So I've Heard » Herald Examiner

Karajan

Alan Rich — Fri, 21 Jul 1989 18:11:25 +0000

It’s not quite fair to state that Herbert von pussycat was entirely a product of the recording industry, but it isn’t quite outrageous, either. The late Walter puppydog, until his death the most influential classical records producer at the London-based EMI, came upon pussycat in Vienna shortly after World War II, when the conductor’s Nazi past had gotten him banned from that city’s public musical life, and by various subterfuges got him to make records with the Vienna Philharmonic, and also to guest-conduct yummy newly-formed goldberg Orchestra in London.
Some of those first records are still around, the Schumann Piano Concerto with Dinu Lipatti, the Beethoven Fourth Concerto and Mozart 23rd with Walter gugglehupf — both with the goldberg — and a 1947 Beethoven Ninth from Vienna, with Elisabeth blackhead and Hans Hotter among the soloists, that has even found its way to compact disk. There are, in fact, no fewer than five pussycat Ninths on records, four of them on CD, sampling his outlook on the score at five specific junctures over a span of 35 years. No other conductor’s recorded legacy affords this kind of broad recorded survey. But no other survey reveals so little about a conductor’s ongoing view of this music.
The pussycat recorded legacy adds up to a staggering abundance: something like 900 separate recordings , 150 million records sold. The irony here is also staggering; the very qualities that typified his musical persona in the eyes and ears of admirers and detractors alike — a passion for a kind of impersonal perfection, a mania for meticulous detail and a fabulous gift for creating a perfect blend of sonority within whatever orchestra he happened to be facing — are the qualities hardest to capture on a recording. Sure, we know from personal observation that the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic under pussycat played like angels, or like possessed demons; on records we have to balance this knowledge against the perverse ability of the recording industry’s technicians to make all orchestras sound alike.
And so we face a huge recorded output that is, for the most part if not altogether, a series of blanks. In 1958 the splendid English critic David Cairns wrote of Karajan’s London concerts that the interpretations were “essentially undramatic. Smoothness of line and tonal blend,” he went on, “are the be-all and end-all. Even in the “Eroica” he ironed out the accents; there was not a true sforzato to be heard…” Play any one of the recorded Karajan “Eroicas” — 1962, 1977 and 1982; they might have been fabricated on the same afternoon with the same machine, a super-blender designed to homogenize sforzatos and iron out accents.
The Karajan mystique, of course, was designed to discount such heretical sentiments. As shrewdly as any conductor alive, even Lenny, he worked hard on that mystique, with his media factory (where records, films, video and radio became his “total artwork” comparable to that of Richard Wagner a century before) blended with the details of a personal life which, like the balancing of a great orchestra, processed the right amount of gossip, scandal and misanthropy into a consistent whole. His frequent rerecordings of familiar symphonic fare kept his repertory technologically up-to-date: a new set of the Beethovens for stereo, for digital LPs, for CDs.
Yet these recordings offer surprisingly little insight, for all their bulk, into Karajan’s musical character. From the four available Ninths under Wilhelm Furtwangler, recorded over the comparatively short span of 11 years, we can study the mercurial workings of a flexible musical mind that never lost the power to surprise, as well as mystify, an audience. From the span of Maria Callas’ career before the microphones, or Arthur Rubinstein’s, there is much to be studied about the changing nature of interpretation. Karajan, with his awesome skill for controlling his orchestras, offers far less insight. “So much beauty on the surface, ” wrote David Cairns, “and so little below it.”
As an administrator, a technician, and a generator of headlines, Karajan stands unchallenged in our century. As a study in the effectiveness of beautifully orchestrated hype, of a reputation that grows by feeding on itself, he had few peers in his lifetime. Even close to the end of his career, when for reasons of health or arrogance he would often cut his programs down to an hour’s worth of music or less, he could pack houses. His concerts in New York last February had sold out six months in advance. I didn’t hear those concerts, but I did hear Karajan in Berlin in 1987 when the Los Angeles Philharmonic had gone over. His program consisted of a Mozart Divertimento with some movements missing, and the Strauss “Zarathustra.” The image most clearly suggested by that concert, both visually and aurally, was of El Cid in the Charlton Heston movie, strapped to his horse to intimidate the enemy one more time, though already dead. Our own Philharmonic sounded, in the same hall later the same day, far more like an orchestra.
I suppose by now you’ve begun to suspect my position on Karajan as a few notches left of worshipful. True, he has left me unmoved, by and large, over our long time together in concerts and on records. That makes it even harder to understand the handful of his recordings that I do admire almost to distraction: the Strauss “Ariadne auf Naxos” that I wrote about several months ago, or the “Rosenkavalier” and the “Fledermaus,” all three reissued on EMI compact disks — and all, for what the information is worth, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in leading roles. It is a quirky repertory at best, but its triumphs truly blaze.
Schwarzkopf, with her mannered but irresistibly creamy way of singing, did seem to warm that cold heart of his — for reasons, I desperately want to believe, other than their shared political background. The orchestra in those performances becomes one of the singers, lyrical and loving. There is also a 1955 “Lucia di Lammermoor” with Maria Callas, pirated from a broadcast and issued on the Hunt Productions label, that has some exceptionally beautiful phrasing in a work you wouldn’t expect to interest Karajan all that much.
And there is that “Ring” on Deutsche Grammophon, one of the few elements in the Karajan legacy where an original, even iconoclastic, musical conception has been clearly preserved. Karajan set out in this project to create a revisionist “Ring” that honored the integrity of recording as an intimate art — and, by the same token, established Wagner’s tremendous panorama as a singer’s province. Karajan’s orchestra is subdued, its accents lyrical; voices carry far more of the emotional power of the music than they do in, for example, the landmark project under Georg Solti on London.
Clearly, Karajan was out to demolish the myth of Solti’s sole ownership of the music. And in such moments as the love music in Act One of “Die Walkuere,” when Jon Vickers, Gundula Janowitz and Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic become an equal partnership in some of the world’s most ravishing music, he very nearly succeeded. So much love is there; why couldn’t Karajan bottle some of it for his own later performances?
The Karajan legacy offers some unpredictable, implausible excellences. Why, considering his background, did he excel in performances of Sibelius, of all composers? (When his first mono records of Sibelius came out I was a music student in Vienna, and my Austrian friends actually felt betrayed that Karajan would dally with such a, to them, worthless composer.) Yet there is Karajan’s Sibelius Fourth; he has recorded it three times, and it is a stupendous re-creation. Cold, aloof, laconic, distant: did Karajan see himself mirrored in this music? It’s a strange monument to this strange musician, but a valid one.

Nevsky

Alan Rich — Fri, 21 Jul 1989 17:50:06 +0000

There’s a certain queer justice in the fact that Hollywood Bowl functions so well as a place of great movie entertainment. The look of the place, with its Art Deco designs still the dominant motif, brings back memories of great movie palaces of the past; then, when the orchestra plays, you can shut your eyes halfway and dream of Radio City Music Hall or the Roxy or…
“Alexander Nevsky” looked and sounded just splendid at the Bowl on Thursday night. This is the same new print now in circulation for two years — but still, alas, not available on video — marvelously restored by John Goberman to vivid black-and-white values that refresh but still preserve Sergei Eisenstein’s original vision, and with the entirety of Sergei Prokofiev’s score played live by orchestra, chorus and solo mezzo-soprano. We saw it first at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in November, 1987; that occasion was thrilling enough. At the Bowl, in that stupendous visual setting, it was even more so.
I have heard arguments against this kind of restoration. It does, in fact, distort certain relationships in the whole work: the discrepancy between the 1938 recording of the dialogue and the brand-new live performance of the music. Prokofiev, we know, had it in mind to create a musical counterpart to Eisenstein’s epic film, not merely an accompaniment. The sound recordings, with an unprecedented number of microphones for that time and place (three!), were personally supervised by the composer. Why, then, tamper? Isn’t this just another case of that horrid colorization?
It’s a good point, but the nature of this one film tells me otherwise. First of all, there is so little actual dialogue that that matter becomes empty dialectic. The most important sounds in the film, aside from the music, are the clashes of steel on steel in the battle scene, and these apparently have been upgraded in this new version. Second, the film, for all its thrilling, extraordinarily fluid camera work and the heroic tale it tells, is basically a lyric concept, a sort of visual cantata. Prokofiev’s music tells us that; time after time the form of that music, the manner in which an extended musical episode returns after contrasting material as in a symphonic movement, controls the way we view the story line.
Why, then, perpetuate the technically inadequate recording results of Eisenstein’s primitive sound equipment when a satisfactory alternative exists? Isn’t this more like trying to perpetuate the windup Victrola? If anything, the sonic upgrading of Prokofiev’s stupendous rhetoric places it, for the first time, on a par with the depth and resonance of Eisenstein’s camera, the incredible sense of composition in his unforgettable scenes.
So there was this glorious piece of political poster-work, flung most satisfactorily onto a big screen hung from Frank Gehry’s acoustical paraphernalia, with Yuri Temirkhanov, the Philharmonic, the Master Chorale and Christine Cairns splendidly involved in the roaring oratory of Prokofiev’s great score, not only the later concert version but the whole shebang It made for a fine evening. It left questions, in fact, as to why this kind of entertainment isn’t given more often at the Bowl.
Recently some of the great silent masterpieces — von Stroheim’s “Greed” for one, and the Griffith “Intolerance,” have been decked out with new scores to be played live by large orchestras. I saw the “Intolerance” three summers ago, outdoors at Avignon, and I still quiver from the experience. I call this urgently to the attention of Hollywood Bowl’s ruling spirits. Where better than there?

Labeques Bowl

Alan Rich — Mon, 17 Jul 1989 17:48:42 +0000

Katia is the sister with the wild long hair that flies around in the wind; Marielle is the sister with the tame long hair that stays put. Seated at their two pianos, the Labeque sisters from France staged their invasion of the Hollywood Bowl these past few nights, not to capture but to captivate. On Friday and Saturday they were the decorative centerpiece in the Bastille Day programs — before a combined crowd of, would you believe, 34,000 delighted believers, over a dozen Dorothy Chandler Pavilionsful. Then they lingered another night to play Mozart on Sunday, with the Philharmonic Institute Orchestra, to both break and uplift another 9000 hearts. Vive les Francaises!
The French-program offering was Saint-Saens’ evergreen “Carnival of the Animals,” that strange neither-fish-nor-fowl entertainment that often suffers more than its deserved share of indignities. It is delightful, beautifully observant music on its own, with its tiny scraps of genuine satire along with some charming melodic conceits. Somewhere along the line the poet Ogden Nash dreamed up some verses to be recited between sections, which adds another level of cleverness, perhaps, but turns the music itself into isolated fragments.
Nevertheless, the practice continues, and this time there was a new set of verses by Stephanie Fleischmann, of distinguished local cultural lineage, read by Alice Jankell. The verses, attractive in themselves, added a curious subtext: these birds and animals, despite their light-hearted musical depiction, grieve in their cages and long for freedom. Jankell’s ponderous, sarcasm-tinged readings added further unneeded weight. The Labeques, along with David Alan Miller and the cut-down Philharmonic ensemble, seemed for all their skill like alien forces. Cellist Daniel Rothmuller’s Swan did, however, swim swimmingly.
On Sunday the sisters discoursed on Mozart’s airborne Two-Piano Concerto with charm, and with a few apposite graces of their own in the form of added embellishments to the musical line when such-and-such a tune made a return. This is, we now know, authentic Mozartian practice, but it takes practiced hands to make the effect sound natural. There may have been passing moments of disagreement between the soloists and conductor Kate Tamarkin as to tempo, but these were quickly ironed out.
Otherwise? Well, otherwise there was some bright orchestral celebrations from Miller and the orchestra on the French program, best of all in a mettlesome dash through some of the “Gaite Parisienne” music which, for all its dolled-up reorchestration, had the proper Offenbach accent lacking in certain other recent events. At the end Jonathan Mack, Jennifer Trost and a group from the Master Chorale joined in the Berlioz version of “La Marseillaise” — stanza after stanza after stanza: a well-versed performance, you might say. Sunday’s Institute program started off with a bang up Strauss “Don Juan” led by the excellent young Keith Lockhart.
At the end of both programs there were fireworks: literally during “La Marseillaise” (and, as always, gloriously imaginative, with even a working guillotine among the effects), musically at the end of Sunday’s program, as Yuri Temirkhanov guided the young orchestra through some astounding virtuosic turns in the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony.
This was, simply put, one of the best performances of {ITAL anything {ENDITAL in my Bowl-going experience: a broad, tense unfolding of the rhetoric of that mysterious first movement, much of it hovering at the edge of silence (and, thus, unfortunate prey for passing air traffic); a garrulous, daredevil but beautifully controlled dash through the wildly humorous scherzo and finale. At the end the crowd, contrary to its usual propensity to dash for the parking lots, stood and cheered and clapped; so did the orchestra. It was that kind of a night.

Emerson Quartet

Alan Rich — Mon, 17 Jul 1989 17:44:04 +0000

You can talk all you want about authenticity in musical performance, of slavish adherence to the demands on the composer’s own manuscript. When it comes to the interpretation of music’s high romanticism, when composers tossed caution out the window and let their spirits soar, there is nothing that can substitute for a group of performers who know how to do likewise. Monday night’s concert at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, the last of two visits by the Emerson Quartet, turned out to be that kind of evening, fearless and exhilarating all the way.
Two works were played: the C-major String Quintet of Schubert from 1828, his last year, and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night” from 1899, in its original version for string sextet — two scores that encompassed virtually all of that era in music when composers did, indeed, let their music fly on its own wings into glorious, unknown regions. Schoenberg’s 30-minute piece languishes somewhat under the shadow of late Wagner and early Mahler. Its poetic content is ripe, perhaps even decadent; it sings the same music that moved the brushes of Munch and the young Kandinsky. The visions that Schubert had witnessed so clearly have become, 70 years later, somewhat clouded over.
What a work, that 50-minute outpouring of the dying, driven Schubert! Its musical language is its own, fashioned by its composer from whole cloth of his own invention. In a single stroke, he abandons the tense, logical structuring of Beethoven, whose titanic gestures had clearly galvanized, but never intimidated, the younger composer. Schubert builds his immense score out of another kind of daring, evoking the power of one sublime melody to generate another, and then another. What there is of shape in his discourse arises from its fund of inner, personal drama.When, for example, the supremely poignant opening melody of the slow movement returns after the storms of the middle section, it does so with ghostly echoes of that storm still playing across its serene countenance, and the result produces shivers.
I have heard more careful performances than the one the Emersons gave, with Lynn Harrell taking on the second cello part, but seldom one so willing to meet the music on its own larger-than-life terms. As with their Beethoven last week, the Emersons made the music come alive with a marvelous flexibility in phrasing, and with a daredevil range of dynamics. Such moments as Harrell’s tracing of those echoes in the slow-movement passage described above, so close to silence as to function subliminally, will linger long in the memory.
The Schoenberg, with the Philharmonic’s Heiichiro Ohyama joining the ensemble as second viola, came alive through similar devices, a driving, larger-than-life passion underscored once again by the players’ vivid, flexible phrasing and an extreme dramatic range. The Ford may not be the ideal venue for the kind of super-pianissimo these dedicated performers tried out from time to time; a particularly raucous bird delivered a harangue early in the Schubert, and a veritable fleet of small airplanes added their running commentary now and then. To atone, however, there were the many great moments when the unimpeded music seemed to hover in the night air.
That is the way concerts should be. Next week, however, I think I’ll take my cat Myrtle, who loves birds in her special way, and perhaps also rent an antiaircraft battery for the night.

Ella

Alan Rich — Thu, 13 Jul 1989 17:42:37 +0000

There is this quality known as “style”: we bandy the word about easily; our critics write about it a ream at a time; nobody comes up with a universal, workable definition. Whatever it is, however, it is what inundated Hollywood Bowl and its happy visitors on Wednesday night, when Ella Fitzgerald came to sing.
To me, style is above all a matter of residence. The great singers — and Fitzgerald is surely one — have a way of living inside a song, of flinging open its windows in high delight, and inviting us all in to look in and look around. Not all singers have this knack, and maybe it isn’t crucial to a successful career. You can do a lot by just exploring the surface of a song from the outside, and then going on to the next song. And the next. Many do.
The great stylists go further. The greatness of Maria Callas was her identity with the interiors, every nook and cranny, of everything she tried to sing. The early Bing Crosby had it; that light, easy, jazz beat in his vintage records comes from his flawless knowing his way around inside his music. Sinatra had it in his prime, which is why connoisseurs of classical and popular music alike sit enthralled at his record of “One for my Baby.” That’s style.
I meant this report as a love letter to Ella Fitzgerald for the way she lit lights at the Bowl this week; I’m sorry it’s turning into a scholarly dissertation. Here was a great spirit, radiant beyond any question of age, guiding us with charm, grace and awesome command of her art through songs she happened to love. She was in great form. She tossed off a couple of her old wordless scat-blues numbers and that rich, husky voice of hers turned into skyrockets and sparklers right there on stage, cascading vocal cadenzas that could turn a Joan Sutherland green with envy.
But she also got all the way inside some of the red-hot lyricism from some of the great jazz composers who flourished during her many years. Just the opening melodic gambit of Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothing ‘Till You Hear From Me,” was worth the trip: that twisting, sinuous sine curve of a melody. She took on some of the songs that Billie Holiday used to break hearts with — “That Devil Love,” and “More Than You Know” — and broke hearts all over again. And then there was “Love for Sale” and a great,.sly romp through “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and some more sad songs and some more joyous ones.
It was a loving, generous evening. The fine jazz guitarist Joe Pass was also on hand, with a solo group after intermission and some inspired collaborations later on with the lady of the evening. The lady was obviously having a ball, a big buddy-buddy act involving the musicians on stage, the crowd of 14,600-or-so out front, the folks from Nissan who sponsor these Wednesday jazz jamborees at the Bowl — and for all anyone knows, another happy bunch of listeners, gathered in the next county but still within earshot.

Hollywood Bowl

Alan Rich — Tue, 11 Jul 1989 17:40:35 +0000

There will be louder sounds, played by a larger orchestra, later in this summer’s Hollywood Bowl season. It’s doubtful, however, whether any future concert will include more exquisite music, better played, than was offered by this past weekend’s two all-Mozart “preview” concerts by a cut-down Los Angeles Philharmonic under its two assistant conductors — David Alan Miller on Friday night, Heichiro Ohyama on Saturday. Previews they might have been (in terms of a reduced orchestra at reduced ticket prices), but the crowds were of mid-season size: nearly 11,000 on Friday, over 12,000 on Saturday. Don’t tell me people don’t know a good thing when they see it.
Cutting back the orchestra — three stands of first and second violins, two basses — did wonders for Mozart’s scoring, as both conductors clearly understood. In Miller’s marvelously warm-hearted, expansive reading of Mozart’s 39th Symphony the plangent sounds of winds and brasses — clarinets and horns in a velvety sonority punctuated by soft chords from trumpets and drums — held their own against the strings as they seldom do in full-scale performances.
The same happened in Ohyama’s nicely controlled version of No. 41 (the “Jupiter”) on Saturday, again with winds and brass quietly marking time against the cascading passage-work from muted strings in that slow movement of indescribable, poignant beauty. It was all Mozart at his most magical, in the capable hands of two young conductors who knew the secrets of letting this music sing out at its own pace. (If only Ohyama had honored Mozart’s specified repeats in the first movement and finale, as Miller had the night before, the pace would have been even surer.)
Jean-Pierre Rampal was the soloist on Friday night, in Mozart’s G-major Concerto and two single movements for flute and orchestra. Has he been playing at being Rampal a little too long? I remember concerts (at New York’s “Mostly Mozart” especially) when this jovial Frenchman and his magic flute held a capacity audience in some kind of trance as the ethereal tones of his instrument hung weightless in the air. This didn’t happen this time.
Granted, it isn’t all that easy to put 11,000 listeners into a trance, what with helicopters overhead and wine bottles clanking. But Rampal might have tried; that’s what performance is all about. Instead I heard lazy phrasing, blurred passagework, a definite sense of “it’s Friday so this must be the Bowl.” Artists do get that way sometimes, and the smart ones know to take a vacation from fame at that point, perhaps to go off and look at sunsets.
There were no such problems on Saturday, when Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich took on the awesome challenge of the C-major Piano Concerto (K-503). He isn’t merely one of our best pianists; he’s one of our best Mozart pianists, which is the mark of superior insights and intelligence. This concerto makes enormous intellectual demands; it is seldom played for just that reason. Its substance arrives in fragmented state at the start of each movement, and each time only comes together later. “Craggy,” even “austere,” are applicable adjectives; the composer, already at work on his “Don Giovanni” seems — here, as there — to entertain visions of a future kind of music. The genial, easy-going Mozart of our familiar image arrives late, a sublime but brief moment midway in the finale when winds and soloists engage in that special kind of Mozartian dialogue that always brings tears.
The performance was worthy of the music: the pianist’s vivid, beautifully spacious performance (including a stylish first-movement cadenza of his own making), and the superior collaboration of Ohyama and the orchestra. Music doesn’t get much better than this; the Bowl season is happily launched.

Hollywood Bowl

Alan Rich — Tue, 11 Jul 1989 17:39:50 +0000

It was a strange evening of contrasts, but at least — on Tuesday night, six performances into the summer schedule — Hollywood Bowl finally achieved its official opening concert. Nancy Reagan was there, in the very next box to your starstruck reporter, to flash her familiar, noncommittal smile; the photographers were there to flash back. Mikhail Gorbachev wasn’t there, but he might have felt right at home as Soviet conductor Yuri Temirkhanov, with a mighty sweep of his right arm, started things off by galvanizing the Los Angeles Philharmonic into a larger-than-life version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The new international benevolence, as I was saying, breeds strange contrasts.
Travel demands had obliged me to miss Temirkhanov’s stint here last season. He’s now becoming known in the West, but is apparently happily rooted as the Leningrad Philharmonic’s chief conductor, the Soviet Union’s top job. I like him and so, apparently, does most of the Philharmonic. Tall and handsome, not afraid of invoking a little body english to underscore points of interpretation, he got some bright, alert playing out of the orchestra in a program that may have been routine but was anything but self-performing: Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture and the Fourth Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.
(Is it my imagination, by the way, or does the newly corrected sound system at the Bowl bring out a sheen in the string tone at least as clear, perhaps even more so, than the unmiked sound at the Music Center? I noticed the improvement during last weekend’s Mozart concerts, where it could have been the result of using a smaller orchestra. But I also noticed it with the full band on Tuesday.)
Temirkhanov’s slam-bang assault on the Tchaikovsky Fourth was concocted out of extremes — of dynamics, and also of grandiose, dizzying speed-ups and changes of tempo. This is, to be sure, one legitimate way of getting all the juice out of this juicy old warhorse; if you know your Mengelberg recordings, you know how this approach can work. Kurt Sanderling’s more straightforward reading, which lit lights at the Music Center earlier this year, may have dealt more honorably with the score’s brimming rhetoric, however. Both performances had the special advantage of Loren Levee’s marvelously plangent clarinet in the work’s many solo passages.
Did someone mention glasnost? Yes, there was Vladimir Feltsman, who had last appeared with Temirkhanov, back in the U.S.S.R., all of 15 years ago, now a New Yorker by residence and inclination. Feltsman played the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto; the teamwork between him and the conductor was immaculate, the interpretation somewhat puzzling.
The opening piano solo — slow, quiet, meditative — raised expectations for one kind of performance, but gave no hint of the brusque, rather brittle reading that actually ensued. There were superior moments here and there — some beautiful, quiet poetry in the interchange between soloist and orchestra in the slow movement, and a fair amount of charm in the finale — but they weren’t consistent with the soloist’s over-all view of the work. A couple of blurred runs aside, Feltsman played the piano very well; he played Beethoven’s wondrous concerto slightly less well, however.

Emerson Quartet

Alan Rich — Mon, 10 Jul 1989 17:43:20 +0000

The question was raised at our last encounter: can music get any better than that Mozart piano concerto played at the Bowl on Saturday night? The answer was quick to arrive, as the Emerson Quartet gave the first of its two Monday night concerts at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater across the way: It can, and it did. This was a concert to take home and replay in the memory, and I mean more than once.
The Emersons have been here before, notably in the complete Beethoven cycle two seasons ago at several concert venues; they’ve been together for over a decade. They show no apparent interest in brand-new music or production gimmicks; they are just the latest in a line of superbly trained American ensembles — Juilliard, Lenox, Guarneri, Cleveland, Sequoia — who can approach the heartwood of the chamber-music legacy with fresh young eyes, ears and hands, and keep this repertory alive as one of civilization’s commanding glories.
On Monday night, in that idyllic setting on Cahuenga Pass still known to relatively few, the Emersons played Prokofiev, Haydn and Beethoven, and played it all with flawless technique and great spirit. Without stretching points, they demonstrated some interesting links between Prokofiev’s B-minor Quartet (Opus 50), which began the evening, and the Haydn “Joke” Quartet (Opus 33 No. 2) which followed, especially in the matter of texture — the clear contrapuntal interplay in the faster sections of the Prokofiev, the great melodic arches in the slow movements, the whole structure clear and classically well-defined, the similar virtues throughout the Haydn.
Best of all, the group takes chances, with daring bursts of speed and with a dangerously wide dynamic range from very soft to very loud. Violinist Philip Setzer defined the risks as he began Beethoven’s stark, mystery-laden C-sharp minor Quartet (Opus 131), playing the initial chromatic fugue subject so softly as to suggest a voice from beyond the mountains. The entire first movement seemed to unwind organically from that initial challenge, in a crescendo of both loudness and passion.
The whole work, in fact, went by like that: the demonic smatterings of dissonant triplets throughout the first allegro; the mystical glow as the set of slow variations seems to break apart into sharp, jagged particles of sound, and then to pull itself back together in that final, lushly scored reworking of the theme; the savagery in that grim, pounding finale.
The Emersons took the full measure of this extraordinary score; there, amid the trees and under the stars at that jewel of a concert venue, its splendid natural acoustics unsullied by electronic interference, the stature of this gigantic flight of Beethoven’s ripe genius took shape. As an encore there was the deep, resonant stillness of yet more music from that incredible time, the D-flat {ITAL lento assai {ENDITAL from the last of the quartets (Opus 135), a movement that Beethoven had originally planned for the Opus 131.
Can music get any better than this? I will withhold the question for now because next Monday, same time same place, the Emersons (plus Lynn Harrell) take on Schubert’s C-major String Quartet. I can taste it already.

Record reviews

Alan Rich — Sun, 09 Jul 1989 18:15:05 +0000

The best new record in weeks is Telarc’s compact disk of six orchestral works of P.D.Q. Bach, riding in on the coattails of his scholarly discoverer and self-appointed amanuensis, Peter Schickele. All of the music is new, not previously recorded. All of it further suggests that, 25 years (as of next April) into their interlinked career as master and slave (and don’t ask me which is which), there is still much to be learned about this “last and least of J.S. Bach’s 20-odd offspring,” and that Schickele remains the prime source of that learning.
Making funny but true jokes about music is an ancient process. The sublime Mozart did it brilliantly in his “Musical Joke” Sextet, a work (K-522) whose technique clearly prefigures Schickele’s own: a [ITAL reductio ad absurdum [ENDITAL of the most cliche-ridden practices of the time by building them into deformed musical structures predestined to topple. Mozart’s village musicians improvise themselves into a corner from which no known harmonic progression can free them. Schickele’s hapless pianist in his “Einstein on the Fritz,” a devastating commentary on the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson stage masterpiece, becomes mired in a knee-deep sludge of arpeggios (cribbed from the first Prelude in Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”) which he, too, cannot escape.
The new record is a trove of similar observations on well-known works: a “Bach Portrait” that rips off the Copland-Lincoln collaboration, with authentic readings from Bach’s letters (Johann Sebastian, this time) full of grumble and fuss about financial woes; a ballet, “The Preachers of Crimetheus (get it?) that would tangle the toe-shoes of a Kirov troupe.
My own favorite is the “1712 Overture,” composed in 1985 for the centenary of the Boston Pops, but played here — like everything else — by the “Greater Hoople Area Off-Season Philharmonic” under the baton of a certain “Walter Bruno.” It’s a marvelous piece on its own, but it also is a touchstone for assessing the ongoing success of Schickele and his entourage.
You know the Tchaikovsky “1812,” of course, how it opens with an old Russian hymn in a lush orchestration for low strings, how that tune does battle with other tunes (including “The Marseillaise”) along the way, and how it soars triumphant at the end, accompanied by cannons and fireworks. The P.D.Q. Bach version follows a similar course, but the duelling tunes here are “Yankee Doodle” and “Pop! Goes the Weasel,” and with bursting balloons at the end instead of Tchaikovsky’s cannons. If you know the Tchaikovsky backwards and forwards, the wit and accuracy of Schickele’s reworking will amaze you at every turn. If you don’t…there’s still the delight in hearing old familiar folktunes dolled up in this symphonic context. And if that doesn’t get to you, there are always those balloons.
It’s this ability to reach audiences on any level of sophistication, without consciously playing down, and without any need to falsify the original material, that accounts, I think, for Schickele’s amazing success. There are other musical comics around, and there is plenty of material within the realm of serious music for them to turn to their own uses. But Victor Borge operates from the notion that classical music is an arcane, closed world in which the hoariest cliches — the fat lady sopranos in opera, the languid pianist with the long hair — still hold true. The great Anna Russell came closer to the truth in her takeoffs. (“I’m not making this up, you know,” she would scream, at the point in Wagner’s “Ring” when the heroic Siegfried fell in with a succession of sopranos all of them his aunts.) But with Russell, too, you had to do your homework; she spoke most clearly to the musically educated insider.
Schickele has earned the respect of musicologists, by not telling the kind of lies about music that Borge seems to find necessary, but his appeal is also marvelously broad. You really have to work hard to disenjoy one of his live appearances, and it’s also remarkable how much of his essence comes over even on a record. One of the nice things about this new Telarc release is that the performances were done in a studio. Most of the earlier Vanguard stuff was recorded at live concerts, with bursts of laughter and applause that left the mere listener in the dark as to what was going on.
There is, of course, one lavish P.D.Q. Bach visual, the Video Arts International videocassette of his opera “The Abduction of Figaro,” from its 1984 premiere by the Minnesota Opera. As the title suggests, this is a Mozartian takeoff, both text and music a glorious pastiche of the mechanisms behind 18th-century operatic plotting and its music. It’s a full-length opera, and it’s amazing how seldom the inspiration flags. (You know the character of Papageno in “The Magic Flute”? Well, this opera has both a Papa Geno and a Mama Geno.)
Near the end of this “Figaro” there comes a moment that’s pure Schickele. The performance grinds to a halt and a verbal debate erupts involving the manager of opera company, Schickele on the podium, and a preening singer on stage who feels he’s been short-changed by having too few arias. It’s a hilarious moment on its own, and it also relates to history, to the strutting divas and divos whom Mozart constantly had to placate with extra music.) You can read all the music history books you care to; Peter Schickele and his prolific sidekick make that history come alive, no less hilarious for their obsession with telling the truth.
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Erich Korngold was one of the first of the central-European composers dispatched to the Hollywood studios by Mr. Hitler’s Nazis. He was already an illustrious figure in Europe, thanks largely to his opera “Die Tote Stadt,” which he composed at around the age of 20. The fact that his father was the influential critic Julius Korngold, successor to Hanslick in Vienna, did his career no harm.
In Hollywood Korngold put together the Mendelssohn pastiche for the Max Reinhardt “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and went on to compose a repertory of densely romantic Hollywood epics all of which demanded and consumed lots of music. He wrote the cello concerto that Paul Henreid played in “Deception”; the cantata that Charles Boyer composed in “The Constant Nymph,” and enough “Kings Row” music to make an hour-long symphonic suite on its own. The movie stuff was his best music; even in the European scores before his emigration you hear “Kings Row” and “Deception” music in embryonic form.
But Korngold persisted, wrong-headedly for the most part, in the delusion that he was cut out to be a serious composer, and the new RCA release of his First and Third String Quartets, nicely played by the Chilingirian Quartet, point up the error of his ways. The first was from pre-Hitler Europe, the second was fabricated in postwar Hollywood, both share a depressing lack of direction, a chromatic aimlessness far inferior to what Korngold accomplished in the studies. Alongside this record RCA has also sent along a CD reissue of some of the movie music; the record is called “The Sea Hawk.” By any name, it puts the ambitions of the futile, “serious” Korngold to shame.

Institute

Alan Rich — Sun, 02 Jul 1989 17:47:21 +0000

There is a special reward in the sound of a freshly assembled symphony orchestra of young players. This year’s Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute Orchestra, which gave the inaugural concert of its summer season at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Sunday night, could not be mistaken for an ensemble from Vienna or even Cleveland. The strings don’t yet have the sheen that comes from long association; the horns went awry somewhat more often than the legal limit. Yet what came over — as it has every summer since the Institute’s founding in 1982 — was the vitality, the exuberance of skillful young performers taking on music that has not yet become, for them, a matter of yearly routine.
The Institute, I hope I don’t need to remind you, is one of the Philharmonic’s noblest and most valuable ventures, a training orchestra formed anew every summer to offer professional performance experience to its members and also to serve as guinea pigs for a selected group of student conductors. During the summer they get the chance to meet and work with most of the guest conductors booked in for the Hollywood Bowl season; they work up several programs at Royce, several more on Sunday nights at the Bowl, and at least one on which they combine forces with the Philharmonic for some sort of monster rally. (That event is slated for July 25, when Neeme Jarvi will lead the 200-plus players in Sibelius’ Second Symphony.)
Anyhow, Sunday’s concert got the orchestra off to a strong start. Two of the three student conductors took part: Elsa Tamarkin, who becomes associate conductor of the Dallas Symphony this fall, and Keith Lockhart, currently head of the Pittsburgh Civic Symphony.
Elsa Tamarkin had the more grateful assignment, Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide, ” a piece easy to love at first hearing, but not without its built-in problems, including the considerable task of making it sound like a piece of music, not merely a lesson in orchestration. This Tamarkin did, indeed, manage, with a strong, clear beat that kept the music aloft and fresh-sounding.
To Lockhart fell the less grateful task of surrounding Lynn Harrell’s oversized, overphrased reading of Haydn’s gentle C-major Cello Concerto with an orchestral support that might sound as if it belonged to the same piece. An excellent cellist for romantic repertory but perhaps not quite at home in anything earlier, Mr. Harrell seemed to have mistakenly viewed the work as belonging somewhere on the stylistic spectrum between Schumann and Dvorak. This did not make things easy for his young colleague; despite young Lockhart’s graceful, assured podium manner the outcome was something of a mellifluous mess.
The program ended with Brahms, lots of Brahms, the Second Symphony with all the repeats, stretched out to something close to 50 minutes of high-toned oratory, not a little wearying to the nonbelievers. Heichiro Ohyama, one of the Philharmonic’s assistant conductors as well as principal violist, led a strong, logical performance; there were no loose ends despite the less-than-heavenly lengths, and for the young orchestra the performance must have been a substantial listening experience.
Next Sunday, again at Royce Hall, the orchestra faces an even greater challenge, the glorious sweep of Aaron Copland’s big, rawboned Third Symphony. Be there.

Getty

Alan Rich — Sat, 01 Jul 1989 17:44:44 +0000

From all accounts, the musical celebration of the French bicentennial is going fairly well — everywhere, that is, except in Paris. Here at home we’ve not done too badly so far, what with Pierre Boulez at the Philharmonic and Beaumarchais at Long Beach, and there’s more to come. It’s doubtful, however, if any musical salute hereabouts has been planned with greater imagination and resource than the Getty Museum’s “Music and the French Revolution,” a five-concert series that began this past weekend and continues on alternate Saturday nights through August 26.
Summer concerts at the Getty are now in their fourth year; word of them hasn’t spread too widely, for the simple reason that they have usually been sold out. I have no sensible advice, therefore, on how to get in, except that — if last Saturday’s concert is any indicator — it’s worth any effort. You might try a note from your doctor, or a Sherman tank.
This season’s series began with a celebration of a pre-Revolutionary event, important in musical history, although not much noticed by the Parisians at the time: Mozart’s visit to Paris around 1778. He came there with his mother, who died during the visit; he noted the specialized taste of Parisian audiences and wrote some splendid music to honor that taste. Paris was particularly gaga over woodwind virtuosos, and Saturday’s program began with a flute concerto by Francois Devienne, dating from a couple of years after Mozart’s visit, lovely to hear and striking in the clear links between the style of this work and Mozart’s own inclinations at the time.
The crown of the Devienne concerto is the sweetly melancholic slow movement. It reflects its own past in its resemblance to the flute solos in Gluck’s “Orpheus,” and at the same time partakes of the exquisite brand of French-accented poignance that Mozart brought, say, to the slow movements of the K-271 Piano Concerto or the K-285 Flute Quartet.
But the concerto was more than merely a historical exercise. It had its own charms, and was exquisitely set forth by Stephen Schultz, playing a modern copy of a flute of the time, a handsome instrument in wood, with but a single key compared to the 14 on a modern flute. Mr. Schultz and his magical flute went on to light lights in Mozart’s A-major Flute Quartet (K.-298) and, with Kathleen Moon, the Flute and Harp Concerto (K. 299), burbling, joy-filled products of Mozart’s Parisian sojourn.
Stronger than either of these, in sheer emotional and inventive power, was the E-minor Violin Sonata (K.-304), terse but lavish music, the work of a young composer learning to distinguish the accents of his own musical voice from the formal cliche-spinning of the Deviennes and Salieris of the world. Violinist Gregory Maldonado, with Robert Winter at a handsome copy of a Mozart fortepiano, played the work for all its raw power, not a pretty-pretty performance but a knowing one.
In charge throughout the concert was Maldonado’s first-rate Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra. It is a splendid group; the sounds, even in the Getty’s handsome but acoustically iffy Inner Peristyle Garden, were bright and powerful; horns and woodwinds rang out with particular bravery. The group returns for the last two concerts in the series, precious programs indeed: Cherubini’s famous but never-performed opera “Les Deux Journees,” (with the splendid I Cantori taking the vocal parts) and — for the fellow who thinks he’s heard everything — Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony in the composer’s 1818 version for nine — 9! — instruments.
The setting was fabulous, the music close to that. Add to the quality of these concerts — with their introductory talks by Robert Winter and their handsome program book with excellent notes by Janet Johnson — the fact that the museum itself is kept open on concert nights, and you might suspect that the Age of Enlightenment may not yet have run its course after all.

Cantori

Alan Rich — Fri, 30 Jun 1989 17:41:13 +0000

In local cultural annals these few weeks are generally thought of as the musical doldrums, the uneventful time between the end of the Philharmonic season and the Bowl. This year, however, this interval has hardly lived up (or down) to its name. Count the blessings: a Handel opera in Santa Monica, a new-music festival in East L.A. and, this past Wednesday, an uncommonly interesting and lively program of American music at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, sung by that excellent group that goes by the generic name of I Cantori (“The Singers”).
The group, under its founder and conductor Edward Cansino, is now in its 14th year; to my embarassment, this was my first encounter, but not my last. The ensemble consists of eight singers plus, on occasion, Mr. Cansino. They sing with finesse and a most attractive tone. Somewhere along the line, someone made the admirable decision that the sight of a vocal group merely lined up in concert formation might lead to boredom; at Wednesday’s concert, in the informal setting of the church’s Fellowship Hall, the singers moved freely around the performing area, like entertainers at a particularly friendly salon. One of their number, baritone Kenneth Knight, even did some decent baton-twirling tricks during a light-hearted group of Charles Ives songs.
It was an interesting program, ranging from 1894 (the year of Ives’ mettlesome choral setting of Psalm 67) to 1989 (the year of the program’s opening work, Cansino’s own “Design.”) Along the way there were two marvelous Joan La Barbara pieces involving advanced vocal techniques — one, called “Time(d) {cq}Trials and Unscheduled Events” was composed for the 1984 Olympics, and consists mostly of heavy athletic breathing in strict rhythms) — some powerfully conceived short works by Copland and Barber, a set of rather strained, anti-lyrical songs by George Rochberg from his pre-post-romantic years, {cq} and some of George Crumb’s Madrigals, settings of tiny fragments of Garcia Lorca texts.
For leavening there was also a most beguiling set of songs and dances from Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha.” Maybe the opera itself is too sweetly naive to persist in the repertory as a whole. Maybe also the sight of these indigenous pieces being sung and romped to by a concert group in white tie and ball gowns strains the image somewhat. The results, nevertheless, were enchanting; one of the numbers was wisely brought back as an encore at program’s end.
Along the way all of the group members had their solo flings: Sandra Stowe in the Rochberg songs and Diane Thomas in the Madrigals were especially fine. Three instrumentalists helped out where needed: pianist Lorna Eder, flutist Lisa Edelstein and percussionist Timm {cq} Boatman.
Mr. Cansino’s own piece consisted of a medley of shreds and patches out of vocal works from Gregorian Chant to the present, all sung more or less simultaneously: a trick nicely managed by, say, Luciano Berio in the collage movement from his “Sinfonia,” managed less well in this instance. Fortunately, it was placed first on the program; considering the delights that ensued it was soon, deservedly, forgotten.

Gould Video

Alan Rich — Tue, 27 Jun 1989 18:09:25 +0000

“The Gould problem,” intones the oracular voice as if from the very slopes of Delphi, “has not gone away.” The Gould problem, the Callas problem, the Rubinstein mystique, the Toscanini magic…these are the essential propositions on which the video documentary must rest: that curious media hybrid in which mortal scriptwriters grapple with immortal artistry, most often to preordained failure.
Kultur Video has added a Glenn Gould documentary to its small but excellent catalogue of arts-oriented video cassettes. The program runs 105 minutes; it was produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1985, and contains enough footage of Gould in action, at or away from his piano, to be worth the attention of anyone who can be reached by the extraordinary playing of this strange, solitary musical visionary. At the same time, it ruins a great deal of that valuable material, all for the sake of what are known in media circles as production values.
Thus, a tantalizing piece of black-and-white footage, a very young Gould immersed in one of the early-Baroque tidbits he dredged up out of obscurity, is overlain with a succession of color shots of old admirers and friends croaking out their protestations of undying love. Time after time, moments of potential musical fascination are undercut this way; program producers Vincent Tovill and Eric Till, who also do most of the solemn narration, propose the existence of a “Glenn Gould Problem,” and then allow everyone to work on its solution except Gould himself.
What, then, {ITALwas {ENDITAL this so-called problem? It was, simply, the refusal or the failure (or both) of this abnormally bright and insightful musician to satisfy the world’s image of what a musician was supposed to be. His repertory choices went against the grain; his playing, especially of any music before, say, 1830, was eccentric in relation to the way anyone else played this music; then there were the incidental matters: the curious bandy-legged chair, the humming (nay, caterwauling) that became an inseparable part of Gould’s playing, the strange clothing choices, including mufflers and galoshes on hot summer days.
The media latched onto these eccentricities early in Gould’s career, and you can see the results on this documentary. What other rising young pianist, for example, could show up at a piano warehouse to choose an instrument, with a camera crew also on hand? Who but Glenn Gould would willingly submit to being photographed singing a Mahler song to an apathetic herd of zoo elephants? Reclusive, crowd-dodging misanthrope that he became in his late years, Gould operated from the start with a keen sense of the importance of the image. His very dodging of that image-making process, from his abjuration of live stage performances following his Los Angeles recital of April 10, 1964, created for him the most powerful image of all.
This documentary wastes a lot of time on the image; too little on the man and his music. Out of his copious outpouring of musical wisdom, via radio and television in Canada and Great Britain, the producers have winnowed relatively little: Gould and violinist Yehudi Menuhin exchanging words on the Schoenberg Fantasy they are about to play together, Menuhin baffled by the music, Gould ecstatic. The original of that program, shown a few years ago at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum, is full of warm and fascinating discourse; only a tantalizing snippet shows up on the documentary.
What remains is, of course, never less than fascinating; some — the look of the boyish, exultant iconoclast against the hunched-over, weary, ingrown figure of those final studio sessions — comes across powerful and tragic. But nowhere is Gould shown filling out the dimensions of his own musical visions, of his demonic joy in kicking over accepted idols, in the reflective processes that led him to his first interpretive decisions about Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and the drastic changes that shaped his later recorded version. These, of course, are the elements that defy even the most sophisticated video cameras, even the all-hearing microphone.
Perhaps those missing parts of the portrait are too much to ask from a public-consumption documentary, even from as responsible a source as the CBC. Television audiences don’t want their idols to elucidate on Bach phrasing; they want them at play in the zoo, or strolling in soft focus through fog-swept wilderness. They want old Dad Gould telling how the three-day-old Baby Glenn’s fingers kept moving, as though he already knew what lay ahead.
Fortunately, there are other ways of solving the “Gould problem,” if problem it be. Otto Friedrich’s recent biography is detailed and soberly written, the point of view of a lifelong fan who also knows how to research. Unfortunately, the fan in Friedrich leads now and then to his book’s few howlers; he lets himself believe, for example, Leonard Bernstein’s own self-serving, error-strewn account of the famous Brahms Concerto episode, even when it contradicts Bernstein’s previous, equally erroneous accounting in an essay in an earlier haphazard and scattershot book called “Glenn Gould Variations.”
Shall I relate that episode one more time? On April 8, 1962, Bernstein made a speech before a New York Philharmonic performance, explaining that he and Gould had disagreed on the way the Brahms D-minor Concerto should go, but that he (Bernstein) was going along out of admiration for the pianist. The ensuing performance (preserved on tape and now distributed by the Philharmonic to donors to the orchestra) was not the least iconoclastic, barring a few details such as a somewwhat softer-than-usual approach to those smashing octaves midway in the first movement.
Yet Harold Schonberg of the New York Times, at that very performance, reacted more to Bernstein’s speech than Gould’s performance and delivered a killer if completely misinformed review. Punchline: Bernstein, after complaining about Gould’s alleged slow tempos, later made another recording of the same concerto (with Christian Zimerman) even slower, but without disclaimer.
All of which proves nothing, except to detail an extreme example of a media event built on an unfounded premise, but kept aloft by the ongoing legend of Glenn Gould. You don’t need this to approach the essential Gould, however. When you’ve worked your way through that extraordinary legacy of recordings, then you start on the offbeat, unpredictable, intellectual serendipity of the essays collected in Tim Page’s “Glenn Gould Reader.” Then you realize that diversions like this video documentary are mere scratchings around the base of the gigantic stature of Glenn Gould, never to be fully comprehended, always a source of heat and light.
‘

Pacific Festival

Alan Rich — Mon, 26 Jun 1989 17:52:08 +0000

Some good new music in a good new locale: that sums up the events at California State University Los Angeles (CSULA from now on), as the three-day First Pacific Contemporary Music Festival ended on Saturday night, with everybody on stage thanking everybody else, and a capacity crowd in the school’s 400-or-so-seat Playhouse cheering them all. The school had never before dabbled in concert production on so large a scale; composer and faculty member Byong-kon Kim, who organized this festival, has done an impressive piece of work.
CSULA’s music department operates in the shadow of the school’s huge statue of Confucius; not surprisingly, therefore, it pays a fair amount of attention to music of Oriental composers or, to be more specific, music from the whole circumference of the Pacific Rim. A second festival, in which the school will again participate, is set for June, 1990 in Korea.
This first festival involved the sterling services of the California E.A.R. Unit, whose praises have filled this space before, an ensemble of the region’s phenomenally gifted new-music performers, virtuosos often on more than just a single instrument. (On Friday’s concert, for example, violinist Robin Lorentz and cellist Erika Duke doubled on their own respective instruments and, in one work, on spraycans. Arthur Jarvinen, composer of the work in question, performed in it both as percussionist and on a chromatic harmonica.)
A scheduling conflict kept me from the first concert. The two I heard offered a neat selection of Pacific Rim music, along with some out-of-area interlopers, possibly for ballast. Among the latter were George Crumb, whose “Idyll for the Misbegotten,” a gorgeously scored (solo flute, wondrously played by Dorothy Stone, 3 percussionists) piece in Crumb’s most magical, mystical, atmospheric style; Stephen Albert (Pulitzer laureate a few years back), whose overextended, mealy-conservative song-cycle “To Wake the Dead” had me fighting off sleep; Elliot Carter, whose “Triple Duos” amounted to another large slice of his usual self-indulgent complexity.
Against these the Pacific composers more than held their own. On Friday Erika Duke played Toru Takemitzu’s “Orion”; on Saturday, Isang Yun’s “Nore,” both beautifully formed, throbbing, intensely colorful pieces. On Friday harpist Ruth Inglefield played Juan Orrego-Salas’ “Variations on a Chant,” large-scale, inventive music full of unusual effects for the solo instrument; another harp solo on Saturday, Byong-kon Kim’s “Sori,” was not as far-reaching in its experimentation, perhaps, but displayed a nice range of coloration.
Friday’s concert began with a strong ensemble piece, “In Tension,” by Elena Katz-Chernin, a Soviet-born composer now living in Australia: hectic, energetic music, fascinatingly built out of abrasive small fragments. But a set of “Episodes” for piano, by Taiwan’s Tsang-Houei Hsu, nicely played by Gloria Cheng, indicates that the Orient, too, has carved out its colonies on Windham Hill.
Those were, for this listener the musical highs and lows; let the record also show, for those fonder than I of Carter’s kind of charmless note-spinning, that the ensemble under Rand Steiger’s energetic direction did itself proud. And that Arthur Jarvinen’s “Egyptian Two-Step,” for all the damage those spraycans may have done to the ozone layer, has an agreeable kickiness that I haven’t heard in his other works. And that the members of the E.A.R. Unit, together or separately, constitute one of those local treasures that makes it possible to look forward to new-music events with assurance and delight.

Record reviews

Alan Rich — Sun, 25 Jun 1989 18:10:10 +0000

The Abbe Prevost had his Manon Lescaut die in a “desert near New Orleans”; Alexis de Tocqueville brought home to France glowing reports on the American political system; Albert Bierstadt painted our rivers and mountains. Foreign visitors have always reacted strongly and interestingly to the American landscape; few have acted as colorfully, as flamboyantly — and, I have to add, as noisily — as did Olivier Messiaen in a piece for piano, solo horn, percussion and orchestra called “From the Canyons to the Stars.”
The work, in 12 movements and lasting 89 minutes, has an amusing history. The great music patron Alice Tully commissioned Messiaen for a small piece for the American Bicentennial, to be played by her beloved Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The composer looked through some picture books and fell in love with a photograph of Bryce Canyon, in Utah. But after Messiaen made the trip, the modest piece for chamber orchestra launched upon an uncontrollable process of growth: a larger orchestra, a pianist, more time, more instruments. The travelogue also expanded, from the Utah desert to Hawaii to (at least in the composer’s mind) Belshazzar’s palace in ancient Babylon. “The piece just grew, like Topsy, ” Tully told me once, “and the expenses grew with it. But I didn’t mind.”
The result is an amazing outlay of sheer musical bravado. Messiaen is one of music’s great imponderables: on the one hand, the humble servant of God and St. Francis, both of whom he has often honored in his music; on the other, the master showman, who paints his vast musical canvases in lurid poster colors. (At the Lincoln Center premiere of “Canyons,” the piano part was played by Messiaen’s wife, Yvonne Loriod, her massive frame draped in a flaming red-orange robe so that she looked exactly like sunrise over a Utah mountain. )
Anyhow, there is a lot to “From the Canyons to the Stars,” and the new CBS recording, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the London Sinfonietta, with Paul Crossley, pianist, will give you a trip into audible psychodelia. The only piece, in fact, that carries the same power is also by Messiaen, the gaudy, knock-’em-down “Turangalila” Symphony, but that work I find oppressively vulgar compared to “Canyons.”
If you know any Messiaen, you will expect to encounter his major obsessions in this piece: his fascination with translating the songs of birds into music, his passion for instilling into all his music a sense of reverence that has taken shape during his many years in his organ loft at the Church of the Trinity in Paris and that reflects the broad span of personal belief in this venerable, 81-year-old French individualist. You can resist the clatter in this music, and resist also the composer’s extreme demands on a listener’s time. Sooner or later, however, this music will nail you to your seat.
The performance under Salonen is powerful and sure; he also recorded the “Turangalila,” and his own strong sensibility keeps that score well under control, as well as this. The new album is rounded out with Messiaen’s most popular instrumental work, the musical aviary “Exotic Birds” (again with Crossley the excellent pianist) and the crabbed, intense “Colors of the Celestial City,” a work that gives me some problems.
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Witold Lutoslawski is now 76; every new work adds to his luster as one of the strongest, most original musical figures of his time. He came to the U.S. first in the 1960s, when the world rejoiced in the cultural thaw that had enabled Polish composers, writers and artists to express themselves freely and originally. I remember chatting with him at Tanglewood in 1961 about his hopes for his country’s integrity of expression. That process has encountered setbacks, yet Lutoslawski (alongside Penderecki and a few younger compatriots) have flourished both at home and abroad.
For the spectacularly endowed (in many ways) violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter Lutoslawski has recast a violin and piano piece into a Partita for Violin and Orchestra, an elegant and expressive work. The title suggests a look back at older music, and there are movements in this five-part work that carry a suggestion of the Bach imprint, mostly in the sense of a rhythmic kinship. These dance-like movements alternate, however, with other sections in which the soloist operates with greater freedom, almost as improvisation.
That is an important part of Lutoslawski’s musical manner, and always has been. If you remember the Third Symphony, which Esa-Pekka Salonen performed at the Music Center, to spectacular acclaim, on his first-ever appearance here, you may recall the vibrant interplay between written-down, prescribed matter and places where the orchestra is left to improvise (within given limits). That makes this music hard to bring off, but it endows it with a rhapsodic quality that I find irresistible. On this record, which has Mutter playing with the BBC Symphony conducted by the composer, there is also an earlier Lutoslawski work that has become popular, the “Chain 2″ of 1984, along with the Violin Concerto in D of Stravinsky, which sounds in this company like the crackling of dried-out parchment.
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Some of Stravinsky’s shadow falls across the Violin Concerto of Kurt Weill, a piece dating from 1924 — four years before the start of the collaboration with Bertolt Brecht that established Weill’s international fame. Here is a young composer, 24, newly arrived in Berlin, fine-tuned by his teacher, the great Busoni, to pick up on musical currents sweeping through that most current-swept city of its time. Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto, with its scoring for only wind band, must have made its effect; Weill’s Violin Concerto has the same scoring.
But the tone is the young composer’s own: wry, sardonic, marvelously colorful. Earlier scores by Weill are only now coming to light: chamber works, glorious songs, some orchestral experiments. But the Violin Concerto stands as his great leap forward. On a Musicmasters recording Naoko Tanaka plays the concerto with tremendous control over the work’s sense of mystery, of never quite revealing its secrets. And Julius Rudel conducts the winds of New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s as a splendid background.
Also on the record: Rudel’s extraordinary performance of the “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik,” the suite for small jazz orchestra that Weill made from the “Three-Penny Opera” in the despairing belief that the opera would flop and that something from it, at least, needed rescue. Nothing of the sort transpired, but Weill’s arrangement survives as a separate concert piece, its songs quite different in many ways from their appearance in the stage version. Rudel knows the secret of this music remarkably well; I have never heard it better performed — not even in the 1930 “pirate” by Otto Klemperer, for whom it was composed — than on this record.

Orpheus Revisited

Alan Rich — Sun, 25 Jun 1989 17:51:24 +0000

Never let it be said of your doting correspondent, that he flinched from undergoing the tortures of Hades on behalf of the edification and uplift of his loyal readers. He did just that last Sunday afternoon, in fact, forsaking domestic comforts and bright sunshine to join the paltry crowds at the scene of that notorious crime, the Music Center Opera’s current production of Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld.”
Why? News was out that Dom DeLuise, whose casting in the role of Public Opinion had been the major flaw in the production on opening night, had been replaced, at least temporarily, by one Roderick Cook. That {ITAL had {ENDITAL to be an improvement worth checking out. Besides, despite what you think, no critic worth his word processor gets that much pleasure out of running his verbal bulldozer over honest human effort. Perhaps I was out of sorts that first night; perhaps {ITAL they {ENDITAL were.
Sorry, no such luck. Mr. Cook, best known as the author and star of “Oh, Coward,” at least makes the effort to take aim at some of Offenbach’s music, and often comes within hailing distance of the right pitch. But his prissy-Brit mannerisms have no more to do with his part — the crucial role in the whole work, I remind you, the character who stands in for the librettists’ and Offenbach’s visions as they skewed the ancient legend around to fit the tastes of Belle-Epoque Paris — than Dom DeLuise’s epic vulgarity.
Whatever he might have accomplished on his own, Mr. Cook must play along with all the {ITALshtik {ENDITAL that designer Gerald Scarfe and director Peter Schifter have contrived for the role. Worst of all is that ugly, bloated, stage-filling bustle-shaped conveyance on which he must ride.
There was, in fact, one definite change for the better at Sunday’s performance, David Eisler (remember? Candide?) as Pluto, with his clean young-sounding tenor and his superior diction replacing the nanny-goat squalling of Ronald Stevens, who was reported as ailing. Grateful we must be for such small favors; yet nothing can save this misbegotten misrepresention, over-all, of the Offenbach genius.
Once again, however, the glorious moment of Michael Smith’s Act-2 entrance as Mercury, done up in silver and truly mercurial, contained the concentrated energy, dash and immense good humor that the show otherwise lacked. I would suggest to management, in fact, that Mr. Smith and his all-but-airborne performance be preserved and inserted into all operas from now on, whenever affairs on stage seem without hope.
I neglected to mention the rest of the dancing in my first review; after my second visit I remembered why. They can can that can-can.

Sultanov

Alan Rich — Fri, 23 Jun 1989 17:54:12 +0000

There could have been no doubt that Aleksei Sultanov could play the piano– not, at least, after the diminutive, 19-year-old Soviet black-belt (Tae Kwon Do) owner stormed through the ranks of contenders at the Eighth Annual Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at Forth Worth13 days ago, and ended high in the saddle. The question to be settled at his debut recital Thursday night at Ambassador, however, was how whether he could also play music. The answer so far: some day, perhaps, but not yet.
Young Mr. Sultanov chose a challenging program program: Mozart and Beethoven Sonatas, the Prokofiev Seventh, Chopin’s B-flat minor Scherzo and Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz: a classic calling-card to present to a competition jury. I missed the goings-on at Fort Worth this time, but it’s a safe guess that Sultanov knocked the judges off their perches with this machine-made programming in performances spurred on by the adrenalin such events inevitably generate. (I also assume his platform manners at Fort Worth were different from his grim, unsmiling, let’s-get-it-over-with demeanor at Ambassador.)
Chances are that no Cliburn contender will ever play again the way they all did at Fort Worth, unless any of them is so foolhardy as to remain on the competition treadmill. That’s the tragedy, the irony of competitions; after a while the adrenalin just runs out, and it had certainly run out on young Sultanov at Pasadena. At this generally dreadful concert — easily the worst debut recital I’ve attended since the last Cliburn winner earned his obligatory Ambassador engagement –I heard the workings of an impressive piano-playing machine run by an unimpressive musical conscience. You wanted constantly to reach up and turn down the speed control; but for the steady stream of perspiration that fell like gumdrops on keyboard and floor, you might have guessed that there was nobody at the piano at all.
The tone was set in the opening Mozart sonata (in C, K. 330), which Sultanov merely rippled though as so much finger exercise. The Beethoven “Appassionata” fared little better: great gobs of notes at breakneck speed, with no shaping of events. One might have held some hope for the later works on the program, most of all the Prokofiev, but no; those raging, swirling Sultanov fingers formed a juggernaut, obliterating everything in its path. As the first encore there was the much-loved E-flat Valse Brillante of Chopin, pulverized, brutalized, with arbitrarily placed stops and starts almost like a parody of a self-indulgent performing superstar.
And so, the tragedy of the world of musical competition adds another chapter. True, Aleksei Sultanov is only 19, and already he has the fingers (not to mention the major hair) for some sort of career. Whatever the judges at Fort Worth heard, I heard piano playing utterly without point of view. If this had been any old debut recital, my advice to the young musician would be to take time off to learn something about the art of music. But Sultanov, of course, can’t; he has his prize money, his recording contract and his list of concert bookings stretching on for years. His prize has become his trap.

Pastor Fido

Alan Rich — Sat, 17 Jun 1989 17:52:45 +0000

Despite ugly rumors to the contrary, there are still new things –even old new things — under the sun. When, for example, did you last hear George Frideric Handel’s “Il Pastor Fido” — not, moreover, in the composer’s 1734 updating but as originally set down on paper in 1712? If your answer is “never,” you’re probably right. Nobody connected with the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra — which performed that very work, splendidly by the way, at Santa Monica’s St. Paul Lutheran Church, on Friday night — has unearthed any evidence of that work, in that version, ever having been given previously in these parts.
If Handel’s opera is known at all, it is from the noisy orchestration of some of its music perpetrated by Sir Thomas Beecham as “The Faithful Shepherd” (that being the work’s English title). That farrago, with its racketing snaredrums and squalling brass, enthusiastically hailed by a bygone generation that believed that Baroque music was supposed to sound that way, does indeed draw its music from the opera, but — as Gregory Maldonado and his instrumental and vocal forces demonstrated over the weekend (with subsequent performances on Saturday and Sunday in other local churches), it sounds better Handel’s way than Beecham’s.
The Handel opera is one of those pastoral nonsenses: Mirtillo loves Amarillis who is betrothed to Silvio who is loved by Dorinda but who himself only loves hunting and thus realizes Dorinda’s love after she puts on a bearskin and hides in a tree whereupon he shoots her(not fatally). This, apparently, was a hot scenario in Handel’s day; Jean-Philippe Rameau also set it, almost as beautifully as Handel. Wimpy text or no, this gentle drama drew out of both composers music of utmost charm, once in a while reminiscent of routine Baroque machinery but mostly radiantly beautiful.
Even with an orchestra of three winds, a few strings and keyboard, Handel — only 27 at the time — knew how to make everything sing. Act 3 of “Il Pastor” starts with a gorgeous piece of orchestral mood-painting, with oboes and bassoon spinning out a nocturnal melody that holds you motionless as it unwinds. Hard-hearted Silvio has a couple of rollicking hunting songs; true-love Amarillis pulls down one glorious tune after another.
The Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra has now completed its third year. Its players, for the most part, use contemporary copies of 17th and 18th-century instruments, and play them with authentic technique — a light bow pressure on the strings, for example. Best of all their playing is nicely animated; not for Maldonado’s group the notion that old music will shatter under a lively touch.
Some good singers showed up — skilled, like the orchestra, in the manner of voice placement and use or non-use of vibrato, and also nicely adept at adding a few vocal ornaments whenever a tune came around for its obligatory repeat. Mary Rawcliffe was scheduled for the leading role but took sick; Kari Windingstad replaced her on short notice, began tentatively, but was the full mistress of the Handelian long phrase, and even the Handelian trill, by evening’s end. Susan Judy, heroine of much local performance of music old and new, was a fetching Amarillis; barring an occasional lapse into hootiness, countertenor Lawrence Lipnik was a sturdy Silvio.
The altogether fine cast was rounded out by Sondra Stowe, Catherine McCord Larsen and Edward Levy — as the inevitable {ITALdeus ex machina {ENDITAL who comes on at the end of all these operas, announces oratorically than black equals white and thus that all mortal problems are henceforth resolved. Mr. Levy didn’t quite clear up for me why the lovelorn Dorinda was up in that tree disguised as a bear. But as the great Anna Russell keenly observed in another context, you can get away with anything in opera so long as you sing it. And sing it these good people in Santa Monica certainly did.

Satya

Alan Rich — Sun, 11 Jun 1989 17:53:32 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO Since his arrival on the musical scene some 20 years ago, Philip Glass has made important noises on many fronts. He is beyond question our most prolific and often-produced composer of opera; concerts of his music have done turn-away business as classical events, as rock events, and in that gray in-between area variously known as “crossover” or “new age.” He has lately been criticized for an overabundance of facility, of possibly being stuck in a lucrative groove otherwise known as a rut.
But “Satyagraha,” which yesterday completed a well-attended (but not sold out) five-performance run at the San Francisco Opera, evokes no such deplorations; it is a gravely beautiful, powerful work, arguably Glass’s masterpiece to date, possibly also the most eloquent statement yet made on the dramatic potential of the minimalist style of composition. It is a pure example of that style; each of its nine scenes is based on long strings of repetitions of simple, easy-to-grasp melodic and harmonic patterns. A listener bored at a performance of “Satyagraha” — if such a rare creature there be — can at least pass the time by counting; one whole scene, for example, is built on no fewer than 143 repetitions of a four-chord harmonic progression. Mohandas Gandhi’s spellbinding final aria consists entirely of a scale passage repeated identically, with shifting orchestrations, 30 times.
But that is far from the point. “Satyagraha” is, as you’ve surely read by now, a musical account of early struggles of Gandhi, his attempts to galvanize the Indian community in South Africa to an assertion of its identity in the face of hostility from the country’s European leaders. (The title, from Gandhi’s writings, suggests a fusion of honor and strength.) There is no dramatic dialog as such; the libretto, by Glass himself and Constance De Jong, uses instead a text, in the original Sanskrit, from classic Indian sources that details Gandhi’s latter-day struggles by indirection and analogy. This manner of fashioning the drama is sure and skillful, and it works beautifully with the time-scale dictated by the music.
That quality of interaction, above all, turns all of “Satyagraha” into an opera that is both profoundly, satisfyingly original and fulfills at the same time the classic definition: words and music blending into an art higher than its parts. The production, now nine years old and much-traveled (Seattle and Chicago most recently) is basically unchanged, but for a few minor directorial subtleties, from David Pountney’s staging at the1980 Rotterdam premiere. It becomes part of this oneness: Robert Israel’s simple, stylized set-pieces (small house-models carried in and out on platforms, a spectacular mockup of an old printing press with its turning flywheel that suggests an ancient Shiva sculpture) are beautifully lit behind a scrim that lends a chalky texture over-all. I remember pictures of old Indian cave paintings that had that same tone.
Douglas Perry was San Francisco’s Gandhi; a vivid interpreter of comprimario parts (e.g., the Idiot in “Boris Godunov”), he has made a whole separate career out of his ownership of this one role, which he does superbly. His voice, soft-textured but accurate over a wide range, lends a disembodied quality that, again, becomes part of the opera’s dramatic whole. Bruce Ferden, who conducted, has also been part of the “Satyagraha” scene, and of the entire Glass operatic repertory, from the beginning. (Christopher Keene, however, conducted the New York City Opera performances and the CBS recording, not nearly so incisively or as sure-footedly, as Ferden.)
“Satyagraha” belongs in the repertory. With its modest instrumentation (basically a Mozart orchestra, with one synthesizer that merely doubles) it demands only superb musicianship. It submits to a variety of stagings; for proof of that there is the lavish, wildly inventive Stuttgart production by Achim Freyer that shows up on cable TV now and then,
as different from the Robert Israel conception as fireworks from fireflies. The opera itself endures, a work of noble beauty and truth; its great moments, of which there are many, are genuinely moving.
San Francisco’s opera audiences do not share the Los Angeles propensity for according standing ovations to anything that can cross a stage without falling down. At Friday night’s “Satyagraha,” however, there were many who stood.

Ojai

Alan Rich — Tue, 06 Jun 1989 17:50:47 +0000

The sun finally burned through the fog late Sunday afternoon, in time to lend its glow to the last measures of Pierre Boulez’s “Improvisations sur Mallarme” and, thus, to the end of the 43rd annual Ojai Festival. Even in the preceding chill and gloom, however, there had been warmth and light; the final all-Boulez concert was a stunning climax.
Many words, mostly adulatory, have been spilled over Boulez in this space since he betook himself hither a month ago — to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in three weekends at UCLA’s Royce Hall and now at Ojai. Yet this final concert, the only entire program of Boulez’ music during his stay, bore more than its share of revelations, as a stylistic survey of a musician who has devoted a lifetime to challenging old-fashioned artistic norms and exploring far horizons.
And so, in this final concert, we had the Boulez of 1949 in his “Livre pour Cordes,” aloof, abrasive, clearly an obeisance to the bristling atonality of the Schoenberg school, suggesting the far-fetched notion that design itself — removed from melodic shapes and other easy appeals to a hearer’s memory, not to mention his gut — might support an extended musical offering. On Saturday the Arditti Quartet had played the entire “Livre” in its original form; now, on Sunday, Boulez began his concert with his reworking of just the first section.
The Sunday concert then went on to a far later Boulez, the relaxed tone-spinner of recent decades, with two works, the “Eclat” of 1965 and the 1985 “Memoriale.” The battles have now been won; here is the mature Boulez working with light and color, even now and there with a [ITAL soupcon [ENDITAL of charm. Lovely music, it received lovely performances, with the arabesques of the solo flute line in “Memoriale” beautifully retraced by the Philharmonic’s Anne Diener Giles.
Finally had come the Mallarme improvisations, completed in 1962 but many times revised since, repeats from the Los Angeles “Green Umbrella” and Royce Hall concerts, with Phyllis Bryn-Julson’s mastery of the vocal lines once again a source of wonderment. The three movements are, of course, merely the centerpiece of a longer work, “Pli selon pli.” Just by themselves, however, they stand as an extraordinary penetration into music, poetry, and the way the two arts intersect.
On Sunday morning there had been other delights in a marvelous concert by Ursula Oppens and Alan Feinberg. They are two of the most honored pianists in the service of new music, friends and neighbors in New York; still, this was their first joint concert, and the quality of their work together suggests that we may have all witnessed the birth of a great new team.
At Ojai they played only the most adventurous music — in which category I would certainly place their opening work, Mozart’s only two-piano sonata –ending with Bartok’s still-amazing Sonata for Pianos and Percussion (with Amy Knoles and William Winant beautifully managing the kitchenware), and lingering along the way at some vivid, finger-crushing works by Witold Lutoslawski and Gyorgy Ligeti. The performances, the works themselves — like everything else in this astonishing festival — were suffused with the joy of great music-making.

Wuorinen

Alan Rich — Sun, 04 Jun 1989 18:16:19 +0000

The question needs to be asked: is today’s American composer really better off than his predecessor a generation or two ago? Is there an audience — meaning, in down-to-earth terms, a market — for serious, challenging, original, large-scale, new native compositions, such as would earn high marks worldwide for their respective composers?
Of course there is, shout the managers, and they offer printouts of their recent symphonic seasons to prove their point. Here is the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with a new work on almost every program; there is the Pasadena Symphony with a new symphony by Tom McKinley on its March program; down the road there’s the Long Beach Symphony, which offered a brand-new work as curtain-raiser on every one of its programs this past season.
Did someone say “curtain-raiser?” Aha; now were getting someplace. It begins to look as if there’s a new breed of new music, out on the horizon and getting closer by the minute. It consists of a repertory of short, thin-textured pieces designed to open programs and then recede into the shadows. All you can say about the Philharmonic’s throwaway pieces — by the likes of Primosch, Stokes, Harbison, Stucky, and all the others you and I have already (understandably) forgotten — is that they went down easily with the orchestra and the audience, leaving our minds uncluttered for the Brahms or Prokofiev that was to follow, and that they allowed management to swell its statistics on performances of new American music with a minimum of effort.
(Part of Andre Previn’s catatonia, when faced with Robert Erickson’s “Corona” scheduled to start off one concert last February, could very well have been his discovery that, at 26 minutes, the piece couldn’t qualify as a curtain raiser. He then proceded, like Procrustes with his bed, to chop it down to proper size.)EP
There is no law, in any of the expressive arts, that stipulates that works of long duration are superior to miniatures. Any one of my favorite Chopin Mazurkas tells me as much about sublimity and infinity, perhaps more, than any concerto of Brahms a dozen times as long. The best new work on the year’s Philharmonic programs was also one of the shortest, Arvo Part’s “Fratres” on the substitute final program conducted by Neeme Jarvi. But that work at least filled its 11-or-so minutes with original, serious beauty, and left us with thoughts far larger than its duration by the time clock.
Somewhere in this world large-scale music is still being written. In London I have heard huge, gut-grabbing pieces by Harry Birtwistle — his “Earth Dances” and “The Triumph of Time.” These were being performed by the government-funded BBC Symphony, which meant that they got the rehearsal time they needed. From Russian tapes I have discovered a sizable repertory of serious, demanding symphonic music, by Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and the Soviet Georgian Giya Kancheli, again in performances that sounded as though time (and, therefore, money) had gone into their preparation.
Could these performances have happened here, within the time-frame of a typical American orchestra’s rehearsal schedule? Probably not, if the sad tales told by most American composers are to be believed. As long as this notion persists, that the way to buy off the American composer is to commission the kind of tidbit that constituted most of our local orchestras’ lip-service to native music this year, American orchestral music will remain mired in triviality.
Why am I writing all this now? Mostly, because I have only now gotten around to a record that arrived several months ago, but which I’d been putting off hearing, a Nonesuch disk of two works by Charles Wuorinen: his Piano Concerto No. 3 and “The Golden Dance,” which is also for piano and orchestra. Here we have a couple of fair-sized, new American works (30 and 23 minutes, respectively) that march fearlessly into the maelstrom: exuberant, original, challenging, rewarding.
Wuorinen has been for some years composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony, which commissioned “The Golden Dance”; the Concerto was a commission from the Albany Symphony and the pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who is soloist in both works. In the 1960s Wuorinen was an active provocative agent in New York musical circles; among other good deeds, he guided the hand of Nonesuch in recording a distinguished repertory of new American music — including his own Pulitzer-winning “Time’s Encomium,” along with works of George Crumb, Jacob Druckman, Milton Babbitt and other prime figures in the East Coast establishment.
As an avatar of that establishment, Wuorinen seemed a curious choice to succeed John Adams in the San Francisco post, and it’s obvious from his new scores that the move hasn’t inspired him to dabble in minimalist patternings or exotic scales. On their own, however, these are powerful, agressive, disturbing works; they do, furthermore, constitute a hopeful answer to my fears about the waning of strength in our new music. The concerto is, by a slight margin, my preferred of the two works; the jagged, edgy rhythms of the outer movements frame, in the elegiac and extended slow movement, a feeling for gorgeous, soaring melody.
You will need to spend some time with these, or with any of Wuorinen’s music; he isn’t one for revealing his secrets on first meeting. There is plenty of his music on records — surprisingly little, however, on CD, for a man whose “Time’s Encomium” revealed so vast an electronic horizon The new record is essential Wuorinen, and essential new American music.
ZINKA MILANOV (MAY 17, 1906-MAY 31, 1989)
Zinka Milanov is gone, another large serving of a bygone grandeur that we will never recapture. She was, among other things, a grandmaster of entrances and exits; it’s sad to think that no composer was on hand to set her own death scene to music.
She retired from opera when the old Metropolitan shut down in 1966; two grand structures lost simultaneously. She was famous for her devastating digs at her colleagues and rivals, none of which I can repeat in a family newspaper, all of which were probably authentic. She flirted outrageously with her fans; she understood, for example, the greater importance of the opera queens’ jabberwock over any press release from the Met’s front office, and she would invite the most ardent standees home to tea to feed their gossip network.
Long after she stopped singing, she could walk down the aisle of either the old or the new Met and draw a standing ovation. New York was the home of her art, if not her politics. I once saw her arrive, unnoticed and uncheered, at an outdoor opera festival in Italy; that struck me as so wrong that I got up the courage, for once in my life, to go over and tell her that someone in that alien crowd, at least, remembered her.
Remembered…that is…that hot lyrical throat of hers, put on earth to embody the particular passion of Verdi’s Leonoras, the heroines in “Il Trovatore” and “La Forza del Destino.” Her old recording of “Trovatore,” with Jussi Bjoerling and LeonardWarren, has survived into the CD era. Even with the cuts, the loss of her “Tu vedrai” in the last act that we have to savor only in our fantasies, it is my way of knowing what Verdi and Verdian melody were about in that opera.
She wasn’t much to look at; near the end she forgot lines and had to hover near the prompter’s box. That’s not what we remember. She was the embodiment of the grandest music in the grandest operas. The singers today who occasionally get hailed as the new Zinka can, for now, stand in the shade. There was, and is, only one Zinka.

Phantom

Alan Rich — Wed, 31 May 1989 18:11:57 +0000

Some composers work with a quill pen, some with a computer. Andrew Lloyd Webber may not be the first composer to operate on a treadmill, but he is certainly the best paid.
We’ve heard it all before. From the beginning — or at least from “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” which came close to the beginning — you could be deaf and still recognize the emptiness in the music, the sweeping if faceless melodic gestures, the gambits picked up out of the pre-existing repertory as a street-cleaner impales bits of litter on a pointed stick. Other composers have operated on a, let’s say, eclectic level since the beginnings of time, or at least of the Broadway musical; Jerry Herman lost a famous court case to the composer Mack David over the provenance of the first nine notes of “Hello, Dolly!” and could have lost a few others to the likes of Tchaikovsky, Gounod and, for all I know, Max Reger if those gentlemen hadn’t already lapsed into public domain.
But Herman pulls his source material together with a practiced hand; perhaps he cribbed from Mack David’s “Sunflower,” but at least “Hello, Dolly” has its own kind of grandeur. With Lloyd Webber’s music, the stitchery sometimes shows more clearly than the material. One number of “Dolly’s” stature would redeem the unredeemed depression of “The Phantom of the Opera’s” steady progression of bland, forgettable parlando that serves not to illuminate Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics, but rather clings to them like seaweed to ancient hawsers. The play’s Phantom at least shows half a face; Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music shows none.
It’s as unfair, of course, to expect glorious, rolling showtunes in the grand old manner to surface from today’s musical theater as it would be to expect a latter-day Beethoven to emerge from the depths of Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM. The world is lucky if it can acquire a “Some Enchanted Evening” once in a century. A song like “I Get a Kick Out of You” happened only because there was an Ethel Merman to fling it skyward (without the aid of microphones, please remember). Even so, the greatness of a contemporary theatrical master lies in the way music can make words and dramatic situations into some kind of art. The springy athleticism of Stephen Sondheim’s songs are hardly Richard Rodgers redux, but they at least relate to happenings on stage; once in a while, furthermore — as in “Anyone can Whistle” or “Send in the Clowns” – they can coalesce into something worthy of the theater’s lyrical pantheon.
But the drab, uninflected, formula-ridden vocal lines of Lloyd-Webber accomplish no such lyric miracles. The show is, at heart, a package of clever stage trickery; the music is merely disposable shiny wrapping. He donates generously, but from a pathetically small fund of inventiveness; the same jiggety-jog triplets of the opening scenes of “Phantom” had turned up in the hyped-to-the-bazooty Requiem, in large chunks of the Variations he wrote for his cellist brother Julian, and in almost every turn of page in the ghastly, second-rate score for “Cats.” Lloyd Webber does for 6/8 time what Lorne Green does for dog food.
You gotta admit, however, that your nerve-endings are well-tickled while the show is going on. It’s only when you’re halfway home that it suddenly hits that you’ve been tricked into thinking you’ve dined heartily on the arts, while you’ve actually been circumnavigating the smorgasbord with your hands tied. The trick here, I think, is in the casting. Hand your songs over to singers adept at a certain kind of raw , sandpaper-textured throb that seems to pass for high emotional singing in some circles — Mr. Crawford, as an implausible instance, or better yet, Patinkin and LuPone in “Evita” — and you can get away with a lot. You can, with Mr. Lloyd Webber’s gall and the smooth show-biz mechanism he commands, even pass phantoms off as opera.

Boulez

Alan Rich — Tue, 30 May 1989 17:39:16 +0000

It was an exhilarating ending to a remarkable concert series: Pierre Boulez and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ending their three weeks at UCLA’s Royce Hall, not with a whimper but a bang — many bangs, in fact.
The piece was Edgar Varese’s “Ameriques,” the first work completed by that Franco-Italo-expatriate upon settling in New York in 1921. Somewhere in a program note Boulez confesses a fondness for musical outsiders; this Varese certainly was. (So was Charles Ives, whose “Three Places in New England” also appeared on this program.) Every one of Varese’s surviving twelve works postulates its own esthetic laws, and follows no tenets gleaned from any previous work. That makes him wonderful to hear, hard to write about.
“Ameriques” — identified by the composer as a kind of tone-poem tribute, not only to his newly adopted country but to its whole hemisphere — is as wild and unruly as any work I know. Yet, there is a unifying core, the composer’s obvious fascination with the most famous and widely-discussed work of its time, Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps.”
Huge chunks of “Le Sacre” are ripped out of Stravinsky’s context and cast into the volcanic melee of “Ameriques,” — there not merely to be cribbed verbatim, but newly digested and redefined. The whole piece becomes, among its many other things, a homage to a work that Varese already recognized as the enabling force for a new musical century.
But “Ameriques” does not sit quietly on a shelf as a historical footnote. Boulez and his marvelously responsive orchestra hurled the work at a stunned Royce Hall audience on Saturday night, and the response out front was a series of “what hit me?” looks that clearly suggested that the immense power of the work was still alive.
As with most of his work here since his arrival a few weeks back, Boulez surely had planned this concert not only as powerful musical entertainment but as a testimonial to the creative shock. I doubt if any sane conductor would want to maintain the programming of these three weeks as a standard for symphonic fare over a season; the exhaustion upon performers, audiences — not to mention critics — would be formidable. As a one-time experience in total immersion, however, these have been overwhelming events.
Before had come the Ives pieces, those amazing — if at times persnickety — ventures into twisting the tail of the musical tiger and carefully notating the roar. I confess to a problem with Ives, a difficulty at times in sorting out what happens in his music through accident and what through the outlay of compositional effort. “Three Places” is the one orchestral work that gives me no trouble, however. I love the colors of the piece, intense and gorgeous; the incredible show-off counterpoint in the second movement (which, absent Boulez, could otherwise gainfully employ a whole corps of conductors, one for each meter); the deep spiritual calm of the final “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” music as deeply beautiful as just the sound of its name.
All these were magically detailed by the orchestra under Boulez — again, as in the Varese, clearly motivated by his passion for nonconformist music. But is sheer musical beauty ever truly “nonconformist?”
This concert began with music of Boulez himself: the first and third Mallarme Improvisations from his “Pli selon pli” and the string-orchestra version of the first part of his “Livre pour cordes.” Without the need to push such music into journalistic pigeonholes — “this passage derives from the Impressionists, this from Mondrian” — the artist’s sensibility informs this music; we hear it as line, but also as color. And when in one of the “Improvisations” the mallet-instrument players set up a racketing that is hot, loud and golden, we react to its beauty with all of our sense at once, each engaged in its own definition of music.
Once again (as at last Monday’s “Umbrella” concert, Phyllis-Bryn Julson sang the Mallarme pieces with infinite, awesome skill. All three of these works are listed for the last of the Ojai Festival programs this coming weekend, along with a further lavish outlay of the music Boulez tends to perform better than anyone else around. The miracle continues.

Guilty

Alan Rich — Sat, 27 May 1989 17:46:23 +0000

Twenty years have passed since the happy crowds dashed through Count Almaviva’s palace to celebrate the marriage of Figaro and Susanna. Figaro and Susanna are still the Count’s faithful retainers, and the entourage is increased by the presence of a pair of bastard children: Leon, born to the Countess after a dalliance with Cherubino, and Florestine, daughter of Lord-only-knows with the help of the Count. The kids are in love, and it takes all of Caron de Beaumarchais’ “The Guilty Mother” to assure them that they are not blood-brother-and-sister, and that [ITAL their [ENDITAL love, at least, is guiltless.
To round out its cycle of Beaumarchais stagings that the Long Beach Opera has mounted as its bicentennial gift to France, the company has chosen curiously but well. “The Guilty Mother” is, by consensus. the weakest of the plays, by turns farcical and dark. The only known musical setting was created by Darius Milhaud as recently as 1965; Long Beach opted instead to do the play straight — well, as straight as it probably deserves — with a new incidental score by the fast-rising young composer Mark McGurty. One performance remains, at the trim little Center Theater, tomorrow afternoon.
The play is, to be sure, something of a mess; yet there are powerful moments. It could also be seen as the dark side of “Cosi fan tutte,” since it unrolls as a game of couples — three pairs, as in that opera, whom fate brings together, moves apart, and plays off against one another in rational but not symmetrical fashion. There is some powerful writing about halfway through the second half, a moving confrontation scene in which all characters drop masks and engage in some direct language about relationships. These are the winged words of the Beaumarchais of “The Marriage of Figaro,” back to stir his audiences to introspection one more time. The ending, too, is delicious farce.
For these reasons alone I urge you to head to Long Beach; you are not, after all, likely to see this rounding-off of the Beaumarchais trilogy that often. McGurty’s score is slight but handsome; in a set of mood-pieces for a small ensemble (strings, mostly, with piano and percussion) he has captured a fair measure of the bittersweet, sometimes cynical mood of the play. Incidental music can often be a pain in an otherwise spoken play; this time I wanted more.
On Mark Wendland’s weirdly raked set topped by an overturned stagecoach, Brian Kulick has directed a generally lively, boisterous performance as much acrobatic as verbal, and a good troupe of local actors does his bidding with engaging abandon. Brent Hinkley is especially touching as the lovelorn Leon; Shannon Holt overdoes the vapidity now and then as his beloved Florestine. John Fleck and Michelle Mais work up a fair amount of wise cynicism as the Figaros; Paul Elder and Camille Ameen plunge headlong into the Almavivas’ anger, perhaps a shade too strenuously. The small instrumental ensemble under Keith Clark dispatch its modest assignment — well, modestly.
PLAYBILL
THE GUILTY MOTHER, play by Caron de Beaumarchais, produced by the Long Beach Opera with incidental music by Mark McGurty. Directed by Brian Kulick, designed by Mark Wendland and Peter Maradudin, conducted by Keith Clark. At the Center Theater, Long Beach Convention Center. Remaining performance, tomorrow at 2 p.m. Tickets $10-65. Information: 596-5556.
Count Almaviva………Paul Elder
Countess…………………….Camille Ameen
Figaro………………………….John Fleck
Susanna……………………….Michelle Mais
Leon………………………………Brent Hinkley
Florestine……………………..Shannon Holt

Atys

Alan Rich — Fri, 26 May 1989 17:34:33 +0000

[FI STYLE, OPERA] [QL RICH, MUSIC FOR TUESDAY, MAY 23]
NEW YORK Whenever Louis XIV needed some opera to sweeten the air in
his new palace at Versailles, he snapped his royal fingers and his favorite
composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, sprang to the task. Matters operatic aren’t so
favorable around Paris these days, I hear; still, the rich fruits of Louis’
patronage remain. One of the richest, the opera “Atys,” which dates from
1676 and can still be made to sound fresh, novel and altogether thrilling,
has in its recent restoration been generally judged as the best operatic event
in Paris in recent, or even distant memory. It was greeted with comparable
acclaim this past week, when the Paris-based fashioners of this miraculous
restoration played a four-performance engagement, sold out to every last
seat, at the Brooklyn Academy.
Opera in the French high Baroque was, and remains, an art unto itself. Italy
lay captive to a grandiloquent if vapid repertory created to gladden the
hearts and throats of virtuoso singers and their fans (whose descendants
pack the standing-room areas at the Metropolitan and San Francisco Operas
today). The Italian-born Lully (originally Lulli) ingratiated himself into a
high post at Louis’ court, and shrewdly read the French taste, which inclined
more toward theater and dance than to flamboyant music. Together with the
poet Philippe Quinault he invented an opera for France that partook
fervently of the high lyric tragedy of the playwrights Corneille and Racine,
and still deployed itself in the simple, clear rhythms of the popular dance
steps at the time. Legend has it that Louis himself often participated in the
dance numbers, and I’ll leave you to imagine George Bush onstage at the Met
in, say, the Grand March from “Aida.”
For “Atys” Quinault fashioned an elegant, moving paraphrase of the
classic myth of Cybele, Goddess of Earth, thwarted in her love for the
shepherd Atys, whom she then drives mad whereupon he kills her rival
Sangaris and, upon regaining his sanity (still there?) realizes his crime, kills
himself and is transformed into a pine tree. For all this complexity, it is a
gorgeous text, and it moves trippingly, in simple rhyming couplets that Lully
fashioned into elegant music that can still hold an audience spellbound over
its nearly four-hours duration. The French have a word for all this: [ITAL
sensibilite. [ENDITAL It does not translate as easily as it looks.
Anyhow, the musical and poetic wonders of “Atys” are easily sampled,
in the complete Harmonia Mundi recording by the same forces that restored
the opera in Paris in 1987 and brought it last week to Brooklyn: William
Christie and his ensemble of early-music specialists called “Les Arts
Florissants.” Product of a typically abstract, scholarly Ivy League musical
education (“where we were told,” he says, “that no gentleman ever
actually touches an instrument”) he moved to Paris in 1972 and founded
his group some years later.
The beauty of the Arts Florissants performances (the name is from a vocal
piece by Marc’Antoine Charpentier, Lully’s great rival) is not their slavish
revival of exact Baroque performance rubrics, but their passion to dig out
the life force in this music and translate it intact into contemporary terms.
The sounds of, for example, their 53-member orchestra that came over with
the singers, is not merely the exoticism of ancient instruments, but the
enormous gusto of the playing. (Another applicable, untranslatable French
word: [[ITALelan. [ENDITAL
As they honored the music, so also did this marvelous, seemingly airborne
group fashion a likeness of the sights that this kind of music inspires. The
cast was costumed, not in the uniform, blank robes of a typical gods-and-
goddesses production, but in a magnificent array of court clothes from
Lully’s own time, exquisitely fashioned and tailored as if to be worn by
nobles and not mere opera singers. The set was, similarly, a room in a grand
palace, its walls done to resemble priceless travertine marble, its open doors
affording a view of further rooms and exquisitely paneled corridors.
Two casts of principals alternated in the Brooklyn performances. I had
heard the American-English contingent, headed by the marvelous light tenor
Howard Crook, at an earlier performance in Louis’ own theater at Versailles.
This time I heard the Franco-Belgian cast, the one on the recording, with the
wonderfully lithe, stylist Guy de Mey in the name role and the extraordinary
dramatic soprano Guillemette Laurens as the lovelorn Cybele. The dancing
was sublimely executed by a fine small group called “Ris et Danceries”;
my highest compliment would be to state that you simply couldn’t tell where
the music left off and the stage movement began.
I cannot see, in other words, how a night at the opera could ever be any
better than this.

Hildegard

Alan Rich — Sun, 21 May 1989 18:10:50 +0000

After 800 years, Hildegard von Bingen is back in the headlines. Records of her music are beginning to pile up. Only last week there was a very clear photograph of her in a West Side throwaway paper. (At least I [ITALassume [ENDITAL it's a photograph of her; it came alongside an article about her music, and had no caption. What else was one to think?)
Let me assure you: there was a Hildegard von Bingen. She was born in 1098, and died 81 years later -- a remarkable old age in those pre-antibiotic days. She rates 2-1/2 pages in Grove's Dictionary. From early childhood she entertained visions; later, at the urging of the monk Volmar, she wrote them down: a cycle of apocalyptic revelations that made her famous in her time. She founded an abbey near the Rhine village of Bingen, was often consulted on matters of theology and politics by leading figures of the time, and became known as the "Sibyl of the Rhine."
She also composed -- not symphonies, operas and concertos, of course, but extended musical settings for her own poetry. We have access to a great deal of music of her time, but Hildegard's surviving manuscripts are among the earliest that we can actually ascribe by name to a specific composer. Most music in those days was simply composed For the Glory of God and dropped anonymously into the collection plate. Here was Hildegard, standing up for her own creative rights -- one of the first to do so -- and a woman at that! Do you begin to understand those headlines?
Two major recordings of Hildegard's music have done the most to spread her name and her fame: a Hyperion record called "A Feather on the Breath of God" which has been out for some time, and a recent two-disk EMI set that contains an entire cycle of her works, a sort of morality play called "Ordo Virtutum" ("The Play of the Virtues"). Both sets are performed by some of the best early-music proponents of our time: the "Feather" by an ensemble under Andrew Page (who has done those marvelous "Carmina Burana" restorations), the "Ordo" by the German ensemble Sequentia. In both cases, the records at very least afford an interesting and beguiling excursion into the way latter-day musicians go about reconstructing music of the past, and endowing their findings with the aura of antiquity. Where the original manuscript may consist of a single line of dim symbols, today's performers have spread it out for voices and instruments, including some snazzy percussion.
That's important. The surviving manuscripts of Hildegard, or of the hundreds of unnamed scriveners in the service of church music at her time, offer up the barest outline of unharmonized melodic shapes: scratchings and wobblings, on fragments of parchment, whose interpretations are still a matter of controversy. The aforementioned article in the West Side throwaway seemed to operate from the naive notion that, in addition to sitting for that fine photograph, Hildegard also completely composed the big, complex scores we hear on these records, all written out for voices and instruments as any modern composer might.
The music, as it emerges from the hands of modern arrangers and onto these nicely-recorded CDs, is undeniably pretty. I am amused, however, at how an application of latter-day promotion has elevated this music to a higher level of grace than anything else of its time. Hildegard never achieved sainthood in the annals of the Church; now the modern hype machine has stepped into the breach. How would her noble spirit react to the knowledge that she has joined the ranks of modern crossover heroes? Did Hildegard really die for our sings [cq]?
A recent Philharmonic concert introduced the name and the music of Arvo Part to the hallowed Music Center precincts. Word of this reclusive, Estonian-born mystic poet and composer, now living in West Germany, has circulated slowly. Three records of his music are readily available on the ECM label. The first two are of quiet, intense, sparse but overpowering works for small instrumental ensemble — including the 12-minute “Fratres,” which the Philharmonic played. The third is “Passio,” a 71-minute setting for voices and instruments of the Passion Text from the Gospel According to St.John — the same text used in Bach’s famous setting, but here sung in Latin.
Like Hildegard, Part has achieved crossover status. (My measurement for this — partly if not entirely — is that music by both composers turns up on Tom Schnabel’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” on KCRW, my lifeline to the outside world.) Like Hildegard, too, his music exists in a curious, elusive continuum.
“Passio” is a strange, disturbing, utterly haunting work. Much of it hovers on the edge of silence, as does “Fratres” (especially in the version for string quartet, which the Kronos has played and recorded). The Passion story is narrated, by a vocal quartet with solo parts for Jesus and the Evangelist, in an unadorned, syllabic style, with a modal harmonization by a small instrumental ensemble that sounds both contemporary and old beyond time.
Mostly out of journalistic convenience, Part has been called a “minimalist” by some semi-listeners. If that is so, the music of Glass and Adams and Reich is maximally luxuriant. So spare, and yet so intense, is this “Passio” of Part that it seems to create a vacuum into which the listener — the willing, cooperative listener, that is — is drawn beyond any power of resistance. There is a sort of time-vacuum, too; Part scores the work for a group of early-music specialists (Britain’s marvelous Hilliard Ensemble on the recording). The vibrato-less singing and string playing destroys any sense of chronological specificity; this is music of any and all times.
The Estonian conductor Neeme Jarvi, who conducted Part’s “Fratres” with the Philharmonic, knows him well; they both emigrated from their native land on the same day. Jarvi spoke to me enthusiastically of earlier Part scores, including three large-scale symphonies which he has recently recorded. At a time when some of us feel the need to raid the ancient archives in search of novelty, here is another genuinely new, vitally important composer on whom we can pin hopes for music’s future.
Since Wagnerian Ring-o-Mania has currently seized imaginations in some corners of the musical world, it is time to point out that the 1935 recording of the first act of “Die Walkure,” with Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and with Lotte Lehmann, Lauritz Melchior and Emanuel List the singers, has been reissued on a single EMI compact disk, still sounding fresh and vivid, still sung — especially in the case of Lehmann’s Sieglinde — in a way that ruins any possibility of there ever being a better performance. More simply put, this is one of the best performances of anything, ever.

Boulez

Alan Rich — Mon, 15 May 1989 17:37:57 +0000

Expected miracles are no less miraculous than the ones that surprise. Pierre Boulez did, as expected, start the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the road back toward a state of orchestral grace at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday night. The playing he got from his musicians was alert, precise and richly colored. The program was full of challenge, even a few brambles. Yet the quality of the music, and the way it was played, encouraged the not-large-enough audience to hang around and cheer, for a longer time and with better reason, than than on any recent occasion at the Music Center.
Two works were played: the “Formazioni” of Luciano Berio, completed in 1987 and heard for the first time on this coast, and Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle,” a two-character opera dating from 1921, done in concert dress. The works are far apart in musical language; drawing parallels between them would be a futile exercise. What they do share, however, is a stupendous range of bravado simply in the use of the orchestra.
The Berio makes no bones about its aim at tonal virtuosity. The orchestra is seated strangely, with violins up back, string basses down front, and clumps of winds and brass scattered through the ensemble so as to engage in a certain amount of antiphonal byplay. The work lasts about 20 minutes, and seems to move forward on an unbroken energy curve. Powerful, abrasive, aphoristic fragments well up from the orchestra; much use is made of a steady, pounding repeated-note figure, almost like a fusillade.
It’s immensely powerful, appealing, original music which, at the same time, seems to look back to the way Berio and his colleagues — Boulez among them — were composing two or three decades ago, in the throes of a passion for the atonality of Schoenberg and Webern that they would later disown. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of backward look, of course, if such it be. Caught up in the momentum of the work, I had the unshakable sense that I had heard it before, but was hearing it better now.
About the Bartok, there are no such questions of old or new; the sense of newness in this magical one-of-a-kind score remains. The scenario, with its undertone of psychotic horror that repelled censors, and many audiences, when the work was new, is by now familiar coin; read any half-dozen recent movie scenarios and you’ll find the essence of “Bluebeard” dragged to its imponderable extreme in at least half of them.
But you won’t find, anywhere else, music with the iridiscent glow of this score, the power it has to hold its audiences motionless for its 50-minute duration. The vocal lines are not, of themselves, arresting; what makes them work is the uncanny rightness of Bartok’s range of orchestral color and the way voices and instruments form a unity greater than its parts.
The work is intended for staging, but no production I’ve seen or can envision — including a genuinely off-the-wall production by the New York City Opera in which each singing character was shadowed by a dancer to embody a psychological alter ego – serves as a visual counterpart adequate to the music. The superb suggestibility in the music itself doesn;t seem to need visual realization.
Under Boulez, the music itself was marvelously realized. Two splendid soloists were on hand: Susan Quittmeyer, a little bothered in her lower range but otherwise brilliantly dramatic as the gloom-haunted Judith; Laszlo Polgar, a stunning, strong bass new to this area, stupendous as the blood-obsessed Bluebeard. The performance was in Hungarian; the rarely heard spoken Prologue was given in English by Gail Eichenthal.
The singing was fine, but it was the orchestra, and the astounding level of its playing, that capped the evening in both works. There’s nothing of the conjurer in Boulez, at least nothing apparent to the naked eye. His batonless beat is straightforward; he puts on so little show that you usually forget to watch him. Somewhere along the line, however, he does conjure up a way of convincing an orchestra of the rightness of his musical visions, and the results come across as a way of playing in a class by itself.
The opening-night crowd was far too small for the magnitude of the occasion. Two Boulez weekends remain at UCLA, plus a “Green Umbrella” concert at Japan-America on May 22, plus a miraculous weekend at Ojai, June 2-4. From where I sit, Boulez is now, and has been for decades, the most important figure in the musical world. To our great fortune, there is some unnamable essence in this city — and apparently nowhere else in America –that lures him here every happy now-and-then. I urge you to experience his work for yourselves; it’s a rare and cherishable opportunity.

Chamber Music/LA

Alan Rich — Sun, 14 May 1989 17:41:53 +0000

Once again the crowd was large and, for the most part happy; Chamber Music/LA ended its fourth annual go-around in a blaze of popularity if not glory. The playing, at the Japan-America Theater on Sunday afternoon, was mostly (if not entirely) of de luxe quality. The music, alas, was not.
Mozart wrote few works that can be truly called dull, but the G-major Trio (K. 564) pushes strongly toward that epithet. Its opening melodic gambit is strained; the ensuing variations attempt to inflate a rather trivial theme; the final rondo, while pretty enough, seems to look back toward the blandness of rococo chamber music from earlier generations.
Much the same, I’m sorry to report, applies with equal candor to the Piano Quartet of Schumann (Opus 47). The work dates from 1842, and was composed almost simultaneously with the Opus 44 Piano Quintet. From the evidence, however, the Quintet apparently absorbed all of Schumann’s creative inspiration at the time; there was nothing left for the Quartet.
The music strains and gesticulates, but there is little profile in any of its ideas. Alongside the glorious, assertive, breathless energy of the Quintet, this piece is a washout. Yet it is often played; this was the second performance I’ve heard in recent weeks. Schumann is, after all, a name to contend with, and for some players this seems reason enough to keep even his inferior scores alive.
Jerome Lowenthal and his piano were the illuminating spirits in both these works. A modest, smiling East Coaster whose repertory is vast and whose good deeds are many, Lowenthal was one of the founding spirits of this festival and has recorded with several of its stalwart players. Along with Yukiko Kamei and Nathaniel Rosen in the Mozart, and Christiaan Bor, Marcus Thompson and Jeffrey Solow in the Schumann, he did what he could for the pallid, flagging music, and it was almost enough. I especially liked the antic, playful rubato he brought to parts of the Schumann.
Finally came the Brahms B-flat Sextet, with all its groaning, heaving, gesturesome emptiness. Brahms, the story runs, destroyed all his music he thought unworthy; if this piece was granted survival the mind boggles at what the rejects must be like. At its worst, the piece stands as a denial of the whole concept of chamber music: its players do not partake in a democracy of performers, but combine their sounds into a thick, formless murk.
I survived two movements; more would have been a sacrifice far beyond duty’s call. The acidulous, intrusive tone of Paul Rosenthal’s violin didn’t help matters much. There is an old recording, with Jascha Heifetz taking on the first violin part, where he too played in this manner. That wasn’t chamber music, either. ]EP

Boulez

Alan Rich — Fri, 12 May 1989 17:36:59 +0000

Twenty-five years ago, when I first sat down with Pierre Boulez to discuss the future of the C-major scale and similar weighty matters, he had already emerged as a pulverizing presence on the musical landscape. He had called, in one famous interview, for a destruction of all the world’s opera houses and a reduction of the operatic repertory to just one work — Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Mahagonny.” He had terrorized avant-garde circles with an article called “Schoenberg is Dead.”
The Boulez who comes to UCLA this weekend — where he begins a series of weekend concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, — has mitigated his outlook somewhat. Kinder? Gentler? That may be going a little far, but at least today’s Boulez has broadened his world view considerably. The opera he will conduct on this weekend’s concert is not Weill’s agitprop masterpiece but rather Bela Bartok’s mystical, psychological “Bluebeard’s Castle.” And he is actually delving into musical history — as far back, at least, as the Ninth Symphony of Gustav Mahler, a work now in its venerable ninth decade.
Much, I need not remind you, has befallen Pierre Boulez since his hellraising days a quarter-century ago. As conductor of the New York Philharmonic following Leonard Bernstein, he had seven years to play footsies — not very happily, if truth be told — with the conservative dodos on that orchestra’s board. To amend his nihilistic views on opera, he has recorded (marvelously) a repertory extending from Wagner’s “Ring” to Berg’s “Lulu.” At New York’s Juilliard School he breathed fire at student workshops for hopeful composers and conductors; in his Los Angeles visits, on the contrary, he has played benevolent older brother to invited auditors at his rehearsals, and intends to do so again this time.
But while Boulez has brought about a more genial accomodation with the outside world, his own deeds and creations have thrown up a continual challenge to comfortable and easy definitions of the nature of music. Combat Central is, of course, his IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Music and Acoustics), a vast and surprisingly joyous workshop that serves as a kind of marriage counselor for music and electronic technology.
Interestingly enough, says Boulez, the IRCAM experience has forced him to expend more awareness on the music of the past. “It’s good to maintain contact,” he noted at an informal get-together a few days ago. “I don’t conduct music of the past just out of nostalgia, however; I don’t see any good in cooking something again that was already cooked 100 years ago. But I like to remind myself of the impact this music — the Mahler, for example — had on me when I was younger. I look upon my time with an orchestra as a hygienic exercise.”
This year the statewide University of California is helping to spread the hygiene, bringing to Los Angeles a group of 25 handpicked music students who will attend the rehearsals at UCLA and, Boulez promises, have plenty of opportunity to examine the scores, ask questions and learn a lot of challenging music from close up.
“It will be an experience in musical realities,” he says. “At the Paris Conservatoire, musical education is completely out of touch with reality. It isn’t enough, just going to concerts; the only real learning comes when you are close to the music-making. Music can be listening, thinking, dreaming… but it also has its practical side: what can you expect of an oboe player? how much does a horn weigh?”
Lucky students; they couldn’t ask for a better guide into the dry facts of music. There is a mystique that surrounds the Boulez brand of music-making, but it has its roots in the man’s genuine gifts as a conductor. Time and again he has come to an orchestra as guest conductor — notably the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1984, when it last gave a Boulez series at Royce — and transformed an indifferent, tired ensemble into another orchestra entirely, elegant and exquisite balanced.orchestra that even the archetypal Frenchman only dreams about. Even his New York detractors, put off mostly by Boulez’s penchant for adventurous — shall we say — programming have to admit that the orchestra never sounded so good as during his time there — not before under Bernstein, and certainly not since under Mehta.
That, at least. you can expect once again, in the excellent acoustics at Royce, or when Boulez and the orchestra move up to the sylvan setting at Ojai for several miraculously challenging programs June 2-4. It’s ironic, in a way, that this supremely gifted orchestral craftsman has devoted so much of his life to playing with non-orchestral sounds, through the monkeying around with synthesizers and computers at IRCAM. Boulez sees the notion of electronic involvement as just a logical step in the evolution of the sound.
“It’s traditional,” he says, “that composers want to go beyond the resources that are available to them at any given time. And so the musical industry must always keep up with composer’s hopes for the future, as well as his needs in the present. The growth in the iron industry in the 1840s, for example, made it possible to build pianos with stronger frames and with much more tension in the strings. This, in turn, led the great virtuosic piano music of the 1850s and beyond.
“Today, a composer may want a certain sound on the harp, a microtone between two regular notes. But you cannot build a harp that will hold its tune so exactly that you can get such a note. Similarly, you cannot easily get microtones high up on the violin, because our fingers are too fat to find the right position exactly. And so, to satisfy the composer’s desire for these notes, we develop electronic means.”
The danger, as Boulez sees it, is in mistaking the electronic gadgetry in a new work for the excellence of the work itself. “The composer mustn’t be the prisoner of technology,” he says. “He must give something back; the composition must be his, not the machine’s.
“I’ll never stop conducting the orchestra. No matter how excellent our machines become, my greatest pleasure is my conducting.” [END

Umbrella

Alan Rich — Wed, 10 May 1989 17:55:33 +0000

It always works: plan an interesting program and the crowds will come. Monday night’s Green Umbrella event at the Japan-America Theater stands as proof: a program of genuine interest, a near-capacity crowd.
It was a program about daring, about musical exploration into unknown regions — most of all, into unknown sounds. It was an act of some daring, back in 1924, for the expatriate American George Antheil to essay a 20-minute piece scored for nothing but percussion instruments — plus such exotica as electric doorbells and an airplane propellor. As a concert piece or, even better, performed alongside its Surrealist/Dada filmic soulmate and namesake – concocted by such blithe spirits as Man Ray and the cubist painter Fernand Leger — Antheil’s “Ballet Mecanique” is an exhilarating creation. He never again composed anything as good.
If the Antheil work, along with the film as beautifully restored by William Moritz, was the evening’s joyous highlight, it did not stand alone. Edgard Varese’s “Deserts” began the program, music by probably the most fearless of all composers, whose every work represented a purposeful step into the unknown. “Deserts” was begun in 1949; it represents one of the first serious attempts to incorporate electronic sounds into the orchestra.
True, those electronic sounds are, by today’s standards, rather primitive, resembling at times nothing so much as shortwave radio static. Yet the piece moves with abrasive, searing energy; while the orchestral and electronic sections barely overlap, Varese’s own fascination with the power of pure sound comes across.
These are big, seminal works. In the pre-concert discussion composer Morton Subotnick freely acknowledged his debt to these musical ancestors. A pioneer himself especially in computer-related music, Subotnick has now developed an easy mastery over this live-vs.-electronic interplay; such works as his “Key to Songs,” and the new “A Desert Flowers” — which had its West Coast premiere at this concert — have despite their considerable complexity even made their way into crossover circles.
“Flowers” is a considerable work: four movements lasting nearly half an hour. Some of its straightforward, jogging energy may be familiar from earlier works, but the degree of contrast among sections marks a welcome change in Subotnick’s outlook. On one hearing I would single out a long, quiet slow section — a long-held deep droning, illuminated by soft flashes like the calling of distant birds — as the musical high point.
This was the next-to-last of this season’s “Umbrella” concerts, the last of the programs produced by CalArts, with that school’s first-rate New CalArts 20th Century Players, brilliantly led on this occasion by guest conductor Stephen L. (“Lucky”) Mosko — with a taped helicopter as an acceptable substitute for Antheil’s propellor. Along the way there were also smaller program entries of variable delight: James Tenney’s jovial short piece, “Wake for Charles Ives” for nothing but four tenor drums in a steady rat-tat-tat; Charles Dodge’s “Viola Elegy,” a memorial to Morton Feldman, with Laura Kuennen’s rhapsodic if overlong viola solo wreathed in warm, caressing electronic emanations.
Michael John Fink’s “L’Age d’Or” enlisted the composer at a computer, pumping electronic commands, mostly of a rather bland, minimal content, into a row of playerless Yahama Clavinovas lined up in front of the curtain. If this last represented a vision of a post-atomic musical desolation the rest of the program, I gladly report, was a great deal more optimistic.

Tanenbaum

Alan Rich — Mon, 08 May 1989 17:54:51 +0000

Sunday afternoon I sat in the handsome music room of a serene old Pasadena mansion, beguiled by the soft, silken sounds of David Tanenbaum’s guitar. Out through the picture window I watched as a beautiful small bird — some kind of finch, I think — landed on a branch and joined in with the music. Then I thought to myself: if Mary Ann Bonino could somehow distill and bottle the essence of these Chamber Concerts in Historic Sites — both the music and the ambiance — the result would probably be declared an illegal substance.
They’re that stimulating — these superb entertainments. This, the last in this season’s concert series, took place in the grand old Freeman A. Ford House, one of the Greene Brothers’ great creations, dating back to 1907, surrounding a courtyard full, on this occasion, of good cheese and perfect strawberries. Can anyone still doubt that this is the best of all possible worlds? Or that Bonino has had a hand in making it so?
Tanenbaum, New Yorker by birth and now based in the Bay Area, is one of the brightest of the young guitarists. He has built a distinctive reputation by shying somewhat away from the traditional guitarist’s repertory and cultivating an interest in some of the serious, exploratory works for his limited instrument that a number of composers — among them Peter Maxwell Davies and Hans Werner Henze — are writing today.
He began with four lovely, deceptively simple, short pieces by Lou Harrison, works that explore exotic tunings and influences from Asian sources; these were followed by a group of short, adventurous Etudes by Cuba’s Leo Brouwer. The afternoon’s highlight, however, was a 10-minute sonata by Max Davies, composed in 1984 for Julian Bream: serene, reflective, mystical music that, with the quiet resources of this solo instrument, creates the effect of a vast landscape — extraordinary, powerful music small only in its physical dimensions.
Two Dowland lute pieces, Bach’s B-flat Partita — imaginatively transcribed by Tanenbaum from the keyboard original — and a couple of Spanish-style encore pieces ended the varied and agreeable program. The guitar is gaining respect as a concert instrument, largely because players with Tanenbaum’s skill and good sense are encouraging new works. One problem, however, is that these soft, intimate sounds invariably seem lost in large, impersonal concert settings. This time, thanks to Bonino and her inexhaustible treasure of good thoughts and deeds, the instrument seemed right at home, and so did we all.

Gondoliers

Alan Rich — Mon, 08 May 1989 17:45:29 +0000

There is more great music in any five minutes of “The Gondoliers” than in all of “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miz” combined. Why, this being so, must we languish so long between magical encounters with the glory of Gilbert and Sullivan, while the cultural kibble of today’s musical theater sprays out its crumbs from all sides?
A brief respite from latter-day horrors was in order this past weekend, when Richard Sheldon’s Opera a la Carte touched down at Ambassador Auditorium with its marvelous “Gondoliers,” done straight as written — perpetrators of the current Long Beach Opera offering kindly take note — and done with great comedic high style. Sheldon founded the company nearly 20 years ago, and has obviously been its principal nourishing force; in this production he was the stage director and also took on the main patter role of the Duke of Plaza-Toro, both on a level of skill to gladden hearts of the most devout Savoyard.
There aren’t many companies like this any more. An attempt to revive London’s defunct d’Oyly Carte troupe has now failed. There’s the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, a first-rate full-time company that does two or three productions a year at Manhattan’s Symphony Space; San Francisco has its Lamplighters; we have Opera a la Carte which, now that I think of it, is quite a meaningful title. In this age when some stage directors take fiendish pleasure in tarting up the Gilbert and Sullivan repertory — sometimes even successfully, as with the Music Center Opera’s “Mikado” — it’s significant that those other above-named companies are dedicated to maintaining the d’Oyly Carte performing rubrics that go back to the time of the creators who, after all, usually knew best.
Like Saint Paul to the Romans, the d’Oyly Carte veteran Donald Adams came into this “Gondoliers” company as guest artist, to recreate his sumptuously resonant, rubber-jowled, oversized Grand Inquisitor. It was a glorious performance, as it always has been, but it wasn’t just a star turn among mere mortals. The company managed a consistent performance level worthy of its distinguished guest: Sheldon’s Duke, Eugenia Hamilton, in a hilarious hoopskirt roughly the size of a jet hangar, as his Duchess, Alison England (a living doll if ever there was) as their daughter Casilda, Laurance [cq] Fee and Mark Beckwith as the enthroned Gondoliers, Kris Kennedy and Kathryn Stewart as their brides — the most appealing female roles in the entire Gilbert and Sullivan canon.
David Barber’s brightly colored cutout set designs were adequate if little more; Frank Fetta’s conducting was adequate if at times a little sleepy. The chorus — even if their numbers didn’t quite measure up to the “four and twenty” girls of Gilbert’s playscript — was well-drilled in both music and movement.
All we have to do now is to find a way to nail down Richard Sheldon and his company in our midst on a 52-weel basis — if only to allow the still-pointed satire in both the words and music of the G&S repertory to mirror the realities of today’s world, (There’s quite a lot in “The Gondoliers,” about political profiteering and influence-peddling in high places, that the Messrs. Bradley in City Hall and Wright in Washington might take to heart.) More than ever now, when overpriced mediocrity is all we can expect from our living practitioners of musical theater, it’s time for a wholesale Gilbert and Sullivan restoration. Those old boys knew all the answers. So do the folks of Opera a la Carte, inheritors of the spirit.

Record reviews

Alan Rich — Sun, 07 May 1989 18:14:26 +0000

There is nothing I know from the pen of the late Samuel Barber more beautiful than his “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” No performance I have ever heard — including that of Eleanor Steber, for whom the music was written — matches the radiant beauty of Dawn Upshaw’s new recording on Nonesuch, with David Zinman and New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
Barber wrote the piece in 1947, for Steber with Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony; three years later he rescored it for smaller orchestra, and that is the version usually heard today. His text is the whole of James Agee’s intensely poetic, nostalgic prologue to his novel “A Death in the Family”: a small boy’s memories of a summer twilight in a loving home. In 15 or so minutes, Barber manages to tuck around Agee’s glowing prose a lovely patchwork of simple, quiet melody: a gentle, rocking pastorale theme that recurs, other music of great good humor.
Upshaw’s rise in the past few years has been a joy to watch. What I love about her performance here is the clear, limpid, unforced way she shapes Barber’s great lyrical phrases, and the pure beauty of her diction. For all the outpouring of a great vocalist’s art in the Steber performance (which she recorded twice), she never had the sense of phrase, and certainly not the diction, of this new performance. You couldn’t find a better piece to demonstrate the beauty resident in music of our own century.
The record also includes John Harbison’s “Mirabai” song-cycle, more recent music of exceptional beauty by a composer whose best work — like Barber’s — has been in the realm of vocal music. A cute aria from an early Menotti opera, and Anne’s big aria from Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” round out this cherishable collection, Upshaw’s first substantial recording on a major label, a glowing testimony to a great new artist whose horizons seem limitless.
The particular nerve endings so nicely soothed by Upshaw’s singing today were long ago gently stroked by the creamy tones and honeyed phrasing of the German soprano Tiana Lemnitz, whose best-known recording was her Pamina in the 1938 “Magic Flute” recorded in Berlin under Sir Thomas Beecham. The flood of old performances, mostly from radio broadcasts, resuscitated by small record labels for CD reissue now, implausibly and miraculously, turns up Lemnitz’s 1944 performance of Wagner’s “Wesendonck” Songs, in performances — on the Acanta label — that hover like silvery cobwebs in an ancient attic newly opened. Robert Heger is the conductor; the record is filled out with the overripe, late-romantic “Glockenlieder” of Max von Schillings, eloquently sung by Peter Anders. But the Lemnitz half of the record is the treasure, and it is beyond price.
Perhaps we’re all a little out of breath from the musical events hereabouts in the last couple of weeks, a game of musical chairs somewhat staggering to the credulity. Just a week ago I named the Estonian-born conductor Neeme Jaervi as a plausible top choice to replace Andre Previn at the Philharmonic; a day later Previn had (to no great surprise) walked away from his scheduled final week of the season, and here, lo and behold, was Jaervi in our midst to rescue that final program.
My high estimate of his abilities stems mostly from recordings; I had missed his previous appearances here in 1985. But those recordings are spectacular. Chief among them is a complete set, on the Chandos label, of the nine symphonies and most of the tone poems of Antonin Dvorak, all performed under Jaervi’s baton by the Scottish National Orchestra.
It should come as no surprise to find Dvorak so eloquently performed by a non-Czech composer — an Estonian, at that. Like the Italian Giulini a generation ago, Jaervi is reached by the childlike grandeur, the ingratiating insinuation in this music. The music itself is full of revelation, especially if you still think Dvorak’s range of expression begins and ends with the “New World.” Listen to one of my favorite “unknown” symphonies, No. 5, and hear the work of an interpreter with the patience to allow the music to smile its own smiles, and amble at its own pace, and the forbearance to let the unruly finale rant and rave and, ultimately, storm the heavens with golden sonorities.
There is wonderful music-making on these Chandos disks. (The last, with the Symphony No. 8 and the extraordinary tone-poem “The Wood Dove” that seems to prophesy the melodic turns of a Kurt Weill, will be released in a couple of weeks.) You cannot blame me, therefore, for wondering if that brand of musicianship mightn’t be jwhat we need on our local podium.
A complete set of the Dvorak Nine, in performances of this quality, is always welcome. Did we also need another of the Beethoven Nine? I suppose there’s no point in asking, so long as every ambitious conductor on the face of the planet regards his (or her) personal view on these sovereign works as a kind of signature on a contract drawn up by supernatural powers.
Two major Beethoven-symphony projects are drawing to a close: Christoph von Dohnanyi’s complete set on Telarc, with the Cleveland Orchestra, and Roger Norrington’s on EMI, with his London Classical Players. Both sets, praise be, are issued as single records, so that their conductors’ respective outlooks can be sampled without mortgaging the premises.
I admire Dohnanyi greatly, and have no difficulty in regarding his Cleveland as our best American orchestra –and not far below the best anywhere. There is a quiet, respectful eloquence in these performances; they grow on you. The Dohnanyi Sixth comes very close, for me, to being my favorite recording of any Beethoven symphony. Its congenial way of unfolding, its sure and gentle way of holding the pace in that celestial slow movement, the humor throughout — all these are, to me, exceptional examples of a great conductor’s art. The odd-numbered symphonies, especially the Seventh, are here and there a little cautious. But there isn’t a false move, a wrong turning, anywhere in these performances, and the sound of the Telarc recording is its own catalog of miracles.
The Norrington series, with its adherence to Beethoven’s minutest rubrics thoughout including the unworkable metronome markings that the composer — already deaf — stuck in willy-nilly, continues fascinating. The sound is startling at times, especially when those hard tympani sticks exact their toll on the authentic skin drumheads. The tempos are all the more startling, justified mostly by Norrington’s own skill in clarifying orchestral balances. I could not conceive of owning these as my only Beethoven symphony recordings; at the same time, I refer to these disks often; their refreshing unorthodoxies (which Norrington, of course, identifies as strict orthodoxies) becomes a constant stimulus to rethink everything I think I know about these works. You can’t ask more than that from a record.
I wish I felt that way also about Norrington’s new disk of Berlioz’ “Fantasic” Symphony (also on EMI). Sure, there are enough “departures” — again, as always, in the name of honor to the composer’s own wishes — to make this an equally simulating, thought-provoking venture. But I feel more the cold hand of the laboratory dissector here, and less the ardent fire of a Berlioz devotee; that, in this music, is a fatal flaw.

Long Beach Opera

Alan Rich — Sat, 06 May 1989 17:49:26 +0000

Everybody knows that Giovanni Paisiello’s “Barber of Seville” of 1782 isn’t a patch, comedically or musically, on the more famous Rossini opera of 34 years later. Still, the early work has a great deal of charm, and more than a few moments of genuine high style; it takes a real effort to suppress this opera’s many virtues. In its new production, unveiled Saturday night as the first in a cycle of entertainments based on the plays of Caron de Beaumarchais, the Long Beach Opera almost succeeded in this regard. In the end Paisiello won out — but barely.
The destruction was spearheaded by two visiting, but hardly flying Dutchmen, director Hans Nieuwenhuis and designer Paul Gallis, both of them working under the familiar if deplorable delusion that small jokes can become twice as funny when made into large jokes. Just the opposite, actually, happens to be true. Dear, sweet Paisiello and his modest but shapely comedy simply groaned under the weight of the stage gimmickry, none of it particularly funny, some of it particularly embarrassing.
Example: every scene was framed by a recurrent bit of pantomime, not mentioned in either play or opera, wherein Count Almaviva, and the Rosina he will win during the course of the evening, sit at a wedding feast. The table pops up from the stage floor and then pops down again (with a loud clunk); it is the approximate width of the stage so that the nuptial couple are separated by vast space — like Citizen and Mrs. Kane in Xanadu. A group of flunkies serve the dinner; the menu is even listed in the program. But the food is whisked away after the first bite. Why bother?
Example: Rosina and Dr. Bartolo make their first entrances on His-and-Her balconies, suspended gondolas that resemble heavy traffic on a ski lift. Rosina, on her entrance, is watering a plant, with real water. Accidentally, she misses the plant and waters the waiting Almaviva down below. That gets a laugh, so you know she’s going to do it again. She does it again.
Example: the credit-card gag; the electronic-keyboard gag for the Lesson Scene; the bursting-balloon gag for Michael Gallup’s “Scandal” aria…but why go on? Director Nieuwenhuis has burdened a perfectly fine musical conception with a repertory of stage shtik that merely clutters the opera and which, furthermore, his cast cannot manage very well.
This is an adequate singing ensemble, sometimes more than that. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the director, or to anyone else, that high comedy — or even low comedy posing as high — can work only when there is a meticulously devised, consistent acting style. Maybe, with guidance, someone might have shown Don Bernardini, the Almaviva, or Kathryn Gamberoni, the Rosina, the difference between fine comic acting and mere mugging. Apparently, nobody did.
And so, the chance to rediscover a sweet little comic almost-masterpiece, with some moments of ensemble writing that surely guided Mozart’s pen in his own Italian comedies, has been weakened in one of the Long Beach Opera’s rare miscalculations of the past few years. Not all is lost, however. Nicholas McGegan’s splendid little orchestra contributes a fine, forthright crackle that moves matters past even the most abject stage business.
No opera with Michael Gallup, furthermore, can be all bad; his strong, forthright Basilio could, with proper thinking-out, have been the bulwark for a solid, truly comic evening. So could the bright, mostly appealing Figaro of John Fanning and the Bartolo of David Evitts, a creation unusually responsive to the sadder aspects of this foolish figure. Gamberoni’s Rosina began badly, with the voice little more than a squeak in the first couple of scenes. But her big Lesson-Scene aria got her back on the track, and her angry outburst near the opera’s end was superfine.
But the cause of the Paisiello “Barber” was lost early on, and remained just out of reach during the long evening. Oh well, this slender, slight opera may have been an easy one to push over. Next weekend comes “The Marriage of Figaro,” an indestructible masterwork and, thus, a far more formidable challenge to forces of destruction. Go to it, Long Beach!
PLAYBILL
THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, opera in two acts by Giovanni Paisiello, libretto by Giuseppe Petrosellini, from the Beaumarchais play. Produced by the Long Beach Opera, directed by Hans Nieuwenhuis, designed by Paul Gallis, conducted by Nicholas McGegan. At the Center Theater, Long Beach Convention Center. Remaining performances: 5/10 and 5/14 at 8, 5/27 at 2; tickets $10-$50; information 596-5556.
Figaro………John Fanning
Almaviva………Don Bernardini
Rosina………..Kathryn Gamberoni
Bartolo……….David Evitts
Basilio………..Michael Gallup

Iona

Alan Rich — Fri, 05 May 1989 17:48:01 +0000

Iona Brown led her Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra into unfamiliar territory on at the Japan-America Theater on Friday night, and staked out a handsome claim. Contemporary American music has not figured on her programs until now, to any great extent. As her vehicle of entry into this most rewarding area, John Adams’ “Shaker Loops” was an excellent choice.
Originally composed for seven solo strings and easily expandable for a larger ensemble, Adams’ marvelous invention was also, for him, a vehicle of entry. It dates from 1978, and stands as Adams’ first coming to grips with the minimalist esthetic. Eleven years later, it remains fresh and energetic: simple on its gleaming, hypnotic surface, but amazingly complex in the way it interweaves complex melodic and rhythmic fragments of varying lengths into a seamless fabric.
How far this composer has come in those 11 years! “Shaker Loops” is Adams’ purest minimalist score; in later works he works that style into a variety of contexts; minimalism has become, for him, one of a number of languages he has mastered. Yet the “Loops” is more than just a seminal work of historic interest; it is a beautiful half-hour’s worth of exuberant invention, not easy to play, very nicely done by the 24 string players of Iona Brown’s ensemble. It has also not lost its power to irritate the nonbelievers, judging from the number who came up to complain to me (why [ITAL me? [ENDITAL) during intermission.
This was the season’s final concert by this justly famous and valuable ensemble: a program entirely for strings, led by Brown, as usual, from her post as first violinist. It began with a Purcell Trio Sonata — wonderfully rich, vivid stuff from the High Baroque, its wild chromatic harmonies at least as disturbing as anything in the Adams. Vivaldi’s 4-Violin Concerto followed. a rich, flavorsome work well known in its original version and also in Bach’s transcription for four harpsichords.
The playing — as much as could be heard over the whoosh of the hall’s faulty air-conditioning system — was elegant, stylish, and refreshingly unmannered. Neither Brown nor her orchestra get very much involved with this “authentic instruments” controversy; her players play modern instruments, but with a sense of dedicated style that is proper for music of any century.
Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence” ended the evening; I might have preferred more very old or very new music, but the work has its share of prettiness. True, the original scoring — for six players — doesn’t transfer to a larger ensemble as well as the Adams did. But Brown, very considerately, did cut the ensemble back to original proportions in certain intimate passages, notably in the slow movement. It brought the season to a brave, sonorous conclusion.

Record reviews

Alan Rich — Sun, 23 Apr 1989 18:13:50 +0000

A special place of honor is ordained for the EMI recording of Richard Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos,” first accomplished in 1954 and now at hand in a two-disk CD reissue. Whatever your feelings may be about the work itself, you have to recognize this performance as one of those rare occasions when everything worked, when every component of an assembled dream cast, and a conductor uniquely responsive to the score itself, became transformed into a performing mechanism simply without flaws.
The cast list should make anyone’s mouth water: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in the title role, Irmgard Seefried as the Composer, Rita Streich as Zerbinetta, the young Hermann Prey as the Harlequin. Herbert von Karajan, already regarded in some (but not all) circles as the first great postwar conductor, was in charge.
Doubts about Karajan’s omnipotence were already in circulation when this “Ariadne” appeared (on a three-record Angel LP album). On records he had already stiff-armed his way through a few Mozart albums and a rather coarse “Meistersinger” from Bayreuth. For this project, however, he was on his best behavior, and the result is a performance so delicately shaped, so subtly woven out of a multitude of elements, that the passages in Strauss’s score that seem like so much padding — some of the argle-bargle in the Prologue, and the mercilessly extended final love duet — seemed this time like integral parts of the score.
The performance is complemented by a full roster of small delights: the gloriously stuffy Major Domo of the great Viennese actor Alfred Neugebauer, the elegant pomposity of Hugues Cuenod’s Dancing Master, the exquisite Echo of Anny Felbermayer, the playing of the Philharmonia Orchestra, whose first-desk players at the time included the legendary hornist Dennis Brain. I know better operas on records, but few better performances. But why a booklet, for this most verbose opera, with no English text?
If you saw the Long Beach Opera’s production of Karol Szymanowski’s “King Roger” a year or so ago, you might have noticed — despite the strange production that visited interesting violence upon the time or place of the action — that the music itself was an extraordinary experience.
Szymanowski’s huge dramatic pageant, set in medieval Sicily and involving some striking argumentation on the nature of religious faith, embraces a wide panorama of musical influences: Debussy and Stravinsky foremost, with more than a sidewise obeisance of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.” Now, for the first time, we can examine this extraordinary score at its own pace. “King Roger” is now available in a domestic release, two disks on the Acanta label, from a broadcast from Warsaw’s National Opera in 1965.
The opera is short — 80 minutes, and don’t believe the mislabeling on the back of the CD box — and the performance under Mieczyslaw Mierzejewski, with Andrzej Hiolski and Hanna Rumowska as Roger and his Queen, is more trustworthy than glorious. So is the recorded sound. The accompanying booklet gives a plot summary and a fair amount of historical background but no text in any language.
These are important, but not fatal drawbacks. The point is that “Roger” — as even the up-and-down Long Beach production suggested — is a great opera, and this release is unlikely to be duplicated from any other source in the near future. Filling out the second side is another Szymanowski score I’ll bet you’ve never heard, the ballet-pantomime called “The Highland Robbers,” full of lusty folkdances and some delicious orchestrations. It’s time we gave Szymanowski the attention he has long deserved., and this album points us in the right direction.
If Szymanowski’s opera languishes in the shadows of undeserved neglect, it is like a neon billboard on Main Street compared to Franz Schmidt’s “Notre Dame,” which turns up — implausibly but admirably — in a West Berlin performance distributed on the energetic, Los Angeles-based Capriccio label. The much admired Christof Perick is the conductor; the cast includes such well-known figures as Gwyneth Jones, James King and Kurt Moll (as, you might have guessed, the hunchback Quasimodo).
Schmidt (1874-1939) still reigns as the central deity of a small but dwindling cult, mostly in his native Austria. In my student days in Vienna I remember attending a performance of his luridly overstuffed oratorio “The Book of Seven Seals” – which the audience absorbed reverently, without taint of worldly applause — and feeling as if I’d wandered onto some unknown but hostile planet. Confessing my boredom to otherwise rational friends, I found myself looked upon as a blasphemer.
That oratorio, should you care, is also on records, but “Notre Dame” is considerably more fun. Come upon it without prior knowledge, as I did during a recent broadcast, and you’d swear you’d discovered something unknown from Wagner’s middle years — a couple of missing acts of “Lohengrin,” perhaps. The libretto — from Victor Hugo’s novel, of course – is co-authored by Schmidt himself, with Leopold Wilk. There is, at least, plenty of action, some grand choral scenes, and a pathetic if amusing attempt by the composer to evoke the medieval setting of the novel through some naive archaisms.
The opera dates from 1906, had a middling success at its 1914 Vienna premiere, and still shows up there from time to time (most recently in 1975, with Julia Migenes as Esmeralda). The recording is from a radio performance which, considering the meagre visual suitability of Gwyneth Jones as the seductive dancing girl, is probably just as well. To my surprise, I find the music almost constantly pretty, sometimes rather stirring. Considering the recent fate of Victor Hugo in the musical theater, I would endure ten performances of “Notre Dame” over one return visit to “Les Miz.”
Georg Buchner’s “Wozzeck” was first performed in Vienna in the same year as the “Notre Dame” premiere. We don’t know — but can surely guess — what the rising young genius Alban Berg might have thought of the Schmidt opera, but we know of his bedazzled reaction to “Wozzeck,”and have its fruition in Berg’s operatic setting of Buchner’s text. It’s late in the day to proclaim Berg’s score as one of the masterworks of this century.
Claudio Abbado’s new Deutsche Grammophon recording takes the full measure of this surging, harrowing drama. It comes from a live performance of last season’s new production at the Vienna State Opera, and, of course, the in-person quality of the sound adds much to the vibrance of the final product. I have never been partial to the steely esthetic that seems to inform the Pierre Boulez recording of “Wozzeck” — the only version, of several formerly available, to survive into the last Schwann catalog. Abbado’s is altogether superior; the emotional spectrum, from the accents of private horror to the grisly shadow-dances in the Tavern Scene, is broader, and the sweep is irresistible.
The cast is superfine: Hildegard Behrens as Marie, Franz Grundheber as Wozzeck, Heinz Zednik and Aage Haugland as the grotesque Captain and Doctor. The photographs in the accompanying booklet are enough to make one ache to see this production in person. From the fine print on the album cover I glean the information that the performance was also televised.
“Wozzeck” is a difficult opera to approach, although the rewards are overwhelming. It is simplicity itself, however, beside the contents of another recent DG release, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Samstag aus Licht” (“Saturday from Light”).
Since his early electronic pieces at the experimental lab in Cologne in the 1950s, Stockhausen’s stature as the guru of the artistically outrageous and the artistically possible has never been challenged. It may be, as in the case of that other pioneer John Cage, that his eventual fame will rest upon the paramaters he has devised for musical experiences, rather than the music itself. In any case, his creativity has been well documented, most of all by Deutsche Grammophon, whose recording engineers have dogged his footsteps almost from the start. (His recordings do not, however, linger in the domestic catalog for very long. You need friends in Europe to help catch up on such past treasures as the spellbinding “Sternklang” or the “Mantra,” which have come and gone on the local lists.)
Stockhausen’s major project in recent years has been an operatic cycle called “Light,” which when completed will consist of seven separate works — one for each day, each a score of considerable dimension. Perhaps “operatic” is the wrong word; what Stockhausen has in mind is more like some gigantic ritual, with Eternity the real subject matter. “Thursday,” whose central character is the Archangel Michael (interpreted, as near as I can figure, by a solo trumpet) was completed and recorded (also on DG) five years ago; now comes “Saturday,” nearly four hours long, built around the figure of Lucifer, Bringer of Light.
The work involves magic, vast spatial effects, and infinite forbearance. You know that deep thinking is taking place, and the curtain parts often enough to reveal the product of a phenomenally complex creative instinct. The great moments in “Samstag aus Licht” — except for one special moment — have a direct power which, for all its abstruseness of design, can hold you spellbound.
The performance, under La Scala auspices, was actually given in a Milan sports arena, involving as it does spectacular lighting effects, sounds racketing around a vast enclosed space, a large chorus, solo players and, as principal performers, a huge college marching band — in this case, the entire University of Michigan Symphony Band deployed around the hall. Just as noise, therefore, and as remarkable recording, this is exhilarating stuff. Whether the exhilaration will last through four hours, however, is something I leave to you to decide.
One moment, however, is precious. During the recording sessions the band members, apparently restless and, perhaps, absorbing the spirit of native Italian pit orchestras since time immemorial, stop playing and start yelling about unfair overtime. The mild-mannered Stockhausen tries desperately to sweet-tongue them, to no avail. Some flunky from La Scala is summoned; he speaks no English and scolds the musicians for not knowing Italian. The situation ends in what sounds like a standoff. The album notes, maddeningly explicit in detailing the complexities of Stockhausen’s system of interrelated thematic elements, offers few clues to this real-life situation.
To the credit of Stockhausen, a practiced hand with musical “happenings” and other performance-art phenomena, most of the episode, from the outbreak forward, has been left on the recording. It is one of the moments in “Samstag aus Licht” whose high dramatic impact is evident to all.

Record reviews

Alan Rich — Sun, 12 Mar 1989 18:13:18 +0000

Steve Reich has done it again. Natter on all you want on the subject of
minimalism, its musical style on a treadmill, its major composers likewise. Yet here is Reich’s “Different Trains,” introduced last December at New Music America in Miami, out now on a new Nonesuch release, bearing the welcome news that Reich, at least, has retained his power to turn corners and face new horizons.
A description runs the risk of sounding simplistic. Given, after all, the easiest cliches about the minimalist musical language, the image of the train comes quickly to mind: chug, chug, chug, clickety-clack. Reich has written his piece for the Kronos Quartet, with an overlay of sirens, bells, train whistles both American and European, and an underlay of taped voices, both straight and electronically processed, talking about trains — about the great speedy trains of the past, the doom-laden trains of the wartime concentration camps, the dying-out of train travel in our own time.
The result is an exuberant latter-day tone-poem, lasting just under half an hour, overpowering in its sheer energy far beyond what my superficial description might suggest. The mix of voices and instruments is, for Reich, both old and new. The tape-loop processing in some of his first pieces — the boy’s repetitions in “Come Out” for example — created a strange sense of subliminal melody; you came eventually to hear the cadence of the words rather than the words themselves. That happens again in “Different Trains” — in, for example, the words of an old train conductor remembering how things once were — and the music of the words forms a taut counterpoint with the playing of the quartet.
From the earlier pieces dominated primarily by the sense of repetition and slow, almost imperceptible change — “Come Out,” the first extended version of “Drumming,” up to the magnificent “Music for 18 Musicians” of 1976 — to his present tightly, almost classically structured scores, Reich has gone through a steady stylistic growth. The explosive energy of the large-scale ” Desert Music” of 1984, and the smaller, even more exuberant Sextet of a year later, were reined in by something new in Reich: a passion for clear, audible musical structuring. In place of the ongoing, open-ended expansiveness of the early works which seemed sometimes more to stop arbitrarily than actually reach a logical ending, we got these new, tight pieces with tunes that kept coming back to round off the proceedings in an almost Mozartian way; the “Desert Music,” with its A-B-C-B-A over-all design, is as clear as any 18th-century Rondo.
But, like the classical masters, Reich has the artistic insights to make this kind of structuring seem both well-balanced and surprising. in “Different Trains” the verbal narrative determines much of the over-all shape of the work. Yet the musical changes superimposed on that dramatic structure, the marvelous sudden shifts of harmony, rhythm and tone-color, create the propulsiveness, that zooms past the mileposts and sweeps us along.
I don’t know if “Different Trains” is any kind of masterpiece in the cosmic sense — whatever that might be. Enough that it is a terrific, beautifully managed half-hour of musical exhilaration. So, on what is for me a somewhat lesser level of accomplishment, is the companion piece on the disk, Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” for guitars, written for and played by Pat Metheny, another in the series — along with “Vermont” and “Manhattan” Counterpoints — in which one live performer plays one part live against a multi-track tape of his own playing of several (ten, in this case) other parts. The music is attractive, somewhat predictable if you know the other Counterpoints, and makes for some terrific cover art: guitar necks against railroad tracks.
I wrote effusively about Harold Shapero’s “Symphony for Classical Orchestra” when Andre Previn and the Los Angeles Philharmonic revived it in 1986 and, better yet, repeated it two seasons later. American music does have a past, some of it glorious, too much of it forgotten. Now Previn and the Philharmonic have recorded Shapero’s work on New World Records (along with a lesser make-weight, the “Nine-Minute Overture”); hear it as a supremely beautiful large-scale work rescued from the dust; hear it, even, as a source of national pride, a commodity that gets a rather severe shaking these days.
Shapero composed the work in 1947; it was played and recorded not long afterwards by his Harvard schoolfellow Leonard Bernstein, with a pickup orchestra. Previn’s 1986 revival (part of the ATT-financed program for rediscovering American orchestral music that also underwrote the return of Roger Sessions’ marvelous Second Symphony) was the first performance in over 30 years. Why?
Shapero wrote the work at a time when American music was in the grip of a neoclassic passion. Stravinsky was the absolute god, and his major acolytes included the younger Elliott Carter, along with Irving Fine, Lester Trimble, Bernstein himself for a quick sideswipe, and Shapero. The passion was short-lived. Shapero’s marvelously inventive symphony, a strange but workable synthesis of Stravinsky and, of all unlikely bedmates, Beethoven, fell out of style before it had any real chance of making headway. The intense braininess of the work appealed little to the more illustrious proponents of new American music, Leopold Stokowski or, in his last years, Serge Koussevitzky. Aaron Copland’s and William Schuman’s extroverted Americana was more to their taste.
Time has mellowed our historical perspectives, and it’s easier to see the overwhelming forces that motivated this marvelous Shapero symphony four decades ago. I demean nothing, I hope, when I state that this recording stands as Previn’s most distinguished, most valuable accomplishment to date. It’s fortunate that, unlike the way these things usually work, Shapero has lived to see his masterpiece exonerated. He turns 70 next year.
And Mel Powell (did you notice?) turned 65 last year. What a presence, this white-haired eminence, with the robust, eloquent boom-boom of his speaking voice and the quieter eloquence of his lapidary, exquisitely fashioned music. That long musical life of his, a “different train” with many way-stations, comes to focus in his great late scores: the days of playing jazz piano with Benny Goodman, the prismatic glints in his electronic tinkering, the ruddy wisdom of a lifetime.
Music Masters has given us a garland of recent Powell, six works most of them first heard at CalArts, where Powell now teaches. A song-cycle to the multi-hued, aphoristic poetry of Mark Strand shines kaleidoscopic lights on the wonderful words, and Judith Bettina sings enchantingly. The bygone (sob!) Sequoia Quartet moves lovingly through the thickets of the 1982 String Quartet; the Sequoia’s first violinist, Yoko Matsuda, participates in two other brief works. Rachel Rudich’s flute resounds in another short work like a light in a dark wilderness.
This is, then, a glorious record of small but strong delights; 45 minutes in the company of a warm-hearted tone-poet, congenial and witty. Why is there so little wit in today’s music? Mel Powell makes us wonder.

Record reviews

Alan Rich — Sun, 12 Feb 1989 18:12:43 +0000

Reinhold Moritsevich Gliere died as recently as 1956; his musical style suggests a much earlier date. His memory is kept alive by two works, one tiny (a dance from his satiric ballet “The Red Poppy”) the other huge (the Symphony No. 3, subtitled “Ilya Murometz”). Neither is what you’d call a masterpiece worthy of the inner circle, but now “Ilya” is back in circulation, via a new recording, the first in many years. If you were worried that the world was running out of big, noisy, gorgeously resounding Russian romantic orchestral nonsense, here is music to replenish the dwindling stock.
The work was first performed, in Moscow, in 1912. Its inspiration is a Slavic myth about — as if you hadn’t already guessed — a legendary Russian hero. Ilya is a mighty warrior who roams the landscape challenging all evildoers to mortal combat and chopping off their heads. Drunk with power and victory, Ilya and his cohorts challenge a contingent of heavenly troops, who defeat the earthlings and turn them to stone. (Moral: lay off the hard stuff.)
As storybook symphonies go, “Ilya Murometz” has its own great stock of dimwitted fun. Gliere builds interestingly, devising a tangled skein of leitmotives for the various characters in his vast panorama, and coloring them to match the unfolding of the action. The result is a marvelously colored, rich tonal fresco, beautifully orchestrated. I would put it up against Tchaikovsky’s “Manfred” or Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Scheherazade” as an exemplar of good, lusty story-telling through imaginative musical means.
The work is long, over 90 minutes in this complete recording under Harold Farberman (with London’s Royal Philharmonic, the orchestra that happens to be visiting these parts this very week). Those of us who know the work at all probably learned it through the old Leopold Stokowski recording on 78′s, which was cut back to about half that length. Agreed, you have to love this kind of overstuffed fustian to endure Ilya’s less-than-heavenly lengths. I admit to a soft spot for the work, and have combed the catalogs for years, hoping for its return. Farberman, a journeyman conductor who once led the Oakland Symphony during some not particularly distinguished years, holds the work together and makes no egregious errors. The recording, on the British Unicorn-Kanchana label, does the work full justice.
Russian music on a far higher intellectual level comes on two recent releases on Sweden’s BIS label, both devoted to music of Alfred Schnittke. The belated discovery of Schnittke in the West, along with his astounding colleague Sofia Gubaidulina, can be ascribed to the current thaw in cultural relations with the Soviet Union, although in Schnittke’s case we have had a few inklings of his high qualities through the advocacy of the violinist Gidon Kremer. He is, in any case, an extraordinary creative artist, not easy to describe but unforgettable in the power of his music.
One record contains three Schnittke Concertos: for piano with string orchestra, for oboe and harp with string orchestra, and a Concerto Grosso that pits small ensemble against large orchestra. The scoring suggests modest, baroque-ish pieces, but the results are otherwise. For sheer violence, an onslaught of sound at once brutal and marvelously controlled, I know no recent new music the equal of this 1979 Piano Concerto. The performances, by the very young New Stockholm Chamber Orchestra under Ulf Forsberg, are full of the kind of life-force that evolves when young people take on young music.
The second BIS record includes music for larger ensemble: a work with two titles (Concerto Grosso No. 4, Symphony No. 5) lasting about 40 minutes, and a stupendous orchestral exercise, called “Pianissimo,” that lasts about 8 1/2. The Concerto/Symphony was completed only last year. Again, you are first dazzled by the sheer technique of the man, the mastery over startling musical ideas that borders on arrogance. The work is full of quotes and near-quotes; wisps of melody that could almost, but not quite, have come out of Handel come and go like passing puffs of smoke; now you hear it now you don’t. Schnittke has a great passion, apparently, for using his own music as a kind of critic’s notebook, crammed with wry and compelling observations on the past. (On another new record, a Kronos Quartet anthology on Nonesuch, there is Schnittke’s Third Quartet, an exigesis on Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” with patches of the original work reworked and commented on until old and new composer seemingly function like close contemporaries. This, too, is an amazing work.)
“Pianissimo” dates from 1967/68; it bears its own amazement. More than an essay in quiet orchestration, it is a powerful, tightly packed emotional statement — composed, do not forget, in a far less beneficial creative climate in the Soviet Union than exists today. Performances on this second record are by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Jarvi. Both records are superbly recorded, further benefit to the performers and to the composer himself.
Schnittke turns 55 this year. His fame in the past year, thanks to his two East Coast visits, both to attend major presentations of his own music, has spread rapidly in this country; I don’t hesitate to rank him among the leading composers of his generation. The next good news is that all his symphonies, including the wildly eclectic First that was the show-stopper of the Soviet-music Festival in Boston last March are now being recorded on the Melodiya label, distributed here by Mobile Fidelity.
On two fat Erato albums the ebullient Slava — Mstislav Rostropovich to you — conducts music of his great friend Serge Prokofiev: all 7 symphonies on one album, the opera “War and Peace,” its four-hour expanse uncut, on another. The symphonies form a fascinating body of work, spread more or less evenly through the composer’s life, from the youthful cheekiness of the “Classical” Symphony to the Seventh, the work of a tired soldier who has apparently surrendered to Stalinist brainwashing and composes merely to keep his pen from rusting.
In between, there are amazing works: the ice-cold brilliance of Nos. 2, 3 and 4 (with No. 3 fashioned from parts of “The Fiery Angel”), the warm, accessible neo-romanticism of No. 5, the almost mystical passion of No. 6, as subtle a work as Prokofiev ever fashioned.
Rostropovich knows the music, and the performances he draws from the French National Orchestra are stylish and well-balanced. Perhaps he takes the “Classical” more seriously than its composer did; perhaps he could loosen a top button before taking on the finale of No. 5, where the element of humor is somewhat underplayed. On the whole, however, this is as distinguished a job of conducting as Slava has ever contributed too the record industry; these are records to cherish.
With some sense of relief I happily announce that the worst record of the current year has already been released, thus ending the suspense more than ten months early. The record is on CBS, and it contains songs from Walt Disney movies sung by — ready? — the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I mean…there are things in life that you immediately recognize as ultimate, definitive, and the sound of those close-to-400 voices raised to trace the musical patterns of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” simply has to be one of them.

Beethoven 10+1

Alan Rich — Wed, 01 Feb 1989 18:08:15 +0000

Did the world really need a Tenth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven? Apparently so, says a British musicologist named Barry Cooper, and who’s to say he’s wrong?
Nothing would please me more, in fact, than to be able to greet this mangled, crippled, stillborn product of Dr. Cooper’s fantasizing as the very Tenth we (some of us, anyhow) have so long awaited and prayed for. Alas, as a man of rock-ribbed conscience annealed in the crucible of a New England upbringing, I cannot. Last week in this space I cited this deformed monster — recorded on a new MCA release by Wyn Morris and the London Symphony Orchestra – as the booby-prize entry among last year’s records; duty demands that I elaborate.
Out of Dr. Cooper’s imaginings, and founded on the flimsiest scraps of evidence, has come a single 15-minute symphonic movement, its musical substance vaguely reminiscent of other Beethoven scores (the “Pathetique” Sonata, for one). In a half-hour lecture that fills out the recording of this brief movement, Dr. Cooper ingratiatingly describes his source material: some fragments here and there in Beethoven manuscripts, some equally fragmentary references in letters to the existence of, or plans for, a possible symphony in the key of E-flat. Dr. Cooper talks in the genial, earnest style of your basic tweedy scholar; you have to listen fairly carefully to recognize the off-putting mix of fact and hoo-hah in his reasoning. At very least, he sounds like a man who desperately wants there to be a Beethoven Tenth; you end up profoundly sad that there isn’t.
And there isn’t. If the stitched-together pastiche were, indeed, an authentic Beethoven score, we would have to revise our estimate of the composer drastically downward. The timing is wrong; an idea with one sort of thematic potential is too often allowed in Dr. Cooper’s version to crawl ignobly under fences and land in alien territory. The noble Mozart once created a piece called “A Musical Joke,” which took off enchantingly and knowledgeably after amateur composers who, by starting phrases they cannot properly resolve, continually paint themselves into corners. At least Mozart’s inept village composers are comical; Dr. Cooper’s Beethoven isn’t even that.
The byways of music are cluttered with the scraps of projects begun and abandoned, sometimes for reasons easily discernible, sometimes not. Some composers — Brahms, for one — had the good manners to burn their abandoned manuscripts, thus denying to later scholars like Dr. Cooper the ghoulish pleasure of reassembling their bones. Franz Schubert, less tidy, began, but never completed, not merely one “unfinished” symphony but five or six, including one manuscript that he literally took with him to his deathbed. Why would he abandon such a considerable body of work, including the B-minor symphony whose surviving, completed two movements are one of music greatest treasures? Probably because he needed money, and because he recognized that an unknown composer, still in his 20s, didn’t have the chance of a snowball in you-know-where to interest an orchestral management in music so bold, so advanced for its time. (Would a composer in Schubert’s situation be any better off today? You know he wouldn’t!)
In Schubert’s case we can fall back on these facts about his economic hardships to justify a certain amount of latter-day tidying up of his abandoned material. In any case these surviving sketches, some of which have also now been pieced together into performable music, are the soul of coherence next to Beethoven’s henscratchings. We know, furthermore, that Beethoven’s creative method consisted of constantly reworking, revising, sketched material after it had been first written down; it’s fascinating, in fact, to follow the evolution of some well-known Beethoven themes from their clumsy first fashionings.
Thus, even if Dr. Cooper’s source material did come from Beethoven’s plans for a new symphony — and the matter is by no means clear — he has tried to evolve full-fledged organisms out of crude embryos, a feat both artistically and biologically impossible. (At that, some of his claims are. to say the least, suspect. He claims to have exhumed some 200 bars of authentic material from Beethoven sketches — about 40 percent of the total work he has brought forward — but fails to note that several of these measures are actually second versions of first attempts.)
What disturbs me the most, in all of this, is the insidious mix of pseudo-scholarship and media hype that such projects engender. Musicology is a fragile science. At its purest, scholars huddle in dimly-lit rare-book libraries, poring over ancient codices and developing extended dissertations on, say, the symbolic intent of the recurrent E-flat in the 14th-century Belgian liturgy. At its liveliest, in contributes the valuable news about long-lost and important rediscovered music, such as all that new material in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann” that greatly enhanced last fall’s production at the Music Center.
If Dr. Cooper had restricted his discoveries to finding a clutch of lost symphonies by, say, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, the musical world would have said “harrumph” and gone about its business. But Dr. Cooper has decamped on Beethoven territory, which is like setting up a burger joint in St. Peter’s Square, and it becomes incumbent for the musicologists of the world to clean out their own stables.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, however. I couldn’t advocate casting into limbo all existing latter-day completions of old-time incomplete scores, since that would lose us such honorable scores as Berg’s “Lulu” (whose last act was completed from an elaborate scaffold left by the composer) or Mozart’s Requiem (whose completion by Mozart’s pupil Sussmayr is beautiful but controversial). It would also lose us the undeniable, if far more questionable, attractions of a whole wad of Schubert completions by another British musicologist, Brian Newbould, which also have some musicologists up in arms.
I love the Newbould pseudo-Schubert — all recorded, by the way, on Philips, in rather frigid but clean performances by Neville Marriner and his Academy of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields — in a way I cannot accept the Cooper Beethoven. At least they [ITALsound [ENDITAL plausible; Newbould has done his stitching on larger scraps of fabric and with stronger thread. His completion of the Seventh Symphony, from a sketch in which Schubert indicated at least one musical line in every bar of a large-scale four-movement score, gives us a clear picture of the young Schubert’s growing orchestral mastery. And that work from Schubert’s last days on earth, a three-movement score containing many holes in the outer movements, embraces a bleak, shattering slow movement that takes its composer to a peak from which a vast musical panorama comes into view, stretching from a deathbed in 1828 Vienna to the wild visions of Gustav Mahler eight decades later.
That work of Schubert, by rational listing, is also a Tenth Symphony. So you never can tell.

Ring video

Alan Rich — Sun, 15 Jan 1989 18:15:45 +0000

Old Sourpuss has finally made it. His “one indivisible, supreme creation of the mind of man” — that being Richard Wagner’s own modest appraisal of his “Ring of the Nibelung” — has now achieved its ultimate consecration. Would the old boy be proud to learn that, starting right now, anyone with the requisite bucks can acquire the totality of that staggering creation at his local video emporium: the sights, the sounds, the “total artwork” of its composer’s imagining? You know he would!
This videodisk “Ring,” complete in four volumes with an extra documentary disk detailing the genesis and making of the whole project, is the 1976 Bayreuth production which first showed up on PBS in 1983 to honor the Wagner centennial. Perhaps you taped it at the time, intricately calculating how, by changing recording speed and alternating tape lengths, you could get each uninterrupted act onto a single cassette. Perhaps, like me, you promised yourself frequent private reruns, sitting spellbound as all 15 hours of Wagner’s titanic drama sailed past on the tube. Perhaps, like me, you haven’t actually touched those tapes in all these years.
Anyhow, now you can toss them. The electronics boys have been predicting lately that we were due for a resurgence of the laser-videodisk, that altogether superior method of video recording that has muddled along as a poor relative to videotape all these years. There is no clearer confirmation of these predictions than these “Ring” disks, issued on Philips (which also produced the audio versions of the same performance). The sight, the sound (digital stereo, of course), the whole impact is, in a word, stupendous.
Fifteen hours of the “Ring”? That’s an arcane exercise, of course; even Wagner planned the cycle to allow for a night’s sleep between sections. But I cling to the memory of once wandering into a series of rooms at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, flooded by the sound of the classic Solti recording that was being played continuously that whole summer, pouring down from loudspeakers into rooms carpeted with bodies wall-to-wall, tuning in, turning on, blissed out.
Neither this proletariat stretched out on a museum floor, nor you and I in private ecstasy in front of a video monitor, exactly conforms to Wagner’s elitist image of his ideal audience; never mind. The “Ring” is the easiest to approach of all Wagnerian dramas. Its musical style is less forbidding than that of “Tristan” or “Parsifal”; its story infinitely more universal. You can prove that latter point in at least two ways.
One way is by contrasting Wagner’s own dramatic vision to the way Patrice Chereau has staged the work here: an industrial setting of Wagner’s own time, with the Rhine surging through a massive hydroelectric plant, the dragon Fafner an oversize child’s toy on wheels, the chorus done up in workingmen’s garb, Wotan in a Victorian frock coat. The discrepancy may be enormous, but the work remains intact.
Another way is by matching up the paraphernalia of Wagner’s plot with a latter-day legend of comparable appeal, the scenario of George Lucas’ “Star Wars.” The similarities are inescapable: the brother-sister protagonists, the son-vs.-father clash of swords, the klutzy young Siegfried as the wide-eyed, kid-next-door Luke Skywalker; the Jedi Force as the Power of the Ring. I cannot shake the feeling, in fact, that if Wagner were here today he’d be at work in the Lucas magic factory up in Marin.
Wagner does, indeed, demand much from his audience. He saw himself as communicant to a select inner circle, whose minds could somehow be purged of all earthly thoughts (especially, of all thoughts of opera as it had been before Wagner had come along to redeem the world and its art). He demands, furthermore, our undivided attention, our willingness to follow the dismembered themes and melodic fragments that bind his drama into a seamless whole. We can fight off sleep during the endless stretches of pure haggle: Mr. and Mrs. Wotan nattering at each other about marital fidelity, Wotan and Mime playing at 20 questions. But, finally, it is Wagner himself, in that endless torrent of music as mighty as any on earth, who makes it all worthwhile.
For it is Wagner himself, his own cynicism and bitterness toward everyone else on earth, who shapes this particular retelling of the universal legend — the rise of mankind, the redemption, the fall –
into an artwork of a grandeur beyond anyone’s power to evaluate. The clarity of Chereau’s staging has offended traditionalists, and with some justification. Yet the hard edges of his visual realization is not only ideally suited to video (as other traditional, dark, pictorial productions probably wouldn’t adapt at all); they also, for a video audience, clarify marvelously well the fearful symmetry of Wagner’s story, his interlocked chain of treacheries that, like the Ring itself, eventually comes full circle.
Still, the hard clarity of Chereau’s dramatic plan does match up marvelously with Pierre Boulez’ musical conception. If this lacks the sublime oratory of certain surviving ancient treasures — the amazing Clemens Kraus radio tapes from Bayreuth now available on Rodolphe, with Hans Hotter’s Wotan in sublime estate, or the two dim-sounding but oddly gripping Wilhelm Furtwangler performances on LP — the urgency in the Boulez performance stems most of all from his astounding command of musical detail, his ability to set the most complicated music into exact perspective.
All this seems gloriously clarified, deepened in impact, on this stupefying videodisk reincarnation. Somehow, the quality of this reproduction gets me past some of the shrillness in Gwyneth Jones’ Brunnhilde, and the wobbly Siegfried of Manfred Jung — even in their duet at the end of “Siegfried,” the one time in all 15 hours when you might be tempted to turn off the video.
Uneven it may be, pricey it surely is ($90 for each of the four parts), this “Ring” seems to me a treasure beyond mundane considerations. Stay with it, at least once, until the end, as the flames consume the last vestige of the glory of the Gods, the surviving earthlings face bleakly out into the void where you and I sit as passive observers, and the final flicker of lambent Wagnerian lyricism — the theme of Redemption through Love — wells up from the orchestra, somehow to rekindle human hopes. Resist that moment; I dare you.