to minor harmonies, underscored by a change from high to low instruments, as death’s shadow darkens the stage in the world’s first great opera.

This moment, and the rest of the supreme accomplishments as Monteverdi fashioned his “new art” from the different kinds of musical drama that he and his Renaissance colleagues had already brought to high estate, is brilliantly set forth in Opera’s First Master, an uncommonly well-told accounting of Monteverdi’s operatic legacy by Mark Ringer, a New York director, dramaturge and writer (Amadeus Press – also my publisher – paperback, $29.95). What Mr. Ringer has done here is to create – rare, in my experience – writing about great music so close to the music itself that it can be read almost like a score. There is no jargon here, no Karl Haas/Jim Svejda/Alan Rich gobbledygook.

Read (and, virtually, listen to) this brief sample (I abbreviate slightly): ” ‘Ah, bitter event! Ah, impious and cruel fate!’ sings the Messenger, in a grating minor-key recitative. Incredulous, the tenor Shepherd keeps to his major key when he asks ‘What sounds of mourning perturb this happy day?’ But the setting of the last word, ‘perturba,’ creates a brief dissonance, suggesting the upward inflection of the voice at the end of a question and a sense of foreboding . . .”

Trying to write about any kind of abstraction – music, the visual arts, another writer’s style – should embody the urge to send the reader back to the source; Ringer’s triumph is that I sit here with my desk strewn with Monteverdi: L’Orfeo on a Virgin-Veritas CD with Ian Bostridge, The Return of Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea in the René Jacobs discs on Harmonia Mundi, half a dozen DVDs. His book brings them marvelously to life, and by doing so re-creates a marvelous era in the arts. Whether I know the work already or not, his kind of writing communicates a deep and honorable appetite for the music under his enthusiastic examination.

The Public Art

L’Orfeo was created for invited guests at a grand palazzo. Three decades later, opera for a ticket-buying public had become a reality, and Monteverdi was in Venice, composing for that public. A compact disc bound into the cover of Ringer’s book provides a pretty good measure of how public taste in opera had developed in the three or more decades between L’Orfeo and the great works that survive from his time as resident composer at the first – or perhaps second – public opera, the Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo, which opened in Venice in 1639. Already by then the public taste for fine vocal work was on the rise – not only showoff virtuosity but also deep, expressive singing. From The Return of Ulysses the disc includes Penelope’s great aria of longing with the heartbreaking refrain “Return, oh return, Ulysses.” If you remember the way Frederica von Stade sang it with the Los Angeles Opera a few years back, or hear how Bernarda Fink sings it on this disc (or on the Jacobs recording on Harmonia Mundi whence it comes), you’ll know that, all the way back to 1640, opera had already gained the power to move, and to break, human hearts.

But there is something even more wonderful in Ulysses, and reading Ringer’s excellent description of the very last music makes me want to spend a day or two just running and rerunning that final scene. Ulysses has returned after all those years, killed off all the hangers-on around Penelope’s palace, proved his ownership of the magic bow. Only Penelope still needs convincing that he is he, and all that will work for her is that this new guy will be able to identify the one thing he alone can know: the embroidery pattern on the marital bed she has kept fresh for him. He does.

“The opera ends with a duet by the reunited couple,” Ringer writes. “They sing a gentle minor-key tune with solo and overlapping lines that changes the emotional temperature from extroverted rapture to private, glowing tenderness. Long pent-up emotion seems to bring them to the verge of tears. Newly invigorated, she sings her own lyric: ‘Fly from our breasts, feelings of sadness,’ and now Ulisse sings his refrain with his own slight variant, ‘Si, si, si, core, si, si.’ The opera ends with a powerful affirmation in five bars of unison singing, ‘Si, si, si, core, si, si.’ Just those simple sounds, fading away; nothing more. Name another opera, if you can, that ends so enchantingly.” (I can, one: Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.)

That final duet is included on the disc (with Christoph Prégardien as Ulysses); there is also a fair sampling of music from The Coronation of Poppea, which is on the L.A. Opera’s docket for next season, in a production from the same Netherlands Opera that sent us the Ulysses a few years back. Meanwhile, as I was saying, you can almost taste this extraordinary repertory in the remarkably vivid, informed – and, I can well imagine, dedicated – writing in this exceptionally valuable book.

Heinrich BIBER: Madcap violin virtuosity from Germany’s leading composer pre-Bach. In concerts and on disc, he’s taken over on the charts from Vivaldi.

CLEVELAND Orchestra: Dvorák’s rarely heard Fifth Symphony made the orchestra’s Costa Mesa stint especially wonderful.

DORRANCE Stalvey: After leading the distinguished Monday Evening Concerts at LACMA almost single-handedly for 33 years, he died last year. The concerts themselves are also on borrowed time.

ESA-PEKKA Salonen: Musical America puts him on its cover as Musician of the Year. Who are we to differ?

FLICKA Von Stade: A little long in the tooth for Offenbach’s man-eating Duchess at the L.A. Opera? Perhaps, but we love her all the same.

GUSTAVO Dudamel: A 24-year-old Venezuelan fireball of a conductor made his local debut late in the Hollywood Bowl season and wowed us all.

HAYDN‘s String Quartet, Opus 54 No. 2, amazing, adventurous, lit up the Penderecki Quartet’s program ?at LACMA, the kind of music that LACMA now intends ?to ditch.

INDISPENSABLE: Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre and Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs sung by Dawn Upshaw on DG, with the Andalucian Dogs barking away in the background.

JEFFREY Kahane: At keyboard or on podium, he has brought his L.A. Chamber Orchestra into a golden age, in time to provide ol’ Wolfgang with the ideal birthday gift.

Olga KERN: With piano and TV cameras at the ready, she came to the Bowl and established the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto as the prototypical sex toy.

LORRAINE Hunt LIEBERSON sang her husband Peter’s Neruda Songs with the Philharmonic: beauty of thought matching beauty of artistry.

MARIN Alsop survived the sexist uprising at her newly acquired Baltimore Symphony post; with our own Philharmonic, she led a strong and exceptionally brainy Tchaikovsky Fifth.

NAXOS, NONESUCH: the two labels that sustain hope that classical recording has a continuing sales strength, room for imaginative programming, and perhaps even ?a future.

OJAI‘s programming had some interesting divergences from the Good Old Days, with more (e.g., Golijov’s wonderful opera, newly revised) to come. Stay tuned.

The PHILHARMONIC returned to classical orchestral seating (second violins down front on the right) and much improved its clarity and resonance, especially in 18th-century music.

The Denali QUARTET is the mainstay of the superb Jacaranda series at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian. It plays Revueltas and Ravel, and raises goose bumps.

Terry RILEY got a messier 70th-birthday concert, at Royce, than the great minimalist deserved, but his own playing and singing gave off the rainbow’s authentic glow.

András SCHIFF played the piano and led the Philharmonic in a warm-hearted and friendly program of small and lesser masterpieces, a most comforting evening.

THOMAS Adés composed a marvelous Piano Quintet, which you can hear on EMI and also hear in person when he comes to the Philharmonic in February.

Frances-Marie UITTI used her double-bow techniques, in a LACMA concert, to turn the throbbing, mystical cello works of Giacinto Scelsi into beauty beyond words.

VIOLETA Urmana, commanding of stature and of voice as well, came as close as humanly possible to endowing Puccini’s Tosca with a semblance of authentic blood and fire.

Schubert’s WINTERREISE underwent the unlikely process of being turned into a stage work; the Long Beach Opera’s production, in a tiny theater, had its own genuine power.

Sheer XTASY: the final trio of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, staged at the L.A. Opera by Maximilian Schell and conducted by Kent Nagano. Can opera get any better than this? (Probably, but not often.)

YING: The string quartet of that name (four siblings) played short works in a dim sum restaurant as one of the Da Camera Society’s “Historic Sites” concerts, which always match the right sounds to the right place.

ZERO: The future stability of the arts, as foreshadowed by the management of the Los Angeles County Museum, on the West Coast; and by the fall of former-maecenas-turned-money-launderer Alberto Vilar, detained somewhere back East.

Two of “the New York School”‘s signature works deal with time scale: John Cage’s four-minute, 33-second “silence,” which is created anew by the surroundings of each performance, and this huge projection of Feldman’s, which (insofar as human endurance can maintain) draws apart from the surrounding world. Off by itself, it communes with its four dedicated participants to propose, discuss, ponder and then move on to some new idea in this endless progression of the most elemental kinds of music. Sometimes a fragment of melody will immediately unwind into something else very similar; sometimes the next idea will turn into a stern rejection of what has gone before. Sometimes all four instruments will suggest a melodic fragment in four-part, grinding harmony, and you sit up straight as if something from above has hit you hard. In every case, you have the sense of a connected, ongoing process in this work, which moves in definite melodic shapes that are often quite long. This differs from other long Feldman works I know – the four-hour For Philip Guston, for example, which I swam around in for nearly a month while writing the notes for the Bridge recording without ever really discerning a melodic process (not that it mattered).

For the playing of the Flux Quartet (whose name stands in tribute to “Fluxus,” the battlefield of musical renegades in the youth-stirring days of the younger Feldman, the topless Charlotte Moorman, Nam June – shed a tear! – and Yoko), I have nothing but praise mingled with awe. Their insights uncovered the depths of the musician that was Morty Feldman – we also used to talk about Schubert, after all – and I wish I could have shared their stamina.

Mexico’s Cuarteto – three Jewish brothers named Bitrán plus cellist Javier Montiel – celebrated their own mix, starting off with Osvaldo Golijov’s ubiquitous Yiddishbbuk and moving on to indigenous Latin material of slighter but delightful substance. I found Gabriela Lena Frank’s Leyendas particularly congenial: charming dance pieces infused with Andean folk rhythms and imitations of local instrumental colors. There is more than one kind of chamber music in this world, and more than one way to hear it.

Sir Donald Tovey, whose writings decades ago started me on the gloomy career pathway I still tread, wrote with purple eloquence about the C-minor Piano Quartet of Brahms. The work isn’t that often performed nowadays-for reasons not necessarily the fault of Sir Donald or myself – so it seemed proper to look in on last week’s performance by the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society, which had the visiting pianist Garrick Ohlsson joined with members of the orchestra’s string section in that very work.

If I should have learned anything since those years of reveling in Toveyesque eloquence, it should be that Brahms in C minor – a piano sonata, a string quartet, a symphony and this piano quartet – spells emotional ruination at the bottom of a mountain of pure ice. What dismal gesticulation! What an infinitude of arm-waving in the desperate search of a melodic shape! In my tattered Tovey I read of “purging through pity and terror,” of an Aristotelian nobility and permanence, of a denial of “cold academicism.” Perhaps I’m holding the book upside down. Mr. Ohlsson, who himself is the size of a couple of Disney Hall’s grand pianos, gave the work the full measure of his convictions; cellist Jonathan Karoly played the gurgling cello solo in the slow movement very nicely, but I found the work empty and cold beyond endurance. My strongest sensation, in fact, was embarrassment at remembering that I had once spent quite a lot of money for the only available recording, with a pianist named Olive Bloom, on some English private label. Last time I looked there were 12.

The Thirteenth of Shostakovich’s String Quartets, also on the program, is yet another of those racked late works that tell us, even more than the symphonies, of some kind of unnamed torment – political? physical? conscience? – that drove the composer’s self-ruinous late years. Here he assigns his outcry to the solo viola, and John Hayhurst’s agonized final terror lingered long in the memory. Along with the cycle of symphonies, the five-year cycle of the Shostakovich String Quartets, which has involved many of the orchestra’s players, has been an enlightening experience as an adjunct to the concerts. I should imagine it has well served the musicians, too.

Garrick Ohlsson was back a couple of days later, looming large over Mendelssohn’s fragile G-minor Piano Concerto, which, truth to tell, might better have profited from somewhat more tinkle than roar. But the roar was also supplied in impressive measure by the Philharmonic and its guest conductor, who used to be more often in our midst, the American-born, Swedish-raised Herbert Blomstedt, who delivered the Fourth Symphony of Anton Bruckner in a beautifully shaped, clear-visioned performance full of the good sense and excellent balance that earned him his staunch following in his San Francisco days. Aside from a passing bad moment among the horns – including a muffed opening note that surely must go into St. Peter’s book – the orchestra rose well to his urging. The sound of Bruckner’s scoring in Disney Hall is one more reason why they didn’t really need that other organ.?

It was a smooth transition, from the substantial wisdom of John Adams’ Harmonielehre, which ended the Minimalist celebration, to the no less imposing substance of the Bach program that ensued. Disney Hall surely needed the two days to air the place out, but you could detect some overlapping echoes. Better yet, the crowd was, once again, near-capacity and, from what I could tell, loving.

All-Bach keyboard programs, live or on disc, tend to favor the Goldberg Variations, with British harpsichordist Richard Egarr’s superb new Harmonia Mundi recording most recently in view. The Partitas, of which Richard Goode played three, contain both sterner and lighter stuff: opening movements that wander rhapsodically and propound powerful, edgy counterpoints that suggest restlessness and the urge to explore far horizons – sounds far beyond your textbook Bach, in other words. Later movements adhere to regular dance patterns most of the time, but also sometimes go afield; an occasional Allemande will turn downright pensive. Of the six works to which Bach attached the term “Partita” (as opposed to “French” or “English Suite”), two – in C minor and E minor – leap far beyond what we expect to hear in everyday Baroque music; they are big, passionate, surprising works, which, properly (i.e., broadly, expansively) performed, run at least half an hour each. That’s the way they came across on Goode’s program – plus a third, in G major, of sunnier outlook – on a full-size piano in a full-size hall to a full-size audience last week.

The emotion this splendid musician revealed in this music rendered moot the usual question of piano versus harpsichord. Since his background includes studies with Rudolf Serkin and Clara Haskil, identification with the high-brain-power musical crowd at the Marlboro Festival, and a much-acclaimed CD box of the Beethoven “32,” the solidity and the eloquence (and, yes, Goode-ness) of Goode’s performance the other night came as little surprise but high pleasure nonetheless.

What works these are! At home I listen often to the wrenching sequence of C-minor harmonies that begins the second of these Partitas. From Trevor Pinnock’s harpsichord I hear a sense of structure, of a piling up from dissonance to unnerving dissonance made the more grating in the sound of the instrument. From Glenn Gould’s piano I hear an awed reconstruction of Bach’s own thought process, the sense of improv re-created anew. From – don’t laugh – the old set of Bach’s Greatest Hits by the original Swingle Singers, I revel in lead singer Christiane Legrand turning the long fugue subject into pure melodic ecstasy. I listened to Richard Goode’s performance the other night with all of these in my memory, and I heard echoes of them all – plus the workings of Goode’s own substantial contemporary intelligence, which drew upon them and from itself the power to turn Bach’s own imaginative patterns into music forthright and moving. That kind of music-making overrides, it seems to me, questions of authenticity and historicity; it was wonderful to hear.

Puttin’ On Airs

Several times this season, at various Southern California venues including Zipper Hall, there have been concerts bearing the grandiose name Camerata Pacifica. Artistic director Adrian Spence shares that grandiosity, greeting audiences at a flowery length that might make such other local greeters as UCLA’s David Sefton seem virtually mute by contrast. “Camerata Pacifica Artists,” so-called in the expensive-looking program – in which the advertising, by the way, is all from Santa Barbara – is actually a sampling of familiar Los Angeles freelancers. The crowd at Zipper last Saturday was fair-sized, about half capacity I’d say; I didn’t recognize more than two or three of the familiar chamber-music crowd. The ones I did recognize told me that they had gotten their tickets free through Goldstar, an online booking service that helps failing concert and theatrical promoters fill houses.

Mr. Spence, who sports a leprechaun’s brogue and plays the flute, the leprechaun’s instrument of seduction, speaks of “emotional programming,” but his program – this year and in next year’s brochure – is full of nice, safe novelties. William Bolcom’s 1976 Piano Quartet was this evening’s highlight, with the Philharmonic’s excellent pianist Joanne Pearce Martin but with string players who didn’t seem very much at home. It’s a wonderful piece, building beautifully from a rather troubled, quiet beginning through a gorgeous outburst of the juicy ragtime-pastiche style of Bolcom’s “Ghost” pieces to a sensational rowdy-dowdy finale; it deserves a rerun with the emotional lights turned higher.

With a top ticket of $40 – if buyers be found – for concerts by locally known personnel, the Camerata Pacifica programs as listed seem rather skimpy. At Jacaranda we never get out before 10:30; Saturday I was home by 9:45. Given the abundance of freelance talent in these parts – and the eagerness you overhear when people talk about the need for more chamber music, more new music or even the steady presence of a group dedicated to keeping the Beethoven quartets alive and well – it’s depressing when a potentially promising project becomes overshadowed with the suspicion of misplaced ego and the wrong leadership wasting time, talent and money. I refer here to my suspicions concerning Adrian Spence (with whom I’ve lunched) and his Camerata Pacifica. I refer also to a certain Peyman Farzinpour, whose “Erato Philharmonia” produced two or three of the most misconceived and, therefore, disastrous musical events on the scene last season, and whose appointment now as some kind of musical director is the latest in this season’s list of egregious errors by our County Art Museum, where the propensity for enacting managerial atrocities seems without bounds.

At Zipper, too – although I keep forgetting to mention it – a charming and communicative pianist named Amy Dissanayake came on from Chicago on March 7 to fill in the wild-card position in this year’s Piano Spheres roster. With her came Chicago music: six Piano Etudes by Augusta Read Thomas attached to descriptive titles – “Cathedral Waterfall,” “Rain at Funeral,” etc. Seven etudes by David Rakowski were more specific: “Repeated-note,” “Etude on Melody and Thick Chords.” I don’t usually expect to get much from the terseness of the piano etude (unless the composer be Ligeti), but these turned out as a pair of valuable, attractive garlands, very nicely put forth. David Rakowski teaches at Brandeis; when last heard from he had run his string of etudes to 70.

And so the stigma has been lifted, and we can sport the mantle of “minimalist” in public without shame. It comes, in fact, in all sizes, shapes and colors. At a symposium on the final day of the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox,” which concluded last weekend, the fortissimo guitarist Glenn Branca, whose full-length concert three days before I had forsworn in self-defense, proclaimed himself a “minimalist” in one breath, and named Gustav Mahler as his prime musical influence in the next. Try that on your stereo.

From any point of view, the “Jukebox” was a brave, enterprising, successful event. You can argue, as Philip Glass did when I ran into him in the hall after the final concert, that it was largely a celebration of old music and therefore belonged with festivals of Bach and Mozart. But that leaves out a vital aspect of this latest event: the audience it drew, and the response that aggregation of teens and college kids (plus young-in-heart of other ages as well) provided. Some way must be found to keep this audience – not through contrivance, as with the hokey “First Nights” concoctions, which common sense is finally ending after this season, but with the unencumbered recognition of where genuine adventure lives and pulsates within the musical repertory.

Until this is done, the notion of stigma remains. What was remarkable about these two weeks of concerts was their revelation of so much music that needs to move into the repertory and, by doing so, start to attract that young-spirited crowd that showed up at Disney these past weeks. Example: There was an all-Steve Reich program, three big works – orchestral and Tehillim with singers – that should be lighting up symphonic programs all over the world where Till Eulenspiegel and the 1812 currently add to the clutter. Example: Terry Riley sat behind me on the night when Mark Robson played a small organ piece by Arvo Pärt, and you knew what a wonderful event Terry and his A Rainbow in Curved Air would create on that organ someday, and you knew that he was thinking the same; it should happen. Example: Forty minutes from the Glass Akhnaten was scarcely enough to rekindle memories of his great years; that work (not to mention Einstein on the Beach) should have nuzzled its way onto the operatic roster beside La Traviata years ago. The “Jukebox” was a wonderful teaser; now it’s somebody’s job to stand there and keep pushing the quarters into the slot.

Discoveries

It was both amazing and gratifying, in fact, how much new and undiscovered got threaded among the time-honored minimalist masterworks. Who, for example, had ever heard of Terry Jennings? The opening program, which ended with the wholesale murder of Riley’s iconic In C (by a CalArts ensemble 10 times too large, organized with cue cards instead of allowing the musicians free choice from one element to the next), began with a proper-size CalArts ensemble performing Jennings’ 1960 String Quartet, music of hypnotic silences and near silences, fashioned at 20 by a legendary colleague of Riley and of La Monte Young. Something that made the work even more interesting, if in retrospect, came late in the series, at a Riley celebration at the Getty Center, when the Calder Quartet played a Riley quartet also from 1960, almost a double of the Jennings (in purpose if not in actual sound). These two works of “pure” minimalism, dating from four years before In C, which is generally accorded patrimonial stature for the minimalist movement, seemed to bookend the whole local program in all but name. (La Monte Young, also among the minimalist “fathers” for, among other masterworks, his fortnightlong single-note compositions, declined to participate in the “Jukebox,” musically or personally, for reasons of his own.)

The legend of the 1973 New York audience revolt that greeted Steve Reich’s Four Organs seemed reason enough to schedule the work (for the four members of PianoSpheres, on itty-bitty electronic keyboards), with audience docility a measure of the changing times. That program included its own brand of latter-day chaos in Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union, for four banged-upon full-size pianos, again politely if adoringly received. Andriessen, who taught at CalArts in the 1980s and worked out a vivid mix of American minimalism with the theatrical outlooks of Luciano Berio and others, also brought to the mix two great, steamy works: the familiar De Staat (melding some of Plato’s harmonic rules into a political context) and the brand-new Racconto dall’Inferno, a glistening, hellish travelogue made all the more infernal in the gyrations of a captivating, diabolical mezzo-soprano with, or so it seemed, a 7-inch waist, a certain Cristina Zavalloni. Wow.

Decasia drew the event’s smallest crowd; I know it’s available on DVD, but the resonance of Michael Gordon’s score, excellently dispatched by USC musicians, bouncing off Disney’s walls to surround Bill Morrison’s film fantasy, was a whole ‘nother kind of media experience. For me, what it meant was that Gordon’s rich, lush musical score was, in some way, creating the tattered, abstract images of Morrison’s film scraps and turning them into some kind of visual drama beyond anything you see and hear. If you don’t know what this is all about, that must mean you still have Decasia ahead of you, and I envy you that.

By Saturday, the “Minimalist Jukebox” was firmly in John Adams’ hands, conducting a Philharmonic program that included the “pure” minimalism of the Akhnaten excerpts, ended with Adams’ own Harmonielehre and also included, before that, a marvelous talk by Adams, interspersed with musical bits, on his life among the shaping forces of today’s music. These included, to my delight, the electronic wizardry of Mort Subotnick’s early adventures at the Buchla synthesizer, so that I could relive my own hair-raising discovery of The Wild Bull (1967, was it?). Then Adams spoke of something newer and electronic called Aphex Twin, and I felt the little remaining hair rising again. Then on to Harmonielehre, in which, along with the throbbings and repetitive textures and clear-headed tonalities and modulations on the edge of minimalism, there are long, eloquent, sinuous, passionate melodies that grab you by the ears, don’t let go for minutes at a time, and even, perhaps, make you think of Mahler. Try that on your stereo.

Several minutes into the second act of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, the lovesick adolescent Cherubino sings a song, addressed ostensibly to the Countess Almaviva but really aimed at womanhood in general. “You [plural] who know about love,” he sings, “tell me what’s in my heart.” Nobody in all of music had ever written a melody like this before: its sighing lines, its rising and falling chromatics. Mozart accompanies his Cherubino with a clarinet, the most humanlike sound in his orchestra then as it is today.

At that moment in the opera, the song is also intended, of course, to convey a message to the Countess. At least twice Cherubino’s age, she is not the target of his testosterone – the opera provides us with Barbarina for that – but the idealized Supermom-with-tits of every adolescent’s dream. In the current production at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (through April 15), director Ian Judge has his Countess so undone that by the end of Cherubino’s song, she has removed nearly every stitch of his clothing; only because her servant, Susanna, has tapped her on the shoulder does she remember who and where she is. The Countess – who is otherwise defined in the opera by a final act of forgiveness that becomes the most sublime of all opera’s sublime moments – becomes, in the vision of our misguided local production crew, a sex-mad ninny. (Never mind that Monsieur Beaumarchais, on whose plays the Figaro operas are based, later wrote an untidy sequel in which the Countess does indeed bed down with Cherubino. That’s another play in another time.)

This is a revival of the Figaro of May 2004, with the sex parts tarted up, and with the same curious anachronisms left intact. We first see the Countess on the telephone (to whom?). The hanky-panky in the garden is lit up with modern-looking flashlights, often painful to a watcher’s eyes. Adrianne Pieczonka went a bit flat at the start of the Countess’ “Porgi amor” on opening night but recovered. Barbara Bonney’s Susanna, long overdue, is worth the wait. A tiny bundle of mezzo-soprano named Lucy Schaufer, as Cherubino, steals hearts and scenes alike. Kent Nagano ends five years as the company’s music director with a pacing okay but nothing more. But he has that aforementioned Forgiveness Scene as his farewell music, which, you gotta admit, is a great way to go.

Simon’s Side

In nearly 500 pages of collected criticism (John Simon on Music, 1979-2005, Applause Press, $27.95), Simon manages the name of Mozart only once, and then in the context of John Corigliano’s Mozart-flavored pastiche opera The Ghosts of Versailles. (“I am not a Mozart man,” he confessed without shame in an earlier collection.) Of Beethoven there is no mention. Bach? “I know of no sounds less bearable than those of baroque music,” writes Simon in a review of the marvelous film about baroque music Tous les Matins du Monde: a self-recusing statement, you’d think, but then you don’t know John Simon.

Best remembered for driving his critical juggernaut over the New York theatrical scene (in the pages, until recently, of New York magazine), Simon has also produced enough sharp-edged verbiage on films and classical music – in smaller publications for the most part, and in theatrical playbills – to fill three volumes of selections. Of the three, the choice of material in the music volume is by some distance the most curious. Very little of it relates in any way to the real musical world, or even the unreal world of opera. Not much of it, for that matter, creates any kind of portrait of a writer in his chosen field of art, concerned about that art, in love with its place in the world, willing to do battle with the pluses and minuses within that art. His book fancifully supplements, but surely does not supplant, any other collection of critical writings (including my own due out in June, which full disclosure ordains my mentioning).

Instead, John Simon builds his own world out of inanities and unimportances. Forsaking the masters, he waxes eloquent, page upon page, over the operatic and symphonic heritage of Nino Rota, the polite proprieties of proper Brits Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Lord Berners, the lightly peppered landscapes of Xavier Montsalvatge, the dense horrors of Belgium’s Joseph Jongen. In one feat akin to the taxidermy of long-dead turkeys, he manages to extract a 10-page essay out of Aulis Sallinen’s Kullervo, that gray-upon-gray venture that our local Opera got snookered into staging in 1992 but which – I had surely thought – had been left to deserved oblivion.

When Simon locks horns with a composer any of us are likely to have heard of, or to care about – Leos Janácek, for one – it is usually with the purpose of launching into a monograph, or several, on the literary figures who served that composer as librettists. When he does take on a genuine musical event – Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the L.A. Opera, say – you get the impression that he has flown here for the sole and long-nurtured intent of flaying director Peter Sellars alive, at unconscionable length, for the sins of a lifetime. Is there music in this opera? A conductor named Esa-Pekka Salonen? Singers with names? Seek your answers elsewhere.

For the most part, Simon seems content to forsake live music making for the rarities on disc that “cry out for rediscovery” (to whom? and why?). Now and then a taste for provocation rears its powdered head. “Opera attracts the queerest ducks,” he proclaims, and makes no attempt to distance himself from the feathered flock, launching into a deeply devoted probe into the aforementioned Corigliano abomination and an appallingly unfunny interview with a concocted “Tobias Maria Blauschuh,” who intends to stage Faust with Marguerite played by Siamese twins.

For someone who, in our days as New York co-workers, was famous for his volcanic fulminations at the appearance of a single typo in his printed columns, Simon has been the victim of haphazard editing this time around. Page 80 has Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle “having little to do” with the Charles Perrault fairy tale, while Page 229 has it that the opera “derives mostly” from Perrault. Better yet, Page 332 has the French emperor identified as “Napolean” three times in one paragraph. What I wouldn’t give to have witnessed Simon’s discovery of that!

I found the word minimalist once in Simon’s book, accompanied by the epithet cursed. After enduring Terry Riley’s In C, the great public monument of the movement, turned into Joseph Jongen by CalArts forces on the opening night of the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox,” I began to edge over to Simon’s side, ever so slightly – just this once.?

Seven years separated the writing of Mahler’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies; just a week separated their hearings at Disney Hall early this month. Ingo Metzmacher (whose photo appeared in this space last week miscaptioned “Louis Andriessen”; oops) led a performance of the Fifth as hot-blooded and indulgent as Alan Gilbert’s of the Ninth had been taut and controlled the week before. In the case of both conductors, theirs was the proper approach.

The Fifth, I know, is popular; it epitomizes Mahler’s prototypical neurosis. It embodies the Mahler of the Ken Russell movie, grotesque and hair-tearing, as gross an exaggeration of its central character as Amadeus of its. What little there is of genuine beauty is almost immediately betrayed; even the Adagietto, the very pretty slow movement, which every hater of Mahler clings to as the Great Exception, is perverted forthwith as its tunes are made to twist and turn in the ensuing finale. Mahler is said to have written the slow movement as a love note to Alma; it may have worked for her, but it doesn’t for me.

I constantly re-read the late Lewis Thomas’ Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. In 1982, in a world still obsessed with survival possibilities in an atomic age – 40 million? 80 million? – Dr. Thomas’ essential question seems to be whether, after those final notes of Mahler have died away, there is anything more in that world that mere human language can possibly express. I had taken the book down after hearing the Ninth, and it was still on my desk after the Fifth, which is perhaps why that work sounded so small this time.

Orchestral bloat even less admirable was inflicted upon a Royce Hall audience earlier that week by the visiting London Philharmonic Orchestra, with Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä substituting for the ailing Kurt Masur. Word from Minneapolis, where Vänskä has amassed a loyal fan club, made attendance seem worthwhile despite a so-so program and the LPO’s reputation as one of its hometown’s lesser ensembles; alas, disillusion reigned. It set in immediately, as the charming Simple Symphony of Benjamin Britten’s boyhood was buried under the weight of the orchestra’s full string section, which then remained onstage to extend similar burial treatment to an early Mozart symphony. Music, if you can call it that, by Khachaturian and Strauss ensued. Maestro Vänskä’s podium antics are fun to watch, and bear a certain resemblance to musical exuberance in general, if less to that night’s program in particular.

Piano Forte

The news at the keyboard last week was bad, bad, super and super: cancellations by Murray Perahia and Martha Argerich, substitution by Ingrid Fliter, heroism on schedule by Jeffrey Kahane. As stand-in for Argerich, the Philharmonic hit it big in the svelte and elegant form of Argentina’s Ms. Fliter, proclaimed only weeks before winner of the solid-gold ($300,000) Gilmore Piano Award in exotic Kalamazoo. Perhaps Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto isn’t exactly the high-powered vehicle to show off an incoming pianist’s brain or muscle power. (She is also slated to play it at the Hollywood Bowl this summer.) Perhaps Charles Dutoit wasn’t exactly the most attuned conductor to accompany this important debut performance. (The Philharmonic’s Alexander Mickelthwate will do the job at the Bowl.) But young Ms. Fliter managed to charm the Disney audience, and the somewhat simple-minded concerto of Beethoven’s journeyman days as well. She is surely on her way.

Four Mozart piano concertos on a single program: Never mind the toll on Jeffrey Kahane, conducting these works from the piano in a single sitting; the glandular toll on an enthralled audience out front is also something to be taken seriously, something no amount of overpriced coffee or pastry in the Royce Hall lounge can counteract. Imagine, having to deal in a single night with that endless thread of single melody (a.k.a. “Elvira Madigan”) that forms the slow movement of the Concerto K. 467, only moments after that other sublime melodic thread, the clarinet solo in the slow movement of K. 488!

Yet another phenomenal reward of this series (which continues through the Chamber Orchestra’s next season, by the way, eventually including all 23 of Mozart’s actual original concertos) has been the wonders that come to light in the earlier works, before the great breaking-out of expressive mastery upon Mozart’s move to Vienna. An early work in B flat, K. 238, lay delightfully between two giants on last week’s program and gave off its own kinds of charm – most of all in some charming rampaging for horns in the finale. The writing for winds and horns in every one of these concertos, from the beginning, is one of the great joys in Mozart discovery. It is also one of the great strengths of our L.A. Chamber Orchestra.

The Palisades Are Alive

Two nights later, some of those same Chamber Orchestra musicians – notably clarinetist Gary Gray and French hornist Richard Todd – were at it again, making music up in the hills as members of Chamber Music Palisades, now in its ninth season at the attractive (if perhaps overly vibrant) St. Matthew’s Parish. Delores Stevens, pianist, teacher and musical prime mover on at least two coasts, is the series’ co-founder, along with LACO flutist Susan Greenberg. Last week’s program, which drew a near-capacity crowd, consisted of four works for which the overall description of “delicious” would not be excessive. Stevens was at the piano in all four. At intermission, there were cookies and hot apple juice.

Matters got under way with Todd and Stevens at joyous, rambunctious work in Beethoven’s little-known early Horn Sonata. One work was new: Peter Golub’s Threaded Dances, commissioned and played by Susan Greenberg – 10 or so most attractive minutes’ worth of quiet nocturnal music nicely full of California mountainside and fog. The program’s other surprise was the Sextet for piano and winds by Ludwig Thuille, a little-remembered contemporary of, say, Mahler and musically a closer clone of Brahms or, save the mark, the much-maligned Max Reger. Better than any of the above-named, this work showed a nice understanding of when to stop.

Best of all was the final work, the piano-wind Sextet by Francis Poulenc: wit, wisdom, sarcasm, tenderness, sheer delight; worth any drive up mountain roads. Hurrah, Palisades! Where have I been all those nine years??

The scene: a January night in New York’s Carnegie Hall, 1973. The Boston Symphony is in town for one of its hot-ticket subscription nights, but conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is trying something new. This will be an experimental “Spectrum” concert, the ads have announced: Bach, Bartók, Liszt and Steve Reich’s Four Organs. Come as you are. The orchestra will play in shirtsleeves. (Sound familiar? Just like last week’s “casual” Mahler at Disney Hall!)

The Reich begins: four players onstage – including Reich himself and MTT – at four small electronic organs as at rock concerts, plus four players with maracas. After a couple of minutes of the same harmonic progression repeated, repeated, repea . . . the audience begins to stir and exchange unhappy, concerned glances. Some of the crowd are young and casual, but some have subscribed to these Boston Symphony concerts since the Koussevitzky days. The stir grows louder. A woman zooms down the aisle, bangs on the stage with her shoe and achieves instant if anonymous fame. “All right,” she screams, “I’ll confess!”

Four Organs plays out its 16 minutes: a terse progression in which the components of a stated chord undergo a gradual augmentation, and the chord itself, in episodes of a few seconds each, pulls itself apart. Some of the crowd, along with The New York Times‘ Harold C. Schonberg, react as to “red-hot needles inserted under fingernails.” Your humble scribe, wearing the colors of New York magazine, finds it “marvelous, original invention about musical time and rate of change.” At the end, there are boos and assorted vociferations reminiscent of the famous birth pangs of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris 60 years before. It would also be quite a while into the future before a major symphony orchestra might once again hazard to schedule Four Organs – or much more of the substantial musical world that has taken root around the pioneering efforts of Steve Reich and his fellow believers – on a regular program.

This the Los Angeles Philharmonic has done. There are several aspects of “Minimalist Jukebox,” the generous chunk of programming spread across the orchestra’s efforts for the rest of this month, that speak with compelling eloquence of courage, imagination and overriding intelligence. Observers of the endangered classical-music scene might well be moved to take such qualities to heart these days. Whatever their secret sources, our local planners act as if there actually might be a tomorrow, and perhaps a next day, too. More than just a retrospective, “Minimalist Jukebox” celebrates a continuing creative vitality.

Long Gone

“Oh well, minimalism,” says Philip Glass in the latest The Gramophone, “that’s been over for 20 years already.” Listen in on the Philharmonic’s “Jukebox,” and the continuing vitality might astonish even Phil Glass. Minimalism came on the scene as a sorely needed housecleaning. New York when I arrived, circa 1960, was a vast cobweb of compositional academe. Twelve-tone was easy to teach, and the small halls were full of tone rows being passed off as brand-new music. Along came La Monte Young with his two-week-long single-note concerts and violins burned in Bob Rauschenberg’s loft; Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik and the topless cellist what’s-her-name at 5:30 concerts when Carnegie Recital Hall could rent for pennies: This all got people talking and cleared the air. John Cage put on Satie’s Vexations, 14 hours of it, in a downtown theater, and we were ready for In C and, eventually, for Einstein on the Beach. How fresh and alive it all sounded! I witnessed both Einstein performances at the Met in 1976, ducking out occasionally for terrific omelets at a restaurant across the street. When Einstein returned to the Brooklyn Academy in, I think, 1984, I sat through four performances uninterrupted.

Don’t tell me that minimalism is over. I hear this vitality – of notes standing out in clear air, of tonalities cleanly defined as they brush against one another and do battle – in whatever latest music John Adams brings forth, because it’s truly amazing how many ways he has made its basic principles work in how many kinds of music. Steve Reich’s latest works, including the You Are (Variations) he wrote for our Master Chorale, keep coming up with fascinating new ideas on the relationship of the spoken voice and melodic lines, and these relate back to some of his early minimalist phasing works like Come Out. Louis Andriessen, who took the minimalists’ ideas back to Holland after his teaching terms at CalArts in the 1980s, and mixed them in with some European ideas, is bringing some works old and new to the “Jukebox.” (His recent opera, Writing to Vermeer, to a text by Peter Greenaway, is due out soon on Nonesuch. I’ve heard it and it’s fabulous.)

The Neighborhood

The Minimalists arrive at Disney (mostly) in interesting circumstances. For two weeks before, there has been great, lumbering, overwritten Mahler (about which more next week). In the week after, there is not-so-great, horrendously overwritten Rachmaninoff. Nothing could better set off the splendid clarity, the power of this music in which every note will count. (I will except, falling back for the first time on my several decades’ life span, the Glenn Branca concert. I do know my limitations.)

But then there is Figaro, opening next weekend across the street and not to be overlooked at any cost. Talk about making every note count! The curtain goes up. Figaro is measuring space for a marital bed; Susanna is trying on a bonnet and trying to distract him. Each has his/her own music; neither will be distracted until the breakthrough. How do we recognize the breakthrough? Simply because he now sings her music as well, harmonizing in a very pretty duet. Three minutes’ worth of singing, and the power of music to tell its story is forever nailed down.

Or take that moment in Act 2. The Count thinks Cherubino is hiding in the Countess’ closet; so, at the moment, does she. Give me the key, he roars; I am blameless, she dithers. The door opens: not Cherubino but Susanna. The Count is dumbfounded; his music grinds to a halt, rendering him mute. The Countess, backed by Susanna, laughs herself silly. The music tells it all, not a note wasted. The neighborhood around First and Grand is full of great music these next couple of weeks; don’t miss a note.?

There is no sound more beautiful in a concert hall than the silence of an audience profoundly moved at the end of a musical experience and held captive by the invitation to share the performer’s trance. For well over a minute at the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Alan Gilbert’s raised baton kept the Disney audience in that kind of suspension; the magic of the music flowed without pause from one edge of audibility to the other.

That was as it should be. There is a transcendence in that Mahler moment, a passage from sound to less sound to near-silence to absolute silence, borne onward by the simplest of means – a solo cello, not much more. At the dawn of the 20th century, more was dying out in the musical world than the final note of a sublime work by one great but dying composer. A whole kind of music was dying, an era. Mahler would attempt, but abandon, one more resuscitation, a Tenth Symphony couched as a long personal confessional to his Alma. But the Ninth was his ending, and the great performances – of which last week’s was one – are the ones that allow that process to take place unblemished by personal intrusion. “Look, folks, this is me, MTT, performing the Mahler Ninth,” said Michael Tilson Thomas, seemingly, when he brought his San Francisco Symphony to town a year or so ago. That’s the other way.

This greatest of all Mahler symphonies, composed as the whole realm of the Romantic symphony was passing from currency, is for all its power and its expanse an artwork of great fragility. Four times, over the course of each very long movement, it rises out of banal beginnings to some truly fearsome midpoint, and then subsides. Yet that subsidence at the very end – the cello solo mounting heavenward to end 90 minutes of music that had begun so simply, with a most unpromising “So what?” of an opening tune for the two harps – leaves you drained of breath, in a kind of benign catatonia. No wonder you cannot immediately applaud.

Or couldn’t, at least, as Alan Gilbert – New York-born, 1968, currently busy with two or three major European orchestras – drew the work from Philharmonic players during his one-week guest appearance here. Being merely human, he did not quite return us to the deep, reflective poetry of the early-’80s Giulini performance here that people still talk about in hushed tones (and whose memory I reinforce via Giulini’s Chicago Symphony recording on D.G.), but it was a Mahler Ninth honest and thoroughly respectable, delivered with a beat simple and clear. Tempos were flexible, expressive but not fussed with; everything sang out. For a one-shot guest engagement, you’d think the guy had been conducting that orchestra, in that hall, for weeks. Maybe, someday soon, he should. (He returns for one week next October, with Mozart and Richard Strauss: not enough.)

And Schnittke

We heard quite a lot of Alfred Schnittke’s music when it first burst upon us in the last days of the Soviet cultural standoff. Gidon Kremer played his violin concertos here with the Philharmonic; the Kronos played his quartets; now those excellent musicians have other worlds to conquer. There was some delightful Schnittke here last month, however. The English violinist Daniel Hope came to the L.A. Chamber Orchestra with Schnittke’s Sonata No. 1, which is actually for violin and small orchestra, a delightful, all-over-the-place kind of piece (pure Schnittke, in other words), somewhat Mozart-permeated with some jolly dance stuff at the end that could just as easily pass as a “La Cucaracha” rip-off.

There was more – Schnittke’s 1975 Prelude in Memory of D. Shostakovich, which Joel Pargman and Sarah Thornblade played at last Saturday’s Jacaranda, standing with their violins at opposite sides of Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church. The trick there was that one violinist played the four notes – DS(don’t ask)CH – of Dmitri Shostakovich’s name; the other played the four notes of BACH. Gradually, over the time and space, they merged, thus forming a statement on the shared eminence of both composers: resource and trickery worthy of Schnittke – and worthy also of Jacaranda.

Sharing the Road

If any music on the planet stands as more convincing evidence of the dark side of mortality than Mozart’s Requiem, let it be the Mahler Ninth. I don’t blame the Philharmonic for scheduling those two somber masterworks a week apart; such death-dealing doings were probably merely a matter of guest conductors’ availabilities and not any kind of demonic plotting. It just so happened, however, that those particularly mournful events also served as portals of doom within my own life scape – a dour week that also embraced my rendezvous with dentistry and my run-in with . . . let’s call her Miss Jessica Blue.

The first of these trials cannot in all honesty, however, be ascribed to either Mozart or Mahler; Westside Dental had had me on its appointment books for weeks in advance. Nevertheless, a procedure that requires an active critic to submit in a single sitting to the removal of six of his sharpest fangs – and to the replacement of these instruments of renowned predatory efficiency with a nondescript plastic gadget that looks terrible and tastes even worse – cannot be regarded lightly. Furthermore, the damn thing hurts.

Miss Blue, whose license plates proclaimed that she hails from Ohio, entered my life through a shared desire to occupy simultaneously the same segment of the Santa Monica Freeway: I with Mozart’s accents of mortality still throbbing in my grateful ears, she with heaven-knows-what in hers. We ended up sharing a lot more – names of insurance companies, phone numbers, that sort of thing. I survived unblemished; the tow truck, my violated vehicle ignominiously suspended behind, deposited me at home in full view of the folks next door. I’ve always regarded it as a civic duty to keep my neighborhood entertained; this latest in a string of episodes – which included the building of my second-story add-on, not to mention last summer’s paramedics – nicely fulfilled my responsibility.?

Brave and forthright rang the sounds of the Santa Monica High School Symphony; I don’t remember anything quite so ear-shattering in Disney Hall’s two-and-a-half-year history. Near the end of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony, in fact, the guy on cymbals had to duck backstage and replenish his supply with a second set; his big golden platters weren’t the only things worn out that night – all in a good cause, of course.

Santa Monica High (“Samohi” in common parlance) fields a top-notch student orchestra, and has for years. The school’s trophy shelf is well stocked, and it was no idle gesture to bring the orchestra to Disney for one of the “Sounds About Town” programs. Joni Swenson has led the group for four years, and she turned one number on the program – the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony – over to an old-timer she identified as her mentor, Vince Gomez, whose credentials as a founder of student music-making here and abroad make him a virtual Johnny Appleseed of school orchestras.

At Disney, the Samohi contingent delivered loud, robust performances of a Rimsky-Korsakov march, the Tchaikovsky Second, the Mahler movement (smoothly delivered by the string section alone) and Gershwin’s An American in Paris. It was particularly rewarding to hear the bright and ballsy Tchaikovsky, which is unjustly neglected in favor of the later symphonies. (Stravinsky was fond of it; it was one of the few works not written by him that he conducted.) I wonder, however, what value today’s young orchestras derive from the Gershwin piece, which, for all its charm, came across that night as a curio in a bygone language, the newest music on the program and yet the one piece least worth the effort of this excellent, greatly talented ensemble.

Less Well

The USC Thornton Choral Artists, which formed the backdrop for the Requiem at the Philharmonic’s better-late-than-never Mozart observance last week, probably averaged a few years older than the kids of Samohi; yet the sounds I heard from their massed forces, 83 strong, struck me as raw and unbalanced, lacking in vocal maturity. The clash of bright, harsh voices against instruments, especially against the remarkable range of Mozart’s orchestral tone colors in this extraordinary work, I found fatally disturbing. I could only balance my own disappointment, in a performance I had long anticipated,

with what I imagined – from my long-standing regard for conductor Christoph von Dohnányi’s own musical conscience – to be his own as well.

There are emanations from this work that go beyond its hokey accumulated mythology (including the rank absurdity of its treatment in the Peter Shaffer play and film) and the picky-picky discussions over editions and completions. Something happens at the very start – the plangent tones of mournful bass clarinets in darkest purple, the soft golden chords from massed trombones, the outcries from the strings – that never happened before in music, not even on Mozart’s most visionary pages. Where did he stand, at that moment, we ask as our spines shiver at these centuries-deep sounds? Into what chasm did he gaze? The question repeats itself: in the violence of the false cadence that ends the “Kyrie” and, most distressing of all, in the murky, muttered dissonances that lead out of the “Confutatis” and into the “Lacrimosa.”

We don’t need a fraudulent Salieri to guide a grotesquely overblown Mozart past these musical marvels; we do, however, need a chorus to capture their overtones of eternity with singing that is loving and awestruck. This the well-meaning youngsters of USC did not provide the other night. Illness by the scheduled soloist also cost us the Mozart piano concerto that would have properly balanced the program – the last in the series, with its slow movement also of breath-stopping melodic substance. Instead we got an agreeable but more juvenile work – No. 19 in F major, its third appearance here in the past two years – in the agreeable but juvenile hands of somebody-or-other.

Dohnányi has become a valued regular visitor. Under his “classical” hat he gave us Schumann last season, and returns with all the Brahms symphonies next. There’s more than that, however; two weeks ago, there was a beautifully shaped “complete” Firebird (shorn of a few feathers that were easily spared) and a brief, attractively dark and atmospheric piece by Britain’s Harrison Birtwistle, of whom we hear not nearly enough. Cherish this Dohnányi; everybody seems to like him, and with good reason.

Hail, Farewell, Hail

Everybody seemed to like Tom Adès, too. At his final “Green Umbrella” concert last week, there were broad hints dropped that his return next season (when, among other chores, he will look in on a staging at USC of his giddy operatic near-masterpiece Powder Her Face) might be the first in a series. We could do worse, and so could he.

This last concert was one more delightful omnium-gatherum: something very early – his Opus 2 Chamber Symphony – and other works, of later vintage. The Origin of the Harp, a middle-aged work for clarinets, violas, cellos and percussion (no harps), charmed me no end: a muttering, whirling, secretive sort of piece full of color and private jokes. At the end came the new Piano Quintet, which I raved about last fall and will do again anytime: serious, beautifully organized chamber-music writing. Music of dots and dashes – one more set of tiny, quizzical György Kurtág songs lasting little more than a minute and leaving behind disturbing prickles; 12 meditative epigrams by Niccolò Castiglioni – filled out the program, nicely delivered by singers Elizabeth Keusch and Cyndia Sieden (the Ariel of the previous week’s Tempest).

What Adès leaves behind is the memory of an exceptional presence among us, and the awareness it seems to have stirred up in musical circles: the quality of mind that seems to inform his way of composing and the splendid richness of his musical resource. Everybody in the classical crowd reacted to his being here, and talked about it, and this created a kind of vision of what musical life in an active community becomes every time something – or somebody – lively and interesting turns up at its core. We in Los Angeles are uncommonly blessed in this regard.?

Tom Terrific

Adès began his visit here at the piano in a Chamber Music Society concert that included Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, and that somehow seemed appropriate: one young man’s exuberance in touch with another’s, the one cramming five notes where one might suffice, the other having one helluva good time making it happen. (I seem to have said some of this last September, when the EMI recording appeared. Schubert was one for revisitation.) It has only been a decade since Adès’ arrival on the scene with the explosive ebullience of Asyla and the nose-thumbing exhilaration of Powder Her Face. The catalog of his works over those years is long and impressively varied, but the marvel with Adès – as with Schubert over the same time span – is the ongoing sense of control in every kind of music he has so far essayed, the way high spirits and magnificent purpose manage to interact, the way you always know what is happening.

On his first “big” Philharmonic program, which he conducted, there was his new violin concerto, bearing the title “Concentric Paths,” in a dazzling execution by fellow Brit Anthony Marwood. What grabbed me immediately in this supremely beautiful and original work was its blend of event and process, the charm of melodic invention and the clarity of its unfolding. Much happens; my memories, after a single hearing, center on a slow movement of haunting, quiet beauty, but are tangled with other moonlit memories from Adès’ opera, which shared the program.

Music from The Tempest filled out that evening: Tchaikovsky’s and Sibelius’ orchestral prettifications of negligible worth, but then a marvelous wad of selections from Adès’ great opera, first done at Covent Garden in 2004. Meredith Oakes provided the libretto, a free gloss on the Shakespearean fantasy that moves the Caliban character to center stage and decks him out with music as close to moonlight as mere earthlings can contrive. In the half-hour Suite at Disney, we were denied this character, but were compensated with the opera’s incredible, airborne Ariel music, flying higher than human throat ought to aspire to but reached nevertheless by the high E’s of the awesome Cyndia Sieden; music of wisdom and regret for the Prospero of Simon Keenlyside; and paler but no less haunting moonlight for the young lovers sung by Toby Spence and Patricia Risley.

A few evenings later there was more to admire and ponder, Marwood and Adès in a “Historic Sites” program at the Doheny Mansion: all of Igor Stravinsky’s oeuvre for violin and piano, the music he created or transcribed for his friend violinist Samuel Dushkin – transcriptions of Pulcinella and the Fairy’s Kiss Divertimento, the Duo Concertant and some small pieces. In its own curious way, this was also a memorable concert, music of decidedly unimposing stature made important by the sense of players able to project the message that they, too, were having one helluva good time making it happen.

Go Golijov

Over last weekend, as Lincoln Center’s Osvaldo Golijov festival ended with the glorious cacophony of his La Pasión Según San Marcos, Santa Monica’s Jacaranda didn’t do so badly, either. The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, with which the Kronos Quartet (plus airborne clarinetist David Krakauer) first brought Golijov to our delighted attention in 1994, was the centerpiece of an altogether splendid evening of “Pampas, Tangos, Dreams amp; Prayers” that filled Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church to near capacity. Works by Ginastera and Piazzolla rounded out the program with, of course, a decidedly Argentine accent; the clash between these and the whole panorama of backgrounds and derivations within the one 30-minute Golijov work was one of the concert’s many rewards.

This matter of nationality and accent in music is not easily dealt with, and Golijov, with his mingled background of Jewish, Russian, Latino and, currently, Bostonian, has always been uncommonly successful at drawing upon this and making it work in his music. Isaac the Blind deals primarily, of course, with Yiddish ancient history; the clarinets of several sizes stand in for the geschrei of the traditional klezmer band – and, possibly, of the abandoned Jewish mother. Yet it is more than that; already, in 1993, Golijov had mastered the many strands in his own heritage. Surrounded on the Jacaranda program by the intense Hispanic identity of Alberto Ginastera’s music – a couple of songs and the short, powerful Piano Sonata, which more people should play – it became by far the evening’s richest music. Its multinational spirit was handsomely caught by Jacaranda’s resident Denali Quartet – its own membership of mixed heritage including Jewish, Hispanic and Chinese – plus clarinetist Donald Foster.

Resplendent in shirt of flaming crimson, veteran Argentina-born pianist Eduardo Delgado – currently on faculty at Cal State Fullerton – performed the Ginastera Sonata and several short works; sweet-voiced soprano Maria Lazarova sang a couple of songs; John Walz performed a short work for cello: a long, varied and rewarding program. From Jacaranda’s enlightened planners, we have come to expect no less.?

Sunday morning in the devout Leipzig of Sebastian Bach, centuries before the Lutherans’ conquest of Minnesota, was an arduous if uplifting experience. The faithful gathered in one of the two main churches, St. Michael or St. Thomas, at 7 a.m. By the time they had, in heart, soul, rump and knees, journeyed past the readings from Scripture, sung along in the day’s chorale plus a few dozen hymns, absorbed the musical wonders of Kapellmeister Bach’s latest cantata and the Sermon – ah, yes, the Sermon, the 1725 forerunner of “News From Lake Wobegon” but without the jokes – the noon hour would have struck. There would be time for socializing, the exchange of the “Grüss Gott” and the week’s gossip, but by then the Sunday Rostbraten und Kartoffeln would be waiting at home.

The nucleus of the Lutheran service was the body of the chorale melodies, collected and codified by the Founders, and assigned to each Sunday of the church year – as the Gregorian melodies were assigned to the Roman year. Like the dozens of other musical craftsmen in the organ lofts of Germany and Northern Europe, Bach had the task of fashioning each week’s music as a paraphrase – a recycling, if you will – of that specific melody, and the miracle is the amazing resource with which he went about his task. His 200 or so surviving cantatas, most of them created during his time as music director for the city of Leipzig, are more than merely a collection of great and beautiful executions of the given task; they represent the outlook of a devout and devoted mind on the nature of faith and its interaction with the nature of artistic expression. (Another 100 or so cantatas, by the way, are noted in catalogs but have yet to be found.)

Sir John Eliot Gardiner was in town recently, primarily to conduct a Mozart concert (which I had to miss due to an exceptionally conflicted weekend, with nothing less than Wagner’s Ring and a new arts center competing for attention), but also to talk about Bach cantatas. In 2000, the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, Sir John had taken his Monteverdi Choir, the small instrumental group called the English Baroque Soloists and a solo vocal group on a “pilgrimage” to perform and record all surviving Bach church cantatas, in churches worldwide chosen for ideal size and sound qualities, and all on the appropriate Sunday in the church calendar. This would mean four or five works on most days: a full-length concert and, better yet, a full CD. Deutsche Grammophon was to release the performances; it issued five discs and backed off from the project, returning the masters to Sir John. Now, with private funding – from a donor list including Alberto Vilar, but we won’t go into that – Sir John has undertaken to release the recordings on his own label, Soli Deo Gloria, which was Bach’s own signature, in handsome two-disc packages distributed by Harmonia Mundi. There will be some 25 in all; there are five so far. Even if you were deaf, you’d want them for Steve McCurry’s haunting cover photographs: faces in Asian villages and monasteries, whose haunting eyes prepare you for the music inside. The music making under Gardiner, with his superbly motivated soloists both vocal and instrumental, somehow goes with this artwork. Even with the tiny and negligible flaws of live performances, I find this a new and deeply satisfying way of listening to Bach.

Soli Deo Gloria

“Whatever your beliefs,” said Sir John, “you have to respond to the irresistible power in this music, of Bach’s ambition to serve a higher power. What is even more remarkable, of course, is the way even his self-doubts come through, the anxieties, the pleading. This is the most human of all Bach’s music, and the most humanistic as well. Probably for that reason, because it is so unlike the standard image – the ‘divine sewing machine’ of the instrumental works, for instance – these cantatas are the least explored of all his works. They are also the music that he was most obviously creating for the future. His sons recognized this. Carl Philipp Emanuel, who moved so far ahead of Sebastian in so much of his own music, listed the cantatas first when he set about cataloging his father’s legacy.

“In later time, too,” Sir John went on, “even in the 19th century, when so much was being reorchestrated and romanticized for Victorian audiences, there were passages in the unadulterated cantatas that were amazing Romantic composers . . .”

“That sequence in Cantata No. 8 . . .” I interrupted.

“Exactly. That passage sounds exactly like Brahms, and Brahms knew it and recognized it. And in No. 27, that opening chorus turns up exactly in the Brahms Requiem: ‘Denn alles Fleisch . . .’ And what is the Brahms Requiem? Music about death, ‘borne patiently only by the corpse,’ as G.B. Shaw once said. And what are Cantatas 8 and 27? Also music about death.”

Cantatas No. 8 and 27 – the numbers are a cataloger’s caprice and have no relation to chronology – go along with 161 and 95 in the set for the 16th Sunday after Trinity; they were performed and recorded on October 7, 2000, at Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Death is the subject matter in all four works: not the tragedy at life’s end, but the release at life’s fulfillment. All four works include at least one aria, usually toward the end, that is downright jovial; the piece in jig time at the end of No. 8 is a ringer for the jiggety-jog at the end of the sixth “Brandenburg.” What I find even more striking are the opening movements, each of them a multilevel musical drama.

No. 161 dates from Bach’s Weimar years before he moved on to Cöthen and then to Leipzig. “Come, sweet hour of death . . .” sings the alto, and the chorus answers with comforting words: “Though the body be consumed by worms . . .” To complicate matters still further, a solo oboe intrudes with yet another tune, the so-called “Passion” chorale, which will be a frequent visitor throughout Bach’s legacy. A chorale tune in No. 95 hollers out a death warning over a syncopated chorus exulting that “Christ is my life!!!” No. 8, from the Leipzig years, starts off with that Brahmsian harmony, and with what is supposed to be a funeral chime but clanging (!) merrily; “Dear Lord,” sing the young men and women of the Monteverdi Choir, “when will I die?” Not soon, if the vitality in these superb new discs is any indication.?

There is no music for piano, large-scale or small, quite like the G-major Sonata of Franz Schubert. Its first sounds tease your imagination: What instrument could Schubert possibly have had in mind, in October 1826, capable of producing the ethereal, meditative sonorities at the edge of silence that begin this piece – an instrument that, furthermore, would rise in fury moments later to renounce those harmonies with sustained outbursts, which must surely have intimidated the ears of the time? A few blocks away from Schubert’s humble studio, in the same Vienna at about the same time, Ludwig van Beethoven had also, in his “Hammerklavier” and other sonatas, explored another whole new range of piano sound. Schubert’s accomplishment, the daring of his invention in this one amazing sonata, is little less remarkable. He would compose three more great piano sonatas, all in 1828, the final year of his tragically shortened life; none was more adventuresome than this noble work of two years before.

Schubert himself was no piano master, and most of his writing for the instrument leans toward the ordinary. It is in this one work, this strange, willful amalgam of solemnity and giddiness, which would make its way into public acceptance far more slowly than the acclaimed late works of Beethoven, that he sets out to explore a new piano territory, and does so enchantingly. “It is right and proper,” proclaimed the Vienna Arts Journal, September 29, 1827, “to rank this work among the good pianoforte compositions that by no means aim at being mere dancing lessons for the fingers.” Lost in a hushed, dark landscape of whispered harmonies and understated bits of tunes, you meet a Schubert strange, mysterious and wonderful in unsuspected new ways. Further surprises – some astounding in their violence, some simply disarming – await around every turn. At the end, nearly 50 minutes later if the performer has observed all the prescribed repeats, there comes a final, smiling, exquisite rush of harmony that would not be out of place in Debussy, and you find yourselves sharing that smile.

Radu Lupu, who ended his Schumann-Schubert recital at Disney Hall last week with this G-major Sonata, honored all of Schubert’s repeats, but not all of the smile. I confess to being spoiled beyond redemption in the matter of this work, going back to Easter Sunday, 1948: Artur Schnabel performing in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. Schnabel had done more than any other pianist to restore Schubert’s large-scale works to public awareness, and from a seat onstage that afternoon I could watch the twinkle in Schubert’s miraculous modulations (G to E-flat to C at the drop of a pinkie) play out across the great musician’s face. I wait for that twinkle whenever the G-major Sonata is on the bill; I hear it in Mitsuko Uchida’s recording. There was a detectable twinkle that night in Lupu’s performance of Schumann’s Waldszenen (but not in his Humoreske, which I found dull beyond rescue), and not in the Schubert.

Lights Out

The Philharmonic’s five-year Shostakovich survey ended with nary a twinkle: the Symphony No. 13 in January, a gigantic outburst for dark voices compounded out of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s bitter anti-everything poetry, and No. 14 last week, equally long but for modest forces, linking death-tinged poetry not so much sardonic as directly tragic. (No. 15, the actual final work in the series, had been performed earlier in the season.) It has been a distinguished project, the more so since Esa-Pekka Salonen’s personal feelings on several of the works – including the Fifth Symphony, by some distance the most popular – were not exactly a secret. He originally announced that he would conduct the entire series, but then thought better. “Thinking better,” I guess, would include taking a good, hard look at, say, Nos. 11 and 12 – which did receive good performances, but in others’ hands.

No. 13, which was led by James Conlon, sets the Yevtushenko poetry about the Nazi massacre of the Jewish populace at Babi Yar and further thoughts on Soviet racism. On the first night, it was preceded by one of the Philharmonic’s “First Nights” minidramas, wherein actors from outside and orchestra members acted out a 30-or-so-minute biz about Shostakovich and Yevtushenko being harassed by Soviet cultural delegates and the performance of the work itself threatened. There are several of these entertainments buried like land mines through the season. (The next, on April 7, concerns Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, which, come to think of it, probably does need all the help it can get.) I don’t think I am alone in finding them just a tad patronizing. I can read program notes, and attend the Philharmonic’s pre-concert talks (which are good most of the time). Minitheatricals, however eloquent several of the orchestra’s sturdy players turn out to be, are an unnecessary burden. Be that as it may, the performance under Conlon was taut and dark and nicely lit from within by the young baritone Nmon Ford, who replaced the scheduled soloist.

No. 14 is a problem work, and worth the effort. Having Mahler on your mind helps: The deep, solemn opening might have fallen from the sketches from the Mahler 10th; the poems themselves share the mood of the Kindertotenlieder. The sparse scoring – strings, percussion and celesta as in Bartók’s great work, but with more prominence given to the death-rattle percussion – enforces careful listening. I was glad that the pre-concert entertainment this time included a Shostakovich string quartet (No. 14); it made for good ear training. The two soloists were baritone Matthias Goerne, who is familiar, and mezzo-soprano Tatiana Pavlovskaya, who is not but who is a superb, rich-voiced tragic singer whom I would love to hear in any dozen operatic roles.

Also on the program, and not insignificant, was Haydn’s Symphony No. 103, the “Drumroll,” one of the most adventurous and brilliantly scored of the 12 “London” Symphonies. We haven’t heard enough Haydn from Salonen lately; it makes for a superb matchup. Something about the edge in Haydn’s humor – the way, in this work, that the finale builds its theme on the repeating figure in the horns, and the back-and-forth major-minor in the slow-movement variations – exactly works in Salonen’s hands, and always has. No. 14 was a valuable experience, I suppose, but it was the Haydn that rode home with me in my head, and remains today.

Robert Wilson’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, as produced by the L.A. Opera two years ago, soared both on Puccini’s lyric urgency and on an inner music created out of Wilson’s own visions, his unique sense of stage movement and color, his repertory of gentle invention, to deepen – but not supplant – the dramatic sense of the work itself. Wilson’s art is serious and subtle; alas, like the Butterfly of the story, it languishes in his absence. It needs his guidance, in his famous painstaking rehearsal technique, to deal with matters of lighting, the positioning of hands, of exact body movement. As enhancement to Puccini’s all-too-famous tearjerker, Wilson drew upon our powers of recognition, for example, by his exact contrast between the hand positions of his Butterfly and the American Kate Pinkerton at their meeting, and it told worlds about the clash of their civilizations, adding a layer of information to an opera that can – and often should – just as easily be ignored as second-rate entertainment. He created a whole character out of Butterfly’s small boy, and gave him a lovely, appealing choreography to make us aware of the tragedy that will devastate his life after the opera’s final curtain.

Wilson hasn’t been here for the current Butterfly revival (through February 19), which is not badly performed on the whole, but is no longer the deeply haunting stage masterwork of two years ago. A small boy – Nathan Cruz on the night I went, one of two brothers alternating in the role – busied himself amusingly on the stage, but he was merely cute and not at all moving. I found no fault with Patricia Racette and Marcus Haddock as the leads; they looked and sounded like every Mr. amp; Mrs. Pinkerton you’d expect in a major-league opera house. Margaret Thompson’s Suzuki is familiar coinage hereabouts; Vladimir Chernov’s Sharpless fulfilled his modest demands – well, modestly. The young Israeli conductor Dan Ettinger, impressive in last season’s Aida, continues to impress.

No, there were no musical faults, and dozens of big-time houses would not be ashamed asking $205 for this night of opera. But this production rests on the memory of something far finer: haunting to the eye and the dramatic sense, with lighting beautifully controlled (not contaminated, as it is now, with follow spots), a dramatic cast whose body movements mesh with what words and music are struggling to proclaim, the overall sense that even this maligned Puccini potboiler can be made to matter. It did then; it doesn’t, quite, now.

The Presentable Past .?.?.

Concerts at the Getty Center come nicely planned but burdened with a problem. It’s a fine idea to immerse yourself in a current exhibition and then, a few feet away, experience music related in time and impulse to what you’ve just seen. On a recent Saturday, there was the beguilement of a small room hung with the awesome lavishness of Titian: two military portraits in full Renaissance panoply and a Magdalene, plus a showcase of small engravings of similar splendor; one left short of breath. At the Harold M. Williams Auditorium down the way, the five members of the Hilliard Ensemble sang wonderful music of that exact time, all the parts of a Mass by Nicolas Gombert (1495-1560 or thereabouts) and works of near-contemporaries including one gorgeously complex motet by Josquin Desprez, who may have been Gombert’s teacher.

To hear is to adore. Gombert’s earmarks are a certain wildness, a complexity in the way his lines of counterpoint push against one another, that gives his music a kind of momentum different from the serenity of Josquin. And the problem at the Getty is that the Williams Auditorium, the only performing space, is not a concert hall at all but a dry lecture room that sucks the sound out of performers (unless they’re an amplified rock group). You could feel singers straining to get the sound out, especially the higher voices, and the result was not pleasant. The whole of the Gombert Mass, plus other works, is out on a new ECM disc by the Hilliards, and the sound of the group at ECM’s wonderful small church, Austria’s Propstei St. Gerold, is to the Getty sound as choirs of angels are to your local boiler factory.

At Westwood’s United Methodist, I heard most of Musica Angelica’s “Splendor of Venice” concert before dashing over (along with several of the players) to the Chamber Orchestra’s Mozart program I exulted over last week. Italy’s Rinaldo Alessandrini was the guest conductor, but it’s the orchestra’s regular conductor, Martin Haselböck, who deserves a low bow for reshaping this into the really fine Baroque orchestra it has always tried to be. Their program – you know, Locatelli, Vivaldi, Albinoni, the usual – came off with spirit and a sense of discovery and even, in a bloodletting Geminiani concerto, the message that this music isn’t all the same after all. Angelica is back on a one-concert-per-month basis; Mozart on February 24 and 26. If you’d written them off, as I had for a while, it’s time to write them back on.

Pierre Without Fear

Pierre Boulez made his first entry into local awareness with his Le Marteau Sans Maître, whose score he had under his arm when he first arrived here. Every local musician who survived that first performance – ask Bill Kraft, for one – has his own nightmare story about that Monday Evening Concert, March 1957. Robert Craft, who was supposed to conduct, gave up; Boulez came to the rescue and rehearsed for 10 days. The program also included electronic Stockhausen. “If this is music,” fumed the Times‘ Albert Goldberg, “it’s time to drop the H-bomb.”

Over the years, Le Marteau has subsisted as much on its bogeyman reputation as on its actual quality; this was the work in which the outlooks of the young (32) Boulez first crystallized into musical shape. Live performances remain rare. At the last Green Umbrella Concert, the Philharmonic’s young assistant conductor, Alexander Mickelthwate, led Le Marteau as what it now is: a contemporary work of great complexity, but also great beauty rising most of all from embedded melodic lines, sinuous and rapturous and no more threatening to the ear than beautiful, great music of any other time.

Once again there is an Anniversary; I have barely gotten through the 179 CDs of Philips’ 1991 compleat Mozart, a splendid highlight of the recording industry as it then flourished. Now there will be another Mozart torrent, even while word also arrives of serious-minded record stores, and labels, too, going out of business. Consider the alternative; a New Yorker cartoon, stuck on my fridge like a memento mori, shows a desert, bleak beyond imagining. The caption: “World without Mozart.”

We grant him a special place – “I hate classical music, except for Mozart, of course” – because of his uncanny take on the human condition and the ease with which this understanding comes through in the music. The great late operas prove this the most easily, but they are not alone. Listen, for starters, to the amazing display of human emotions and reactions in the 20 or so minutes of nonstop interaction that ends the second act of Figaro. The Count, with murder on his mind, thunders forth his menacing octaves; the Countess, quite honestly terrified, dithers in shivering roulades. Then the closet door opens to reveal not the expected philandering Cherubino but the blameless Susanna, and the stupefied Count is reduced to a monotone while the women giggle around him in triumph. On and on the scene proceeds: More people join in, more complex the music grows, with every line a separate, beautifully preserved personage. And while all this is happening, Mozart is also working within the classic framework that involves our listening process with the logic of key change, key return – the design that makes it all work.

Verdi’s operas are full of marvelous character depictions; Wagner’s Ring drew tears, even in those patched-together performances at Long Beach last week. But it is to Mozart that I turn for the sublime equilibrium of musical shape and the power to stir the emotions through the balance of harmony and design. The operas make this power the most accessible because of the words. But it is a power ingrained in Mozart’s music itself, almost from the start of his amazing if brief trajectory. One of the few honest episodes in the otherwise execrable Amadeus comes when Salieri overhears and eloquently describes the slow movement of the Serenade for 13 Winds (361 in Koechel’s chronological catalog of Mozart’s works) and is undone by mingled awe and jealousy. (“I was suddenly frightened. . . . It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God!”) If ever words have served to describe the process of falling in love with a piece of music, perhaps beyond reason, let it be these.

The Synthesis

You can undergo similar processes in the whole treasury of “wordless operas,” the dozen piano concertos from Mozart’s last years in Vienna, in which, time after time, the interplay between solo piano and orchestra becomes a serious, loving conversation on subject matter too subtle for words. Even more than the symphonies – and the violin concertos, which are works from youthful days – Mozart’s mature piano concertos represent a synthesis between his operatic language and his individualistic orchestral idiom in which the woodwinds of the orchestra take on almost human characteristics. This past weekend, Jeffrey Kahane and the L.A. Chamber Orchestra began their series of Mozart piano concertos, which will run into next year, and on that first concert, the last work – the G-major Concerto, K. 453 – has a slow movement that is a marvel among marvels in this regard. The orchestra proposes a small fragment of a theme; the piano responds with the theme ever so slightly varied; the tone gradually deepens, then lightens; and after eight or nine minutes we find that, unconsciously, we’ve moved to the edge of our seats – as if to connect with every word of a profound overheard discourse with words unspoken but clearly understood.

These marvelous works constitute by themselves a wide-ranging repertory of Mozartian dramatic devices. The March 12 program includes two works whose slow movements are almost too emotionally draining to coexist on a single evening: the C-major K. 467 and the A-major K. 488. The first of these contributed a slow movement to a very pretty if morose Swedish film romance under the name of Elvira Madigan, where it kept getting clipped off in midphrase by a director obviously tone-deaf. The A-major has a slow movement of similarly breath-stopping beauty, a melody for one finger, stark and simple. And on May 21 there is the great E-flat Concerto, K. 482, the most grandly orchestrated of the concertos, in which all kinds of strange and wonderful things happen in all three movements, including a conclusion to the slow movement that leaves you in a “What hit me?” state of mind.

Near the end of his life, Mozart discovered the music of Bach, from manuscripts in the libraries of Viennese collectors, and from his own discoveries on journeys to Bach’s churches in Leipzig. The possibilities of creating drama by ramming lines of counterpoint together in daring and novel ways impressed him deeply, and the parts of the Requiem that he actually completed can lead us to tantalizing speculation as to what his next works would have been, with mastery of contrapuntal devices even more firmly in hand. To me, the last of Mozart’s symphonies, the so-called “Jupiter,” is the real synthesis of his command over the complex musical textures that he gleaned from his contrapuntal explorations. Even before the famous finale, the working out in this exultant, extroverted work is uncommonly rich-textured – the wisps of string tone surrounding the themes in the slow movement, the brass punctuation in the minuet: Could classical orchestration have moved further than this deep, lustrous sonority? Then comes the finale, with its five-part melding of voices, a composer triumphantly staking out his conquest over the complexity of his art.

It didn’t end there, of course. After came the profound sublimity of the Clarinet Concerto and the endearing sublimity of The Magic Flute. And it doesn’t really end then, either. The next Mozart year comes in 2041; see you then.

If you raise a questioning eyebrow at the news that the Long Beach Opera is currently offering a reasonable likeness of Richard Wagner’s 18-hour Ring of the Nibelung in something close to 10 hours, that can only mean that you don’t know Long Beach’s not-so-little opera-company-that-could (and does) and its infinite capacity for inflicting creative mayhem upon the jewels of the repertory and for making it all (like this sentence) work out at the end. And if you hustle down to Long Beach’s Center Theater – a welcoming performing space even when empty but far better this very weekend for the second of the company’s two Ring-arounds – you can verify all this for yourself.

To be sure, the version at hand, created by Jonathan Dove for Britain’s Birmingham Opera and also currently in the repertory of Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, reduced both in time scale and in orchestration, takes a few tucks in Wagnerian holy writ that will surely send ardent apostles of the Bard of Bayreuth – a stiff-chinned lot at best – up walls. Conversational tidbits gleaned during intermissions at Long Beach last weekend were studded with revolutionary rumbles of the sort that might have landed the Master himself on proscribed lists in his day. Those unhappy souls will find their surcease locally next fall from – of all unexpected sources – Russia’s Kirov, whose Costa Mesa Ring promises to be longer and surely louder.

I, too, await this benefice with mind, heart and rump at the ready, as I have many such experiences in the past. Meanwhile, I found little difficulty in identifying this 10-hour squeezed-together two-day (instead of the usual five) “Ringlet” as an authentic Wagnerian experience, at times an exhilarating one, and seldom below competence: pure Long Beach, in other words. Credit, above all, falls to Andreas Mitisek, who in his years with the company – first as chief conductor and now as artistic director – has grasped the founding ideals of Michael Milenski and advanced them as if in a single breath. With an orchestra of a mere 25, mostly young, and placed in the theater behind the action so that eye contact between conductor and actors was impossible, Mitisek was still able somehow to mold a reasonably cohesive performance, one in which – the Gods’ entry into Valhalla, for one instance – you could almost imagine an authentic Wagnerian sonority. No, it wasn’t Bayreuth, and it wasn’t even the Met or Seattle, but I have the feeling that those fussbudget, dyed-in-the-dirndl Wagnerians were really struggling to have as rotten a time as they were proclaiming in the Long Beach intermissions last weekend.

Jonathan Eaton managed the stage action, in a single area around a ring-shaped structure set off with Danila Korogodsky’s gadgetry, including standing headless statuary of various sizes and forms and a huge suspended ball stuck with skulls on spikes that stood for the Rhine’s gold but reminded me more of those cheese-ball hors d’oeuvres at fancy parties. Stage movement was mostly of the lurch-’n'-clutch school; success with the elegant complexities of Andrew Porter’s English text was varied.

I did, however, hear some excellent singing, by a few old friends and a number of new ones. Among the former was the tenor Gary Lehman, who sang the ardent Siegmund with a fine thread of the tragic; he had been the substitute Parsifal with the L.A. Opera last fall. John Duykers, one of our great character singers, was the Mime in Siegfried, making me regret that the role had been cut from Rhinegold. The Perry brothers, Eugene and Herbert, whom everybody remembers from the Peter Sellars video of Don Giovanni set in Harlem, sang the brothers Fasolt and Fafner in Rhinegold, and Herbert came back to do the Fafner in Siegfried. Among singers new to me I found particular pleasure in Suzan Hanson, who returned to life after 20 years asleep as the Brünnhilde in Siegfried and bounced and cavorted (with Dan Snyder as a cavorting Boy Scout Siegfried) like the lady in the sleeping-pill ads: a new tack on Brünnhilde and a delightful one. (She sobered up properly in the final Twilight of the Gods.)

Yes, cuts are cuts. And there are good reasons to raise eyebrows, as I am wont to do, at the kind of damage done to accepted masterpieces that this Ring treatment represents. One slash I found truly unacceptable: the murder of Siegfried that took place without the motivation of the preceding music in which the hero’s memory had begun to return, leading to the Funeral March, which everybody knows and loves, but which was chopped in half. I recognized many of the cuts, but I also recognized the music around them as authentic Wagner and authentically beautiful, and there were times when that was enough. Ten hours with Wagner’s Ring is no small strudel.

Keepers of the Flame

A questioning eyebrow at the most recent Monday Evening Concert, confronted with the news of the series’ approaching final flicker, might well question; the program by XTET, the intelligence in its choices and the strengths in its execution were close to anybody’s ideal as to what constitutes a perfect evening of new-music presentation. Word, furthermore, had gotten around; the crowd was large and enthusiastic. What kind of managerial fool puts such enterprise to rest?

Yet the County Museum management seemed bent on playing the fool, or at least on sabotaging the event. The sound system – which, as any fool will tell you, is crucial to any new-music event – was left untended; there were no stagehands to assist in the considerable between-numbers rearrangement; the program might have worked just as well out on the sidewalk. With the growing attention afforded our city for its cultural growth (as in last Sunday’s New York Times music section), you’d almost think that LACMA was out to bring public disgrace upon itself on purpose.

The program began with a whimsical reminder of better times, a Stravinsky song that had had its world premiere at a Monday Evening Concert way back when. The big new works were by local composer Tom Flaherty – an exceptionally appealing duo for cello and marimba – and a Passion-inspired ensemble work by the East Coast’s Christopher Rouse. XTET, one of our truly significant freelance ensembles, whose regular members include the treasurable singer Daisietta Kim and the sturdy cellist Roger Lebow, has been performing new music at LACMA for 20 years. With a couple of misguided pen strokes, it is about to become homeless.

Three years ago I wrote under the spell of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin, whose American premiere I had attended at the Santa Fe Opera. The recording that was promised at the time has now materialized, a Deutsche Grammophon DVD, identical to the Santa Fe production (which had come originally from Paris’ Théâtre du Châtelet) except that the conductor is now Esa-Pekka Salonen, a longtime friend of and fellow student with Saariaho in their native Finland. We heard some music from the opera a year ago, when Salonen preceded one of the acts of the so-called “Tristan Project” with a suite of excerpts, a wise move since both operas in their way breathe similar sorrows and undergo similar pain. L’Amour de Loin is a work of extraordinary power and beauty. Hear it, if you will, remembering the Metropolitan Opera’s recent broadcast of the workaday exemplar of what passes for innovative, contemporary opera in some circles these days – Tobias Picker’s drab note-spinning around Dreiser’s An American Tragedy- and it may restore your hope that, somewhere on the planet, opera does, indeed, survive. It is a work that, furthermore, restores the lyric stage to the level of myth and mystery, of appeal to an audience to lose itself in timeless imagery – not just the reworking of some popular movie scenario. It is, in other words, a genuine opera.

The text, by the Paris-based Arab writer Amin Maalouf, is drawn from the medieval account of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, the Countess Clémence whom he worships from afar for her purity of heart and body, and the Pilgrim who crosses the Mediterranean to carry messages to the separated lovers. At the end they are united in transfiguring death. Peter Sellars’ evocative production fills the stage with water, not only to signify the gulf separating the lovers, but to cast a rippling shimmer that gorgeously reflects Saariaho’s deep, dark, achingly beautiful music – its orchestra wondrously enhanced by subtly interspersed electronics. Dawn Upshaw’s final ironic outburst, as the dead Jaufré (Gerald Finley, San Francisco’s recent Oppenheimer) lies in her arms, is, simply put, the stuff of sublime operatic drama.

Try This on Your iPod

I’ve had to add new shelves for my operatic DVDs. While classical recordings dwindle, or self-feed on repackaged reissues, the flood of video operas continues unabated and, for the most part, rewarding. I can remember when experiencing just the sounds of Wagner’s Ring at home meant piecing together several albums of excerpts with varied casts and agonizing omissions. Now my shelves bend under the weight of five complete videos of the cycle. One of these, from the Metropolitan, follows Wagner’s stage rubrics more or less literally: the sword in the tree, Brünnhilde the same soprano awakened on her rocks as when she was put to sleep there 20 years before, the dragon Fafner an honest-to-Wotan fire-breather and not just some hydroelectric monstrosity on the banks of the Rhine. The others, however, take all kinds of staging liberties, while offering plenty of proof that the world these days is well populated with good-to-excellent Wagnerian singers. Instead of being starved for the sound of a single proper Wagnerian performance on your home Victrola, in other words, you had damn well better be prepared to wrestle with the luxury of owning all five.

An opera date at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion can run you $410 these nights, tickets alone. Far be it from me to shoo you off the box-office line, but consider what else $410 can land you, including – since we’re still in the season of list-making – 10 marvelous operatic DVDs, Wagner aside, that can get you a lot closer to excellent performances than connections at the Chandler box office ever could. That’ll leave you something over for dinner – not at Patina maybe, but too much of that stuff isn’t good for you.

Let’s proceed chronologically. The fascinating Pierre Audi production of Monteverdi’s Return of Ulysses that played here back in the Peter Hemmings days is available now, with some of the cuts restored, on a two-disc Opus Arte set, again conducted by Glen Wilson. Move on then to my favorite among half a dozen Don Giovannis: Riccardo Muti conducting on Opus Arte, with Thomas Allen as Mozart’s incurable rake and Ann Murray as the tragic, put-upon Elvira. Also on Opus Arte: a spectacular containment of Berlioz’s Les Troyens from Paris’ Châtelet, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting his properly named Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and our own Susan Graham as Dido.

Achim Freyer is remembered here better for his marvelous staging of the Berlioz Faust than for his fussed-with Bach Mass; one of his stage masterworks was his production of Weber’s Der Freischütz as a real Germanic folktale, and a Kultur DVD has nicely captured a Stuttgart performance conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. For Carmen there is an interesting choice: two performances with Plácido Domingo’s prime Don José. On TDK there’s a Franco Zeffirelli staging, quite old (1978) but conducted by the legendary Carlos Kleiber; the other, on TriStar, is the Francesco Rosi movie, with Julia Migenes-Johnson. You really need both; hell, they’re only one disc each. For The Barber of Seville only one choice is possible: Cecilia Bartoli, on ArtHaus, in a shameless flirtation with her cast, with Rossini’s music and with us all.

For any composer named Strauss, again only one choice is possible. Something about Kleiber’s presence in the pit becomes an irradiating force that can reach out to his orchestra, to his singers and to the audience. I was able to feel it during my one in-person experience, and much of that presence lingers as captured on video; I don’t want to try to explain it further than that. Anyhow, there are Deutsche Grammophon DVDs of Die Fledermaus and two performances of Der Rosenkavalier that somehow under Kleiber’s leadership become transformed into the excelsis of wise, all-knowing, human comedy. If people really knew how to immerse themselves in any or all of these miraculous events, the makers of Prozac would suddenly recognize their product as superfluous.

For Verdi, I can let myself be bowled over by the sheer force of Jon Vickers’ Otello (on DG, with Herbert von Karajan conducting) and try not to notice the lousy lip-synching. Bryn Terfel’s larger-than-life Falstaff (from the recent Covent Garden production) on BBC is the one performance I’ve seen on video that might persuade me to look into one of those oversize HDTV jobs. On the other hand, I hear that the 2-inch pictures on those new TV iPods are pretty good, too.

The Philharmonic has had the admirable idea, for the last couple of years, of
inviting some of the more interesting guest artists to tarry in town for more
than the usual one-week stint, to display a broader range of their interests than
just a single concerto. Last year’s “on location” visitor was
Emanuel Ax; this year, Leif Ove Andsnes took part in four different programs (nine
concerts in all) and departed a respected, valued and well-known friend. He returns
in May in yet another kind of program, as participant in a Lieder recital with
Ian Bostridge.

At 35, handsome and plain-mannered on the stage, Andsnes seems phenomenally right
for his time and for ours. He has followed the proper paths, won the right competitions,
paid his dues with the apposite number of Grieg Concerto performances to honor
his Norwegian ancestry, recorded the requisite Rach 3. In his first concert here,
he played Mozart – the G-minor Piano Quartet and the Piano-Wind Quintet
- with Philharmonic members at one of the Chamber Music Society programs,
and it was all very correct and well-balanced, if somewhat dry. In his final concert,
he again played Mozart, the E-flat Piano Concerto (K. 449), the first of the series
composed for Vienna; this time he, Esa-Pekka Salonen and a small Philharmonic
contingent joined in exploring the sheer delights of a work too often undervalued:
whimsy, surprise and, in the slow movement, melody to charm the senses -
nearly half an hour of wise, airborne music making.

Turning to music of our own time, Andsnes accomplished some eloquent pleading
on behalf of two major, unalike masters: Hungary’s quixotic, secretive Gyouml;rgy
Kurtág, whose thoughts unwind in lapidary nuggets of often little more
than a breath’s duration, and the supremely rational Marc-André Dalbavie
of France, who works in grand designs subtle but clear. At a Green Umbrella event,
there was music of both – a night of spine-tingling discoveries. At the
start came a clutch of Kurtág’s “Game” pieces for solo
piano, some of less than a minute’s duration, small, flashing, uncut gemstones
to dazzle eye and ear at once. At the end, there was the Tactus of Dalbavie, music
for nine instruments with the piano of Andsnes serving as a rhetorical pivot.
This I found even more extraordinary, a work that seemed to balance major dramatic
material with a remarkable clarity of organization that made the geography of
the music clear and involving at every point. Not much strong new music these
days treats its listeners with that degree of respect. Dalbavie – whom I
know also from a disc on the Naiuml;ve label with a big Violin Concerto and a
piece rightly titled Color – is someone eminently worth our attention.
Andsnes performs his Piano Concerto in Chicago sometime next year.

Anyhow, the Umbrella concert had other small pleasures along the way, including
a madcap piece by Kurtág with toy trumpets and harmonicas deployed through
the hall. Andsnes did, of course, get to play the Grieg Concerto during his time
here – at the end of the “Northern” program I wrote about last
week – and he played it with all the notes in place. That concert began
with Salonen conducting Sibelius’ Finlandia. To every man his albatross.

88 x 2

Piotr Anderszewski began his Disney Hall recital (the night following Andsnes’
departure) with Mozart (the C-minor pairing of Fantasy and Sonata) and ended with
Bach (the D-minor English Suite): serious stuff, in other words, with performances
to match. I have missed previous appearances (and recordings) by this Polish-born
pianist of Hungarian-Polish parentage, which was a mistake; this was a terrific
recital. It was so, most of all, in the Bach. No two pairs of ears will ever agree
on piano Bach, and the sins committed in the matter are egregious and legion (see
below). Anderszewski’s performance was notable for its detail and its perspective.
It was not a piano trying to be any kind of older instrument, and it was not a
piano taking off on old musical patterns to indulge in a virtuoso spree (see below).
It was a re-creation of superb musical designs whose light and shade had possessed
a certain integrity on its original instrument, but which can be reconstituted
- with a new outlay of integrity – on another.

In this great work, perhaps the most complex of all the English Suites, the splendid
young (36) pianist had found the way to preserve the power of that complexity.
I’ve been trying to remember hearing another performance of that suite on
a modern piano in which I was left so free to concentrate on Bach and less on
its performer – Glenn Gould or Edwin Fischer or that self-indulgent Tureck
woman or whoever; I don’t think I can. The Mozart pairing also drew a big,
thunderous performance – which this music can stand. The set of Szymanowski’s
Métopes – three gorgeous pieces full of the aura of Greek
ruins and reminiscences of Odysseus’ sea journey – moved me to acquire
that music, by that pianist, on the Virgin label.

The pianist Sergey Schepkin was a curious entry in this season’s Monday
Evening Concerts lineup, which is otherwise devoted to heroes from past seasons.
Who knew him, and from where? A program note identifying him as a laureate of
a Maestro Foundation Fellowship should have been a red flag, since Maestro is
a dilettante operation devoted to good food and innocuous music in a Santa Monica
private home. Schepkin was booked to LACMA on the strength of his promise to perform
a work of the Monday Evening Concerts’ late guiding spirit, Dorrance Stalvey,
but he then found the style of the music too difficult and backed down. We were
left, instead, with a short work by Sofia Gubaidulina not at all representative
of her style, and a performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations
that might raise words like disgraceful to new expressive heights: slippery
glissandos, drooling rubatos – the kind of virtuoso spree (see above) that
might appeal to Maestro’s dilettantes, but to nobody that you or I might
care to know. That he decided, properly, to honor all of Bach’s specified
repeats only intensified the annoyance.

Home, to Sir Simon Rattle, is the familiar musical repertory we most often
hear at concerts and on the radio, music from the 19th century or before, when
the tunes and the harmonies were friendly and set the mind at rest. Leaving
Home is the television series that Rattle and some friends dreamed up at
the BBC some years ago, to tell where music has gone since then. Produced in
1996, the series is now being released here on ArtHaus DVD and is, I think,
the best package of music-plus-information I have yet come across on any medium.
One of the “friends” who worked on the series, by the way, was the late Sue
Knussen, who later came here in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s education department.
Those of us who came to love her in her time here will, I think, recognize her
spirit and her remarkable level of imagination in these programs.

There are seven, each lasting 50 minutes. Rattle is at the center of each, with
his City of Birmingham Orchestra. His eyes skewer you to your seat as he talks
with spellbinding intensity about the directions that music has followed through
the 20th century. He traces the unfolding of rhythm, starting (as expected)
with the ecstatic outbursts in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring but moving
further afield toward Steve Reich’s purely rhythmic concoctions and the wild
mechanical creations of Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano rolls. On another episode
he steers us through the dark passions of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle,
the tortured elegies of the late Shostakovich. The great Polish composer Witold
Lutoslawski is on hand to join Rattle in an explanation of his ideas on chance
music, the technique of allowing performance choices to be decided in part by
the players themselves.

One program is all about American music, a topic I entrust to British speakers
only with extreme hesitation. This one is gorgeous, however, starting with Gershwin’s
Rhapsody through the lithe curve of pianist Wayne Marshall’s playing,
and continuing on with a splendid collage of short works (Feldman, Carter, Ives,
Copland’s Appalachian Spring with Martha Graham’s first dancers, Cage,
and the smallest shard of West Side Story) set against New England autumnal
scenes of heartbreaking beauty. The whole 50 minutes becomes a tone poem about
American music, an achievement in itself.

The marvel of these programs – the three that have been released so far (by
Naxos) and the four on the way – is their extraordinary success in reaching
a level of seriousness and importance that is informative, valuable and totally
free from condescension. This is a rare happenstance. People my age were supposed
to go all weepy at the reissue, several months ago, of a large box of Leonard
Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, and those discs are
supposed to rekindle all the first things we ever learned about music, on top
of which all our future artistic wisdom has been erected. I respectfully bow
out; these programs are riddled with misinformation, glibly delivered and intended
to establish points about musical history or sonata form or what-have-you that
are simply wrong. For all the famous Lenny charm, a quality arguable at best,
I find these programs next to unwatchable. Thirty-eight years separate the first
of the Lenny series from these excellent essays by Simon Rattle and his musical
forces. Let that stand, then, as a measure of civilization’s advance in those
years.

Words, Words

What makes it great? asks Rob Kapilow about Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony,
but he leaves the question, alas, unanswered. Composer, pianist, lecturer, former
student (at 19) of the legendary Nadia Boulanger, the first-ever licensee granted
access to the words of Dr. Seuss, leader of the “What Makes It Great Players,”
Kapilow has somehow not crossed my path up to now, although I understand that
he sets up shop at the Cerritos Center now and then. His “What Makes It Great”
number on Mozart’s Symphony, issued on Vanguard’s “Everyman” Classics, is at
hand. On it he talks his way through selected passages of the “Jupiter” Symphony.
Once in a while he will identify a previously mentioned theme as “bub-bub-bup,”
so that we will know what he’s referring to. About halfway through the first
movement, just before the first appearance of one of the juiciest themes, he
gives up and moves on to the second movement. That strikes me as strange. Maybe
there wasn’t room on the disc for discussion of the whole symphony, although
the theme he leaves out is one of the things that makes the “Jupiter” Symphony
great, or so it seems to me. The point is: Discs are cheap and easy to make,
and you don’t need to have much going for you nowadays to turn out lousy product
like this. (The actual performance of the “Jupiter” on the disc is a Vanguard
recording first issued in 1960.) I understand that quite a few people buy tickets
to Rob Kapilow’s lectures, and that makes me wonder what makes him great.

You don’t need the 29 volumes of the latest Grove’s Dictionary, and you
can probably squeak by without the six volumes of the New Oxford History
of Western Music. But everybody feels kindly toward penguins these days,
and the Penguin Companion to Classical Music is by some distance the
best single-volume reference I have ever encountered. Paul Griffiths is its

In last week’s concert, which paired the final work in each series – the harrowing death processionals of the Quartet No. 15, which unfurl in 35 minutes of near silence, and the grinning death masks of the Symphony No. 15, which usher out the composer’s last musical breaths in music of almost indescribable desolation – the match was exact and shattering. The marvelous reading of the Quartet, by orchestra members Bing Wang, Varty Manouelian, Meredith Snow and Peter Stumpf, was somewhat undermined by the sound of latecomers tromping over Disney Hall’s resonant floors; their performance will be repeated under proper concert conditions on November 29. The Symphony was flung forth under the leadership of guest conductor Andrey Boreyko, young, flamboyant chief conductor of orchestras at Hamburg and Bern, obviously headed topward.

What are we to make of this final symphony, with its strange baggage of trivial references and percussive effects from a battery of toys, nose to nose with dire Wagnerisms and those final nihilistic pages? Solomon Volkov, in his now-discredited “memoir,” has Shostakovich talking of a 15th Symphony based on Chekhov; that, we know, didn’t happen. The symphony dates from times of poor health; some of it must be a final sweeping-out of very old memories, some from childhood. However strange these digressions – most memorable, of course, the references to Rossini’s William Tell – the symphony in proper hands becomes a work of mounting power. Kurt Sanderling’s performances, here in 1988, revealed what the work was all about. Young Boreyko, I think, has captured some of that insight. Against dietitian’s orders, I remained to the concert’s end, and allowed myself to be captivated by his intense and totally thrilling unwinding of Tchaikovsky’s high-carb Romeo and Juliet. It’s nothing but lettuce and water for me now for a week.

Boreyko is also the conductor on the latest release in ECM’s ongoing service to the endlessly varied and unpredictable body of music by Arvo Pärt. Lamentate is, for once, a large-scale work for piano and orchestra – well, actually not so large-scale, since it breaks down into 10 movements, many lasting little over a minute. The inspiration is Marsyas, the imposing sculpture created by Anish Kapoor at London’s Tate Modern, which has inspired, says Pärt, “a lamento not for the dead but for the living.” That is, indeed, the mood: quiet, penetrating, with the kind of stabbing, poignant harmony you may best know from such works as Fratres. Alexei Lubimov is the pianist; both he and the conductor have mastered the composer’s unique art of causing time to stop.

Truth, Beauty, Fantasy
I don’t mean to sound obsessed with the Santa Monica concert series known as Jacaranda. (We are just good friends.) It’s just that its concerts have generally been so fine, its programs so adventuresome, the audience growth – in the handsome, small and comfortable First Presbyterian Church – has been so encouraging, and I wonder why in three years the L.A. Times has chosen to review only two of its programs.

Saturday’s program was all Schubert, including two works from his last year – the Trio in E flat and the F-minor Fantasy for piano duet – whose magnificence everybody takes on faith but that rarely turn up in live performance. Most gorgeously accoutered of all music’s elephants, the Trio crashes headlong through outer space, fearlessly chasing its own tail, endlessly and arrogantly reiterating its blustering key changes, which under some star-borne momentum actually seem to intensify in momentum and ecstasy. Jacaranda’s resident players – violinist Sarah Thornblade, cellist Tim Loo and, need one add, pianist Gloria Cheng – played as if delighted to imbibe the music’s dangerous brew. By mid-finale, by the forty-’leventh mad Schubertian hurtle from E flat to C flat, it seemed as if all willing souls in that enchanted space “at the edge of Santa Monica” were sharing the same spell, and happy to be there.

The Fantasy, that troubled outcry that intrepid pianists (including myself in braver times) attempt at home but rarely get to hear alive in concert, stands up to the Trio as an exact opposite: terse and stern, melting only in the magical moment when the melancholy F-minor theme dissolves into a momentary wisp of F major. It was that work of Schubert, above all others, that first made me aware – as a Berkeley grad student shopping for a thesis topic – of his scope and depth. As Gloria Cheng and Steven Vanhauwaert performed it last Saturday, my own 60 years with Schubert passed by most agreeably. (We were just good friends.)

More Schubert ended the program, with utter delight: four of his choral pieces, quite nicely sung by 32 members of the Cal State Fullerton Men’s Chorus. Two of them were short and familiar, but two were special. One was Nachthelle, an ecstatic nocturne for high tenor (Shawn Thuris) and voices; the other, Nachtgesangim Walde, perched on a Wagnerian threshold, set a long, woodsy text for voices and, up in the organ loft, a quartet of French horns. Talk about your magic!?

Schiff began his program with one of the 12 Symphonies for String Orchestra
that the very young Felix Mendelssohn composed as muscle-stretching exercises.
Some of these juvenile pieces, in fact, turned out to be quite handsome, grown-up
compositions, and there are recordings to bear this out. Schiff conducted one
of the shorter of these works, No. 10 in B minor, a slow preamble leading to
a dark, beautifully formed allegro – a real discovery and, as it happened,
by some distance the best music on the program. Then came music for piano and
orchestra by Robert Schumann, not the Concerto (which I’m sure Schiff plays
marvelously) but an unfamiliar one-movement piece, the Introduction and Allegro
Appassionato. It begins like Schumann at his most romantic: rippling piano
arpeggios and a moonstruck horn solo; then it turns dramatic. It struggles ardently,
but also seems at times to self-strangle on its own gesticulations – as
if to prove to us why it doesn’t get performed very often. Still, it was
worth the hearing this once. Then, to clear the air, there came the better-known
D-major Piano Concerto of Haydn, an agreeable piece that lives on its composer’s
name without having anything much to say on its own.

More Schumann ended the concert – the “Spring” Symphony, amiable,
sometimes downright jovial (with even a triangle added to the percussion contingent,
to underscore the jollity), but with its prettiest moments hopelessly thickened
by Schumann’s orchestral ineptitude and, thus, beyond repair. Of Schumann’s
four symphonies, I find this the one with the most attractive ideas and the
clumsiest manner of setting them forth: melodic lines ruined by excessive doubling,
solo winds reduced to squalls. It makes you (or me, anyhow) want to get down
there and rescore the piece for toy instruments, or perhaps kazoo and harpsichord.
Under Schiff’s fond leadership, the music huffed and burbled nobly and
bravely along its uphill path. All that love, and the cause was lost nonetheless.
It always is.

True Brits
The sound of kazoo did not figure on last week’s superb program at Disney
by Andrew Manze and his English Concert, but harpsichord surely did – along
with theorbo and other baroque strings. Manze, who has taken over from Trevor
Pinnock as head of the “Concert” (as in “Consort,” and kindly
spare me explaining these fine points of archaic nomenclature), stands for a
new and free spirit in early-music performance, dashing and at times delightfully
unruly. A splendid pile of discs on Harmonia Mundi bears witness to his good
works. Heinrich Biber, violin virtuoso and composer from the generation before
J.S. Bach, is the new Baroque aficionados’ hero. This concert began with
five extensive Biber movements, wildly virtuosic, harmonically all over the
place. It went on to music by the better-known Biber contemporary Johann Pachelbel
- not the much-overused Canon but a ravishing Suite in minor keys. (Trivia
note: I’ll bet you didn’t know, and cannot be made to care, that Johann
had a son, Charles Pachelbel, who gave concerts in New York coffeehouses in
the 1730s and died in South Carolina.)

The result of all this passionate musical experimentation from the pre-Bach
decades, which also included a fascinating Purcell Fantasia with harmonies off
the walls, floor and ceiling, was to make the evening’s later, more familiar
music – most of all a Vivaldi cello sonata, even though elegantly performed
by Alison McGillivray – sound square and predictable. If Andrew Manze and
his explorations have finally brought the Vivaldi fetish to its well-earned
sabbatical, our gratitude will have been justly earned. At the end there was
more familiar music but unfamiliarly transformed: Bach’s B-minor Suite
“deconstructed” to a putative early version, with the solo line taken
by violin instead of the later flute. Since the violinist was Manze himself,
and his cavorting in the final Badinerie was of a level of infectiousness to
make anyone want to dance along, no blame need be reckoned or ascribed.

At Royce Hall on Sunday another welcome visitor, Britain’s Harry Bicket,
fondly remembered here for his leadership of Handel’s Giulio Cesare
with the L.A. Opera, took over the L.A. Chamber Orchestra and succeeded, with
less than a week’s rehearsal, in transforming that excellent ensemble of
players on contemporary instruments into something you could easily take for
a gathering of early-music specialists. This was done, as first violinist Margaret
Batjer explained in the pre-concert talk, simply by guiding the players to rethink
matters of pressure on the bow, and to phrase groups of consecutive notes in
a sexier-than-usual manner. The result, in a program of 18th-century music of
no particular expressive depth but enormous charm – Mozart, C.P.E. Bach
and Rameau – was ravishing. For some, the highlight was David Shostac’s
show-stealing performance of the C.P.E. Bach D-minor Flute Concerto, a work
of many notes but slender content. For me, the revelation was a work I’ve
known all my life, Mozart’s little Serenata Notturna for strings
and timpani, so beautifully phrased under Bicket’s loving baton that I
could not shake the sense that the music was talking to me in person. That’s
Mozart for you, or can be.

Minimal
On the Saturday (10/22), at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church, the treasurable series known as “Jacaranda” began its third season with a whiz-bang program of American minimalism: John Adams’ Shaker Loops in the original version for eight players in a daredevil performance without the usual safety net of a conductor; Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments; a small and, perhaps, expendable Philip Glass organ solo; and – wonder of wonders – a suite concocted out of the “knee plays” from the Glass–Robert Wilson Einstein on the Beach, the most extensive hearing of anything from that legendary, elusive bedrock masterwork to make it to these shores ever.

Imagine! Einstein on the Beach, finally here! We were doled out only 40 minutes out of 300, to be sure, and without the spaceship, the locomotive, the crazed dancers acting out the numerals, the recitation – 39 times repeated – about bathing caps and the Beach. Yet the sense of the work was somehow there, with Gail Eichenthal and Ken Page among the narrators to deliver the frenzied verbiage and with Jacaranda’s string players – Sara Parkins, Joel Pargman and Sarah Thornblade – to stand in for Dr. Einstein’s fiddling. Jacaranda’s heroic founders, master mover Patrick Scott and conductor-organist Mark Hilt, had had to move mountains to pry some of the work’s tattered manuscripts out of the publisher’s vaults. To their greater glory, this third season – seven imaginatively planned small-ensemble programs, each a connoisseur’s wet dream – began, as it deserved, with a capacity crowd. All-Schubert comes next, November 12: concert planning to die for.

Maximal
If the sense of the minimalist composers rests on a distancing of self from expression, the marvel of Osvaldo Golijov’s music, brought forward more clearly in every new major work, is a fascinating process of self-revelation of his own variegated heritage, gorgeously made clear in one work after another. Ayre – you could call it a 40-minute song cycle – compiles texts from Hispanic, Sephardic and Israeli sources with some words by Golijov himself. The passions are bitter, brutal and sardonic, often hidden behind a wash of angelic simplicity. All of this relates to Golijov’s own backgrounds – Eastern European, Israeli, Argentine, suburban Bostonian – and the enthusiasm with which he has allowed them to guide his pen. One further dimension is the extraordinary amalgam of his multifaceted expressive language with the artistic impulse of singer Dawn Upshaw, whose musical soul Golijov’s music has deepened and strengthened into one of the treasures of our time.

Upshaw’s performance of Ayre has just been released on an essential Deutsche Grammophon disc, along with Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs, a similar enterprise of a generation ago. Her singing of the Golijov at Disney Hall (10/21) had the same vocal magic; alas, the participating instrumental ensemble did not quite. Instead of the rhapsodic mania of klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer on the disc (from the ensemble Andalucian Dogs), there was the merely polite work of Michael J. Maccaferri and his colleagues from Eighth Blackbird. Instead of the marvelous Berio suite on the disc, there was more of the Blackbird repertory, a gooey conceit by a certain Derek Bermel, who is mostly memorable as an intrusive presence on otherwise memorable concerts in these parts in previous years. In fairness, I must note that guitarist Gustavo Santaolalla, from the aforementioned Andalucian Dogs, was on hand to join with Upshaw in some solo songs and perform with the ensemble, but that marvelous disc has spoiled me.

More
It had been 25 years and counting since I last heard, and was deeply challenged by, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mantra; a couple of CalArts undergrads performed it then at one of the school’s new-music festivals. It was one of the events that convinced me that California and I deserved each other, and I moved out here a year later. At this season’s first “Piano Spheres” concert (10/4), with Vicki Ray and Liam Viney at the pianos and Shaun Naidoo managing what have now become the charming, old-fashioned electronics, the piece sounded like an old friend, a predictable and beautifully worked-out set of variations with, in the final few minutes, a virtuosic scramble that old Franz Liszt would have been proud to acknowledge. There are works of Stockhausen that, in my opinion, render him certifiable; Mantra isn’t of their number. It lasts a mere 60 minutes, and deserves a place in the repertory.

On 10/17, the embattled “Monday Evening Concerts” began what might be their last stand (and might not) with the kind of off-the-wall program that did full honor to the late Dorrance Stalvey’s imagination and drew a crowd large enough to honor his memory. The phenomenal Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio, whom Stalvey had first brought to our midst, was on hand with works of his own that seemed to resound from far deeper than the confines of his fabulous instrument. Joining him, with even more profound resonances, was the American cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, she of the double-bow techniques, who studied with, and spreads awareness of, the Italian visionary composer Giacinto Scelsi. From his works, suspended as they are between the boundaries of familiar harmonies and, thus, outside anyone else’s kind of music, Uitti has fashioned a Trilogy of throbbing, radiant colors that seems to probe endlessly into strange, dark regions and end up in realms of beauty beyond rational criticism (as you may have noticed). And this, says an art museum’s management, has no place within its walls.

Washington’s National Symphony came to town (10/19) for the first-ever transcontinental junket in its 75 years, and with our hometown boy Leonard Slatkin in charge and the First Symphony of John Corigliano as its tastiest offering. The work has earned both the composer and Slatkin their Grammys and their international huzzahs and, as Slatkin told the audience twice at Disney (at the pre-concert talk and again from the podium), has earned more performances in its 15 years than any major work in the past whatever. It is possible to believe all that, and still find the music shallow, contrived, agonizingly protracted and, at many junctures, ugly beyond recall. So turns the world.

Just that teasing first chirp from the superb woodwind contingent was news good enough to start off the Philharmonic’s 87th season, its third in Disney Concert Hall, the first of its “Beethoven Unbound” series. That sound – the tricky woodwind seventh chord that starts Beethoven’s First Symphony, delightfully, in the “wrong” harmony – hung suspended in Disney’s welcoming air, a magical presence. Do people bother to notice the elegance in Beethoven’s scoring for winds? That, to these ears, has been the special pleasure so far in the orchestra’s Beethoven project, which has now reached its midpoint and will resume sometime next spring. The premise – the lordly Nine Symphonies set against music of more recent vintage – is sound enough if you don’t ponder it too hard. Fortunately, management has stopped short of trying to find truly compatible companion works to “unbind” the masterworks of yore; of the three new works so far, only one struck me as truly worthy to share a program with even Beethoven’s most rudimentary symphonic venture.

Nobody will yet claim Esa-Pekka Salonen as the eloquent friend to Beethoven’s music he may someday ripen into. His performances to date, these past few weeks and in previous seasons, have been clear-headed, conscientious and, let’s say, noncommittal. He makes all the right moves. He seats the orchestra in the “classical” formation, with the second violins to his right, which nicely underlines the marvelous interplay among the strings. His orchestral balances favor the winds, and in these weeks there have been two splendid young tryout oboists who have turned Beethoven’s frequent oboe solos into pure stardust. Salonen’s attitude toward the composer’s stipulated repeats is, however, somewhat capricious; he honored the first-movement repeats in the First, Second and Fourth symphonies, not in the “Eroica” and “Pastoral”; in the Fourth, he omitted the repeat in the final movement, turning that wondrous whirlwind into a brusque breeze. It may take a few years’ mellowing before Salonen allows the brook in the “Pastoral” to flow unimpeded in its natural bed; this past weekend’s stream was the triumph of artificial plumbing. On the positive side, I could not ask for a more seductive 10 minutes in all of the Viennese repertory than the time spent with Salonen and his glorious woodwinds in the slow movement of No. 4.

Oliver Knussen’s Violin Concerto, which came between the “Pastoral” and No. 4 this past weekend and was delivered with infectious delirium by Leila Josefowicz, is, like its composer, a likable piece of work; in that respect, at least, it formed a fit companion for those particular Beethoven symphonies. Now and then it reaches into its British ancestry, with an occasional “hey nonny nonny” as if to flash its passport; most endearing, however, is a kind of all-over-the-place athleticism. Of the previous “unbinding” works – Henri Dutilleux’s The Shadows of Time and Magnus Lindberg’s Sculpture – my memories are so negative that fairness demands further hearings before I can honestly write.

Apropos honest writing, however… the pre-concert talks for the Beethoven series
have been delivered – nay, hurled – by UCLA’s Robert Winter, who in his day held
audiences spellbound with his three-dimensional musicological discourse but seems
of late to have fallen into a fantasyland of his own fashioning. At the session
on the “Eroica,” I wandered in as Dr. Winter was leading a group sing-along in
“The Star-Spangled Banner” to demonstrate three-quarter time. A few minutes later
he produced, or so he claimed, a recording of the “Eroica” by “my friend Artur
Nikisch,” who a) died in 1922 and b) never recorded the “Eroica.”

Meanwhile . . .

The new season has burst upon us. Six other events held my attention in the past few weeks; let’s see if I can squeeze them in.

L.A. Chamber Orchestra at Royce Hall (9/25): An opening blast from Mozart’s Titus overture confirmed the sheer vitality of Jeffrey Kahane’s marvelous small orchestra. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations was as good as the music needs, but boy! do that tired piece and I need a vacation from each other (after three hearings this summer).

EAR Unit at REDCAT (9/28): Our great innovative ensemble began business as usual at its new venue after being dropped at LACMA. In the usual gathering of self-indulgences and small-scale delights, Jacob Gotlib’s taut, nicely shaped contrapuntal exercise Filaments cast a particular glow in the latter category.

Terry Riley 70th Birthday Concert at Royce (10/1): I don’t often walk out of concerts early, but the lurid travesty perpetrated upon Terry’s In C by Japan’s Acid Mothers Temple (with, I’m told, Terry’s acquiescence) started a considerable exodus, in which I was not the first. Terry’s participation in his A Rainbow in Curved Air was the redeeming feature in an otherwise painful evening.

L.A. Master Chorale at Disney Hall (10/2): Francis Poulenc composed his Figure Humaine in France in 1943; ?the poetry, by the Resistance poet Paul Éluard, had been secretly circulated in occupied France during the war. The last of these choral settings is a passionate cry of pain: “On my notebook, on my desk, on each gust . . . I write your name!” In a fearsome crescendo, the rhythms and tempo continually interlocking and building over 21 stanzas, the poet struggles to write the name: LIBERTY!! And whatever you may think – whatever I have thought – about the frivolous beauty of Poulenc’s music, this final outcry on Grant Gershon’s program with his Master Chorale grabbed a capacity audience by the scruff of our collective neck and held us spellbound.

Cecilia Bartoli at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (10/10): Extraordinary, that with all the easy roads open to her to shine in the standard, even crossover, operatic fare, Bartoli has applied her awesome talent – a voice of melting, vibrant beauty, technique of pinpoint accuracy – to exploring unfamiliar, bygone Italian repertory of historical interest that nobody else seems to want to touch. Some of this material is, let’s face it, not all that great on its own. When Bartoli sang it in town the other night, with a splendid backup orchestra of early-music specialists, nobody seemed to notice.

The Juilliard Quartet at Disney Hall (10/11): The personnel has changed over the years, but the gold standard remains unalloyed; this is the quartet that knows how to prove that the late string quartets of Beethoven and the works of Elliott Carter are part of the same language. If anything, Carter Five in the Juilliard’s hands seemed to speak in gentler tones than Beethoven 131, but that was just part of the evening’s magic. Some grossly misinformed stringer in the Times has it that the Juilliard was once “brash.” That’s how a critic becomes an endangered species.

The year was 1982, and Joe Coulombe was explaining to me the philosophy behind his creation, the Trader Joe’s markets. We sat in the South Pasadena store that was the first Trader Joe’s. Shared musical passions had made us buddies back then, and Joe’s wife, Alice, would become a mover in the Los Angeles Opera League. Joe tied his marketing philosophy entirely to his grasp of demographics – all those young couples returning from European fellowships.

“I can give them a good bottle of wine for a buck,” Joe continued, “and a great cheese for two bucks a pound. In France there isn’t all this fuss about pricey, vintage wine. They just pour the stuff and drink it.”

When I arrived in Los Angeles 25 years ago, none of the expected treasure chest of new discoveries was more curious, more rewarding, than the small shack of an emporium up the block from my first rental in West L.A. It bore two names: “Pronto Market” and, just above in bolder, cruder capitals, “Trader Joe’s.” It was a food store of sorts, but those “sorts” demanded explanation. They still do. Think of food store as love object; there were people I met, in those first months in Los Angeles, who made career choices on the basis of Trader Joe’s, people who would accept or reject out-of-town job offers on the basis of whether the new location offered a T.J.’s branch nearby. It wasn’t as though access to T.J.’s offered the well-stocked life in those days; it’s somewhat better now. You couldn’t buy ordinary table salt there, only rough crystals from the Mediterranean; no paper towels or laundry soap; no Crest, but an organic toothpaste with bee propolis that didn’t taste like candy; marvelous fruit compotes from Belgium and an extraordinary range of wines priced in those days at 99 cents. No fresh-meat counter and no fresh produce – those amenities would come later. Somehow, the very selectivity of T.J.’s offerings created a fellowship among us early customers – we knew why we were there.

By the early 1960s,the San Diego–born Joseph Coulombe had bought in and
out of a drugstore chain and launched Pronto Markets, a chain of convenience stores
(“boozacola,” he called them) throughout Southern California.

“In 1971,” he recalls in a recent chat to relive old memories, “an article in Scientific American on the growing consumer market in herbal products and vitamin awareness brought about a conversion comparable to St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus, and I merged the Pronto merchandise into a line of health products, vitamins and more. Meanwhile the 7-Eleven markets had come to town from Dallas with their big bucks, and eventually Pronto got swallowed. I saw that coming, so I had opened the first Trader Joe’s, sort of on top of the Prontos, in 1967. At the same time that was happening, for several reasons, the whole idea of brand-name dominance had begun to disintegrate, so there we were at Trader Joe’s with our own brands and our own pricing and our own marketing philosophy based on our own understanding of the kind of people who come into our stores and the kind of people we hire to serve them.

“The real success of Trader Joe’s,” he continues, by now unstoppable, “is our ability to realize our demographic focus. Our ideal customer is overeducated and underpaid – music critics, for example. Another principle is that we have the highest-paid staff in the retail business. In my time we had almost no turnover. Nobody is just a cashier. Everybody works the whole store, at median income which, with benefits and bonuses, works out to $48,000.”

Coulombe sold his interest in Trader Joe’s in 1989 to a large European corporation, which has maintained the identity of the stores to a remarkable degree. Advances in packaging have made it possible to stock meats and produce that weren’t possible in 1982; there are also paper towels, for whatever reason. The chain has expanded to more than 200 stores in 19 states.

Two years ago, when I made a sentimental journey to Brookline, Massachusetts, I found a Trader Joe’s at Coolidge Corner, two blocks from the temple where I had been bar mitzvahed. The snow was packed in the parking lot; the trolley cars clanged along Beacon Street. Inside there was the sales help in Hawaiian shirts, the burritos and frozen soups in the rough wooden bins, the hand-lettered signs of my own T.J.’s back in West L.A.

“Sure,” Joe says, “Doug Rau manages our Eastern stores from New England to Minnesota. He had some questions about carrying Mexican food in Boston, or the Hawaiian shirts, but I told him not to worry, and I was right.”

Today I ask Joe, now 75, in his wonderfully light-spangled aerie high above
Pasadena’s Arroyo, about his frequent use of “I” and “we” as he talks on about
recent and current events at the chain of stores that honor his name.

“Don’t worry,” he assures me, “the old bastard is gone, dead, off the rolls. My
influence in the stores these days is absolute zero. Even so… I can’t help but
notice certain things that go a long way back. The turnover in CEOs that I hired
has been next to nil. Dan Bate of the Del Mar–and–Lake store in Pasadena lives
two blocks west from me – we just celebrated his 35th anniversary at the stores.
We talk all the time, but never about business. I spend a lot of spare time on
the boards of companies that don’t have a cutoff age limit: sporting-goods and
drugstore chains, mostly, and something called True Religion Jeans. I write a
wine column for several papers based around Pasadena. Oh yes, and I paint.”

He points proudly to tidily framed watercolors on the room’s brightly lit walls: vivid splotches, loving portraits and desert landscapes whose sharp outlines and colors Georgia O’Keeffe would not disown.

“A few years ago I found that my sight was becoming weak in one eye due to macular disintegration, so I decided to take up painting, both as a hobby and perhaps a therapy. That’s some of my work, on these walls. Not too bad, would you say?”

“Smog is the reason I don’t live in Los Angeles any more,” writes Nixon. “My children and grandchildren are now in the L.A. area; my husband wants me to move back. I could be busy with, maybe, other things besides what I do in New York, with more movies and TV. But I hate the smog.”

From time to time she receives offers of employment in Los Angeles. “I know, it always seems attached to a PR person who keeps implying that it is getting better and better, but that’s ridiculous as far as I’m concerned, and you may quote me.

“Smog affects the membranes of my throat,” she rants on. “It dries it out and makes everything hurt. I cough, and the sinuses get all messed up. Yes, I could take pills, I guess, to moisturize and deaden and coat. But it still hurts to sing when there’s smog in the air.”

There’s no question that the presence of particulate matter in the atmosphere, in whatever concentration, presents a singer – and especially a singer of classical music where exact realization of what the composer has set down on paper is of some importance – with a certain handicap. “Think of the body as a sound-producing mechanism: the generator, the vibrator and the resonator,” says David Alessi, a Beverly Hills physician with an ear-nose-throat specialty. “Any impurities that get into that chain of events along the way are going to clog the process, both the input and the output.”

The more singers you talk to, the more the impression emerges of Los Angeles as a prime booby trap for anyone who contemplates a serious vocal career. If the smog doesn’t get you, says Rhonda Dillon, who sang major roles and covered others for three years during the first run of Phantom of the Opera at the Ahmanson Theater downtown, the Santa Anas will. “Those dry winds got to me while I was still a vocal student at USC. Smog is one great enemy; the other is mucus. You choke on one, or you drown in the other. Early on, the most important thing you study is your own body.”

Natalie Limonick, the charming, smiling, white-haired woman emanating wisdom that you hear at nearly every vocal performance in the area, echoes her advice. Before your time and mine, she produced some of the best student opera performances in Southern California. “Even before you start to sing,” Limonick says, “you fortify yourself against the dangers by developing a strong speaking voice – like yours, for example. Better than anything you can take to medicate yourself – better than antihistamines, or cortisone, or Alkalol, or anything the allergists will prescribe – you work on yourself to fortify those membranes, and you have a chance against those impurities.”

No other hope? “Sure,” says David Alessi, “but it’s not very practical: maximum hydration. The more moisture you can create around yourself, the less you’ll be affected by outside impurities. That’s why people sing in the shower, after all. Surrounded by moisture, the human voice takes on a lot more resonance – men more than women. Equip our opera houses with a continual onstage water spray, and singers won’t have any problems with smog.”

Offenbach at the L.A. Opera in the hands of Garry Marshall . . . need I go on? Doom descends even before a note is sounded, when a smarmy character, gotten up to impersonate composer Jacques Offenbach in the flesh, pops up on the podium and tries to wrestle the baton away from conductor Emmanuel Villaume. Throughout the evening’s long and exasperating attempt to present Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein on the Chandler Pavilion’s uncomplaining stage, this obnoxious individual – played by the same Jason Graae who made such a pest of himself in the Merry Widow fiasco a few seasons back – skitters in and out of the production to inform us out front as to what’s going on (which we out front have been mostly, actually, trying to ignore).

I suppose I might as well give up on hope of experiencing Offenbach in the true colors of delight – the wit, the elegance, the sheer ravishment of the tenderness in a tune like the Duchess’ “Dites-lui.” Instead we have the raucous cutes of a Garry Marshall rewrite, secure in the assurance that somewhere along the line there will be a matzo joke and a joke about weapons of mass destruction. There was a time when Frederica von Stade could manage the curve of an Offenbach lyric line so as to seduce any beating heart in an audience of any size; that she could no longer do so with the music of the title character, at least on opening night, was the evening’s major sadness. (Where was Susan Graham when we needed her?)

What we got, therefore, was not Offenbach in any stylistic sense, but an oversized, overstaged laff riot with some well-conducted, gorgeous music in the background, some above-competent singing (Constance Hauman, Rod Gilfry, Paul Groves) and, overall, the sorry spectacle – not the first in L.A. Opera history – of a representative from an alien industry taking on an artistic product, not to create something innovative and interesting, but merely to insult.

The next night’s Pagliacci, first seen here in 1996, offered similar over- and underkill. The Franco Zeffirelli production seemingly involves the entire population of several Sicilian villages – although that doesn’t mitigate the fact that a whole evening of that one short opera here constitutes half of a double-bill anywhere else (at ticket prices that have now broken through the $200 mark). The Zeffirelli whoop-de-do has been restaged by Marco Gandini, still with TV sets and motorbikes mingled with antique theatrical flourishes to give a sense of no time and all time. The evening’s tragedy is the Canio of Roberto Alagna, which is utterly without tone. Nicola Luisotti’s orchestra screams its “Ridi, Pagliaccio” at the climactic moment, but over it Alagna’s pale, colorless tenor shows no emotion or motivation. His Mrs., Angela Gheorghiu, does her baby-doll Nedda quite prettily, and rises to some expression at the end, but in a lost cause.

Isolde Gets Her Man

Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is variously titled in popular parlance. It is most often spoken of simply as Tristan. Among dedicated discophiles, however, it is further identified by its female star: the “Flagstad Tristan” or, in more recent times, the “Nilsson Tristan.” Its identity might also relate to the podium; the Flagstad Tristan is no less the “Furtwängler Tristan,” with good cause. There is also a “Kleiber Tristan,” deservedly named for the remarkable performance that the legendary Carlos drew from a quite ordinary singing cast.

Now there is the much-anticipated “Domingo Tristan,” a three-CD set on EMI, which at least corrects the gender mismatch. The album notes also cite an eminently justifiable dedication to the memory of Kleiber. The image-makers have let it be rumored – although not yet officially confirmed – that this will be the last-ever operatic recording produced in a studio. Given the current state of classical recording, this is a little like announcing the end of the manufacture of dial telephones. Operatic recording, taken from live stage performances, rather than studio setup with the dramatic effects and distances artificially produced, has advanced to fair estate nowadays; if the record companies prefer to give over their Abbey Road studio time to sentimental ballad collections by the Alagnas or violin tidbits by the next doe-eyed subteen to come down the pike, theirs be the privilege.

Given access to technology that doesn’t yet exist, but may be upon us by the time these words see print, my desert-isle Tristan und Isolde would be an electronic montage assembled from individual excellences already on hand: conducted by Kleiber, with Furtwängler’s Philharmonia Orchestra playing with the eloquence it possessed in 1951. The Tristan would be Jon Vickers, with the heroism and the beauty of tone he brought to a recording led by Herbert von Karajan in the 1960s; the Isolde would, of course, be Furtwängler’s Kirsten Flagstad, still ardent and aflame in spirit in 1951 though vocally somewhat past her prime.

Lacking the means as yet to create that singular superperformance, I have no problem according shelf space to this new EMI version, to the surge and eloquence of the Royal Opera House Orchestra under Antonio Pappano, and to the abiding intelligence toward word meaning and phrase shape that has allowed the astonishing Plácido Domingo, at 63, to operate so freely and so movingly in a musical realm that he has, after all, only recently come to conquer. The Isolde is the Swedish soprano Nina Stemme, who has also taken on this killer role just recently. For now, I suppose, she will be thought of as Domingo‘s Isolde, but she is also Wagner’s: a singer of genuine power and personality, clearly embarked on a career out from anybody’s shadow. Mihoko Fujimura is the Brangaene, René Pape the King Marke; Olaf Bär manages a Kurvenal a shade less boring than anyone else you’ve ever heard in the role. The profligate casting even includes top-rank lyric tenors in walk-on roles: Ian Bostridge as the Shepherd and Rolando Villazón as the Sailor. Along with the three CDs of the complete Tristan comes a bonus, a DVD that contains the entire audio performance on – get this! – a single disc in surround sound which also shows the running text in German and a translation in your choice of English or French. O brave new gadgetry!

Gustav Mahler has some goddamn chutzpah. Envious of my general good feelings at the evening’s start, he rams a solo trumpet into my ear to kick off his Fifth Symphony. “These are my neuroses, my Weltkvetch,” he screams at me through the agency of a zillion-member symphony orchestra, “and you will pay attention or else.” On and on he rants: one movement very sad, another movement marked “with utmost vehemence” (and, boy, does he mean it!), a third movement that has the utter gall to chew on the same indigestible wad for a good – no, make that “bad” – 20 minutes. Comes then a moment’s relaxation, a sublime, quiet slow elegy, but it’s over almost before it begins. Then comes a ludicrous finale that transforms the melody from that divine slow movement into a ludicrous travesty of itself.

Basically, I resent Mahler’s right to assume my interest in his personal hang-ups, as he pins me to my seat and hammers an endless enumeration into my long-suffering eardrums. This just might be a minority report, of course, although I won’t swear to it. Long may I argue that 75 minutes of Mahlerian Weltschmerz might not be the most appropriate entertainment for a pleasure-seeking audience on a balmy night at the Hollywood Bowl. Yet there were 6,000-plus merrymakers last Tuesday night, applauding and cheering like a bunch of sozzled hedonists, happily anchored in the opposite opinion.

Sure, the Mahler Fifth has its champions. (Even more strange to relate, so do the Sixth and the Seventh.) It starts magnificently; its opening trumpet solo could waken the dead, and is probably meant to do just that; the ensuing drum beats are like rushes of blood. The tension soon dissipates; Symphonies Two and Three also begin that way, but hold on more firmly in a grip more icy. Number Five, to these ears, is more diffuse. An hour passes, then comes the one genuine marvel, the ethereal Adagietto like a vapor trail, so brief that we virtually hear it as a double take. But the grotesque finale profanes that one tender memory; you even wonder whether Mahler himself recognized the beauty of his quiet creation.

Under Leonard Slatkin, and with the Philharmonic in reasonably responsive condition, the Fifth came across with no major commitments, no egregious sins. I do mourn the passing of the portamento in Mahler performances, the swoop from note to note in his eloquent melodic string writing, notated in the composer’s own scores and preserved in old recordings by conductors familiar with the style – Bruno Walter’s performance of the Fifth with the New York Philharmonic and a treasurable performance by Willem Mengelberg of just the Adagietto.

Leonard Bernstein’s so-called Mahler revival in the 1960s involved a certain amount
of laundry work, and one of the results was a wholesale scrubbing-out of the old
performance styles. Most of all, portamento was banished as unclean, sentimental
— feh. This attitude merely betrayed an ignorance of this important aspect
of Mahler’s expressive principles and Mahler’s own carefully detailed means of
achieving them. (As I remember, Salonen’s per-formances and recording of the Fourth
Symphony do a better job than most in honoring Mahler’s markings.) Slatkin’s performance
of the Fifth the other night was a fair example of the contemporary-bloodless
approach: very clean, very nicely detailed, with not a moment’s appeal to the
tear ducts. There was a lot more meat to be carved, in fact, from Slatkin’s nicely
controlled reading of Ives’ Three Places in New England, which began the
program, with the multiple marching bands of General Putnam’s Revolutionary Camp
nicely set apart.

Slatkin Territory

Slatkin’s presence at the Bowl, in the newly created post of principal guest conductor for the summer seasons, continues a long family connection extending back to early sound-studio days and arousing memories of wonderful chamber-music performances as well. Start with Eleanor Aller, born to Russian immigrants in New York in 1917; her grand uncle, Modest Altschuler, headed an orchestra of Russian expatriates that gave first American performances of music by Scriabin and Mussorgsky and toured with the newly arrived Rachmaninoff. The Allers – all of them musicians – immigrated to California in 1933, on word (which proved true) of employment in the studios. There Eleanor met the St. Louis–born conductor Felix Slatkin; they were married in 1939, and gave birth to the first Hollywood String Quartet (half of it, anyhow) soon thereafter. They also gave birth to Leonard and to Fred, who has gone back to the old family name of Zlotkin. Fred Zlotkin is an active freelance cellist in New York; you can hear him in the pit at the New York State Theater, and on the latest Cyndi Lauper disc, among dozens of others. He sent me an old video of the Hollywood Quartet in action. Watching Eleanor Aller playing the eye game with her three colleagues tells you everything you need to know about chamber music.

World War II brought on several personnel changes in the original Quartet. The ensemble that came together in 1945 – Slatkin and Aller, with Paul Shure and Paul Robyn in the center positions – soon became recognized as one of the great quartets of the time, the more so for the rarity of its being entirely American-formed. During my student days in Berkeley, the Hollywood Quartet’s frequent visits were a major part of my own musical discoveries. A Sunday that began with a hike on Mount Tamalpais and ended with the Hollywoods (plus guests) performing Hindemith’s Third Quartet, the Schubert C–major Quintet and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is a memory I need very little chemical assistance in reliving.

The Hollywood String Quartet disbanded in 1959, leaving happy memories to folks of my generation and a fair number of recordings (on the Testament label – in mono, but so what?) to everybody else. They include my favorite of all versions of the Schubert Quintet (with the cellist Kurt Reher); performances of the last Beethoven Quartets so close to unsurpassable as never mind; and a disc of Kodály, Smetana and Dvorák Quartets that tells me, in a language beyond words, exactly what it means to be in love with music, and with the ability to bring it to life.

Armed with this splendid new information, I betook myself and my left insula to the all-Mozart program at the Hollywood Bowl last Tuesday, fully aware of the imminent peril to that part of my brain and the rest of my composure as well. Mozart’s (and my) old friend Sir Neville Marriner led the Philharmonic that night; the last work on the program was the Symphony No. 39. Before that had come the “Haffner” Symphony, the early (but astonishing for its time) E-flat Piano Concerto, K.271, nicely rattled off by Jonathan Biss, and a couple of concert arias yelled at by the young American soprano Marisol Montalvo. It was a poor night for audience behavior, and a worse one for Bowl restaurant caterers’ behavior – as my colleague Mark Swed noted far too amicably.

But it was Mozart 39 that redeemed the evening – came close, in fact, to making my entire summer worth the endurance. There is one particular spot in that lustrous work where I am sure to break out in goose bumps. It’s in the first movement. The low strings hold a sustained note, and the high strings meander around it. Clarinets, in heartbreaking harmony, ask a question, twice. The strings attempt an answer over a pizzicato. In perhaps a minute at a fairly leisurely tempo, we are asked to consider four, five, maybe six interlocked melodic propositions, every one of them gorgeous in a different way; only at the end of this truly amazing sequence is there time to draw a breath and sort them out. Now you know why Mozart specifies that the expositions of his first movements should be repeated. Realities at the Bowl, alas, apparently make this impractical. At least the beautifully spacious, congenial pacing of Sir Neville’s performance made this utterly marvelous symphony, the most richly orchestrated of all Mozart’s 41, come to life the first time around.

Anybody who loves Mozart at all must have a personal collection of goose-bump moments. If I tell you some of mine, it’s with the proviso that the list could change tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll ever stop waiting breathlessly, however, for the moment in The Magic Flute when Tamino and Papageno assault the Three Ladies with questions about finding Sarastro’s palace, and their answer comes with a miraculous change in the orchestra to winds and pizzicato, and the Three Genii appear overhead; it’s for moments like this that people build opera houses. I’ll never stop writing about the moment in the G-minor String Quintet when the change from B flat minor to B flat major is signaled by a high D from the first violin; to me that is the greatest single note in all music.

Then there’s that Sonata for Two Pianos, the one that some psychologists studied for its possible effect in raising students’ IQ scores. I think those findings have been fairly well debunked, which doesn’t come between the work and me in the slightest. There is a passage just before the end of the slow movement, a gradual shutdown of the melodic energy but with the most elegant pianistic decoration to speed the music on its way. More than goose bumps, that passage is the small gray Myrtle I no longer possess, rolling on her back in greeting to re-enact the ultimate act of love. In The Marriage of Figaro there is a similar moment: Susanna in the Act 3 Sextet, spinning out her slow, quiet cadenza over the massed joyousness of five other characters as – for the moment at least – her marriage to Figaro has come out from behind the clouds. And then there’s that . . .

And the Others, Too

For the Crucifixus of his B-minor Mass, J.S. Bach takes a lamenting movement from
an earlier cantata, unplugs the original German text (“Weinen, klagen…”) and
installs the Latin description of Christ’s crucifixion, ending with “sepultus
est” (“he was buried”). For those words, with the deep, dark resonance of the
middle syllable (“pul”) sung by basses, Bach gives the harmony a wrench, and this
is something you cannot hear (or I cannot and you should not) without the fuzz
between your shoulders going rigid. Is Bach trying to tell us something about
the emotional pull of the sudden modulation, nearly a century before Schubert
and the Romantics? I don’t know, but there is a particular song by Schubert, one
of the hundreds, that affects me in exactly the same way: the haunting, small
“Nacht und Träume,” a quiet, moonlit nocturne in which, again, the harmony just
suddenly drops – and so do we. And then you cannot leave Schubert without sharing
the emotional scars from his own last weeks on Earth: the tortured flicker that
ends the slow movement of the String Quintet, or the astonishing key changes midway
in the final Piano Sonata, when C sharp becomes C natural out of sheer defiance
and the music flames hot.

It’s the heat of defiance that reaches me the most profoundly in Beethoven’s music,
too: the trumpet that shrieks midway in the “Eroica”’s Funeral March, the horns
on their high E all the way through the Seventh Symphony, all four string players
in the bloodbath that is the Grosse Fuge. But there is one work of Beethoven
that raises goose bumps especially high, and I think something I wrote about it
five years ago belongs here.

“Beethoven’s first theme is its own kind of miracle. It crashes in on you, out of the mists of uncertainty, like the Titanic‘s iceberg, massive and gruff. Later, it splits apart in wondrous ways: now haunting and melancholy, now a horn solo like a distant benediction. Midway in the first movement, its fragments knock against one another and, with terrific energy, coalesce once more in a recapitulation both sardonic and triumphant. The interweave of counterpoints – close at hand, in the middle distance and afar – is staggering; time and again you have to remind yourself that all this incredible detail is the fashioning of a mortal totally and tragically deaf. At the movement’s end, Beethoven’s incomparable theme pulls itself once more out of a mumbling, eerie blackness and flings itself against us, against the gods.”

Well, I just checked out the first movement of the Beethoven Ninth against the left insula, and the goose bumps still work.

Even if he weren’t one of the finest performers on his chosen instrument anywhere in today’s musical world, Yo-Yo Ma would stand apart. Fame rests upon his shoulders as a benevolent aura. His recent appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, not so much at the head of his Silk Road Ensemble but in its midst, drew a sellout crowd of more than 17,000. He did not, that night, thrill the crowd – as he sometimes does – with a show of personal virtuosity in a cello concerto by Dvorák or Schumann, which he plays as well as anyone on Earth. He participated, instead, as a member of an ensemble performing interesting music in styles colored by influences from world sources – Asian, African, Eastern-European – in which he took brief solos on his cello or on other instruments of more exotic design. All evening, in other words, he functioned as one of many.

The more than 17,000 people who had shown their continued delight that night had come, from what I could glean from conversations around me, to spend the evening with the friend they had known for many years, from his appearances on Sesame Street or with Mr. Rogers. They knew their friend Yo-Yo because years ago he had shown them how it was possible to be a nice guy as well as a wonderful musician. Anyone contemplating a career in the performing arts – or in anything else, for that matter, for which becoming famous might be a helpful ingredient – would do well to study the example of Yo-Yo Ma.

Yo-Yo formed the Silk Road Ensemble at Tanglewood in 2000, an open-ended consortium of musicians from the various cultures along the famous old trade route between China and the West, with the intent of reviving past musical cultures or re-creating contemporary imitations of their stylistic outlines. The group first visited here, at Royce Hall, in 2002, and I found the concert “curiously unsatisfying, a smorgasbord of tidy but blandly spiced dishes.” Either I or the Ensemble – maybe both – have changed over three years because the concert at the Bowl last week was satisfying, and occasionally thrilling. There was a kind of eloquence in the seven, long-listed works, and even in the dazzling encores, in which echoes in a time warp – a cascade of fast plucked notes from Wu Man’s pipa, a virtuoso vocal cadenza by supersinger Ganbaatar Khongorzul, a mournful cantilena from Yo-Yo’s cello, or from an ancient cello-like instrument of similar shape – seemed to hang suspended in time, belonging to both past and present.

I don’t know where any of this is heading, this music that defies boundaries or
definition; must I? This was a concert of serious, very beautiful, sometimes extremely
exciting music, and perhaps that’s all the definition we need to restart the troubled
performing arts. Incidentally, in the same review from 2002 in which I deplored
the earlier version of Silk Road, I delivered something of a rave for Tan Dun’s
Water Passion, which had just come out on a Sony recording. Now I can’t
stand the work. Plus ça change…

Opera by Template

Within five days, September 15–19, 2003, the infamous mad monk Rasputin trod the stage in opera houses on both sides of the planet. In Los Angeles – as I am sure you’d prefer to forget – there was Deborah Drattell’s Nicholas and Alexandra with Plácido Domingo himself self-cast as the flamboyant charlatan. At the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, Matti Salminen took on the title role in Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Rasputin. That opera, recorded and televised at the world premiere, is now at hand on an Ondine DVD. You don’t need me to tell you which is the better of the two operas, but I can tell you by how much.

Rautavaara (born in 1928 and, by the way, in Finnish you have to pronounce every vowel separately, so leave yourself plenty of time) studied for a time in the U.S. with Copland, Persichetti and Sessions. He belongs to a group of Finnish neoromantics, all of them prolific and well supported at home, who have created a respectable native rep-ertory. Aulis Sallinen, whose Kullervo was per-formed here in 1992, is probably the best known.

There is nothing wrong with Rasputin; up against Drattell’s opera, you can take this as high praise. Everything that happens in the opera is exactly what you’d expect to happen. The orchestration is big, romantic and dark. Rasputin’s first long aria, in which he asserts his power and informs the assembled Russian royalty of how indispensable he intends to be to the continued health of the empire, is a marvelous showpiece, and Salminen dines on it most lavishly. (He’ll be the Gurnemanz in the L.A. Opera’s upcoming Parsifal.) Jorma Hynninen is Tsar Nicholas; Lilli Paasikivi is his Tsarina. Mikko Franck, who made his local debut last season at Disney Hall leading Shosta-kovich’s Twelfth Symphony, but took ill after one performance (wouldn’t you?), is the conductor.

Dark and handsome (I won’t bother you with any more vowels to chew on) in Helsinki’s marvelous new house, Rasputin strikes me altogether as the personification of an operatic dead end. No, perhaps “per-sonification” is wrong; come to think of it, somewhere behind the excellent work of the human cast and orchestra and the intelligence of the stage director and designers, the impeccable turning of some kind of operatic machine is faintly, but clearly, heard.

And suddenly the inferiority of Drattell’s opera doesn’t seem so bad. At least its incompetence was the work of human hands.

I may have the measurements slightly off here, but it seems to me that Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and the Hollywood Bowl are artworks of about the same size, and were actually made for one another. Both are eminently satisfying, with few demands on the thinking apparatus, to large groups of people (more than 6,000 last Thursday night). Both actually take on an enhanced luster when their proponents display small and forgivable human flaws. When Olga Kern joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic to dish out the work at the Bowl last week, she hit a couple of clinkers as early as in the famous introductory passage, and somehow I felt myself in the presence of a friend. My first-ever recording of the Concerto was by Artur Rubinstein (back when he spelled his first name without the “h”) on Victor M-180, and at the start of the last movement Rubinstein hits a great, gleaming clinker that will, forever, be embedded in my view of the work. (The recording is still available, on an RCA reissue; John Barbirolli conducts.) Any performance that fails to include that particular fistful of wrong notes is, for me, foredoomed. To that extent (but to no others) Ms. Kern’s performance was a letdown.

In truth, Ms. Kern – recent winner of the famous (did someone whisper “notorious”?) Van Cliburn Piano Competition down Texas way – played the bejesus out of Tchaikovsky’s lame-brained concoction, and the Philharmonic, under its bright young assistant conductor Alexander Mickelthwate, followed her along every misguided note of Tchaikovsky’s vulgar trajectory. Actually, the splendiferously endowed young Russian-born pianist, string bean–svelte and blond as if to challenge the sheen of Fort Knox’s gold, provided two performances of the concerto at once: one to manage the rise and fall of the music’s virtuosic ambitions, and another to justify the presence of the Bowl’s video screens, as few performances I have seen up in that Cahuenga Pass venue ever have. It would not surprise me to learn that she had carefully studied her repertory of facial expressions from the back pages of the publication you now hold; lucky for the riot police she didn’t include the phone numbers as well.

Filling out the program, and returning it to the realm of serious musical consideration, young (36) Mickelthwate took on the Berlioz Fantastique Symphony under handicaps not of his making. First was the venue. If ever a single work has demonstrated the acoustic marvels of the Disney Concert Hall it has been this, which Esa-Pekka Salonen has conducted in both seasons so far. Second, of course, was Salonen’s performance itself, a probing by a modern-day orchestral master of the extraordinary sound panorama in this one-of-a-kind creation from the past.

Up against these memories, and with some interesting new competition at the Bowl from squabbling coyotes up on the hill and gabbling newly hatched wildfowl somewhere high up in the stage mechanism, Mickelthwate’s performance, if not truly “fantastic,” was a good deal more than merely creditable. He makes friends with the audience in a manner pleasant and unstrained; as befits his German upbringing, once he reaches the podium he is all business. He has a strong, clear beat, and a stage presence agreeably free from choreography. I could have wished that he had taken the repeats in the first and last two movements; they actually give the work shape and logic, as the Salonen performances have proved. The second-movement Waltz did not quite dance, but the enchantment of the third-movement Pastoral was beautifully captured. Keep your eye on Mickelthwate; he has the goods. Next season he conducts in a couple of “Green Umbrella” concerts and a Christmas program, but he needs to be thrown a symphony or two.

Serendipity

The Bruman Concerts at UCLA, which I had only discovered two weeks ago, came to an end for this summer with the fine young Calder Quartet nearly filling the hall. Christopher Rouse’s Second Quartet was the tough new work: strong, shapely and quite eloquent. Rouse began his career with music in an aggressive, pin-’em-to-the-seat style that didn’t have much to tell me beyond sheer impact. This quartet is something different; I found its ending, a long, quiet chorale, exceptionally beautiful. The work dates from 1988; Rouse later transcribed it for string orchestra (Concerto per Corde) and it has been recorded in that form, but the chamber version also deserves circulation. Smetana’s E-minor Quartet (“From My Life”) ended the program: wonderful, robust music that used to be performed more often than it is today. The Calder guys have moved up quickly – with residencies currently at both the Colburn and Juilliard schools – and I suspect that they haven’t yet learned to relax into the fun of this kind of middle-European repertory. Neither the dancing nor, at the end, the dark tragedy of this bucolic masterpiece came completely alive on the stage at Korn Hall; the marvelous scenery and colors beyond the notes remained unexplored.

Downtown at California Plaza (next to MOCA) there are “Grand Performances” so-called,
a variorum of free musical entertainments set up in that charming watery environment
of fountains and lagoons just in from Grand Avenue. On Saturday night there was
the Mládí Chamber Orchestra, this time in full force. Through the wretched microphoning
and overwrought amplification, and in a locale directly under a much-used commercial
flight route, an outlay of imagination could still discern that this gathering
of local freelancers, which functions without a conductor and gives concerts in
several locales during the season, is an elegant and well-trained – and, therefore,
valuable – small orchestra. Saturday’s concert began with an early Haydn symphony
— No. 7, “Le Midi” – and moved on to the pallid charms of Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo”
Variations, with cellist Timothy Loo excellently maintaining the music’s modest
semblance of momentum. Following intermission came the gut-wrenching Chamber Symphony
of Shostakovich, music written in horror at the composer’s first view of war-bombed
Dresden. When I tell you that the ending of this wonderful work was allowed to
segue directly into recorded pop music to send the crowd home happy, you may ask
whether the management of this music series is worthy of trust to produce classical
music on Grand or any other avenue in town. So do I.

Every year around this time I start keeping a yellow pad close at hand, to jot down all the reasons why classical music at the Hollywood Bowl is a totally unworkable proposition. The list is long and sad; it should be familiar by now. Most of it dates back to Bernheimer days. Some items on the list seem to come and go. The concerts two weeks ago, for example, deluded me into believing that the sound engineers had beaten back the echo problem that had been so annoying last year. Not so; last week’s Beethoven program, with those quick, sharp sforzandos that stand out in Ludwig’s musical signature, restored that particular bugaboo in full glory. The Bowl endures, warts ‘n’ all.
But then there are the times when those warts impart to the joys (and perhaps even the sorrows) of Bowl-going a radiance of their own; you have to realize that there is nothing just like this cultural phenomenon anywhere else in the land, and that it is our great good fortune to have it among us. Take the aforementioned Beethoven program, an event that, though it promised modestly on paper, I still cannot get out of my ears in the actuality. To begin, the weather gods were all enthroned that night; it was one of those sublime, calm, 70-ish nights when the 6 o’clock news is full of Texas hurricanes and East Coast heat waves but the local air offers naught but benevolence. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, music that I have often found somewhat soft-spined and lacking in point of view in indoor concerts, a pretty but inactive piece more endurable than adorable, sounded on that night no less miracle-strewn than the surrounding air: smiling and caressing. The special marvel of Beethoven’s orchestral language in this particular work – the way, for example, that he bends his violin solos around the first bassoon in notable passages in all three movements – stood out like a newly fashioned stripe on an audible rainbow. The most magical of all its episodes – the hushed G-minor rhapsody in the first movement, when the violin soars heavenward with a newly fashioned variant of the main theme, accompanied far below with the timpani’s insistent throbbing of the movement’s principal rhythmic motif – was transformed that night into irresistible messages from some distant galaxy. And that power, friends, to convert the musically ordinary into the celestially extraordinary merely through the phenomenon of atmosphere, is reason enough to keep up attendance at the Hollywood Bowl.
Gil Shaham was the soloist, with Jeffrey Tate the evening’s conductor. Born in Illinois, raised in Israel, Shaham has earned most of his following so far through his service to the flashy, romantic side of the repertory. Moving on toward Beethoven seems, therefore, like a step upward. I heard his effort as honest, dedicated and intelligent – the foundation, in other words, of what may turn into an important statement on Beethoven’s quiet not-quite-masterwork, but not there yet.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony rounded out the program, with Tate observing all the composer’s specified repeats – a rarity at the Bowl. I found this a strong, beautifully shaped rendition, with special care lavished once again upon Beethoven’s remarkable wind scoring. I struggle somewhat to visualize the shape of the donkey’s ears through which the junior critic on the Times apparently heard the performance, with the quiet, melancholic allegretto turned into a “funeral march.”
My Fair Mládí

Musical pickings are sparse during the summer months, but rewards await the ardent serendipiter. Two days after the Bowl’s Beethoven, I happened upon an eminently satisfying chamber-music concert in a UCLA lecture hall, and was glad I did. The players were five members of Mládí, the ensemble whose wintertime programs in an old apartment building near Silver Lake I have also found reason to praise. The setting, Korn Convocation Hall at the Anderson School, is your basic drab lecture room, but the sound is warm and welcoming. There are five concerts every summer, endowed by and named after Henry J. Bruman, a UCLA professor who liked the idea of making music available, and admission is free.
The Bruman concerts are solid, interesting and challenging. Last week’s program consisted of four new or newish works for winds. One, a perky and thoroughly delightful duet for flute and oboe by the local composer Alex Shapiro, was brand-new, and Shapiro was on hand to deliver a few words about her piece. The final work, the Six Bagatelles by György Ligeti, is the kind of energy-packed music, novel and adventurous at every turn, that you keep on hand to play for people who tell you that contemporary music isn’t worth the ink it takes to print it. The hall at UCLA seats about 600 at a guess, and it was comfortably filled. Most of the audience were on the gray side, the kind of people who’d have the time for a concert on a Monday or a Thursday afternoon, and they seemed thoroughly pleased with the kind of programming these concerts tend to offer. I bring this up in relation to the fear that seems to stalk the land – concerning LACMA’s “Sundays Live” concerts and their broadcast sponsor, for example – when the matter of unfamiliar or contemporary music comes up.
There are three more Bruman concerts: July 28, August 1 and August 4, with the superb Calder Quartet on hand for the last of these. Don’t tell me that nothing happens out here in the summer.

They knew how to do things then. Opening night, 1938, at the Hollywood Bowl consisted
of nothing less than Wagner’s Die Walküre, four hours plus, with Valkyries
on horseback careening down the verdant nearby hills. The legendary Maria Jeritza
was the Brünnhilde; Richard Hageman, better known for such salon tearjerkers as
“Do Not Go, My Love,” was on the podium. National and international celebrities
attended, or so the press gushingly reported.

Nowadays we get our Wagner one act at a time, indoors and out. The Philharmonic
gave us Tristan und Isolde over three nights (with three admissions) this
past season, and a single act of Die Götterdämmerung served to light up
the sky as the Bowl’s first serious-music event earlier this month. (Okay, so
an 80-minute single Wagnerian act runs the same as the whole of La Bohème.
Even so…) And now news is at hand that the first-ever local production of all
four parts of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, the grandiose 18-hour artwork
that keeps getting promised and postponed and promised again by the Los Angeles
Opera, is slated to sneak in instead under the auspices of the Long Beach Opera
for two performances next January. The four operas will be performed – get this
— over two days, each opera running anywhere from two to three hours, in English
in the 820-seat Center Theater. On top of this comes news that the Metropolitan
Opera is planning a new “family version” of its current production of Mozart’s
Magic Flute, to run 90 minutes instead of the usual three hours. No word
has come from the Met as to whether ticket prices will be adjusted accordingly.
Wanna bet?

John Mauceri conducted the Götterdämmerung at the Bowl; no Wagnerian slouch, he had led a respectable Walküre at Opera Pacific during that company’s more adventurous days. He also delivered an authoritative and delightful exegesis on the whole tangled Ring plot that almost, if not quite, atoned for the lack of supertitles. This was, surprisingly enough, Mauceri’s first time on the Philharmonic podium in 25 years.

Christine Brewer, the Philharmonic’s Isolde last December, moves on rapidly toward Wagnerian eminence. Her Brünnhilde, even through microphones, had its own thrilling impact, defiant and, at the end, richly human. Christian Franz, the Siegfried, and Christine Goerke, the Gutrune, were forged from lesser metal but not by much; Kurt Rydl, whose wobble had lent a nice comic edge to his Ochs in the L.A. Opera’s recent Rosenkavalier, put it to far less admirable service as the villainous Hagen this time around.

Some work has obviously been done on the Bowl’s sound system over the down time. The absurd echo has been vanquished or substantially reduced; the sound, from a point halfway back, is at least as true-to-life as, say, an early LP. The video screens still strike me as wasted expense, but perhaps I’m missing some of the pop-oriented entertainment that fills them on the weekend concerts. The coordination between the camera shots and the people actually performing at any moment is no better than last year; it can’t be without an enormous budget for extra rehearsals, and I’m still not convinced that all that many people go to the Bowl to watch TV screens. You’d think that at least there’d be a way of getting the texts for vocal works up on the screen, but that might also be wasted effort for the benefit of few. At least the short bursts of Magic Fire – live, at center stage – as Valhalla and its neighborhood went up in flames at the grand Wagnerian finale, provided the evening’s visual reward for those among the fast-dwindling crowd who had stuck out those 80 minutes to the end.

By George

Two nights later there was Gershwin: not the master of Broadway sass whom we all
rightly adore, but the aspirant to a place among the Higher Artists whose aspirations
merit a raised eyebrow or two. The Piano Concerto in F, from which Jean-Yves Thibaudet
extracted the ultimate measure of razzle-dazzle on this occasion (with proper
support from conductor Leonard Slatkin and the Philharmonic), is my case in point
— a head-on collision between high-flying creative ambition and a woeful inability
to make anything work from one minute to the next. Any single musical notion is
uncommonly attractive, and their variety is vast: the veritable torrent of syncopated
flourishes that begin the work, the curious lapse into a kind of static Charleston
rhythm that stops everything a few minutes later, the lovely blues tune for solo
trumpet that begins the slow movement, the pseudo-Yiddish kvetch that takes over
midway in that movement. But what is there in this music that holds us by the
collarbone and renders thrilling the progression from idea to idea? This question
seems beyond Gershwin’s power, or his interest, to resolve; we are left, in the
perceptive words of Paul Rosenfeld, one of the few American critics to resist
the inevitability of the “Great American Composer” bandwagon in Gershwin’s case,
with “a heap of extremely heterogeneous minor forms and expressions.”

Curiously, the same program also included a shorter and less-known Gershwin piece also for piano and orchestra, his Variations on “I Got Rhythm,” in which I sensed the presence of a real and serious composer, genuinely in charge of his material and aware of where he wants to take it. The form of the piece, a series of compositional essays on a single (and singularly great) tune, prevents its wandering afield, and the permutations devised by Gershwin over its 10-or-so-minute span are the work of a genuine smart-ass.

The program ended with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a piece whose cleverness
I usually find endearing and surely would have this time. But I was out of sorts
by then; one large chunk of inferior Gershwin and two monumentally undistinguished
pieces by Gershwinoids Ferde Grofé and Robert Russell Bennett disinclined me to
inflict my state of mind on anything else that evening.

–A.R.

Double Talk

As I had hoped, a number of pens (or word processors) have been active over
the past few months in response to the actions by the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art in drastically curtailing its music programming. Nothing has yet been
amended from LACMA’s original announcement. The Residency Concerts – the EAR
Unit and XTET series and the Rosalinde Gilbert Chamber Concerts – have been
canceled as of now; the Monday Evening Concerts, the crown jewels of the museum’s
musical activities, have been granted one more year of existence. The free concerts
- jazz on Friday afternoons and the Sunday Live concerts by young musicians
- will continue, at least for now.

Some of the correspondence from LACMA officials to the protesters has been circulated
by recipients, and it makes for depressing reading. Let us you and I, for example,
take one paragraph from a recent letter to a well-known and distinguished arts
patron, and read it together. It is dated June 16, and comes from one Bruce
Robertson, who is the deputy director of art programs at LACMA and the chief
curator of its Center for the Art of the Americas. “Over the last decade or
more,” Mr. Robertson begins, “we have been very proud that LACMA’s classical-music
programs have consistently won awards for their quality.” No argument so far.

“At the same time,” Mr. Robertson continues, “we have noticed declining audiences
and a real divergence between the programs and audiences and our art programs
and membership.” May I suggest, as I did in a letter of my own to Mr. Robertson,
that the fact that many of the LACMA concerts have drawn small audiences is
not at times the fault of the music, but the fault of LACMA itself for obliging
its concerts to exist with zero publicity support: not a penny’s worth of advertising
budget. Perhaps if Mr. Robertson had looked in on these concerts himself, he
might have noticed – to cite one instance of many – the interesting tie-in a
couple of years ago between the “Made in Los Angeles” concert series and the
similar exhibition at the museum. The museum exhibits were lavishly promoted;
the concerts, not at all. Divergence?

Mr. Robertson goes on: “We feel that the musical landscape of Los Angeles is
changing and that what LACMA needed to do 20 years ago, when we started developing
our current classical musical programs, is not what we need to do now . . .”
Yes, the musical landscape is changing, and a great deal of the credit for this
goes to the progressive musical forces in the area: the Philharmonic, CalArts
and the Monday Evening and Residency concerts at LACMA. The significance of
the LACMA programs isn’t the matter of the small houses, but the power of word
of mouth that has, on many occasions, counteracted LACMA’s do-nothing policy
in this regard. Take just three of many examples: the Arditti Quartet, the bassist
Stefano Scodanibbio, the pianist Marino Formenti. All three made their local
debuts at LACMA with pathetically small houses; all drew near-sellout crowds
from then on. With just minimal support from LACMA’s publicists, that phenomenon
might have been repeated on a regular basis. For a LACMA spokesperson to blame
audience drop-off on changing tastes, at a time when critics worldwide write
enviously about Los Angeles’ musical progress, liberally citing the LACMA concerts
along the way, suggests that either Mr. Robertson and his office mates have
no conception of today’s musical world, or that they don’t want to know.

They even seem to believe that their “core mission, of serving the public through
making the visual arts available to them,” can somehow function in silence,
setting aside a unity of the arts on which civilization has rested for several
millennia. Somehow it doesn’t strike me that free Friday jazz is going to go
very far in piercing that silence. Nor will the free Sunday Live concerts, since
their broadcast medium, KMZT-FM, does so with the stipulation that they include
no “difficult” (i.e., contemporary) music. The condition of music, which all
the arts were once wisely said to approach, seems ever more distant.

That You, Ludwig?

It’s a sunny Viennese morning in the summer of 1804. The musicians gather at
the Lobkowitz Palace, dressed in livery but with hairstyling of two centuries
later. Beethoven shows up, a large bundle of musical scores under his arm, cleanly
notated despite what we know of his penmanship. He looks a lot like the several
W.B. Mähler paintings of the real 34-year-old Beethoven, including the famous
scowl, but he is actually the actor Ian Hart. The musicians gather for their
first-ever reading of Beethoven’s new symphony, a huge new work in E flat; there
are complaints about the length, about the rhythms; there is small talk about
whether the symphony is to be dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte or simply titled
“Eroica.”

The audience arrives, a gathering of invited nobles including a sourpuss named
Count Dietrichstein. He is obviously the Martin Bernheimer of his day, prepared
to despise the new symphony before he hears a note and equally prepared to make
sure everybody knows it. (There was an actual Count Dietrichstein in Beethoven’s
life, but not for another 20 years.) The great and revered Joseph Haydn arrives
in time for the last movement. He, too, wears a sour face, but at least lets
loose one quotable statement. “Everything is different from today,” says Herr
Haydn, and we know that history will prove him right.

One false start, but then the music sails on effortlessly. Imagine: an orchestra
in 1804, presented with the most innovative orchestral writing of its time -
violent rhythmic quirks, sudden key changes and dynamic shifts, and practically
at sight they start to sound like, well, like Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (who, indeed, they are). Eroica,
Nick Dear’s “award-winning period drama,” on a BBC Opus Arte DVD, serves
up a lavish chunk of musical and historic absurdity, beside which our old friend
Amadeus pales into a steadfast document of unimpeachable accuracy.

Considering that Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw for Collier’s
Weekly, a popular fiction magazine in 1898 as it was until its demise some
60 years later, his ghost story has borne the weight of considerable serious analysis
and interpretation. There is reason to suggest that music – i.e., Benjamin Britten’s
tightly crafted chamber-opera setting of 1954 – puts forward the best of all explanations
of the wavering fault lines between fantasy and reality in James’ out-of-reach
landscape. The performances in the new BBC Opus Arte DVD of Britten’s opera (distributed
in the U.S. by Naxos), conducted by Richard Hickox – which is not a staging but
a re-enactment in a natural setting – allow the work to take its own shape. Katie
Mitchell’s opening up of the drama frees us from having to surmount the unnatural
barrier (in this instance) of equating a character’s inner thoughts with the spectacle
of singing mouths and artificial body movement on a cramped stage. Since much
of Britten’s opera consists of inner dialogue, the device is splendidly successful
here as it might not be in, say, La Traviata.

The setting is a not-all-that-grand country mansion in decaying, swampy woodlands,
with mists arising to mask the ghosts’ coming and going. The cast is as good as
you could want, with an insolence in the young Miles (Nicholas Kirby Johnson)
that you want to slap down on first meeting, and a plain-Jane helplessness in
Lisa Milne’s Governess that tells you she is up for defeat from the start. Mark
Padmore is the Quint and also sings the Prologue; something both ingratiating
and slimy in his tenorial thrusts chills you from the start. Their voices under
Hickox form a fine ensemble, without ever allowing this harrowing, vivid musical
drama to take on the artifice of mere opera. Like the studio-created version of
John Adams’ Death of Klinghoffer that I wrote about late last year, this
DVD points the direction of a new joining of music drama and video to the greater
enhancement of both.

Ring Around

The treasure of DVD operas currently available, and rapidly growing, is astonishing:
No similar luxury of choice has ever been available on any previous medium, not
even counting the “pirate” versions of, say, legendary Callas performances that
once drove collectors gaga – and play-actors too, as in Terence McNally’s Lisbon
Traviata. European and Australian opera houses televise most of their productions,
and these show up a few months later on DVDs, most often in decent productions
properly translated. Live-performance recording has its dangers, of course, but
one major advantage is the assurance of freedom from incompetent lip-synching.
Some of the earlier opera videos – the Karajan studio productions, for example
— are virtually unwatchable in this regard.

Wagner fares well – in quantity if not always quality. I wrote some time ago about
the Eurotrash Ring of the Nibelung from the Stuttgart Opera, with four
different directors imposing four ludicrous “modernized” settings on the timeless
mythology. Now, from Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, another Ring takes
shape, also on Opus Arte. Of the four dramas, Die Walküre and Siegfried
are already at hand. Bertrand de Billy is the conductor; he has been here, with
the Los Angeles Opera, in something-or-other. Falk Struckmann is the Wotan, Deborah
Polaski the Brünnhilde; both are excellent German-repertory singers at the top
of their powers. John Treleaven, the Siegfried, is not up to their level, however.
I found him brash and rather squally, and kept dwelling on Anna Russell’s immortal
description of Siegfried as “a veritable Li’l Abner.” Harry Kupfer is the stage
director; his production was originally mounted at the Deutsche Staatsoper Unter
den Linden in Berlin.

Kupfer’s work is the principal attraction here; these discs – and presumably the
entire Ring when the other parts appear – document one of the most creative
of the new generation of European stage directors. Like his Eurotrash-oriented
lesser colleagues, he tends to rethink and, thus, to recast classic operatic material.
The Ring seems to play out in a vast enclosure hemmed in with geometric
patterns generated by tubular lights that change color and thereby create dramatic
undertones and overtones. Most of Valhalla’s denizens, Wotan included, are thugs,
and that adds an important level of credibility to Wagner’s cynical dramatic design.
Time and place are kept purposefully fluid. If you’re not going to stage these
grand music dramas as Wagner’s own high Romanticism – as they are on the Metropolitan
Opera videos and in Stephen Wadsworth’s staging at the Seattle Opera – I think
these Harry Kupfer productions are, easily, the next best thing.

Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s controversial take on Wagner’s Parsifal got my back
up in San Francisco some years ago, and has since traveled to Chicago, London
and now to an Opus Arte DVD via a production at Baden-Baden conducted by Kent
Nagano. The problem here is not one of changed time or place – as it is, for example,
in the Syberberg film, which I find otherwise thrilling – but of a whole overlay
of ersatz symbolism with which Lehnhoff has burdened both the work and its audience.
The look of the production he has created, and the performance under Nagano -
in which Christopher Ventris, the Parsifal, has grown greatly since San Francisco
— are eloquent and moving; the Gurnemanz of Matti Salminen leaves me all aquiver
to see and hear him here, in the Robert Wilson staging, come November. But having
already succumbed to the spell of Wilson’s version in Houston some years ago,
I’ve come to resent the false turnings that Lehnhoff obliges me to follow in his
cockeyed interpretation, however splendid the musical performance under Nagano.

Obiter dictum: You need something cool after all this, and so, on ArtHaus,
there is Pierre le Grand. André Modeste Grétry is the composer, a lesser
(but not by much) contemporary of Haydn and Mozart. It’s a comic opera with spoken
dialogue having to do (but not much) with the founding of the city of St. Petersburg
by Peter the Great and his several girlfriends. The text, please note, is by one
Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, who went on to write the play Leonore, or Conjugal Love,
which served as the basis for Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Still here? Pierre le Grand is sung, in French and Russian, by the Helikon
Opera of St. Petersburg under Sergey Stadler. The voices are young and agreeable.
The production looks as if painted on bed sheets for the grand finale at a summer
camp, and somehow that is exactly right for the aura around this whole enterprise.
The music, as with everything in the small repertory of Grétry that anyone gets
to hear, is fabulously beautiful. Parsifal it isn’t.

The sound of Frances-Marie Uitti’s cello resonates in the bloodstream. She would have it so; she has devoted considerable time and effort to enhancing the seductive throb of her instrument – developing a cello with six strings, and a way of playing with two bows. Next fall she starts a year’s residence at Berkeley, working on interactive electronic systems. I have no idea whether she uses this advanced technical stuff when she plays Bach or Dvorák; mostly she has hung out with the composers who match her visions: John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis. Born in Chicago, to Finnish parents, she now lives in Amsterdam, the world’s best place for visionaries.

On a new ECM disc, There Is Still Time, Uitti plays her own music while Paul Griffiths reads his poetry. Griffiths, Welsh-born, a sometime music critic and the author of some excellent writing on new music, has a voice that sounds like Uitti’s cello – don’t all Welshmen? – and he uses it the way she plays: intense, throbbing, now and then breaking off and darting in some unexpected direction. His poetry is darkly tinged with memory – “There it was, and it was, and it is gone.” Single words and phrases seem to dissolve into cello sound, and just as often the process is reversed. “Think of that day,” the poet intones. “Be there again,” he and the cello join to implore. “It was then … now it’s then again.” In Munich, where poet and cellist first performed the sequence live, Griffiths insisted on appearing barefoot.

There are 17 poems in There Is Still Time, some of few words, some crammed with words and breathless. When its 55 minutes are past, it is nearly impossible to resist playing the disc immediately again. I have written before about the Korean composer Unsuk Chin, mostly abut her great Violin Concerto, which we haven’t heard here yet, and about her Alice in Wonderland opera, which was supposed to show up at the L.A. Opera next season but is apparently lost down the rabbit hole. One major work of hers that has been performed here is the delightful Acrostic Wordplay, which George Benjamin conducted at a “Green Umbrella” concert seven years ago, and which heads a splendid collection of her short works on a recent Deutsche Grammophon disc. There is a hint of Alice in this 1993 work, too; the text is drawn from Lewis Carroll and other author, with narrative reduced to syllables or word fragments until only their significance remains. Text becomes music, music becomes text – or so the program notes imply, although I think that the aforementioned cello and reader achieve a more satisfactory metamorphosis. On its own, however, there is some delight in this bouncy, perky piece, and in the performance by the Ensemble InterContemporain, under Kazushi Ono, with Piia Komsi burbling out the syllables.

SPACE

On the same disc is the formidable Xi from 1998, with the EIC led by David Robertson; they played it here, at Royce Hall, that same year. Xi calls for large ensemble plus electronics, and multichannel processing, and sends the sound on a single broad arc around the performing space. The title in Korean, says the composer, means “the smallest unit, the origin of all things … thus, the idea of metamorphosis.” The buildup is awesome, from the sound of simple breathing to a wrenching, percussive apotheosis. Don’t make the mistake I did, hearing the music first on a car stereo in murderous Friday traffic on I-405 on my way to the Philip Glass concert I’ll tell you about a couple of paragraphs down. The sense from the music, that the whole car was coming apart, was not, let’s say, pleasant; it took further hearings to restore the realization that Xi is, indeed, some kind of sonic masterpiece.

So is the extraordinary Violin Concerto by Marc-André Dalbavie, which comes with two other works by him on a new disc from a label known as Naïve, which it is anything but. Pierre Boulez led one work by Dalbavie at a “Green Umbrella” concert in 1998; another is scheduled here next season. The three works on the new disc are vast soundscapes, with Debussy in their ancestry – above all the sense of limitless space in works like La Mer and the Nocturnes. The Violin Concerto, stupendously dispatched by Eiichi Chijiwa with Christoph Eschenbach conducting, comes with voluminous program notes on relationships of music to space and the “spatialization” of sound objects. But the exhilaration of the music speaks for itself.

GLOBAL GOOP

At Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall there was Philip Glass, his ensemble, an international gathering of participants, and Orion, 90 minutes of the usual accompaniments-plus-riffs that pass as his music these days. The gadget this time – there always is one – was the celebration in Athens last summer of the Olympics. Musics of many lands performed by talented proponents – Australia, China, Canada, the Gambia, Brazil, India, Greece – were stirred into the familiar background of our old friends, the Philip Glass Ensemble. The outdoor performance in Athens last June – a month when it never rains there – was accompanied by a howling downpour. Times were when people were more adept at heeding warnings from the gods.

What am I missing in the ongoing fame and acclaim surrounding the Philip Glass
phenomenon? I watch in wonderment as large audiences greet, with whoops and hollers
and standing ovations, works large and small – the Fifth Symphony, the new soundtracks
glued onto splendid old Cocteau movies, the insipid little Piano Etudes and now
this protracted venture in hands-across-the-seas patronization. I recoil at the
sheer tastelessness, not to mention the ugliness of sound, in combining the crystalline
elegance of Wu Man’s pipa (even if amplified to satisfy the space of Costa Mesa’s
barn of a hall) with the bovine keening of the alto sax from the Glass ensemble.
I reach for earplugs as the needlepoints in the sounds of an Indian sitar become
crammed into Western rhythmic patterns. What is put forth as assimilation, of
a joining of musical styles under the night sky lit by the stars of the Hunter
Orion, I hear as mindless exploitation. I do not enjoy mindlessness in a composer
I once admired. Come back to the beach, Einstein; we need you. Philip needs you.

Alberto Vilar’s name still remains in two places on the L.A. Opera’s program, on the board of directors and among “Domingo’s Angels,” an elite list of “individuals who have made a leadership commitment to fulfilling the artistic initiatives of the Domingo seasons 2001–2005.” That does not, however, mesh with recent news about this flamboyant, if controversial, arts figure, co-founder (with Gary Tanaka) of the money-management firm Amerindo Investment Advisors, who with his partner spent the recent holiday weekend in a New York City jail facing criminal-fraud charges, unable to raise bail. There, as of June 6, Vilar remained.

In his day, Vilar rode his technology stocks to dazzling heights, and used the take to finance his operatic passion. At the Metropolitan his benevolence got him his name, in foot-high gold letters (recently removed), over the “Vilar Grand Tier” and a lifetime seat in Orchestra Row A-101 (a lousy location for a true opera lover for both sight and sound, if truth be told). London’s Royal Opera sported a Vilar Young Artists’ Program; the Vilar Center for the Arts stood proud in Avon, Colorado.

By the time Vilar had come to flash his bankroll at Domingo and the Los Angeles Opera, Vilar’s fortunes were already showing signs of tottering. One technology fund he controlled, The New York Times reported, fell 64.8 percent in 2000, and declined another 50.8 percent in 2001. The story circulated at the time that Vilar had decided to play footsie with Domingo in his new Los Angeles post only after the San Francisco Opera, which he had previously supported, backed away from his choice as artistic director and went with the modernist-leaning Pamela Rosenberg. For whatever reason, Vilar and Domingo became entwined. In the summer of 2000, Vilar invested heavily in Domingo’s prestigious “Operalia” talent competition, and then stayed on to lay his $2 million pledge on the company itself – plus $2 million to Domingo’s other company, the Washington Opera.

Almost immediately, things started not happening. The best anyone can glean from the public-relations strongholds at the Met, the Washington Opera and Los Angeles is that part of Vilar’s pledges – a total hovering around some $20 million over five years – has been restored by friends, including, of course, Domingo. (Rude thought: Might this be why the great man continues to pull down his singer’s fees, at an age when most tenors might sit back and retire the tonsils?) In 2002, New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel replaced, from his own pocket, a $700,000 pledge that Vilar had made for the orchestra’s conductors’ competition.

None of this, of course, adds up to the kind of boondoggle that results in a kind-faced, opera-loving gentleman – 64, born in New Jersey, raised in Cuba and Puerto Rico – being picked up by the feds at the Newark Airport on a holiday weekend. According to government sources, the charges involved an actual theft: $5 million from an old friend and Amerindo investor, and from three other women who accuse Vilar of helping himself to millions more of their money and refusing to give it back or to come up with promised interest.

One of the alleged victims is a woman who should be dear to all local opera lovers: Tara Colburn, the very classy, slender lady who sat down front center and set the whole Dorothy Chandler Pavilion aglow by her presence. Tara had endowed the opera company to pay for the supertitles that run above each performance; her husband, Richard, had paid for that whole music school across the street. Tara had deposited a large sum in Vilar’s investment firm, and when the market turned skittish, she tried to get it back. She died in May 2003. Vilar still hasn’t returned her money.

His own influences included Milton Babbitt and Donald Martino and Tibetan Buddhism. A few years ago, Peter Serkin was here to perform a Lieberson piano concerto, which I found full of wheels going around but not very friendly. At one of last week’s concerts at Disney Hall there was another dry-point early work, Lieberson’s Drala from 1986. Both had been written before Lorraine Hunt entered Lieberson’s life, and became his wife and his voice. Most of his music that was played here these past two weeks – the songs to texts by Rilke and Neruda, a Piano Quintet and a Horn Concerto – postdate that meeting. It is all a different kind of music, by a composer wondrously transformed by the presence of, let’s say, the greatest dramatic singer of our time. Before Lorraine Hunt Lieberson came onstage to join Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic in her husband’s Neruda Songs last week, I might have wondered why management was devoting that much program time to not that eminent a composer. Half an hour later, I wanted it all to go back and start again.

The poems are love songs by Pablo Neruda to his third wife, Matilde – not ardent mooncalf stuff but aching, middle-aged, wise love full of dark coloration. Lieberson, wisely I think, left them in the original Spanish, allowing Lorraine to draw upon gorgeous, sensuous vocal purples and dark wines for such words as luna and azul. His orchestra is small and beautifully used, always mirroring the rapture of the words. A recording has been promised; count the days. At a “Green Umbrella” concert a few days later there were more songs for Lorraine, a set of Rilke settings with piano, more complex in musical line and with the rasp of German words rather than the mellow Spanish. But the instrumental works – the Piano Quintet, with its charming echoes of country fiddling, and the jolly bluster of the Horn Concerto, with visiting virtuoso William Purvis to blow it sky-high – were further evidence of the warming and humanizing that seems to have taken hold in Lieberson’s music these past few years, and it isn’t hard to figure out why. Love conquers all.

Double Doom
A proper performance of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise can move an audience to deep sadness with nothing more than a singer and a pianist delivering the cycle of 24 songs alone on the stage. Alone in a cold attic room, a reader can make his or her way through Johann von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther with nothing more than the book in hand, and be driven at the end to suicide – as, apparently, hundreds of impressionable adolescents were in the ——–
AUTHOR’s day. Combining the two as a single entertainment, a venture in redundancy to say the least, might produce, you’d think, a roomful of lemmings.

You would, however, be reckoning without the enterprise of the Long Beach Opera, whose new managerial force, Andreas Mitisek, is apparently out to prove himself ready to maintain high aloft the brave banners of iconoclasm erected by the company’s founding spirits. Against every better judgment I could possibly summon under the circumstances, Mitisek has, indeed, worked out a conflation of these two trajectories down the dark road of heartbreak and self-destruction, and played them off against each other without violating the integrity of either. This all happened not in the company’s usual performing venue at Cal State Long Beach, but in an experimental space, not much larger than this page, at the Edison Theater in downtown Long Beach, where, according to plan, such small-scale LBO productions will occur from time to time.

Mitisek directed, gave the pre-performance talk, hung out with the crowd, did
everything but pour coffee; it’s clear that he wants this to be his company,
and he’s entitled. He has been fortunate in his principal performer this time,
a young baritone named Erik Nelson Werner, who sang the 24 songs of Schubert’s
cycle (23 of the 24, actually, since one song was an offstage recording of “Frühlingstraum”
for reasons that escape me) quite creditably and interspersed them with forceful
spoken excerpts, in English, from Werther’s self-pitying monologues. That much,
at least, worked quite well. For staging there was a cluttered attic room, a bed
and scattered trash – almost exactly the same set, if anyone cares to remember,
as the 1986 Long Beach Tales of Hoffmann. Unfeeling, rejecting
Lotte was done in dumb show by a dancer, Jennifer Hart Jackson. At the very end,
when the dead Werther lay in her lap, she extended one hand in a caress – a small
directorial touch that I found extremely moving. Michelle Schumann was the pianist,
behind a scrim. Midway, she added part of the slow movement of Schubert’s last
piano sonata, which, in this context, became the saddest music in the world -
and also, at that moment at least, the most beautiful.

Now, suddenly, word is out that the ax is poised and about to fall. Before the EAR Unit concert, as it happened, there was a dinner at the museum for visiting arts journalists at which the program’s two composers, Paul Dresher and Mort Subotnick, legitimized the event by talking about their music. There were also boilerplate speeches by the museum’s curators and other reps, rattling on about LACMA’s commitment to the arts, but these rang hollow given the occasion. There is further word of negotiations still going on, but the situation at this writing is that the Monday Evening Concerts – the most creative series, the direct inheritor of an enterprise that began (as “Evenings on the Roof”) on a Silver Lake rooftop in 1939 and has been the heartbeat of the Los Angeles creative impulse since then – will be vouchsafed one more year of life, under the leadership of Dorrance Stalvey, who has run the series since 1971, and then close down forever. The free jazz will continue. The residency programs and the Rosalinde Gilbert series will be discontinued.

People around town are writing letters, as well they should. There were things wrong with the museum concerts, most of all the drab, uncomfortable auditorium, which was much too large. Stalvey, 75 and not well, has never had the support from the museum that would have enabled him to publicize his concerts properly; some amazing events have gone on before audiences of 100 or fewer. The eventual end of programming at the museum does not pull the plug on small-music concerts in the area, of course. There’s Santa Monica’s Jacaranda (see below), which I’ve come to love; there’s more and more good music at the Zipper Concert Hall downtown, including the valuable “Piano Spheres” series, and at Disney Hall’s REDCAT. There are the hot-ticket “Historic Sites” concerts, if you can get near them. I am concerned, however, at the decline of serious music events at UCLA, whose current program manager, David Sefton, seems to have his head buried in esoteric foreign theater while one of the city’s best halls, Royce, goes sadly underused.

But music at LACMA has always been more than any of this, because Stalvey – and Stalvey alone – has run the series as a flowing pipeline to the world of current creativity, blended into the strong impulses of music’s great past. Cases in point: the Penderecki Quartet concerts, which I exulted over last week, or the New York New Music Ensemble, or the Parisii, or the amazing bassist Scodanibbio – all of whom entered Los Angeles’ awareness thanks to Stalvey’s booking. The EAR Unit, rounding out 18 years’ residence at LACMA, was and remains a unique organization, above all for a certain built-in ecstasy in its playing that sends everything skyward.

Most of the EAR members and Subotnick grew up at CalArts, after all; there was something in Mort’s new big piece they played the other night, the 2003 Release for electronic sounds and instruments, that seemed to sum up the broad gestures of their lifetimes: something of his pioneering earlier work, the electronic/symphonic Silver Apples of the Moon or the mixed-media Key to Songs, historic but still very fresh and exuberant. So, too, for Paul Dresher’s The Tyrant — unusually, for him, a non-electronic piece, a monodrama for tenor and instruments drawn from an Italo Calvino text on tyranny that also became Luciano Berio’s Un Re in Ascolto: tense, bitter drama handsomely set forth by the apparently indestructible Jonathan Mack.

A HAPPIER ENDING
Splendidly planned and produced, the Jacaranda concerts at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church give me the impression of a series of aristocratic musical evenings fashioned by exceptionally intelligent people for their own pleasure first of all, and for anyone of like mind who happens by. The exceptionally intelligent people are the partners Patrick Scott and Mark Hilt, and the second year of Jacaranda, which concluded last weekend with a Benjamin Britten program, has been a glowing tribute to the high inventive level that these concerts have attained from the start. The like-minded, furthermore, have been happening by in droves. The church itself is handsome, small and comfortable; its new concertgoing friends pray that the current round of repairs and additions will keep it so. Patrick does the welcoming, and writes the uncommonly informative program notes. Mark is the organist and choir director, and the one small drawback at this Britten evening was that the Chancel Choir, numbering 14, is not quite ready for prime time.

Everything else was. The Denali Quartet, which has been Jacaranda’s resident string group from the start and grows in strength and expressive depth, mastered the Britten Third Quartet, a work of remarkable richness and subtlety of tone, centered on a slow movement that is a long, haunting violin solo with other instruments massed as a soft shimmer underneath. Oboist Keve Wilson and violist Alma Lisa Fernandez unearthed Britten solo works seldom heard, and the chorus did muster a fair degree of strength at the end to deal with the mix of the childlike and the visionary in the remarkable cantata Rejoice in the Lamb.

Jacaranda’s third season begins in October with an American program. The whole
season isn’t quite set, but what’s been confirmed includes a lot of my favorite
music and, perhaps, yours as well. They may run out of music at LACMA, but not
in Santa Monica.

“Surely the saddest thing ever said in notes,” wrote Richard Wagner of the opening music of Beethoven’s C-sharp minor Quartet (Opus 131), thus setting aside his own third-act Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. Here is Beethoven a year from death, illness-racked in a world swept by his music’s growing fame . . . “tapped and drained and physicked and hayseed-bathed and narcotized,” writes Joseph Kerman, “[ordering] in the string quartet what he was so pitifully unable to order in any other aspect of his existence.” The exercise of compositional power in this stupendous work grabs you in the dismal emptiness of that opening fugue with its dying falls into bleak dissonances. It releases you, also somewhat tapped and narcotized, 40 minutes later.

The dedicated performances, of which the Penderecki Quartet’s was one, jar you mightily with every one of the music changes, because those changes are like nothing that has ever happened in music before that time. C sharp to D, the squeeze over just a half-step; D grinding back to C sharp: These shifts, for 1826, represent music’s ultimate bad manners. Beethoven delivers these blows not spread throughout a classical format with four movements neatly spaced, but in a nonstop 40-minute expanse with no moment to breathe and every change delivered as a rude jolt. As well as I think I know the sequence of astonishing events in this one-of-a-kind work, I was delightedly swept away by the Penderecki performance, the explosive power of its transitions, the sublime if brief relaxations in the slow variations, the bone-crushing exuberance of its final measures.

Secret Messages
Exactly a century separates Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite of 1926 from the tortures that produced Beethoven’s Opus 131. Recent researches in the form of newly discovered letters, fragments and manuscripts reveal that this work, too, is a document of torture, a fabric of interwoven references and messages relating to Berg’s secret affair(s), with the person or persons in question subtly identified by initials, which then become embedded in the musical themes. The score thus becomes a complicated web of clues leading toward the elaborate plotting of a love affair that, in all probability, was never fulfilled and was never even meant to be. (The final, climactic quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, that epic of coitus interruptus, all but screams this out loud.)

What should be a lot more important is the beauty of the music; this, again, was
the element made most luminous by the Penderecki, intense and stirring. I know
of two ways to approach this work. One takes most seriously Berg’s capitulation,
for the first time in a large score, to the 12-tone principles of his teacher
Schoenberg, and delivers the work as proud if somewhat uptight product of Vienna
II. The other reacts more seriously to the music’s many built-in rubrics (amoroso,
estatico, giovale) and respects the urging of the title itself. I found
this a deeply moving performance, possibly the most so of my experience. It seemed
in a strange way to bridge the century between these two troubled masterworks:
the glistening, insinuating, delirious scherzi of both; the lyric urgency of their
slow movements, which takes on an almost human throb.

Other Voices
Witold Lutoslawski’s one String Quartet began the first program; one of Joseph Haydn’s 83 works in that medium – the C-major, Opus 54 No. 2 – began the second: works 177 years apart, once again original unto themselves. The Haydn, in fact, is quite an amazing work. Its departures from the hypothetical Rule Book of Classical Practice begin in the slow movement, wherein the first violin soars high above the quiet melodic line in a rhapsodic, Gypsy-like improvisation. They continue with the crushing dissonances in the Trio of the Minuet, not at all your basic 18th-century dancerie. They conclude when the finale, not the usual jovial sendoff, turns into a quiet, slow benediction. Expect the unexpected, Haydn tells us, and in no uncertain terms.

Lutoslawski, a frequent visitor here until his death in 1994, fashioned his String Quartet, as many of his works, on a flexible blending of chance principles and strict usage: elements not necessarily audible from out front but clear enough to musicians brave enough to work through his ideas onstage. What comes over from, say, the combination of players working simultaneously in different rhythmic variants and with changing textures, is a music of terrific emotional impact, often shading with brutal suddenness toward huge climaxes, then back to a shattering, sudden silence. It is also, as these words may suggest, not the world’s easiest music to describe. Its power, however, is beyond argument, as is its ability to bring out the best in brave performance ensembles.

Oh yes, I mentioned “trash” back there, didn’t I? That was supplied by Omar Daniel’s
Annunciation, wherein the 45-year-old Canadian composer seeks to distill,
via string quartet, color slides and some vague electronic grumbling, the moment
of the Angel Gabriel breaking the news to Mary as captured by seven Renaissance
masters. Since that particular biblical moment has inspired some of the world’s
most sublime art, as the slide show all too clearly proved, you’d think that perhaps
an upstart composer like Mr. Daniel might want to earn his spurs with a musical
setting of perhaps an R. Crumb cartoon or a Carnation Baby calendar. You’d be
wrong.

We have yet to experience the pleasure of observing Susan Graham in action on the operatic stage, but her solo recital at the Chandler Pavilion, from first note to last, was an event of high and delightful theater. “First note” consisted of her acting out simply, with her fingers slinking insinuatingly around the edge of Malcolm Martineau’s piano, tracing the insidious double meanings of delightful Apollinaire nonsense texts amplified to triple and quadruple meanings in a set of endearing Poulenc songs. “Last note” was the desperate high hilarity of her final encore, “Sexy Lady,” an autobiographical lament created for her by Ben Moore, detailing the sad fate of a 6-foot-2 mezzo-soprano of irresistible stature and honeyed voice, condemned by these physical magnificences to a lifetime of roles as trousered, oversexed, male warriors. (Sad, but boy-oh-boy fabulous . . . or did you miss her Octavian in the Met broadcast of Der Rosenkavalier a couple of weeks before?)

She is a treasure, this Graham, a matter happily known to opera audiences everywhere but here. The breadth of her program was astonishing in itself: not just the usual recital routine with the solid stuff at first and then the Twinkies. This time an adoring near-capacity house was better rewarded, with an elegantly planned range of entertainments to engage both the intelligence and the delight of its hearers, starting with the insidious wit of Poulenc and Ravel balanced against the radiant lyricism of Berlioz from a century earlier. Following intermission there was a momentary slump via some vapid note-spinning by the opportunistic yet woefully talentless Jake Heggie, but that emptiness was soon redeemed with a cheering gathering of Ives, unfamiliar and extraordinarily beautiful. At the end, where the lightweight novelty numbers go on most recital programs, there came instead a set of Mahler, haunting and powerful. A singer who trusts her audience with this kind of programming deserves a return visit. Is it ungallant to suggest that the title role in Offenbach’s Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, on the books for the Los Angeles Opera’s next season, has been allotted to only the second-best choice?

THE RIGHT “TOUCH”

Alone of the hell-raising artists who made up the so-called New York School in the 1950s – among them the composers John Cage and Morton Feldman and the painter Philip Guston – Christian Wolff survives; he has always been the least-known. Until his recent retirement he taught classics at Dartmouth. His 2002 piano piece called Touch, written for the Stanford pianist and teacher Thomas Schultz, was the major work on Schultz’s Piano Spheres recital at Zipper Hall last week, the season’s final concert in this nicely planned series.

Like much of the work of his New York Schoolmates, Wolff’s 20-minute piece is a neat mix of options and strictures. Dynamics are left to the performer’s choice, and there are times when the manuscript even leaves unspecified whether a passage belongs in treble or bass clef. But, as Schultz pointed out in well-written program notes, and did again in congenial talk before his performance, such matters are of less importance than matters of texture, drive and actual sound. In these regards I found Touch an exceptionally attractive new work for piano. I would also urge on the enlightened Piano Spheres management, whose series has become one of this city’s major assets (although you wouldn’t know this from the paltry size of last week’s crowd), to consider ways of enhancing the value of premieres such as this by scheduling second, third and fourth hearings in the not-too-distant future. Premieres are all very well; however, I left Thomas Schultz’s concert with a lot of other good music in my head, but an immediate desire to hear that one piece again.

The “other good music” included one of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s killer Klavierstücke and a big, dramatic work by Frederic Rzewski, one of his marvelous “Four Pieces” from 1977. There was also considerable time wasted, alas, with a pair of wispy, cruelly overextended pieces by the Bay Area Korean composer Hyo-Shin Na, where a repeat of the Christian Wolff would have been a more imaginative choice. But I dream.

SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS . . .

On a summer evening some 30 years ago, a friend and I arrived at Troisgros, the legendary three-star multifork restaurant in the south of France, aglow with anticipation for a dinner we had reserved many months before. Upon being seated, we noted with horror the adjoining table, where sat a company of well-fed executive types heavily wreathed in cigar smoke. Mustering my rudimentary French, I cast my culinary hopes upon their mercies – to no avail. Fortunately, Monsieur Troisgros allowed us to postpone dinner until the air had cleared. His explanation came with a resigned shrug: “Ce sont des Belges.”

Memories of that dinner – not the masterworks from the Troisgros kitchen but the atrocities that preceded – returned loud and clear at Disney Hall last weekend as the Philharmonic, organ and all, took on Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie Concertante, music as painful to the senses as anything I can remember being imposed upon me in my long years on the local scene: music, indeed, of a terribleness so wretched as to stir up memories of those clouds of cigar smoke in Roanne that night of contrasting fragrances so long ago. Monsieur Jongen, perhaps I neglected to inform you, was also a Belgian.

The music dates from 1926, composed originally for the monster pipe organ at the Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia (where I once participated in a St. Matthew Passion sing-along, standing next to the necktie counter). Imagine the loudest, most chromatically convoluted, defiantly non-ending piece of César Franck’s organ music, and paste onto that an orchestral counterpart equally loud and long, but also grindingly out of tune with the organ (as orchestras-versus-organs inevitably are). Thirty-five minutes pass. The ears ache, the teeth rattle, you wish for a lungful of Belgian cigar smoke as blessed relief. Before that, on this disastrously downhill program, had come the wonderfully smart, insinuating Piano Concerto of Maurice Ravel; before that, the clear-headed, ballsy First Symphony of Beethoven.

Edo de Waart conducted; apparently he likes the thing, and has even recorded it.
Jean-Yves Thibaudet was soloist in the Ravel, mucho zippy. Cherry Rhodes, dressed
in Dracula colors, was seated that day at the organ. At the end, where even a
loud C-major chord usually draws a standing ovation from the Disney crowd, there
was next to none. There is hope for us yet.

Three orchestras held the Disney stage on successive evenings last week, diverse in program offerings and in musical language. Two of the groups were of symphony-orchestra size (100 or so); the other numbered 10. In Disney’s acoustic splendor, all three produced, when called for, prodigious varieties of wondrous sound. I didn’t hear a deathless masterpiece at any of the concerts, but I wasn’t lured into an early departure at any of them either – not even when, at the first event, I stumbled over the Sibelius Violin Concerto lurking in some dark corner of the program by Valery Gergiev and the visiting Kirov Orchestra (fresh in from the Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg).

That singularly empty, aimless, drab spinoff from the Sibelius treadmill – phenomenally played this time by the Greek whizbang Leonidas Kavakos as if in a single stroke of the bow – didn’t even turn out to be the worst piece on that program (as it usually is). The place of dubious honor belonged that night to the Second Symphony of Sergei Prokofiev, the least known of his seven, music so little played that I couldn’t find a fellow critic’s comment to crib, music thoroughly terrible and therefore, I suppose, worth hearing this once. The score, “a symphony of iron and steel,” the composer once said, dates from 1924. Compared to Prokofiev’s other great dissonant works of the time – the Scythian Suite, for example, or the opera The Fiery Angel — its half-hour’s music seems to meander nowhere and everywhere, with a final movement that consists of an opening theme and about six logical endings, all of which the composer bypassed. Like everything else on Gergiev’s program, it was accorded the full 21-gun treatment.

With or without his orchestra, Gergiev has acceded to living-legend stature; while among us last week, he also planted a few more flags in press conferences down in Orange County, where he will help celebrate the new concert hall by leading operas in the old concert hall. In the Kirov Orchestra he has created an icon, a self-image in both sight and sound. Hearing the unit hurl itself upon the first measures of Borodin’s Second Symphony – with the double basses massed up in the corner of the stage, howling like wolves on the moonlit steppes – you might wonder how this onslaught on Borodin’s careful structures might relate to the intentions of the gentle pharmacist-turned-composer. Even with its native music so blatantly overplayed, you recognize that this is some kind of unique orchestra, with whip-cracking conductor to match, and that they mean business.

Ravioli

The second work on the next night’s program, Samuel Scheidt’s Battaglia á 5 — battle music for five string players and keyboard, published around 1621, performed by the Italian visitors who call themselves Il Giardino Armonico (the Garden of Harmonies) – seemed like a distant but accurate echo of the Russian hurly-burly of the night before. Styles have changed rapidly in the performance of Baroque string music, as I noted a few weeks ago when some gooey, romanticized version of Vivaldi’s Seasons hit the market. Not long ago, the “authentic” Baroque style consisted of the very elegant, if somewhat bloodless, foursquare playing of I Musici and the Virtuosi di Roma, who purvey their Vivaldi very straight and nicely patterned. Now come these harmonious gardeners – only half of the full group that you can hear on their new Naïve disc titled At Home With the Devil, but still plenty loud and full of the Big Baroque Bounce. By contrast with their tractor-driven horticultural approach, those earlier “authentic” ensembles suddenly sound just a bit sleepy.

The aforementioned Scheidt piece called for great outbursts of sound: trills and cascades of tone, the instruments re-tuned to create dissonances and strange sound effects. The Giardino’s leader, Giovanni Antonini, performed a Vivaldi flute concerto with a remarkable slow movement, full of chromatic twists and turns. Another flute concerto, by one Nicola Fiorenza, ended the program with a full-scale, four-handkerchief jerking of tears, music as firmly anchored in the minor modes as any Verdian death scene in the centuries to come. They don’t write ‘em like that anymore, I am happy to report.

Palatschinken

By the end of his two-week residency on the Philharmonic podium, Iván Fischer had infused the orchestra’s language with the soft, elegant melancholy of Central Europe – specifically, this second week, the robust, carb-laden harmonies of Bohemia’s romantic masters Bedrich Smetana and his younger countryman Antonin Dvorák. Mistreated as their music may be through the years at Bowl and Pops concerts, the proper shaping hand – as Fischer wields with exceptional grace and wisdom – draws from this music a message coaxing and irresistible. In music as simple as the B-major Notturno for Strings, which Dvorák originally planned as a movement in his G-major Quintet and later expanded, any modest turn of phrase, when phrased as Fischer’s strings did the other night, becomes a memory that clings.

Dvorák’s Violin Concerto was the evening’s most substantial work, nicely played by Martin Chalifour but with no more drive than it deserves. Dvorák’s legacy glows with one supremely great concerto, but this isn’t it. What was lovelier to hear from his pen this night, and far less familiar, was the set of the early Moravian Duets for soprano and mezzo (Carolyn Betty and Kelley O’Connor), with a gentle orchestration contrived by Fischer himself: bittersweet, piercing harmonies that defined the wonderful, distinctive language that Dvorák would go on to shape into the great works of his mature years. Ending the program were three of the six audible travel posters that make up Smetana’s My Country: the often-sailed Moldau and two others less known but no less enchanting. If there had been a Czech Republic travel agent outside Disney Hall that night, I would have been first in line for tickets.

Seldom had the Brahms First Symphony sounded more turgid, more irrelevant, than at the end of last week’s Philharmonic concert. Preceding that hapless work, visiting conductor Iván Fischer – master programmer, he – had set the air aglow at Disney Hall with the music of Brahms’ own birthright: the rhythms and harmonies of Hungary’s gypsies, some of it straight, some of it refined and sugarcoated for the serious concert hall. Latter-day gypsies had come over from some of Budapest’s finest bands: a fiddler in the old style, his violinist son, and a virtuoso on the cimbalom. The music they played – a couple of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, even a delicious bit of sentimental drool by Brahms himself – may have been old friends, but the manner of performance, the insinuation in both rhythm and harmony, was so fresh, vital and captivating as to sound utterly new. There was nothing wrong with Fischer’s clear-headed, intelligent projection of the Brahms First after intermission, but it was obvious from the work’s first thudding, constipated C-minor chords that the evening’s fund of authentic ecstasy had come to an end.

The Pasadena’s Symphony’s Jorge Mester, of mixed Mexican and Hungarian ancestry, played the Hungarian card last weekend with the shards of the Viola Concerto left incomplete by Béla Bartók at his death and pieced together by several hands. Clouds of suspicion hang over the work; if its actual ——–
AUTHORship isn’t firmly established, its sounds represent some pretty good gestures of the music of its time and place. The world doesn’t have enough viola concertos, nor enough Bartók even ersatz, and the soloist, young Antoine Tamestit, made a convincing case for whatever it was that he performed. Shed a tear, however, for the Pasadena Symphony’s imperfect home, the Civic Auditorium, with its lousy acoustics downstairs and its life-threatening steepness upstairs – while the superior Ambassador Auditorium sits pathetically underused a few blocks away.

No sooner had I let loose a few snide words on the usual low level of Pulitzer
Prize–winning music, when word came of a genuinely excellent winner, Steven Stucky’s
Second Concerto for Orchestra. At the Philharmonic’s
premiere last March, I wrote of Stucky as “a composer with something to say, and
a pretty good handle on the language in which to say it,” and it’s nice to be
agreed with by distinguished judges. This is only the second Philharmonic commission
to cop a Pulitzer; Mel Powell’s Duplicates of 1990 was the first.

Historic Bites

When it comes to masterly programming, nobody need defer to MaryAnn Bonino and her “Chamber Music in Historic Sites,” going strong now for well over 30 years. Take this recent event: A sit-down dim sum dinner for 150 or so at Chinatown’s spacious Empress Pavilion (and never mind it being the wrong time of day) was followed, in another part of the same room, by musical dim sum, a program of short pieces for string quartet by Chinese composers plus Ravel, played by the four young Chinese-American siblings who constitute the Ying Quartet. Born in Chicago, trained at Eastman and united as a quartet since 1992, the Yings played beautifully, with a couple of short but strong pieces by Chen Yi and her husband, Zhou Long, as the concert-stealers and two exquisite bits from Ravel’s Quartet – dappled with gorgeous splotches of color no less Oriental than French – not far behind.

Vicki Ray’s recent “Piano Spheres” concert at Zipper was also all about those sight-versus-sound overlaps: short, lovely pieces from all over that drew upon visual inspirations, and David Rosenboom’s longer suite, Twilight Language, which evokes the gestures of 10th-century Tibetan artists. Vicki, too, plans programs with a knack for marvelous freeform artistry; what she draws from her piano always relates in wondrous ways to all the senses. At the end she joined with the splendid tenor Jonathan Mack in Poulenc’s charming song cycle, setting Paul Éluard’s poetry about seven painters: synesthesia writ large.

At LACMA, everybody’s favorite local soprano, Daisietta Kim, persuaded her colleagues
in Xtet to allow her Windup, a self-celebration of a lovely and varied
career in which she got to sing bits from her repertory (this and that, framed
within a Schubert song), with dancing, recitations, projected artwork – an olla
podrida of the many ways the remarkable Daisietta has found to enchant us over
the 28 years of her performance career so far. I can only hope that her title,
Windup, is to be taken in the sense of the star pitcher preparing for action;
any other interpretation would be beyond contemplation.

All in the Family

Over 18 years I’ve been fairly successful in avoiding Pacific Serenades, even though its programs are often attractively baited. This, in case you’ve been even luckier than I in dodging its expert press-agentry, is a movable chamber-music feast, four or five programs a year, repeated in small public venues and in private homes where elegant food is often served. The series is the vanity operation of Mark Carlson, a composer who has in the past been affiliated with UCLA. Over its years of operation, Pacific Serenades has given 18 world premieres of works by Mr. Carlson, although, judging from the works I’ve heard, another way of putting this is that the group has given world premieres of the same work 18 times. The list of donors includes nine Carlsons. Other solid, academic, conservative, eminently trustworthy UCLA composers whose names appear frequently on Pacific Serenades programs include Roger Bourland, Paul Reale, Ian Krouse and Paul Chihara. Hurrah for the C-major scale!

I mentioned bait. There must be money in the Pacific Serenades operation, because the performers are top rank. What finally got me to one of the concerts was the lure of two chamber works: Mozart’s G-minor Piano Quartet and Schumann’s Piano Quintet. The Philharmonic’s Joanne Pearce Martin was the pianist; Miwako Watanabe and Jim Dunham, of the long-lamented Sequoia Quartet, were the first violinist and violist; Connie Kupka and David Speltz rounded out the ensemble. The performance I got to was at the UCLA Faculty Club, a nice, intimate setting for chamber music, and the performances were superb. In the middle there was a new work, Collage, by 35-year-old Pasadena resident Peter Knell – faceless, aimless, harmless music, pure Pacific Serenades stuff as I’ve heard on their discs and, accidentally, elsewhere.

Apropos of discs: I made it a point to tune in on intermission conversations with notepad in hand. I heard the word sciatica 17 times.

Christian Zacharias’ midseason visits to the Philharmonic have a cleansing effect: the right music at the right time. His luggage is filled with 18th-century music: Mozart and Haydn and their pals, symphonies and concertos. He furloughs the orchestra’s heavy brass and the strings’ back-desk players; he stands among the musicians on floor level, not above them on a podium. The sense prevails of a benign chamber music writ large, and of musicianship of the highest order. Whatever he chooses to perform, familiar or not, becomes a discovery of delight.

This time he brought us two Mozart piano concertos, which he led from the keyboard: the early B-flat (No. 6 in the usual listing), with the 20-year-old composer simply spilling forth melodies from one elegant phrase to the next, and the F-major (No. 19) of only eight years later, subtle, mysterious, full of surprises around every turn. Framing these were two off-the-wall symphonies, neither well-known, both hovering at the outer expressive limits of what constituted the unstated rules of the “classical” – and, therefore, polite and predictable – usage of the day.

First came the early Haydn symphony (No. 31 of the 104), known as the “Horn-Signal,” whose forward momentum is subject to constant and hilarious disruption by a quartet of horns who sometimes join in the design but just as often obstreperously out-shout it. If we anchor our awareness of Haydn around the great dozen symphonies of his mature years, we miss the marvelous experimentation of the early symphonies, when his orchestra at the Esterházy Palace was like a sonic Erector set, a glorious toy for trying out all kinds of sonorities and forms. Aided no end by the Philharmonic’s intrepid brass contingent, Zacharias captured the essence of this remarkable work, both the soaring wood notes wild and the overall inventive exuberance. So did he, too, in the final work, a G-minor symphony by one Johann Vanhal, music from around 1770 drenched in the mood of Sturm und Drang (breast-clutching, fist-waving). The key of G minor seems to have been invented to allow 18th-century composers to let down their hair. Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in that key – that great orchestral screech at the beginning of Amadeus — said it even better, and the great No. 40 said it the best of all.

LARGE RED STAR

Two concerts at LACMA last week afforded too-small audiences the chance to welcome back Antares, the enterprising New York chamber ensemble that first beguiled us in December 2003 and in the meantime has been gathering up virtually every chamber-music prize you can mention. The name refers to a large red star in Scorpio (or just as easily to the impressively red thatch of its pianist, Los Angeles–born Eric Huebner); the group seeks to build upon the meager repertory of music for violin, cello, clarinet and piano, through commissions or just by being so good. Since five of the seven works on the two programs were from the past decade, that repertory is not so meager as one might have thought.

Of particular interest, on their second program, was Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy, the chance to sample what kind of music wins Pulitzer Prizes these days. Same kind as usual, I guess: thin, harmless, agreeable, forgettable. Mr. Moravec ladles out three movements describing characters in Shakespeare’s play, one devoted to the line about “sweet airs that give delight” and one a sort of hodgepodge on the music just heard. Music inspired by The Tempest that reflects more of this most precious of dramas’ magic than does this treacly flapdoodle by Moravec ranges from the recent opera by Thomas Adès to the suite of incidental pieces by Sibelius.

Actually, the music I found most attractive in these two concerts, to my surprise, was a 1938 quartet by Paul Hindemith. In general, I lean toward the Hindemith of the 1920s: sassy, sometimes even diabolical, inflamed by the newfangled jazz that was sweeping across Europe, bosom buddies with Schoenberg on one arm and Kurt Weill on the other. Then a soberer Hindemith takes over; the bright, sharp orchestral colors turn Brahmsian. Mathis der Maler becomes his Parsifal, but without the sex. In some ways this quartet is a kind of memoir, a throwback in the best sense to the vintage Hindemith style – not all the way to the opera of 1929 with its nude bathtub scene, but close. Its structural lines are strong and clear; it makes its points tersely, and with high artistry. I rushed home to scour my shelves but found no copy. Fortunately, Amazon had several as low as $1.25. O brave new world!

DREAM ON

Two weeks ago, the American Youth Symphony drew a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for its gala program, what you might call an out-of-town tryout for its Carnegie Hall concert last weekend. Tickets went for $100. Veteran violinist, teacher and Philharmonic concertmaster Alexander Treger conducted; he took over the AYS from its founder, Mehli Mehta (daddy to Zubi), in 1998. There was some new music, Dreams and Whispers of Poseidon by the 32-year-old Russian-born Lera Auerbach (with well-remembered Philharmonic alumnus David Weiss on musical saw). Yundi Li, the latest Chinese whiz-bang to hit these shores, played a Chopin concerto. For the rest, spooned over the second half of the program like last week’s warmed-over kasha, there was the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony.

At the post-concert dinner, young orchestral members spoke glowingly about playing in Carnegie Hall – even if buried among 100 orchestral colleagues – as the realization of a lifetime ambition. Board members bestowed awards upon one another and spoke of the vast privilege of transporting the Tchaikovsky Fifth cross-country, fulfilling a historic mission in the very hall where the great Tchaikovsky had led the same work 114 years before – as if the AYS had existed these 40 years for no other purpose.

Perhaps it doesn’t, anymore. Beyond all this money-backed pride is the sad reality
that the AYS is no longer the spirited enterprise of the Mehli Mehta days. Many
young musicians I have talked with tell me that the dropout rate is high, and
that a stint with the AYS is no longer the inevitable career move it once was.
Surely this level of soggy, unbalanced playing is not qualified to tour any farther
than, say, Glendale. I can only hope that those predatory New York critics found
something else to do last Saturday night.

Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is so seldom played that every new hearing becomes a trove of rediscovered delights; so was it with the Philharmonic last week. The orchestra, just back from its weeklong conquest of Cologne (read the reviews if you doubt this), might have been entitled to some jet lag; perhaps it was the luxury of Beethoven’s orchestral language, and the enlivening guest leadership of Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, that forestalled this consequence.

The personality of Beethoven’s orchestral sonority per se is not often dealt with; I put forward the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony as containing the most seductive sounds in his entire legacy. They consist in the main of conversation among the winds, a solo clarinet (Michele Zukovsky’s the other night, pure rapture) answered by a somewhat more serious bassoon, a horn gently trying to change the subject, strings and even the timpani as concerned onlookers. The miracle – and I use this word advisedly – is compounded when you realize that this music dates from a time when Beethoven’s oncoming deafness had already begun its inroads. There is a small body of moments in Beethoven’s music, from around the time of this Fourth Symphony (Opus 60), that give off this particular kind of ecstasy; you shiver when you hear them, or should at any rate. I tend to grow weak-kneed, for example, during the slow movements of the first and second “Razumovsky” string quartets (Opus 59); the rhapsodic G-minor episode that intrudes upon the blandness in the first movement of the Violin Concerto (Opus 61) affects me the same.

There are other remarkable moments in the Fourth. Just the beginning, for example, tries out an effect new in Beethoven’s usage, but one he will employ again in other contexts later on: the notion of the music emerging out of a cloudy nowhere, one note at a time, with empty space in between, and then suddenly getting down to business with a mighty whoosh. (Twenty years later he will pull the same trick in the Ninth Symphony, and every good German composer – and some bad – from then on will follow that lead.) What is interesting, and delightful, in the Fourth is the way Beethoven, later on in the first movement, repeats that whole coming-from-nowhere process, much condensed but just as surprising the second time around.

The performance under Frühbeck was strong, beautifully detailed, respectful of Beethoven’s stipulated repeats and respectful, too, of the winged spirits that make of the final movement an entire wondrous library of joke books. The rest of the program had to be downhill; the second of Prokofiev’s two violin concertos is a rather drab business under any circumstances, although Alexander Treger dealt bravely with its convoluted patterns. Even so, I hadn’t expected to enjoy the two suites of Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat music that ended the program; instead, I kept wishing it wouldn’t end. In a lifetime of pop-concert and Hollywood Bowl performances, I have apparently missed the sizzling, diamond-hard orchestral language of the piece and, of course, the gorgeous, insinuating curvature of its rhythmic patterns. It doesn’t always follow that Spanish conductors can make this music work; ask any San Franciscan who remembers Enrique Jordá. But Frühbeck, in what couldn’t have been many days’ work after the European jaunt, got the Philharmonic to master his own accents to a remarkable degree. The sound of that music, in that hall, was something to roll around on your happiest receptors for hours afterward.

PAST MASTER

The death of Carlos Kleiber last year has activated the consciences of the media, leading to the issue or reissue of most of his recorded performances. Every one of these is essential not only for the strength of the insights that he brought to his chosen (if limited) repertory, but also for the amount of the man himself, the musician infused by music and by the act of making music, that both microphone and camera have been able to capture. You start with the two videos – on Sony and on Deutsche Grammophon – of the New Year’s Day concerts he led at Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal in 1989 and 1992. You are first held spellbound by the sheer gorgeousness of the room itself, the gold of its décor, then of the music that fills it – Vienna’s golden treasury of waltzes and the like – and by the smiling, delighted companionship of the man who is making it happen. There is a lot of folderol around about how musicians make music: about God moving the baton, or Beethoven coursing through the veins. The remarkable thing about watching Kleiber is the sense of easy companionship between him and the task at hand. The remarkable thing about listening to Kleiber is how much of this sense comes through.

The reissues include a CD on Deutsche Grammophon of Schubert’s early Third Symphony and the “Unfinished” in a performance that may leave you paralyzed for some ensuing minutes. The DVDs include Beethoven symphonies – the Fourth and Seventh – and a Mozart “Linz” Symphony so immediate that you fancy yourself onstage, feeling the phrases as they take shape. You’re also onstage, or so you feel yourself, in a Vienna performance of Die Fledermaus, supremely funny and supremely wise. There should also be a Rosenkavalier one of these days, if not already; he recorded it twice, and both versions were released on laserdisc. That was the only opera I saw him conduct in person. Lucky me.

Most remarkable among the Kleiber releases, however, on TDK, is a Carmen from the Vienna State Opera, never before released, with – get this – Elena Obraztsova as Carmen and Plácido Domingo as José, designed and directed by Franco Zeffirelli. The date: December 9, 1978. Above everything else – and “everything else” in this case includes Zeffirelli’s 500 co-workers and eight horses – this is the most nearly complete imprint of a Kleiber performance. The exigencies of 1978 TV production keep him visible for large time segments: molding drumbeats with his whole body, string passages with perhaps 40 fingers in the air, settling back to allow his orchestra – the Vienna Philharmonic, after all – to do what it knows to do. Domingo is youthful, ardent, and takes the B flat in the “Flower Song,” alas, at full volume; Obraztsova is coarser at times than I would have expected; Yuri Mazurok, the Escamillo, is splendidly stentorian. Zeffirelli’s production, need I add, abounds with pretty chorus boys out front; his Lillas Pastia Tavern might be the Grand Canyon. The bad version of Carmen is used, with sung dialogue and not a line left out. At Domingo’s L.A. Opera, at least, they cut.

On comparing the body count before and after intermission at last Thursday’s concert, it was clear that the latest visit by the reigning superpianist Lang Lang, rather than the interesting orchestral offerings by the China Philharmonic Orchestra, had brought out the near-sellout crowd to UCLA’s Royce Hall. True, the performance before intermission by Mr. Lang² of Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody (plus one of Liszt’s Sonetti di Petrarca as encore) had sent out its share of musical skyrockets. Some, however – your scribe among them – might argue that the program’s real value lay elsewhere.

Most of our knowledge of contemporary Chinese music comes from the four exceptionally interesting musicians who made their way out of Beijing soon after the collapse of the Cultural Revolution and did their advanced compositional study in New York. There is a violinist named Chen Yi in the China Philharmonic, but she’s obviously not the same jolly, roly-poly lady whose tough, gritty compositions we know and admire. These youngsters from Beijing all looked like refugees from a Jenny Craig ad.

Under the able leadership of conductor Long Yu, the China Philharmonic showed its muscle at Royce in some rafter-rattling stuff by Rimsky-Korsakov and Bartók (his China-permeated Miraculous Mandarin). The homegrown offerings began with a pretty, old-fashioned piece by Hua Yanjun, who died in 1950: atmospheric music of little consequence. The second indigenous work, however, was of considerable stature, a song cycle by the 40-year-old Xiao Gang Ye bearing the title Das Lied auf der Erde and, thus, evocative even before a note is struck. Its text, indeed, is drawn from the same collection of ancient lyric poetry that – in German translations that bent their meanings somewhat away from their origins – elicited the great Das Lied von der Erde of Gustav Mahler. (Notice the difference: the Chinese “song from the Earth” against Mahler’s “song of the Earth.”)

It probably stretches a point to suggest that the contemporary Xiao Gang Ye, in this 20-minute cycle of five songs for soprano and orchestra, has returned Mahler’s poetry to its source. Yet the relationship between the two works is fascinating, and so is Xiao Gang Ye’s music: shot through with bright bursts of color and emotional warmth. It breaks through no stylistic boundaries. It may be significant, however, to compare these substantial, well-schooled but basically old-fashioned musical manners with the kick-butt music of Chen Yi and her American-trained “Gang of Four” colleagues, who broke out of their Chinese upbringing so dramatically and acquired their musical manners half a planet away.

As for the proficient and highly decorative Lang², concerns about musical manners still lie concealed behind an ample trick repertory in which the Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody fairly gleams by virtue of brevity and superior invention. Musicality mattered less on this occasion; dimples more. Next season he drops in on our own Philharmonic with Bartók’s Second Concerto; that’s a step forward.

ANOTHER COAST

To LACMA’s Bing Theater, with music from elsewhere in the world, came the New York New Music Ensemble, excellent and frequent visitors. The Bang on a Can folks had visited David Lang’s Cheating, Lying, Stealing upon us earlier this season; time does not soften its jerks, false starts and general juvenilia. Magnus Lindberg’s Ablauf, for somewhat the same instrumentation (clarinet and aggressive percussion) did the same things but on a grown-up level. Most of the program, in fact, consisted of workings-out of unlikely combinations of melodic instruments and percussion, including an uncommonly likable piece by Dorrance Stalvey – Exordium, Genesis, Dawn, now 15 years old but new to me. The one work “normally” scored, the 1971 Piano Trio by Britain’s Jonathan Harvey, seemed so much weak tea in such energetic company.

Too few people seem aware of the extraordinary contribution Dorrance Stalvey has made to our musical life, carrying on the pioneering efforts of these Monday Evening Concerts, which date back to 1939 and have given this city a backbone of awareness of music for small performing forces – very new, very old, set forth on a consistently high level that few communities can match in this country or in many others. Since 1971 (34 years!), Stalvey has planned and guided these concerts virtually single-handedly, with minimal financial support from the museum and only half a page’s worth of outside donors. He is also a composer of considerably above-average competence, and the least, you’d think, would be that he’d insist on having a piece of his on every other program over the years. But no; he has been too busy running this remarkable concert series, bringing in new-music groups from New York, string quartets from Paris, Terry Riley from up in the mountains. He turns 75 this year (next August), and in his honor several of the museum programs include his music. It’s about time.

FANTASTIC

Not many performers, and even fewer writers, bother much with Ferruccio Busoni these days; Alfred Brendel is a noble exception. Of Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, “that monumental fusion of thesis and antithesis, of counterpoint and fantasy, Bach and Busoni, that confrontation of an infinitely subtle range of keyboard colors with a Baroque-style independence from tone-color,” Brendel recommends “a thorough study.” A student of this work, he suggests, “may find himself transported into a novel sphere of instrumental art.” To those willing to trust Brendel’s words (as I always am), and armed with a fair supply of courage and patience, Busoni’s work does yield its rewards; Susan Svrcek and Mark Robson reaped them at the last “Piano Spheres” concert at Zipper, in Busoni’s edition for two pianos. (The work comes in several versions; Brendel himself recorded it as a solo early in his career, although that may require something of a search.) What the work is, is a mammoth (half-hour-plus) meditation on the music that Bach left unwritten on his deathbed, The Art of the Fugue. If that sounds vague, it has been clearly expressed, and so was the performance.

If anyone needed further confirmation of the strengths of Esa-Pekka Salonen, and his success in sharing those strengths with the musical life of this city, the events of the past week should answer any lingering questions. Those events included performances with the Philharmonic of huge and demanding orchestral works familiar and otherwise, and other works of high quality composed by Salonen himself. There was also a personal affirmation by Salonen, in the presence of well-fed members of the local and national press at a well-laid brunch, that – contrary to the much-reported attitudes of other symphonic conductors toward their managements, their orchestral players and their public – Maestro Salonen apparently likes life in Los Angeles and is willing to keep at it for another term of contract, maybe more. Imagine: A happy conductor; what will they think of next?

All of this, along with the announcement of next season’s musical fare, which immeasurably enriched the state of mind at the aforementioned gathering of press freeloaders, adds up to thrilling news – the more so in the face of the outpourings of doom ‘n’ gloom from many of the musical establishments beyond the mountains: James Levine’s ill health in Boston, Lorin Maazel’s lousy press in New York, acoustics in Philadelphia’s new hall. (Only Cleveland’s orchestra, apparently, thrives – for anyone, that is, who might want to live in Cleveland.)

Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder began Salonen’s wonder week, with its four harps downstage, 10 horns up back and other performing forces of comparable size. The work survives on its composer’s name; it throbs with the visionary monumental bloat that came into the Germanic musical language (and, fortunately, soon departed) right around the turn to the 20th century, leaving such works as this, the Mahler 8th and certain unmentionables by the likes of the Franz boys Schreker and Schmidt in its wake. There are beautiful moments among the love songs that make up the long first part, and the immensely sad contralto aria for the “Wood Dove,” which Lilli Paasikivi sang most touchingly, has a separate life as a concert piece. Salonen’s orchestra, deep and rich and bone-shaking, howled wondrously into every cranny of the hall, and Grant Gershon’s Master Chorale provided the proper added demonry. Two of the three performances were closed affairs, for the visiting members of a choral directors’ conference, which was curious since the big choral numbers in the piece come only at the end (which, to these ears, couldn’t have come too soon).

SIGNATURE TUNES

More convincing demons danced later in the week, on two programs with what might now be reckoned as Salonen signature tunes: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Thursday and the Berlioz Fantastique on Saturday (in preparation for the orchestra’s next European tour). Both flourish under Salonen’s leadership. There is something in his unfolding of the opening measures of the Stravinsky, the hard-edged platelets of wind tone gradually moving apart and upward into Frank Gehry’s clear air space, that has come to define for me, in a microcosm, everything good about this hall – and the people who work in it. The Berlioz was no less marvelous: the thrusting string tone at the start, the phenomenal urging of the summoning bell at the end (but why was it moved offstage this year?). One complaint: Salonen left out the repeats this time. He shouldn’t have; every note of his performance is precious.

The real matter at hand on these two programs and a third one yet to come (on February 24) is the beautifully designed, well-fitting second hat worn by Salonen himself as one of our times’ major, serious composers. Conductors who compose are nothing new on the landscape. Elephantine bloats by the likes of Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter belong among the sorry items cited two paragraphs ago; Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic ventures will gather dust while his stage shows continue to flourish. Salonen came to Los Angeles with a commendable repertory of a young man’s smart, craftsmanlike pieces that showed the touch of good teaching and good companionship. His music since his arrival has taken enormous forward strides; it is some of the most important music being composed anywhere in the world today, and the remarkable thing is that it gets better right along with his strengths as a conductor.

The L.A. Variations of 1997 was his giant step; it is now a repertory piece. It is the work of a master of orchestral practice, a knowing testimonial to the excellent state to which he had brought his own orchestra at that time. But it is also a work of musical mastery, a process piece that holds you in its grip as the variations unfold. The three works on the current “3 x Salonen” Mini-Festival follow logically. (I heard the first two, Wing on Wing and Mania, at last week’s concerts, and Insomnia — which is on the third program – from the new Deutsche Grammophon recording.)

Wing on Wing was wonderful to hear again live, breezing through the same hall and through the musical forces for which it was written, saddening to hear in its inferior preservation with its cramped, studio sound on the D.G. disc. I love its sparkle, its cold, clear wind. Wherever it may travel, with its amiable intrusions by the sampled voice of Frank Gehry, it remains our piece, Disney Hall’s piece, lightest of this “festival’s” three works, but a treasure. Mania draws the phenomenal cellist Anssi Karttunen into the mix, removing most of the orchestra (strings, especially) from his manic path.

When I first interviewed Salonen, soon after he began his career here, he seemed anxious to downplay the image of Sibelius, as Grandpa in the attic, the dark secret borne by all living Finnish musicians. The sense I get, in both Mania and the imperfect hearing of the thrilling Insomnia on disc (which I will write about again after the live performance) is that Salonen has found a way to extract at least one valuable aspect of Sibelius’ orchestral style, the wonderful headlong dash in, for example, the end of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony or again in the Seventh. Both these new pieces, it occurs to me on early acquaintance, seem to have found the way to make Grandpa respectable once again in polite society. That takes some doing.

The eloquent blurb writers at Naxos, the little record label that could, have been lighting the sky lately with pronouncements on their latest reissued treasure, the first-ever recording (or so they say) of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, newly dusted off to join the 80 or so versions of that much-loved work already on the market. The violinist, also much loved, is the late Louis Kaufman; the performance dates from 1947, and its reappearance at this time has been enough to send me scurrying back into history – especially the performance history of the work itself, which is somewhat remarkable. This recording, by the way, is on the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry as the “first LP recording” of Vivaldi’s elegant conceit, a notation that might merit some revision.

Let’s start around 1920. Even in Vivaldi’s native Italy, almost nothing was known of his music at that time: a few overarranged pages from concertos, a few arias from his operas. Several Italian musicians, however, became obsessed with implanting a native persona in their musical life, to set it apart from the heavy German influence. One of the first things they did was to exhume these four unknown Vivaldi concertos and publish them – in a version for (!) piano duet. In 1927, the highly regarded conductor Bernardino Molinari (who later was to become the teacher of Carlo Maria Giulini) fashioned his orchestration of The Four Seasons, making sure to dedicate it, with all the proper Italianate flourishes, to Benito Mussolini as testimony to the rebirth of Italy’s pride in its grand orchestral heritage. That version, with full symphonic-size string sections (16 first violins), organ, grand pianos doctored to sound like harpsichords, harps, and a violin soloist well versed in the expressive methods of Italian bel canto at its weepiest, found its way to records in 1942 – six 78-rpm discs on the CETRA label. You can still buy it on CD online – at least I did, last month – on the Aura-Music label, and it’s a hoot.

And that, friends, was the first-ever recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It was already in circulation when Louis Kaufman made his (also on six 78s); I know, because I worked for the importer, in New York, at the time. Kaufman, a well-known studio musician on both coasts and a respected concert artist as well, recorded his performance on the Concert Hall Society label, an upscale producer (“discs pressed from gold-sputtered masters”), with a small orchestra conducted by Henry Swoboda. Then and now, the project lay claim to representing the “authentic” Vivaldi (as opposed to the Colosseum-size Molinari Vivaldi), but it is no such thing. Kaufman’s solo performance has the same inauthentic juiciness – sliding into notes, slowing down at the ends of phrases – as his predecessor’s. When either of them takes on the slow movement of “Winter,” you can almost hear Andrea Bocelli wailing out that gorgeous tune. The orchestra under Swoboda lacks clarity; a harpsichord is credited in the notes, but I don’t hear it; and I think that? that’s a (horror!) harp in the slow movement of “Autumn.” (Both recordings, by the way, were reissued on LP in the U.S. in 1950.)

Don’t blame Louis Kaufman. What he delivers is a beautiful rendition of the historically uninformed way violinists were performing Vivaldi, Corelli and the rest of the Baroque orchestral repertory in 1947. A year later Renato Fasano, who had succeeded Molinari at the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome, founded the first “authentic” ensemble for this music. His Virtuosi di Roma opened people’s ears to smaller, cleaner sounds, initiated the “Baroque Revival” that still goes on, and led eventually to the 80 Four Seasons, etc.? recordings now at your local discothèque.

FIDDLE-FADDLE

A generation before Vivaldi, and far to the north, the violin had come into its own as an expressive and virtuosic instrument to rival the human voice. Salzburg’s Heinrich Biber (1644 1704) is the new star on the charts; two recent discs of his music for solo violin, riding high and wild above a supporting organ and/or harpsichord, fill your ears with vast torrents of sound. On a two-disc Harmonia Mundi set, Andrew Manze plays Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, 15 short works whose titles carry you through the “mysteries” of Christian faith from the Annunciation to the Life of Jesus to the Resurrection and the Assumption, each short work a tense, fabulously beautiful meditation or outcry. On an ECM disc no less irresistible, John Holloway traces Biber’s depiction, with fanfares and whooshing onslaughts in ecstatic virtuosity, of the Turkish invasion of Austria, the siege at Vienna and the ultimate victory of Christians over the infidel invaders.

The notion of entrusting all this to a solo violin may strike you as naive, especially since Biber took great care to inscribe in his manuscripts the exact identification for every episode in his musical retelling; in this regard, his work prefigures the charming lines of poetry that Vivaldi inscribed along with his Seasons. What delights me in this music is the sense of trying things out. The violin itself was new at the time; the great Italian makers were just then sending their wares throughout Europe. Biber and his colleagues messed around with experimental tunings – scordatura, later to be used by Mahler and many others – which allowed them unusual harmonic shadings. Both these performers, consummate Brits in whom the spirit of exploration burns bright, capture in their playing a sense of the creative joy that must have gone into these oddball little pieces at the start. This may be the world’s first over-the-top music, and the playing matches it marvelously well.

Back another two centuries, there was Antoine Busnois (boon-WAH, d. 1492), principally employed at the Burgundian court. He is newly celebrated by a disc on Harmonia Mundi of essential, unearthly beauty: songs, motets and a Mass. This is early Renaissance counterpoint; listening from one early work of his to another of later date is like watching an organism hatch in a petri dish. The harmonic sense emerges, the dominant-to-tonic cadences begin to sound like other music we know. But the older pieces have their own beauty: the way lines of counterpoint twist around one another to form a rich if tangled fabric. The very distance of these harmonies from more familiar territory (Palestrina, say) suggests the outlines of the church of St. Sauveur at Bruges, whose vastness the music of Busnois once filled. Performances are by the Orlando Consort, a men’s quartet that sang here a couple of weeks ago in one of the “Historic Sites” concerts that my own tangled fabric of a schedule made unreachable. This disc is fair recompense.

Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations), the Master Chorale’s gleaming new acquisition unveiled at Disney Hall last weekend under Grant Gershon’s proud direction, starts off on congenial ground. We are immediately thrust among old friends: the Reich signature of pulsating polytonal chords lit with the familiar ping of marimbas and vibes. Music for 18 Musicians began that way in 1976; so did The Desert Music in ’84. The latter piece used a small chorus to intone and entwine brief lines from William Carlos Williams; the new work for small chorus and instruments – a co-commission by the Master Chorale, Lincoln Center and Germany’s Ensemble Modern – incorporates “aphoristic truisms” (Reich’s words) from ancient Hebrew and more recent Wittgenstein, sources Reich has used before. The marvel of the latest work is the newness of its expression, the fresh sounds and messages Reich has found within materials that are already known aspects of his musical language.

The essence of that language is repetition, and the richness of impact to be gained from the infinite variety of that technique. “You are wherever your thoughts are” is the line by a Hasidic mystic that gives the work its title. Like a jewel examined in changing light, the text rises and falls through the instrumental texture, with single words or entire phrases passing in and out of audibility. Like all of Reich’s music, the work must use amplification in live performance as a means, he explains, of controlling the clarity in the percussive textures. In Disney, where amplification problems still loom, there were moments of harshness.

This kind of music, which has grown directly from Reich’s earliest minimalist exercises and flourishes mightily, is now only a part of his legacy. Beside it are his multimedia pieces – The Cave, Three Tales – in which other kinds of lyric writing usurp the attention and in which some fascinating uses of speech patterns become further elements among musical sources. He continues to find new uses for his “classic” minimalist techniques, as You Are (Variations) handsomely suggests. His publisher recently sent along a tape of a new Counterpoint for cello and tape, a worthy shelf-mate for the “Vermont” (flute) and “Manhattan” (clarinet) Counterpoints. He becomes positively flirtatious when the matter of writing an opera comes up in conversation. The final text for this splendid new work for the Master Chorale, it might be worth noting in this regard, is “Say little and do much.”

Piano Spheres and Lead Balloons

At Zipper Auditorium two nights later, Gloria Cheng began the 11th season of Piano Spheres, with the presence – only in spirit this time – of founding mentor and participant Leonard Stein, who left us last June. Some of her program had been Stein’s choice (for himself, although his fingers had been stilled a year before). Seventy rain-soaked minutes on I-10 had cost me the first of Schoenberg’s Opus 19 “Little Piano Pieces”; what I heard elicited from Cheng the elegance, the fantasy, the daring of a young composer breaking through that I doubt Stein could have approached at any time in Piano Spheres’ history. Stein had also pushed for George Benjamin’s Shadowlines, and indeed this British composer needs better attention over here than this set of wispy short pieces suggests. The evening’s strongest work was also short and also Brit: a single section from Harrison Birtwistle’s Harrison’s Clocks, marvelously intricate and witty, an emphatic drumbeat for a composer whose neglect – locally, and in the U.S. on the whole – measured against his considerable strengths is a matter of some shame.

Music by two composers named Stephen Taylor – a set of sound-effect pieces by Stephen Andrew relative to scenic wonders (Antarctica, Tibet, etc.) and something by Stephen James about anger expressed in intervals of seconds and sevenths – were further linked by shared triviality. Stephen Andrew offended with his fondness for fortissimo trills with great handfuls of notes at the top of the keyboard, a process for the inflicting of pain upon large numbers of trapped people that bears criminal investigation.

In Praise Of Popov

But for the irresistible evangelism of Alex Ross, periodically in The New Yorker and virtually day-to-day on his Web site (www.therestisnoise.com), I might have passed to an unquiet grave without hearing a note of the music of Gavriil Popov; now curiosity and satisfaction possess my inmost soul. Popov’s dates are 1904–72, making him an almost exact contemporary of Dmitri Shostakovich; his music made something of a splash last summer as part of Leon Botstein’s Shostakovich Festival at Bard College. There were recordings, apparently rather dim, of three of his seven symphonies on the Olympia label, now defunct. Now there is a new recording of No. 1 on Telarc, not at all dim, with Botstein conducting the London Symphony.

The Popov story reads like that of Shostakovich, but without the happy endings. This First Symphony, commemorating the October Revolution, had won a newspaper prize; the day after its 1935 premiere it was attacked and banned in Pravda as “formalist,” reflecting “the ideology of classes hostile to us.” The ban was eventually lifted, but Popov was scarred by the experience. For the rest of his life he ground out safely non-formalist, party-line music. He had some contact with Shostakovich, but they were not close.

This First Symphony, then, can be taken as the one work encapsulating Popov’s full genius, which is considerable. The work, in three movements, lasts about 50 minutes. The Shostakovich Fourth comes to mind in the music’s massive outreach, but Popov’s control of his material makes for a tighter, stronger organization. David Fanning’s program notes refer to a “manic momentum,” and that is a fair estimate. The shape (“formalism” if you prefer) of the first movement disturbs me somewhat; it seems to come to an end too soon. Perhaps a conductor with a greater command of oratory than the rather all-purpose Leon Botstein can make this work better, although this recording is already an open window to a remarkable “new” masterwork.

Obiter dictum: As promised, I checked out the B-team for the L.A. Opera’s Carmen, a group most notably motivated by the vital, sizzling conducting of Nicola Luisotti – whose arrival in the pit the orchestral musicians loudly cheered. May he soon return, in better company. Catherine Malfitano is the aged, clumsy star, her tattered off-cue voice the ghost of Carmens past. “Je veux danser en votre honneur,” she tells Don José in Act 2, and proceeds to “dance in his honor” by standing stock-still without a twitch. Mario Malagnini is the acceptable B-team José; at least he doesn’t bray.

I promised I’d go, but I didn’t promise I’d stay to the end. I mean . . . gee whiz, folks!

The problems go back to the opera’s early days, to Bizet’s original sizzling opéra comique with its abrasive orchestration and the spoken dialogue between musical numbers that moved the action furiously forward. Bizet died soon after the 1875 premiere, and tampering hands got to work on the score, slowing the action with sung instead of spoken dialogue, diluting the genius of the original with lesser hackwork. This became the “standard” Carmen, so identified in all the press handouts. Everybody knows that Bizet’s original is by far stronger, but the “standard” version has become so ingrained that singers and conductors are too lazy to learn the better score. Francesco Rosi’s marvelous film, with Plácido Domingo and Julia Migenes-Johnson, now on DVD, preserves this original version.

Like its previous attempts in 1992 and 1998, the Los Angeles Opera’s new Carmen is defeated at the start by its espousal of the corrupt “standard” version, further weakened by the nothing-much conducting of Domingo on opening night, by the work of three of the four principal cast members that ranged from negligible to deplorable, and by a production that clogged the visual receptors even as the music offended the ears. (Two casts of principals are being fielded during the 12 performances, and two conductors. I’ll check out the B-team and report, if there’s anything worth reporting. How’s that for heroism beyond the call?)

Milena Kitic is the A-team Carmen, Belgrade-born, currently residing in Pasadena, active in local opera. She sings prettily, but without much in the chest. Worse, for a woman of her slender and attractive build, her stage movements are without slink: a Carmen behaving like a Micaela. That latter part – my nomination for opera’s most unnecessary role even under optimum conditions – was sung by Carmen Giannattasio with the requisite forgettable, pale sweetness. From the yawps and howls of Richard Leech’s Don José there were no surprises: a tenor never more than second-rate-utility at the height of his career, now in decline from even that sad state. Only the larruping Escamillo of the ever-reliable Erwin Schrott produced something like a spark of life.

To its great credit, and our no-less-great edification, the Philharmonic’s current “Silenced Voices” program uncovers a segment in musical history virtually unknown and certainly undervalued: two generations of Central European music, mostly but not entirely by Jewish composers, deemed unacceptable by Nazi artistic standards and thus removed from circulation. Some of it, of course, survived with its composers who were able to emigrate – Korngold, Weill, Zemlinsky; much of it did not, vanishing as its composers perished in Hitler’s gas ovens. Absent this music, we lack a whole strand of 20th-century musical history parallel to the development of atonality and neoclassicism.

One single thread that did survive, miraculously, is the music of Viktor Ullmann, who as a prisoner at Theresienstadt composed almost 20 works, including an opera, and managed to pass the manuscripts on to a librarian at the camp who preserved them and, many years later, made their presence known. An amazed world first heard the one-act satirical opera The Emperor of Atlantis in 1975; it was given here this past week at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. James Conlon conducted with a small vocal ensemble from Juilliard and the Philharmonic New Music Group; on discs and in two weeks at the Philharmonic, this “Irish kid from Long Island” (his words) has made the rediscovery and restoration of this suppressed concentration-camp repertory a matter of personal priority.

There is more to this music than its creators’ personal stories; both the opera and Ullmann’s Second Symphony, which Conlon conducted with the Philharmonic, are strong and fascinating works that do indeed fill in great stylistic gaps in our awareness of their time. The opera, to a libretto by Peter Kien, treats a fable familiar itself for its time, an allegory involving the personification of Death held at bay, and an Emperor and a Harlequin at odds on the value of Life; into the music there went the expected shreds of Strauss (all Strausses), some Mahler, much Weill, much of the bristle of the young Hindemith. In the symphony, fleshed out by a contemporary editor from notations left by Ullmann on the manuscript of a piano sonata, there is all of the above plus, in a powerful slow movement, a richness of oratory that has the outlines of a Bruckner on a level of eloquence that tragic figure never attained. This is, then, important music. There are Conlon recordings of the two symphonies, on Capriccio; see for yourself.

Cage, Ives, Harrison, Riley . . . somebody in heaven must have had a hand in concocting Jacaranda’s first program of the season (and the second one, too, all-Mozart on November 20, with the 13-Wind Serenade, the Piano-Wind Quintet and the “Dissonance” Quartet). Surely you know this concert series by now: chamber music lovingly planned, handsomely set in Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian (where even the organ is the proper size). This first concert, a rewarding variorum of masterwork and not-quite, drew well; word is around.

Matters began with the endearing trivialities of Cage’s Living Room Music, congenial strokings of household furniture brought onstage for the occasion, some to Gertrude Stein poetry, some not. Later there was Cage’s famous silent piece 4’33” performed by pianist Scott Dunn with majestic solemnity; Dunn also participated – fingers and all this time, and with violinist Sarah Thornblade and cellist Timothy Loo – in Charles Ives’ Trio, with its hilarious jumble of quotations one minute and its apparent inability to get to any kind of point the next. Guitarist Miroslav Tadic and violinist Thornblade collaborated in a set of garrulous Terry Riley pieces whose inability to get to a point was part of their charm. Best of all was Lou Harrison’s hugely insistent, dramatic Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, its killer solos dispatched by a phenomenal 22-year-old violinist named Joel Pargman – remember that name – with a mostly student ensemble led by Donald Crockett.

There are times when you’re listening to a piece, and you squirm in your seat and can’t wait for it to end. There are times when you sit transfixed and pray that it never ends. On successive nights last week – the Carmen and Lou Harrison’s Concerto – I was able to touch both extremes.

In a whole shelf of tomes on the life and works of Beethoven, I find no writing kindly disposed toward the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, yet Nagano’s new Harmonia Mundi recording is actually the fifth of the work to appear since the dawn of the CD era. Worse yet, Franz Liszt’s St. Stanislaus rates no more than a footnote in my three or four biographies of that worthy composer, yet here on Telarc is an hour’s worth of music from this unfinished work from Liszt’s dying years, a performance Conlon put together at last year’s Cincinnati May Festival, an annual event he has shepherded since 1973.

The ardent collector would have us believe, of course, that the less renowned a work’s position in its composer’s pantheon of masterworks, the more exalted its stature as a masterpiece. These two works from, respectively, the dawning and the sunset years in the era of the overstuffed romantic choral escapade – an era illuminated along its way with such flickering lights as Mendelssohn’s Elijah and the Brahms Requiem – hold a certain fascination. Terrible as they are, they serve as paradigms: the Beethoven as the perfect specimen of the bloodless academic counterpoint he so brilliantly surpassed in the fugues of his last string quartets, the Liszt as a blind alley where Wagner-inspired chromatic harmonies seem to strangle themselves in their own complexity.

Beethoven’s 48-minute oratorio tells of Jesus’ betrayal by Judas and the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane; there are important roles for Jesus, Peter and a Seraph, and a chorus of soldiers and disciples gets to whoop things up at the end. But nothing ever moves; arias and recitatives fall into blocky forms, and even the choral movements lack impulse. Everything goes by formula – it’s difficult to realize that this stodgy music was conceived earlier in the same year (1803) that produced the “Eroica.” Plácido Domingo sings the Jesus; his recent success as Wagner’s Parsifal would, you’d think, endow his voice with the intensity to countenance the pathos in this kind of music, but Beethoven gives him little. Nagano and his Berlin Deutsches Symphonie provide a fine resonance; Luba Orgonasova and Andreas Schmidt take the subsidiary roles.

An oratorio on Poland’s Saint Stanislaus, who in 1079 had the sass to confront the tyrannical King Boleslaw and get him to recant his evil ways, occupied the aging Franz Liszt in his last days, until failing eyesight forced him to put the project aside with two of the four scenes completed. Since those scenes already add up to an hour’s music, there was plenty for Conlon, his May Festival Chorus, seven vocal soloists and the Cincinnati Symphony to sink their teeth into for their world premiere last year; this, after all, is the kind of event that brings the Lisztomaniacs, the media and the recording engineers on the run (or would have, in my day).

There is only one problem, and it reveals itself about 30 seconds into the tortured, slithering, aimless chromaticism of the opening orchestral introduction and never shakes itself loose thereafter: This music is dull, as if nothing in the world had ever been dull before. It is dull like a parody of dullness; it is dull as if the Brahms Requiem had turned into a klezmer convention; it is dull as if the AMA had defined a new level of physical pain. In a wretched sequence, chorus passes into aria; aria passes into orchestral fantasy on some obscure Polish hymn, then to another. One excellent soloist is Kristine Jepson, who sang the role of Sister Helen in Opera Pacific’s Dead Man Walking and, therefore, knows her way around lost causes – which do, after all, count as collectibles.

IT IS TIME — long past time, in fact – for me to write about Valentin Silvestrov, one of that remarkable group of Eastern European composers whose cause in the West has been most forcefully undertaken by the noble record producer Manfred Eicher of ECM. Born in Ukraine in 1937, Silvestrov followed a more or less standard evolution – some 12-tone, some Cage, some Shostakovich and Schnittke – toward the unique stylistic mix his music presents as a challenge to latter-day description.

His Requiem for Larissa, released on ECM this past spring and composed in memory of his late wife, explodes out of darkness. Deep-toned percussion (“a black lake,” writes Paul Griffiths in his notes) floods our ears; a horn and the chorus can’t quite get the words out: “Requiem.” The music pounds, then stops, then pounds once again. Of all the settings of the words of the Mass for the Dead, the “Dies Irae” here, in its jagged savagery, strikes the deepest terror. Later a solo mezzo-soprano sings the “Lacrimosa” in a tortured, fearful melody, and the men of the chorus fling it back at her. “Eternal rest” lies far out of reach in these harmonies that pierce the eardrums. Near the end solo, winds and brass hurl fragments of troubled melody over what sounds like an empty vastness, yet this soon melts into a kinder vision, as soft bells, harp and celesta offer the comfort long awaited and a soft wind seems to caress the troubled landscape.

Silvestrov writes strong music that hurtles across many styles. On another ECM disc from a year ago, there’s his Postludium, a massive work for piano (Alexei Lubimov) and orchestra (Dennis Russell Davies, conducting), astonishing in its brutality at times but no less astonishing for its angelic apotheosis at the end. His music comes to us this coming March, when UCLA and ECM join in an extended festival they’re calling “Elective Affinities,” with a number of ECM notables on hand that I’ve written about in awe over the years – the Hilliard Ensemble, Jan Garbarek, Dino Saluzzi and the Keith Jarrett Trio. One event, listed for March 17, has music by Valentin Silvestrov and Arvo Pärt played by the Munich Chamber Orchestra. Both composers will be in attendance, and you should be, too.

Impressive, yes; awesome, yes; one more Frank Gehry visual to do honor to its creator, definitely yes; what I cannot do, with the new organ at Disney or with any other of its kind, is to accept its sound as beautiful. The sound of the pipe organ, any pipe organ, is a noise mechanically created, by extraordinarily complex means, to simulate musical tones. It cannot, at the same time, simulate the human impulse that creates these tones – the impact of breath or finger. It cannot simulate the way a singer or a string player can bend a tone slightly to match another tone nearby. (Not all “human” instruments can do all of this, either, which is why we have ensembles made up of many kinds of instruments.)

And so, organs (pipe, electronic, whatever) are some kind of elaborate fake, and they sound fake. The opening dash to the cadence of Bach’s D-minor Toccata and Fugue, which Todd Wilson played to start the first subscription concert, was a glazed, metallic, tooth-jarring shriek that had nothing to do with any musical sound I could acknowledge. Organs in churches much smaller than this one, of course, have been used by great composers like J.S. Bach to create wonderful musical designs; has anyone actually described the sound of these works as “beautiful,” as the term might apply to a slow movement from a Brandenburg Concerto or an aria from the Mass? The organ works are masterpieces of design, and we hear them that way. They have paved the way for generations of lesser composers, who have perverted Bach’s compositional impulses on perversions of Bach’s instruments to create the contemporary organ repertory. Olivier Messiaen has been more eloquent than most in employing the instrument to convey his long-winded personal messages to the Heavenly Host and all His pals.

Some composers have been tempted to blend the organ into monster orchestral compositions. In the Philharmonic’s first two weeks the programs have put forth two of the best-known horrors along this line: the so-called “Organ” Symphony by Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, along with Strauss’ Festival Prelude, which is my new nominee for the worst music ever written. It’s worth noting that, although both the Saint-Saëns and Zarathustra owe their fame to their bone-rattling C-major organ blasts, in both of them these blasts occur only one or two times during music of a half-hour duration. Most likely, both Saint-Saëns and Strauss were shrewd enough to realize that the discrepancy in tuning between organ and other instruments would have created harmonic chaos if allowed to settle into an audience’s awareness.

I asked the Disney Hall organ builder, Manuel Rosales, how designers deal with this discrepancy, the clash in intonation between the organ and instruments in equal temperament. (The Saint-Saëns, which calls for both organ and piano, sets up a particularly horrendous clash, which nobody bothers to notice because the music is so busy at the time.) He had no real answer: “We just make the organ sound as nice as we can.” The one really satisfactory organ-plus-instruments music on these inaugural concerts was Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ and Percussion that was stuck between the Bach and the Saint-Saëns and, in terms of innovative sounds deployed with high imagination, put everything else to shame. Wilson’s stilted performance, however, had the feel of a stranger in a strange land.

PIPE ORGANS IN GREAT cathedrals become part of the architectural psychology; their sound seems to fulfill the interior of the building. Two wheezy ancient organs answering each other across the vast space of San Marco in Venice renew the inspiration that drove Monteverdi and the Gabrielis 400 years ago. High mass at Notre Dame in Paris involves some turgid, nondescript music by a latter-day hack composer, but the place defines the sound and vice versa. At Disney Hall it’s the sound of the orchestra on the stage – Salonen and the Philharmonic performing Berlioz, say – that fulfills the space; the organ comes at you from one place, up high in the hall. I’m not at all sure that we’re going to make the adjustment to include that sound in the fullness the hall provides. Maybe, but don’t take bets.

Pipe organs in concert halls are prestige items. The New York Philharmonic suffered a terrible blow to its ego when its pipe organ had to be ripped out of Avery Fisher Hall during one of its frequent acoustic make-overs. (That organ, by the way, currently resides at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.) In the concert hall it is not totally useless, of course; at Sunday’s Master Chorale concert, which consisted entirely of choral music plus organ, the sound supporting the chorus in the D-major Mass of Dvorák was lush and lovely; the trumpeting dissonances in and around James MacMillan’s Magnificat helped redeem the churchly dullness of the interminable vocal stuff. But at the Philharmonic pre-concert event, the orchestra’s CEO Deborah Borda had rattled off, as benefits bestowed by the possession of the new organ, the gladsome tidings that the orchestra would now be able to schedule the Poulenc Organ Concerto and Franz Liszt’s Battle of the Huns, and it struck me that those works of arguable merit may have been acquired at rather a high price.

Meanwhile, back at the opera . . . I had promised you, and myself, to look in on the Los Angeles Opera’s Ariadne auf Naxos one more time as Laura Claycomb took on the role of Zerbinetta for the last two performances. This, in a word, was stupendous: more than a flawless vocal performance, a creation of body and voice and spirit so grand in conception as to spread its magic to those around her. Everything worked; the creature of light and air scratched together by Strauss and von Hofmannsthal out of random scraps became a whole new and vital gear in the turning of the drama. Claycomb, who has sung songs of Salonen at Ojai and Bellini’s Juliet at the Music Center, became here not just a late-in-the-run replacement but a great and original creative artist. Cherish her.

But last season’s Madama Butterfly at the L.A. Opera, not a new production but a carefully prepared revival, was pure Wilson: the exquisitely intricate sense of stage movement, the lighting that swept the eye toward magical far horizons, and, most remarkable, the way the characters onstage seemed to absorb light and color until it became their defining dimension. And if you make the pilgrimage to San Francisco’s Geary Theater – where Wilson’s The Black Rider, the first completely original work of his to play these shores, will be on the boards for another week – the first thing you will notice is that same intensity, as though the confraternity of dyestuff and paint and lighting has saturated everything and made the essence of color into a dimension of itself.

The fable of The Black Rider partakes deeply of the essence of theater: good versus evil, the power of make-believe to enlist the participation of all the senses. This particular permutation derives from a German folktale, but the aura is universal. Wilhelm, the simple-minded schnook, needs to win the huntsman’s contest to earn the hand of Katie; on his own, however, he can’t even hit a barn door. Enter the Devil, who offers a handful of Magic Bullets, but doesn’t let on that the last bullet belongs to him. Needless to say, that last bullet becomes the bearer of mischief; Katie falls, and Wilhelm ends up in the loony bin. Carl Maria von Weber took the same story into Der Freischütz but gave it a happy ending. The only treatment of the tale that comes close to the Wilson version is Achim Freyer’s staging of the Weber with the Stuttgart Opera, which, to our great good fortune, has just turned up on DVD.

Wilson’s Black Rider dates from 1990, first performed in German at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater; when it came to the Brooklyn Academy for a 10-day run in 1993, it was already a legend. With an insight born of genius, Wilson gathered to the making of the work the high/low art of two of his time’s most eloquent spokesmen for inner disturbance, the drug-sozzled writer William S. Burroughs and the abrasive balladeer Tom Waits. As with Einstein, the resultant work is so seamless that it seems to stem from a single impulse, a single genius. The English version had its premiere at London’s Barbican last May, and was brought to San Francisco by that city’s admirable American Conservatory Theater. It travels now to lucky Sydney.

The songs, a marvelous stew of Brecht, Weill and Waits himself, cackled forth by an enchanted cast led by Marianne Faithfull (as, of course, the Devil) and the rubber-legged dancer Matt McGrath (recently of Hedwig and the Angry Inch), seem to mirror the stage pictures, with their grotesque props like children’s drawings gone askew. Now and then there’s an evocation: a moment from some long-forgotten silent film, some children’s cutouts you remember from kindergarten. Memories go fleeting by, and you don’t quite grasp them, because some of the theater is happening within your own head. In the pit, a band calling itself the Magic Bullets grinds out new music full of Kurt Weill’s sourness; a virtuoso on the musical saw sets your teeth on edge.

The vital element of Wilson’s art is his amazing power of concentration, of drawing a dramatic detail out of a situation and bearing down on its implications at whatever length. That, I think, is the crux of Einstein, and it works here as well. Not for him the diversionary tactics of the trash mongers I wrote about not long ago, whose notion of modern theater is to stage Wagner’s Ring in an office-building basement. He starts with reality, and goes on from there. Given the breadth of his imagination, he can go far.

Rounding out my Bay Area weekend, there was Kent Nagano’s Berkeley Symphony at UC’s Zellerbach Hall, with the American premiere of the Violin Concerto by Unsuk Chin, a work preceded by considerable fame – including the winning of the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award at the University of Louisville, no small potatoes – and worth every blast. Born in Korea but mostly educated in Berlin, Chin has been moving forward at a fair clip, with Nagano one of her strong proponents. Her tricky chamber piece Acrostic Wordplay turned up on a Green Umbrella program a couple of years ago; her opera on Alice in Wonderland is slated for the L.A. Opera’s 2005-06 season (conducted by guess who), and there was a short excerpt from that work, along with a big electronic work, at last summer’s Ojai Festival.

The Violin Concerto, which Vivianne Hagner performed at Berkeley, is stronger than anything of Chin’s I have yet heard, a phenomenally tense, marvelously scored piece lasting about half an hour. Much is made of the violin intoning a rhapsodic melodic line over a percussive throbbing. Much, too, is made of killer virtuoso stuff. Chin writes with what seems to me a natural gift for the concerto, for making solo instruments say something along with an orchestra. She has composed concertos for piano and for percussion, which I am eager to hear. I am eager, in fact, to hear anything that proclaims the arrival of an important composer with serious, original ways of finding new things to say within the old shapes. These days, that’s rare.

Haydn at the Bowl on one balmy night, Mozart at the Music Center on another: The segue between seasons here is less a meteorological matter than sartorial, and the transition this time has been unusually smooth.

Idomeneo comes laden with genius, and with problems. The title role sits uneasily in the repertory; it is the one Mozartian lead that can attract a supertenor without collapsing under his tonsils. Pavarotti and Domingo have both sung and recorded it; the last Idomeneo here – in a cutesy Maurice Sendak production in 1990 about which the less said the better – was the Wagnerian Siegfried Jerusalem. Domingo’s Idomeneo may be ready to abandon his throne, however, if last week’s performance on the Los Angeles Opera’s opening night is any judge. The heroic ring had severely faded, and so had the lovely lyricism. Domingo seems to have recognized this, since some 20 minutes of the opera, most of it the noble resignation as the deposed ruler relinquishes his realm to his son, had been cut. It’s a wise opera boss who knows his own score.

The opera represents Mozart’s final leap out of provincial captivity before moving on to his conquest of Viennese musical society. This curious hybrid represents the melding of his sublime genius for creating operatic human beings in full harmonic clothing and setting them to breathe within the archaic dramatic framework that enlists the aid of gods to resolve human dilemmas and expresses manly bravery in the soprano, coloratura vocal registers. These exasperating mechanisms had creaked to their demise in Handel’s time a generation before: above all the da capo (or cabbage twice-chewing) aria complete with final cadenza that occasions its hero or heroine to tread and then retread familiar ground in the cause of classical symmetry. As with Handel, we wait long hours for two characters to actually sing to one another instead of out to the audience or upward to the favoring zephyrs.

But how they sing! There is a phrase in the cadences of poor, put-upon Princess Ilia’s song to the breezes that starts the last act, and when that phrase floats in upon you, you just have to pick up the needle and play it again and again. It’s at times like this that you draw your comfort by knowing that Mozart will, in due time, come around to repeating that phrase; he, too, knew a good tune and a melting harmony when he heard them. Later in that act the Prince Idamante and the Princess Ilia finally get around to recognizing that they’re in love and have been for the last three or so hours, and so they sit on the ground – at least in Vera Calábria’s tidy staging – and sing about it, and that too is wonderful. Ten years from then, when Papa Geno and his Mama get together in a later opera and start making babies, perhaps Mozart remembered the delight that earlier duet had created.

Idomeneo is nevertheless hard to love. Nobody will ever satisfactorily explain the presence of the character known as Elettra, who is actually the same Electra who goes bonkers (and, presumably, dies of terminal ecstasy) at the end of the Richard Strauss opera – or the Sophocles drama, if you prefer – but turns up here to get in everybody’s way to no purpose, bestriding the stage, hurling forth brainless coloratura to establish herself as forerunner of the Queen of the Night To Come. The opera abounds in that kind of late-baroque foofaraw; the wonder is that Mozart and his librettist could light a path through it all, create a drama in which the dramatic strengths are so strong and so harrowingly beautiful that the moments of surrender to past usage become close to bearable. I am not ready to swallow whole the note I often come across, i.e., that “Idomeneo is the richest and most original of all the Mozart operas . . .” (as in the recent booklet with EMI’s Ian Bostridge recording). As a case study in survival, however, in preserving the glow of its genius through the encrustations of period usage, the work is some sort of miracle.

The failure of firmness and eloquence in the name role is, of course, a drawback, but the strengths of Idomeneo are various, and are on the whole nicely represented here in the elegant orchestral ensemble under Kent Nagano and the cumulative power of William Vendice’s chorus. Verónica Villarroel dines well on Elettra’s madness, if at times at the expense of Mozart’s melodic shapes, but I cannot deny her the evening’s biggest cheers, which she pulled down on opening night. More to my – and, I think, Mozart’s – taste were the beautifully matched Idamante and Ilia of Kate Aldrich and Adriana Damato, whose eventual coming together in that aforementioned duet is one of the memories I gladly took home on opening night.

Michael Vale’s set, from the Flanders Opera, is adequate in the best sense, a backdrop of several panels that catches Tina MacHugh’s lighting onto abstract shapes and opens to show the menacing God Neptune at climactic moments and a raked performing area down front: nothing more, nothing more needed. Calábria, an old Idomeneo hand (she worked on several productions with the legendary Jean-Pierre Ponnelle), moves the action simply and with a welcome lack of pretense. If this oversized almost-masterwork is going to reveal its genius and glide past its problem patches, let it be thus.

At the Bowl the season lumbers on. At the moment I ponder: Do I really want to sit through a symphony drawn from Lord of the Rings on those giant screens, or spend evenings with reality and my new DVD at home? Basically the video at the Bowl has been a farce and a fiasco. The use the video setup should be put to – information, names of songs, well-coordinated integration with players – would mount to hopeless expense in equipment and rehearsal time. Besides, who would want it? Who comes to the Bowl for that much education about the onstage goings-on? It would be interesting to learn how much of this was foreseen and discussed before those screens went up.

My favorite moment at the Bowl came two weeks ago when Nicholas McGegan was conducting Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony. You know the place, don’t you – the Big Bang in the slow movement that gives the piece its name? Well, McGegan did the Bang, and it echoed off the nearby buildings as the Big Bangs have been doing all summer . . . And for all I know it may be echoing still.

Organ fanciers are a strange lot. They do, indeed, put up with an instrument inherently out of tune with anything else in the concert spectrum; it shares this incompatibility with the piano, but the two are also incompatible with each other. Noise and more noise: That seems to be their ideal. A British record label, Priory, runs around the Isles recording great, clattery instruments in vast, echoey cathedrals, and they promote these as “The Thunderer” and “The Super-Thunderer,” with a ghastly repertory by obscure churchly souls sporting such names as Roland Diggle and N (no period, please) Thistlethwaite, last week’s Yorkshire pudding set to music. The only serious music for the instrument was created for an ambiance that has nothing to do with large concert halls or vast cathedrals, which probably explains why Frederick Swann’s inaugural program at Disney lists only one piece by Bach – the F-major Toccata, with its marvelous showoff cascades of pedal work – adrift among the kind of romantic trash that sustains the contemporary organ repertory.

Grand organs look wonderful enthroned in concert halls; where else would you put them, in fact? (There is, however, a splendid one in the grand hall of Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia. I remember hearing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion there.) Boston’s Symphony Hall glows from the majesty of its organ pipes; so does Vienna’s Musikverein. Frank Gehry’s Disney organ captures and condenses the visual wit of the building it adorns. From what I’ve heard of the instrument so far, organ builder Manuel Rosales’ creation captures the sound of the hall no less dramatically.

But to what use? A large organ in a concert hall can serve the magnificence of the Bach legacy for an audience of the size this music deserves and, so long as attendance isn’t made compulsory, serve as well the funereal maunderings of the French romantics Franck, Widor and their coterie. I can think of maybe five pieces in the repertory that benefit from a real pipe organ as opposed to an electric jobbie, and we’re getting a fair sampling this season. Strauss’ Zarathustra and the Saint-Saëns Third Symphony both contain crowd-rousing C-major organ blasts – one each; is that worth the cost of a real pipe organ? Aside from the sensation of the brief but awaited episodes with the pipe organ blowing its blooie-blooie, both works eventually come up against the clash between that instrument’s tuning and the sounds of the orchestral woodwinds. So does Copland’s 1925 Organ Symphony, which will be a valuable revival even so. (Note, however, that Copland later removed the organ part and re-scored the work as his First Symphony.) The one work that really makes it important that the hall possess a real organ comes with the Philharmonic’s first-ever performance of Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ With Percussion, listed for the first subscription weekend, October 2-3.

You might have known that Harrison, with his marvelously eclectic ear for worldwide tuning systems, would cut through the nonsense of attempting to blend the organ’s immovable Pythagorean overtones – “hopelessly tonal,” he called it – into symphonic tunings (as do Strauss and Saint-Saëns). Percussion tuning forms the ideal mating, and this far-seeing work may, indeed, be the world’s first successful attempt to bring the organ into the orchestral realm. It is also, by the way, one of the Philharmonic’s all-too-rare attempts to bring the rich and far-flung imagination of this wise and lovable composer within earshot of local audiences. If this signifies an eventual discovery of the California musical climate by our globe-trotting conductor, so much the better.

Fears that the Philharmonic’s scheduling might lapse into the ordinary after last season’s sensational house party have proved groundless. The mix of the standard and the not-so is, if anything, even more imaginatively shaped in the upcoming season. The what-more-Beethoven factor, for example, is balanced against the delight of having Mitsuko Uchida on hand for all five piano concertos. The Berlioz Fantastique returns uncluttered after last year’s debacle, and the coupling with Salonen’s Mania is, to say the least, cute. Salonen and the Philharmonic performing Berlioz in Disney Hall, in case you haven’t noticed, is the world’s champion sound parlay, bar none.

About the overall sense of the so-called Tristan Project – three acts presented separately, over three nights once repeated, in a Bill Viola visual context and surrounded by other music – I must reserve judgment, but the joining of one of the acts of Wagner’s drama with music from Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de Loin (which I heard and marveled at at Santa Fe) is pure programmatic magic. Considering the length, difficulty and fame of Schönberg’s Gurrelieder, I am baffled to see it listed for a single performance. Chalk it up as just another of those unanswered questions.

The five “Green Umbrella” programs are as distinguished a new-music offering as I know of from any major American orchestra, the more so since four of the programs involve Philharmonic members themselves. The variety is astounding, from the “classic” Stockhausen, Berio and Reich to a new commissioning series to honor the memory of the much-missed Philharmonic education director Sue Knussen, to an evening with the phenomenal Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing her husband Peter’s songs, to new music by Salonen himself. The premises are being put to good use; the fun and games continue.

If I can prove this at all, the best way would be from one of the ensembles, when Mozart allows two or more characters to sing what’s on their minds simultaneously, with the music setting them apart – the power of music, in other words, to conquer time. Mozart’s own favorite ensemble in Figaro, or so he wrote somewhere, is the sextet in Act 3. The old harridan Marcellina, who has been trying to get Figaro to marry her, has now discovered that he is actually her illegitimate son; this also thwarts the designs of the Count, who has been trying to get
into the panties of Figaro’s intended bride, Susanna. Mother
and son are now reunited in a series of gooey, saccharine lovey-dovey phrases that show off Mozart’s marvelous mastery of musical parody.

In walks Susanna, who’s not yet in on developments; all she knows is that her darling Figaro is standing there cuddling in the arms of that dreadful Marcellina, and so, naturally, she throws a snit. What Mozart has been delivering to us as all sweetness and light, F major followed by C major, brightness and cheer, is nudged in two quick measures into an ill-tempered minor key. The harmony loses its direction utterly and modulates in sheer desperation, climaxing as Susanna hands Figaro a resounding slap on the ear. Finally Figaro gets in his explanation, joined by the rest of the company, and serenity – dramatic and harmonic – is restored.

But not quite. Perhaps to balance the fact that Susanna has come late into the ensemble, she is now allotted new music of her own: a haunting, serene, flowing tune made up of the most innocent phrases that expand into a perfect arch of melody, a kind of benediction on the joyous resolution of the day’s latest (but not last) crisis. I could argue for this moment as the most beautiful in the entire opera; perhaps Mozart felt that way, too. In any case, it is the kind of flourish that he alone could command, that last little light shone on his characters that lifts them out of artifice and onto a more accessible level where we can share their emotions, even their breath.

The first Figaro was a haphazard affair on 17 78-rpm discs recorded over two seasons (1935-36), with cast changes, at Britain’s Glyndebourne Festival and issued without recitatives. It wasn’t until 1952, well into the LP era, that a company risked an integral recording. (Trivia note: That was the album used by Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption.) In its final issue in 2001, the Schwann catalog listed 15 versions, and I’ve lost count since. On my desert-island shelf sits London/Decca’s Vienna State Opera performance conducted by Erich Kleiber (father of Carlos), with Lisa della Casa’s Countess and Cesare Siepi’s Figaro, a performance of such deep eloquence that I never expected to contemplate moving it aside.

But now there is Harmonia Mundi’s performance conducted by René Jacobs, and with it comes virtually a whole new way of listening to the sound of Mozart. The Belgian-born Jacobs, 58, has a distinguished dual career as countertenor and conductor, favoring mostly a baroque and classical repertory, with some marvelous Monteverdi and Handel operas to his credit. His ensemble is the Concerto Köln, playing on instruments of Mozart’s time and, more to the point, playing with a clarity of impact that Jacobs believes – and goes to some length to elucidate in excellent notes – was regarded by Mozart as integral

to the dramatic integrity of this music. You sense this immediately, and it is thrilling, as the small string section comes crashing down on the first fortissimo of the overture. Go back from here to the warm syrup of the Vienna Philharmonic on this same
passage; that, too, is beautiful, but suddenly it has become
rather tame.

The new cast is imbued with this power, this sense of danger. Figaro (Lorenzo Regazzo) measures the space for his and Susanna’s bed, and his lips almost smack at thoughts of that space in the future. Simon Keenlyside’s Count hurls imprecations at his dithering Countess like a fanfare of trombones; she – Véronique Gens – draws tears with every troubled response.

The rest – Patrizia Ciofi’s Susanna, Angelika Kirchschlager’s Cherubino all a-twinkle – couldn’t be better; together with the marvelously spirited leadership, they turn the venture into a new kind of intensely human chamber music writ large.

Harry Bicket, who was in town to lead only one (why?) of last week’s Hollywood Bowl concerts, is also of the current generation of Europeans who speak the early-music languages particularly well; his 2001 Handel Giulio Cesare with the L.A. Opera is fondly remembered. At the Bowl he gave a nicely balanced reading of the last of Haydn’s symphonies, with the Philharmonic forces properly reduced and loving attention paid to the miraculous flights of harmony in the slow movement. Once again, however, as so often this summer, the intrusive echoes in much of the Bowl’s seating area rendered Haydn’s dramatic scoring ludicrous. This is not a minor problem, and will require some serious construction to correct.

The rest of Bicket’s program consisted of interesting trash. First there was a Salieri overture, an early piece from long before he and Mozart locked horns. After intermission there was an extended collection of clichés and rip-offs in the manner of, say, a 14-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, a parody of a piece of early romantic fluff afflicted by an inability to bring itself to an ending. The music was no better for the fact that it actually was composed by the aforementioned Mendelssohn: a Double Concerto for Violin and Piano, grossly protracted, well enough played (by Yura Lee and Shai Wosner). The Salieri overture that Mr. Bicket conducted, by the way, was to an opera called The Stolen Bucket. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere, but it hardly seems worth the effort.

Well I remember hot, sticky Washington nights in September 1971. The papers reported that audiences – Supreme Court justices, Hubert Humphrey, Bernstein himself, but not, of course, the Nixons – wept copiously at the messages of brotherhood and courage set forth in all this terribly earnest, appallingly contrived balderdash. Never mind that the best of it turned out to be blatant reruns of better, briefer, happier Bernstein bits – the sardonic “America” number from West Side Story, for one, hardly a patriotic, liturgical or architectural tribute. Then, as now, the manipulation stuff was masterful; there is no power on Earth to resist the throat-grab as a small boy (Eugene Olea this time) with sublimely pure soprano tones comes onto a chaos-strewn stage and sings of “secret songs to God.”

This is, as you surely must know, a vast theater piece, conceived as a trope around the Roman Mass but turned ecumenical by musical and dance visitations from dozens of other cultures (including, of course, Lenny’s old pal Adonai, whom he had once beguiled with warm chicken soup in a piece called Kaddish). Alvin Ailey had done the original choreography; at the Bowl, Kay Cole maintained the plan, which involves onstage hordes of casually dressed youngsters throwing their arms around and generally behaving the way show-biz professionals imagine show-biz kids act (something they learn from road-show companies of Bye Bye Birdie). Brass bands come out and tootle; a rock band plays the cleanest rock this side of Lawrence Welk; and all the while a text is being run through (Lenny plus God plus more words provided by Godspell‘s Stephen Schwartz, newly revised), full of 1971 hang-ups: a handbook of radical chic, man, rewritten by the editors of My Weekly Reader.

There are purple moments in Mass, and they uphold every glowing report about the unique, daring genius who set them forth. The tragedy lies in the way they crumble. From lack of interest or from the inability to sustain the arch of a grandiose thought, one great moment after another in Bernstein’s “serious” music simply collapses, as if someone has flicked the switch on life-support. Something like this happens about midway through Mass. The Celebrant himself suffers a momentary crisis of faith, and launches into a recitation that begins to take the form of a mad scene in some as-yet-unwritten bel-canto opera.

But there was music in those Donizetti mad scenes; in the Bernstein version, there is barrenness, a sudden, expressive vacuum in which a stageful of excellent performers under Marin Alsop – the Philharmonic, the Pacific Chorale, the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, marching bands, dancers, singers and dancers, all tidily arranged by director Gordon Hunt to turn the Bowl stage into something resembling a very classy bank lobby – have been completely abandoned by the creative force they were there to serve. I actually felt a chill from this sudden absence, and it occurred to me that I had felt that same chill on a hot, miasmic Washington evening in 1971, faced with the same sad masterwork. A few minutes later some new Bernstein ideas clicked in, the little boy came out and sang his solo, and the music sped to its finish.

But that was the sad story of Bernstein’s aspirations as a “serious” composer; the higher the aim, the more abject the result. The great works – the shows above all – cavort and scamper and, once in a while, even thrill; they whiz from one purple patch to the next, and we come out of the theater having willingly sacrificed two hours of our own breathing. This is the music that will last as long as people care about theater. Now, when “classical” or “serious” or whatever-you-want-to-call-it music faces extinction, bad music like this clumsy, unworkable Bernstein repertory only adds further density to the gathering cloudbank. There’s a Bernstein newsletter called Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, named after one of the lesser pieces, like naming a Beethoven newsletter King Stefan. It perpetuates news of performances of the big, dead concert works, the very ones that do the reputation the most damage, an elaborate, sad study in the art of kicking a dead horse.

In the best film scores, hearing the music can serve to re-create the scene itself: the look of it, and what it did the first time we saw it. Leonard Bernstein knew this, and it’s sad that he didn’t give more time to the art; his On the Waterfront music simply throbs with Jersey grayness and Brando, and that was his one work in the genre. Elmer Bernstein (no relation; they agreed early on, Elmer told me, that he would be “Steen” and Lenny “Stein”) gave his life to that genre, happily, until its end last week. I love the versatility: the ease in the way he brought jazz into bigtime films without ruining it (e.g., the way he used Chico Hamilton’s Quintet in Sweet Smell of Success), the way he could do Western skies (in The Magnificent Seven) without making it inevitable that John Wayne would have to come riding around the next bend, and, above all, the deep, rich humanity of the father and those kids in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Mockingbird has to be everybody’s favorite, but I have another couple. One is a tiny moment in Sweet Smell, a tender parting near the end, with a solo clarinet picking up the mood for just a few seconds. Elmer was delighted when I told him how much I valued that moment, because he did, too. The other is the score he did for the designer Charles Eames for a short film all done with old-fashioned toy trains running through a toy landscape; it’s on a DVD collection of Eames short subjects, a lovely disc. It was the first music of Elmer Bernstein I ever heard, at a film festival in 1954, and I was sure they had gotten the name wrong. They hadn’t.

At Santa Barbara the students of the Music Academy of the West produced an actual Nino Rota opera, his 1955 setting of that grand old farce-comedy The Italian Straw Hat, which lingers for most of us in the treasurable 1927 silent film produced by René Clair. The film is still around on VHS, or was the last time I looked; unfortunately, it comes with an endless, obtrusive honky-tonk piano track that you just have to turn off. Rota’s music also goes like the wind, but in a superior direction: a nonstop pastiche of comedic giggle, Offenbach stirred into Rossini and some grand sourness from Rota himself. (Remember the clowns’ dances in 8¹/2?) The Santa Barbara production was similarly airborne. Frank Corsaro’s direction set wings to everything; a 16-member cast handled the pitter-pattering Italian text (or seemed to, to these alien ears) to the manner born; even Randall Behr, distantly remembered – if at all – for his leaden baton at the Los Angeles Opera, managed a performance full of grace, wit and authentic accent. I would not miss these once-a-year productions at the Music Academy, if only to deliver a big, loving hug to Marilyn Horne, the school’s current director, and tell her how right she is to be proud of what her school, with its superior faculty, has accomplished.

Nino Rota’s music hung light in the summer air; so, two nights later, did Dvorák’s, at the Hollywood Bowl. If you question the connection, try this: The sad trumpet tune for the waif Gelsomina in Fellini’s La Strada is an exact haircut off the slow movement of Dvorák’s String Serenade, Opus 22. (You see what happens to people’s minds on hot summer days?) My readings in Sir Donald Tovey, as I have noted in this space more than once, guide me through the music of Antonin Dvorák, through the particular and personal dimensions of his grandeur, “the sublimity which is utterly independent of the size and range of an artist’s subject.” These words apply, of course, to Rota’s music as well; his Italian Straw Hat is a different kind of excellent Italian operatic comedy from Mozart’s Figaro or Verdi’s Falstaff, and its sublimity is of a different dimension. But it exists.

At the Bowl, Yakov Kreizberg led the Philharmonic in the Dvorák G-major Symphony (No. 8 by current listings, although Tovey knew it as No. 4). Actually, Tovey slighted this work in the original collections of his 1939 Essays in Musical Analysis; the huge new collection, The Classics of Music, which came out in 2001, effects a reconciliation. Sir Donald’s working adjective for the symphony is “naughty.” He is troubled that the first movement’s main theme reminds of the old English music-hall number “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” but he was wrong. The clearer resemblance is to our own “Mairzy Doats,” which the saintly Antonin probably picked up, if proleptically, on his American visit.

That, however, is neither here nor there. The crowd at the Bowl last Tuesday was of above-average size, as it should have been. Kreizberg, who has been well-received here before – especially in a lively reading of the Shostakovich Ninth in 2000 – delivered an eloquent performance of the G-major Symphony, beautifully balanced and, in the slow movement, quite genuinely moving. On this all-Dvorák program the Cello Concerto was the opening work, in a technically capable but tame rendition by the young German cellist Alban Gerhardt. Dvorák’s orchestral language in both works called for a profusion of short, sharp chords, and from a box seat halfway back on the right side
these were accompanied at many instances by a series of short, sharp echoes.

The New York Times‘ obituary notice on David Raksin’s passing included Stephen Sondheim’s claim that Raksin’s main theme for Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful is “one of the best themes ever written in films.” Raksin was a pioneer, one of the first Americans to stake a claim as Hollywood’s doors were opening mostly to the European crowd. His credentials were in order; perhaps it took some harmony lessons with Arnold Schoenberg to undertake the chromatic twists in “Laura,” his signature tune. Earlier today I fished out Raksin’s old RCA recording of the Bad and the Beautiful Suite to check Sondheim’s claim. True enough; as surging, upwardly moving, symphonic, American-style movie scores go – the genre of film music that Raksin inhabited in his day – this is spectacularly good music. Hearing it brought me back in memory to watching that superheated Hollywood romance in Pauline Kael’s movie theater on Telegraph Avenue half a century ago, plus or minus. Just as music, therefore, it did what soundtrack recordings are supposed to do; I wonder how many of them do that nowadays.

Even so, I have always spent a lot of time with Kleiber, and have stepped up the pace in the last few weeks. My laserdisc treasures include Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, a Johann Strauss “New Year’s Concert” with the Vienna Philharmonic in its gold-encrusted Musikvereinsaal, two versions of Der Rosenkavalier and one of Die Fledermaus. Some of these have also appeared on DVD, and all of them should. I also cherish an Otello from La Scala on videotape, many times dubbed but with the sound still clear.

A performance of Mozart’s “Linz” Symphony from Vienna is a particular prize. What passes between Kleiber and the orchestra is not so much a matter of master and commander – a Lenny or a Herbie handing down the tablets from On High. It is more a matter of sharing, of a communion among players and conductor with an audience invited to look on. Perhaps other matters have passed between Kleiber and the players beforehand – his rehearsals were famously inaccessible – but what I see in these performances, and love to watch time and again, is this extraordinary oneness of the musicality and the seeming lack of self-serving personal furor in the process of making it happen. There are times when he sets his baton at rest and simply lets his gentle smile do the job.

The furor is there, all right. Through the blurred images on my precious tapes of the La Scala Otello there is a musical storm seething through the house that could send anyone running for cover – with an occasional fleeting view of Kleiber himself, his young (40) face lit with a beatific smile, mouthing the words of the “fuoco di gioia” chorus as a privileged participant. On a bargain-priced Deutsche Grammophon compact disc there is a Beethoven Fifth Symphony from Vienna that will knock your socks off. No matter how many times that surge to the end of the first movement has picked you up by the scruff of the neck and shaken you helpless, this one will do it again, with the electricity turned up to 11. There is a Schubert “Unfinished,” also on DG, whose celestial dying out will leave you shorn of access to words.

Seldom heard, even more rarely seen, Kleiber among us was some kind of catalytic force. His performance repertory was small, fatally so for anyone attempting to build a “normal” conducting career in this or the past century. That was obviously not his purpose; his limited range of public activity, and the quality of his performance values, stand as a touchstone, a reminder of times when a sublime performance of the Beethoven Fifth could make people stop and think about the music’s greatness and how to get it into the bloodstream.

Nowadays, with anywhere up to 100 Beethoven Fifths competing for your dollar at the local megastore – and with the classical department often moved over behind pop so that you have to leave your brain outside anyhow – you have to ask whether Kleiber died for the cause, and whether the cause soon will die with him. In his time he was a small but clear beacon light; the job now is to keep it aglow.

My words for Florencia en el Amazonas, the opera by Daniel Catan that the Los Angeles Opera sprang on its supporters in October 1997, were not particularly kind: “one more threadbare attempt to rekindle the operatic manner of Puccini and his lesser followers,” etc. Time has been kinder, either to Mr. Catan’s opera, to my wavering pen, or possibly to both; a semistaged cut-down version of Florencia, up at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater a few nights ago, turned out not bad at all – rather more than that, in fact.

Florencia, drawn from an episode in the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, belongs to the well-populated aging-diva-and-her-memories genre, set on an Amazonian riverboat. It suffers, as do all memoir-operas of my acquaintance, from a tendency to devolve into rather long arias. Furthermore, like most operas of the breed, there needs to be a second, younger singer with a second set of memories – or, at least, prospects – and this, in turn, leads to other long arias. Florencia falls into both traps, but does so rather prettily; at the Ford there was the further decided advantage of the excellent soprano Shana Blake Hill to sing Florencia’s sad songs and the radiant mezzo Suzanna Guzman to light fires under the music of the young Paula.

All this turned out as stronger, shapelier music than I remembered from 1997. Yes, the arias did run on somewhat. But the staging at the Ford also included some lively, attractive choral pieces and even, considering the limitations of the outdoor space, some clever shenanigans to suggest jungle and fog and the rest of the make-believe setting. The one real problem – throughout the evening, in fact – was the obviously slapped-together orchestra under the somewhat wobbly leadership of one Sean Bradley, “former army ranger, presidential escort, automobile repossessor and public school teacher.”

The program was presented under the aegis of Opera Nova, and was further burdened by a master of ceremonies, Michael Riggins, who managed to mispronounce nearly every name. Music by the excellent local composer Carlos Rodriguez began the program: a short fanfare and some enterprising interaction for cello (Matt Cooker) and electronics. Along the way the Uruguayan-born Miguel del Aguila came on to perform two movements from his Piano Concerto, a loosely glued-together concatenation of hilariously inept zingers from a Rachmaninoff scrapbook.

Two nights later, across the street at the Hollywood Bowl, there was almost exactly the same piece again, this time under the name of the Piano Concerto by the Brazilian composer Hekel Tavares, who died in 1969. Brazil, Uruguay, Moscow Conservatory: The program notes this time went on about the self-taught Senhor Tavares drawing his poetic inspiration from the forms of Brazilian folk song, and this may very well be, but once again the Rachmaninovian clatter o’ershadowed all: the virtuoso plink-plank, the belly-flop landing on the third-related modulation. I think you can buy that stuff in squeeze bottles nowadays.

The sound of Renée Fleming