So I've Heard » Musical America

TAN DUN

Alan Rich — Sun, 25 Aug 2002 22:51:29 +0000

Suddenly Tan Dun is everywhere you look, everywhere you listen. In just the past few months audiences in Lisbon and Singapore have flocked to his large-scale orchestral works. His Water Passion After St. Matthew reached its first American audiences last July, at the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene; it’s listed for a Brooklyn Academy of Music performance this December, by which time the Sony recording (of the work’s world premiere at Stuttgart in the summer of 2000) will be in the stores. By then, too, his latest opera – bearing the terse title Tea – will have arrived at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall in a co-production with Suntory and the Netherlands Opera, and Hong Kong’s Fusion Festival will have presented a full evening of Tan’s orchestral works – including his Concerto for Pipa, which mingles in typical Tan Dun fashion the sounds of his native China with those of his adopted West. A new cello concerto, The Map , is on the agenda for Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony, with performances in Boston and New York in early 2003.
And while the usual trajectory to acclaim as Musical America’s Composer of the Year can take anywhere from 30 years (in the case of Steve Reich) to half a century (Lou Harrison), the name of Tan Dun has flashed across the musical horizon in less than a decade. Now that gleam is reflected in a shelf’s worth of acclaim that includes, so far, an Oscar, a Grammy and the prestigious and lucrative Grawemeyer Award.
It has only been during that time, in fact, that the possibility has materialized for a Chinese presence in the worldwide musical spectrum. Tan’s early history is shared by at least two other compatriot composers, Bright Sheng and Chen Yi. All three are in their 40s; they look back on childhood years of enforced labor under China’s hardline leadership in which such decadences as serious musical activity were harshly proscribed. Came the end of the grossly misnamed “Cultural Revolution,” and all three composers found their way through suddenly opened doors into the outside world. All three emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1980s, and are now well established here. (Bright Sheng’s new opera is scheduled for next summer at Santa Fe. Its subject: Madame Mao.)
For young Tan the transition had been the most drastic. “I grew up in the small village of Si Mao in Hunan province,” he recalls. “We had a kind of music for our ancient rituals, but most of it was just making noise on whatever we could lay our hands on – kitchen utensils, paper that we could tear, water in bowls that we could stroke with our hands, stones that we could hit together. I was more fortunate than some in the village, however; I had learned to play the violin, and when the Beijing Opera needed players for their orchestra I was taken off farm duty and sent to join the opera company.
“Then came the end of the Cultural Revolution and suddenly the doors were opened. Arriving, at 20, at the Beijing Central Conservatory, and discovering for the first time the music of the real world, was for me a thrilling experience. But I have never lost my interest in making sounds with those primitive noisemakers from my childhood. When I came to New York I discovered that John Cage had also been making music with water, kitchenware and paper; these devices may have seemed strange to some people, but to me they were entirely natural. That’s probably why we became good friends. ”
Tan’s first major American success was the 1995 Ghost Opera, composed for the Kronos Quartet plus a solo pipa, and with the quartet members also asked to riffle their hands through nearby water basins to create distant, mysterious sounds. The Water Passion came about through the Stuttgart-based International Bach Society. Four composers – Tan, Sofia Gubaidulina, Wolfgang Rihm and Osvaldo Golijov – were commissioned to create contemporary Passion settings to honor the 250th anniversary of the death of J.S. Bach. Tan had only discovered Bach’s music and its relationship to the Christian ethic at Beijing. “I had come from a non-Christian background, but the story in the Passion wasn’t all that different from the ancient stories in my village. So many cultures use water as a metaphor: birth, creation and re-creation. The water cycle itself is the story of resurrection; the water comes to earth, and then returns to the atmosphere, and returns to the earth once more. Christian or Taoist, it all becomes the same.”
Unlike the commissioned Passions by his three colleagues, which rival Bach’s own settings in their scoring demands, Tan’s work calls for relatively few performers: a small chorus whose members also play Tibetan finger bells, two vocal soloists, solo strings and keyboard and, as you might guess, a gathering of percussion instruments including stones of various sizes and pitches, water drums (upside-down salad bowls floating in a water basin), a small soda bottle (for bubbling sounds) and water gongs partially immersed. Much of the drama – in Tan’s own paraphrase of Biblical sources – proceeds in a dark, unearthly calm in which the faint rippling of the waterworks becomes a hypnotic counterpart to the words. “A sound is heard in water,” sings the chorus at the Last Supper, “The tears are crying for truth.”
For the world beyond Tan Dun’s Hunan village, the process of discovery has worked in two ways. As Tan himself finds his place in the musical realm of Bach, Beethoven and John Cage, worldwide audiences are discovering a richness in authentic Chinese musical sources that goes far beyond the sing-song choruses of Turandot and Ravel’s cracked teacup. Tan has been particularly skilful in blending authentic presences East and West without blurring their original nationalities. He has done this, furthermore, over a wide variety of musical forms: in serious operas like the 1996 Grawemeyer-winning Marco Polo (with a text by British-born critic Paul Griffiths), the massive, hourlong “symphonies” to celebrate the unification of Hong Kong with China and to proclaim the universal meaning of the Millennium. In 1998, when Chinese authorities forbade the exportation of the traditional romantic epic Peony Pavilion Tan and director Peter Sellars created their own two-hour version, remarkably faithful to the spirit of the original work but an enchanting artwork on its own.
In 1999 Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, with its principal percussionist Christopher Lamb out front, offered up its own Tan Dun commission: the Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra in which, this time, Tan pits a similar set of waterworks as in the Passion against a full symphony orchestra. That work, composed in memory of Tan’s great friend and sometime mentor Toru Takemitsu, gleams brightly in the Philharmonic’s multi-disc issue of notable Masur performances. The year 2000, which saw the premiere of the Passion before a cheering audience in Stuttgart, was also illuminated by the Oscar-blessed filmscore for compatriot Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (with Yo-Yo Ma’s cello a haunting voice in the wilderness of Lee’s magic forest); that score, in turn spawned the much-praised Crouching Tiger Concerto.
Questions of assimilation – of a further “Americanization” of musical style and outlook – are apparently of no concern to Tan Dun. His latest opera, Tea – “a tragic love story set in the 15th century,” he explains – has as its dramatic framework three characters representing water, wind and stone, who recreate the traditional tea ceremony. “These are the elements of the shamanistic spirit in the rituals that I remember from my village,” he explains, “and they maintain their power even today. The stones can talk to the wind. The wind can talk to the water. The water can talk to the human being.”

Reich

Alan Rich — Fri, 23 Aug 2002 22:48:15 +0000

“it is a principle of music
to repeat the theme. Repeat
and repeat again,
as the pace mounts. The
theme is difficult
but no more difficult
than the fact to be
resolved.”
William Carlos Williams, “The Orchestra” in Steve Reich’s “The Desert Music.”

A Harlem teenager testifies on police brutality, and one phrase on tape – “come out to show them” – runs over and over with the two stereo channels oozing out of phase; the words vanish but the sound builds into a terrifying music, endlessly repeating, endlessly building. A radio reporter describes the landing and explosion of the dirigible Hindenburg, and the repetitions of a single shocked word builds on the tape like white-hot daggers. Words, again, turn into music, and they go right through you.
Some 33 years separate Steve Reich’s early experiments with tape phasing and the “Hindenburg” of 1999, visited upon a highly reactive young-in-heart crowd during San Francisco’s “American Mavericks” Festival this past June — the first panel of “Three Tales,” a multimedia triptych with his wife, media artist Beryl Korot now nearing completion. In between there is a repertory richly varied in its resource: chamber music, orchestral music, pieces for solo instruments accompanying themselves on multitrack tape, a work for nothing but two performers clapping hands, eighty minutes of ensemble drumming, a gigantic cantata, another kind of vocal work just about trains. The path from there to here has taken some curious turns now and then – “there” being, let’s say, the audience uprising on the night in 1973 [SEDGE:ck?] when Reich’s “Four Organs” shattered the complacent air in Carnegie Hall; “here” being his recent attainment of Columbia University’s prestigious William Schuman award, not to mention his current anointing as Musical America’s Composer of the Year.
Throughout this splendid repertory – celebrated in 1996 by a ten-disc retrospective box on Nonesuch Records in honor of its composer’s 60th birthday – certain constants persist. One is this matter of what the casual ear hears as repetition of small, insistent fragments — thus giving rise to the overused and misused term “minimalism” – but which is really a matter of infinitesmally slow but inexorable, breath-stopping change within a texture so that sometimes you start out at point A, arrive eventually at point B, and have no idea how or when you got there. The other is the composer’s ongoing obsession with the music that lies within the human voice, not only when singing a pretty Mozart tune but just as often in the mundane act of spoken communication. “Most people do some kind of singing when they speak,” says Reich, “more than they realize.”
“Come Out” serves as proof. The boy speaks his phrase as part of a taped testimony; later Steve Reich, transfixed by that one phrase, gets in onto a stereo tape which he then plays – and plays — with one channel slightly out of phase with the other until, 13 minutes, 658 repetitions later (by rough count), the music has built to a thunderous obsession with a five-note phrase that sounds for all the world like D minor.
“Come Out,” the party record in excelsis back in the legendary days when courageous record producers still stalked music’s outer edge, crystallized for Reich the several strands of his own musical identity, above all a fascination with African drumming ensembles, the overlap of short rhythmic patterns so that downbeats never came in the same place. Drumming had been his lifetime obsession, from his Manhattan boyhood through music studies at Cornell and beyond. At Cornell the legendary prof William Austin helped organize Reich’s priorities. “In his history class we began with really early music, medieval counterpoint and the like, and then moved on to world music and experiments. Only then did he go back and deal with the familiar masters. Compared to what we had begun with, all that 50-great-masterpiece stuff was like an afterthought.”
By the 1970s Reich was a throbbing presence on the new-music scene. There was “Drumming,” 80-or-so minutes of Africanized patterns breath-stoppingly ascendant; “Music for Mallet Instruments,” more of the same an octave or two higher; the dazzling, hourlong “Music for Eighteen Musicians,” a masterpiece by any measurement.
In the 1980s came the voice pieces: “Desert Music,” with William Carlos Williams;s words zooming through the orchestra, looping back on themselves, proclaiming the glory of their own music; “Different Trains,” with the spoken reminiscences of riders on trains woven into the multilayered texture of the Kronos Quartet taped several times on top of itself; the multimedia “The Cave,” with Korot, a tapestry of voices from several cultures old and new delivering a counterpoint of impressions about Abraham’s ancient cave and its contemporary significance. “By 1988,” says Reich, “I really got to concentrate on the way the human voice could work into an ensemble. With ‘Different Trains’ and ‘The Cave’ the music follows along with the text on tape, a sort of faithful scribe. Then, in ‘City Life’ I moved on; what, I wondered, would happen with no tape, with live voices, speaking and singing bits of text right off city streets, and picked up by the keyboards and sampled on the run, you might say. Okay so far?
“By the time we got to ‘Hindenburg,’ ” Reich continues, the rat-a-tat of his New York-intense exposition gathering steam, “we had not a sacred text, not any kind of poetry, but a guy, the radio announcer Herb Morris, scared off his block at what he’s witnessing. So we take that word of his, FLAME!!!! and we stretch it, run it in slow motion. The musicians get up to speed, and the disaster is running on Beryl’s screen, and the words just rain down on them. Back in 1967 I might have wanted to do things like this with a voice, but couldn’t. Now you can do it on a desktop.”
“Three Tales” will run from the “Hindenburg “visited upon a highly reactive young-in-heart crowd during San Francisco’s “American Mavericks” Festival this past June disaster into an essay on Bikini that will seek common ground between the H-bomb testing ground and the apparel that takes its name. The final segment concerns Dolly, the cloned Scottish sheep – with, Reich promises, huge blocks of harmony built up out of the vowel sounds of scientists and other observers.
A question suggests itself: “are you moving in any way toward opera?
“Well,” answers Steve Reich, “I consider this to be an opera. Okay; bel-canto voices on a stage and an orchestra in the pit have zero interest for me. Zero. That went out with the ‘Three-Penny Opera.’ ”

In a small hall on the Columbia campus, eighteen musicians hold an audience spellbound with an hourlong continuous outpouring, and at the end you’d have thought you’d discovered a new kind of light, blinding and deliriously audible.

REVISE

Alan Rich — Thu, 20 Sep 2001 22:52:21 +0000

In the summer of 1979, in a madcap decision that I still don’t regret, I succumbed to the urge to go bicoastal. (The term, I think, had just been invented.) New York Magazine, whose music critic I had been from its founding, had just cloned itself on the West Coast, and I thought it might be interesting to cover – and, perhaps, even compare – the musical life on both coasts; the plan was to commute for a year and then turn the Western territory over to an eager recruit and return to the relative sanity of a power job in the seat of all power.
It’s twenty-two years later. The aforementioned clone is now a distant memory, but I long ago accepted the reality of myself as a dug-in resident of the West Coast. That’s okay as long as I have the carfare for an occasional visit back to the real world past the mountains. Friends on both coasts still ask: what do I miss the most. My only answer strikes me as somewhat superficial. I miss the energy around a New York performance: getting there by bus or subway or on foot, finding some acceptable food within a block or two, hanging around to schmooze over a drink or coffee afterwards. You can’t do that here.
The comparisons are, indeed, deep-seated and fascinating. In California people drive their cars to concerts, park close to the halls in relatively cheap (by New York standards, at least), accessible garages. After concerts or operas, they drive straight home; late-night dining, where people gather and discuss the music they’d just heard, was then, and is now, an arcane practice. The benign climate has an interesting effect on the way people dress for musical events. Even on classier occasions – an operatic opening night, a symphony-orchestra benefit – you can always spot a sport jacket or two amid the black ties, perhaps even a patch of denim.
I find this agreeable. The way the casualness infiltrates some of the music-making also makes its points. The phenomenon of the Hollywood Bowl, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s famous cash cow and local landmark, probably couldn’t be duplicated anywhere else on earth. The fare: eleven weeks of concerts, from July to mid-September, with two programs a week given over to substantial classical repertory, one program of showtunes and lighter classics, given twice to near-capacity crowds often culminating in a sensational fireworks display, a jazz night and other programs ranging from full-length opera to third-world folk – all in a space whose 18,000 seats are filled as often as not — in an outdoor area for dining in styles ranging from Glyndebourne to Yankee Stadium. Again, the benign climate makes it possible; in my 22 years here I remember only one rainout.
And this all takes place, mind you, not in the sylvan reaches of a West-Coast Tanglewood, but in an urban enclave easily reachable by car or public transit, walking distance from, say, Grauman’s “Chinese” Theater with its famous footprints, not far from where major freeways intersect. There are things wrong with Hollywood Bowl, as the more curmudgeonly of local critics sometimes delight in pointing out. A wine bottle will sometime roll down a concrete stairway; an LAPD ‘copter will intrude overhead. You couldn’t mistake the ambiance for an all-Beethoven night at Carnegie Hall, or at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Music Center for that matter, but the fact remains that Beethoven nights (or Tchaikovsky, or Rachmaninoff) at the Hollywood Bowl can draw an audience the size of four Carnegies – even more when the program includes, as it often does, a dramatization of the “Battle Symphony” complete with marching bands and fireworks.
I decided to remain.
SPACE
The Continental Divide is an invisible line that snakes across Rocky Mountain peaks, south through American deserts and into Mexico. On one side of the line, rivers flow east toward the Mississippi and beyond; on the other, they head toward the Pacific. Something similar to this dividing line, if not so exactly positioned, exists in music as well. There is New York, facing (or, perhaps, glaring) eastward toward Europe, its musical history firmly implanted and its outlooks shaped by the European generations from Charles Pachelbel (son on the Canon guy, who organized concerts of chamber music in Lower Manhattan in 1736) to Kurt Masur, (who performed Beethoven only yesterday). There is California, facing west, its major composers as likely inspired by the exotic scales and rituals of Japan and Indonesia as by the academic precepts carried in across the Europeans who braved the Sierra barrier. You can still, of course, invoke a time when California’s musical roster numbered such notable Old Country expatriates as Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Yet two of the West’s most indigenous creative spirits – the Los Angeles-born John Cage and Oregon’s Lou Harrison – studied briefly with Schoenberg and then rejected everything he had taught them.
California’s music began to shake itself free from old-masterdom on the day in 1912 when the 15-year-old Henry Cowell scandalized a San Francisco audience with his music that involved whomping down on a keyboard with full forearm or fists. Not much later, Cowell proclaimed the one uniquely Californian message: forget Europe, forget sonata form and tonal structures and all that classical history. At Cowell’s urging, Harrison and Cage rummaged around in San Francisco junkyards to find new kinds of resonance: brake drums and old trolley-car springs that could be grouped into percussion orchestras. Even as California became home for great Europeans chased from their native lands by Nazi ideologies, California’s musical originals stood firm.
Something of that cussedness, that sense of freedom, abides. It is the spirit behind a remarkable educational project – funded, would you believe, by Walt Disney out of his long-standing secret passion for creative originality. Founded in 1971 on what was then an isolated hilltop in the middle of nowhere – suburbia, alas, has caught up – the California Institute of the Arts (aka CalArts) guides its students through the brand-new mysteries of electronic music, multimedia blendings of sound and video and, above all, the interweave of Third-World, Pacific Rim and you-name-it into a new, composite musical language. To the south, the San Diego branch of the University of California has, at one time or another, encouraged young composers to fashion serious new music out of natural sounds – waves crashing on the Pacific shore, a gurgling stream in the Sierra.
That need to challenge the accepted definitions, to astonish, to move far afield – that spirit that was born with Cowell and Cage and lives on in Lou Harrison – remains the prime spirit in California music. It’s the spirit that moved a gathering of young composers up north, in the early 1960s, to form the San Francisco Tape Music Center, to explore the complex possibilities of the newly-devised electronic apparatus and to see how it might translate into genuine music. One member, the young Terry Riley, dreamed up a piece, which he called In C, where any number of players could follow its small, repetitive patterns any number of times and transport an audience into something close to a trance state. From In C came the music we know as “minimalism.” One of its most successful practitioners, John Adams, was moved to migrate to California from his native New England after reading the writings of John Cage, thus bringing the California spirit around full circle.
And yet…when one of Adams’ most ingratiating works, the burbling, euphoric Grand Pianola Music had its New York premiere in 1983, you couldn’t hear the music for the booing. If there’s any shape to the musical divide, it’s the obsession in New York’s musical circles to take its serious music seriously. Is it a matter of crowding? The tensions in the ongoing battle on either side of the Fourteenth Street dividing line? The surfeit of critics, some of them employed on make-or-break publications, that stills the creative impulse and strikes fear? Morton Subotnick, electronic guru and one of the founders of both the San Francisco Tape Music Center and CalArts, put it this way not long ago. “It’s easier to try to be original in California,” he said, “because nothing out here matters.”
SPACE
Something out here, however, matters a lot. Behind the cutting edge, there is a solid musical structure that seems to expand exponentially – like the creeping urbanization that bids fair to transform the entire coastline into a single mall, but far more rewarding. At the northern end there is Seattle, home of strong lumberjacks and stronger coffee, now also metamorphosing into an American Bayreuth with its hot-ticket stagings of the Ring cycle. At the southern end, an hour south of Los Angeles, there is the extraordinary rebirth of Orange County, long the butt of right-wing japes, now harboring the high-adventure “Eclectic Orange” festival plus a splendidly born-again opera company. In between there is the rejuvenated San Francisco Symphony under the exuberant leadership of Michael Tilson Thomas – an extraordinary and rare instance of the exactly right fellow in the right job in the right place. Across the street there is the San Francisco Opera, probably the most traditional of all West-Coast musical amenities, but now headed for an interesting shakeup under new management. And then there is Los Angeles.
“What could you find to do there, in that cultural desert?” my New York friends asked when I made my foolhardy move 22 years ago. As they asked, the great Carlo Maria Giulini had taken over leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, offering music-making of legendary eloquence at the time when his predecessor, Zubin Mehta was launched into alienating most of New York. Giulini’s stay was short, but it served to awaken Los Angeles to what it meant to have a major orchestra in its midst. Ernest Fleischmann, the Philharmonic’s general director of comparably legendary status, guided his audiences as well toward the new-music adventuring in the energetic “Green Umbrella” series, chamber-orchestra performances of cutting-edge repertory. While the New York Philharmonic’s similar series, “Horizons,” petered out after a couple of years, the “Green Umbrella,” at 20, still sells out most of the time. Now, too, there is a Los Angeles Opera worth taking seriously; I write these words still aglow from the start of the company’s 16th season, its first under the leadership of Plácido Domingo.
All these adornments to the West Coast cultural life have their counterparts back East, to be sure. You can hear Plácido, after all, in practically every opera house in the world; there are major symphonies in every city on the map. Yet there is something out West that matters. New York’s musical calendar is so crowded that it doesn’t really matter that its Philharmonic signs on the aging and not-very-important Loren Maazel; people will wait for some other orchestra to come to town and just go there instead.
In San Francisco and Los Angeles, that condition hasn’t set in. Perhaps it will in another fifty years, but for now Esa-Pekka Salonen matters a great deal to Los Angeles, and Michael Tilson Thomas to San Francisco. In Long Beach, down the coast from Los Angeles, there’s a shoestring opera company that has earned a loyal following for productions that shouldn’t pan out as well as they do, but always do – Elektra in a Malibu beach house, most recently. Up in the hills near Santa Barbara, an easy hour’s drive from Los Angeles, the little Ojai Festival has been doing sell-out business for over half a century, making music in a bandstand in a park. The music is, and always has been, new; Ojai’s gods are Boulez, Stravinsky, Copland, even Cage. It thrives because its music-making is so good, but that’s not always enough to keep an enterprise afloat. It thrives, because people have learned to care – enough to endure rough park benches and noisy crickets and insistent birds – enough, just so there’s music.

BILLY BUDD REVIEW (aka This Budd’s for You)

Alan Rich — Wed, 19 Sep 2001 22:41:53 +0000

“Billy Budd” was the appropriate finale for the Los Angeles Opera’s 14th season, a reminder that of all repertories sampled by departing founder and general director Peter Hemmings during his tenure, the operas of Benjamin Britten have consistently earned highest acclaim. This was the fourth work to be heard; “Peter Grimes,” scheduled for next October, will extend the list. “Billy Budd” runs at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through June 17
History abounds. The Billy is Rodney Gilfry, who has come far since he sang the Herald in the company’s inaugural “Otello” in October, ’86; much of his rise has been nurtured by Hemmings’ benevolent regard for young artists. Roderick Brydon is on the podium, as he has been for nearly all the company’s Britten ventures. (Robert Duerr led the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” the first time around; Brydon, the revival.) The production, from London’s Royal Opera, is directed by Francesca Zambello, also now an international celebrity, whose off-the-wall “Les Troyens” for Hemmings in ’91 was one of the company’s most illustrious fiascos. And Richard Stilwell, the Billy in the Metropolitan Opera’s premiere in ’78, is on hand in Los Angeles, older and wiser, as First Lieutenant Redburn.
All told, L.A.’s “Billy Budd” constitutes a distinguished sendoff, both for Hemmings (who returns to the England he never really abandoned at least in spirit) and for the company’s 1999/2000 season, a bumpy journey for the most part. Alison Chitty’s stage designs nearly steal the show; the several decks of Herman Melville’s “HMS Indomitable” rise and fall, opening vistas of endless starry skies at one point, and crowding down onto the climactic scene of murder and recrimination as if to trap its principals – the saintly Billy, the insanely lovelorn Master-at-Arms Claggart and the benevolent but catatonic Captain Vere — in a psychological prison of their own making.
The stage designs capture as well the multileveled symbolism of Melville’s parable, over which scholars will forever haggle. E.M. Forster’s libretto, while taming some of Melville’s visionary prose, neatly touches up its unspoken homoerotic undercurrents. (The similarity to Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” which Britten also successfully set as his final opera, is made inescapable in Forster’s prose setting.) Similarly, Zambello’s propensity for freeze-framing Rodney Gilfry’s Billy in a succession of tableaux worthy of any Sunday-school calendar, turned celestial in Alan Burrett’s ecstatic lighting, gaudily highlights another of the fable’s disturbing, captivating undercurrents.
Gilfry now owns the role of Billy worldwide: brilliantly in command of the clear, poignant eloquence for the final haunting ballad, as well as the physical ease in climbing foretops and ladders. As his antagonist and ultimate victim, Jeffrey Wells creates a hulking, horrific Claggart; Robert Tear’s Captain is exactly right in its tone of incertitude blended into nobility. The great “Billy Budd” performances – the John Dexter staging at the Met, for one – triumph ultimately in their creation of a taut, rough-edged, howling ensemble out of a huge all-male cast whose dark tone colors are furthered by the pounding drums and brass of the orchestra. Peter Hemmings’ song of farewell belongs in this company.

LOHENGRIN REVIEW

Alan Rich — Sun, 16 Sep 2001 22:36:25 +0000

If anyone ever advised Plácido Domingo that running an opera company might be an easy and well-oiled undertaking, last week’s events around his West Coast branch – also known as Los Angeles Opera – were surely enough to set him straight. His new season, his first actually as the company’s head and decision-maker, began smoothly enough, with the triumphant Pique Dame as previously noted. Then the skies opened.
On September 9 the London Sunday Times ran a doom’n’gloom article about the company’s future, citing unrest among the notoriously parsimonious board of directors over Domingo’s exuberant spending – specifically the George Lucas–designed Ring slated for 2003 and rumored with a $45 million budget encumbrance. “Not true,” responded a company spokesman, but the clouds thickened the following Wednesday with the sudden resignation of executive director Ian White-Thomson after little more than a year on the job.
That act was curiously timed; it came a day after New York City’s terrorist attack, whose impact included a wholesale shuffling of performing schedules worldwide. The company’s first Lohengrin was scheduled for that Wednesday but cancelled; Kent Nagano, the company’s incoming principal conductor, was marooned in Berlin. By Saturday, when the Lohengrin actually took place, Nagano had made his way back to Los Angeles in a zigzag trajectory by plane and car, and the opera company’s board chairman had picked up the dropped reins pending a search for a replacement.
Eventually, however, the skies cleared; the new Lohengrin – only the third Wagnerian foray in the company’s 16 years –also became its first real triumph in that repertory. The best news of all was that the glory belonged in large measure to Nagano’s firm hand in his newly created post. Wagner’s music had previously been accorded short shrift in the local repertory, and the lack of a firm conducting hand had frequently foredoomed some of the best-intended productions in the past. Both problems have been resonantly renounced in the company’s first mountings in the new Placido Domingo regime.

Everything worked. Immensely aided by Alan Burrett’s stark, intense lighting, In his company debut, actor/stage director Maximilian Schell deployed his onstage forces in a a mounting dramatic line of terror, menace and ultimate redemption. Painter Yevgeny Lysyk’s projected designs, seen previously at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, created a haunting if eclectic atmosphere, medieval with arresting contemporary overtones, as if half a dozen Cologne Cathedral facades had somehow become woven into a neon factory. Lohengrin’s famous Swan, a stumbling block to many stage designers in the past, this time took the form of a gigantic birdlike construction midstage, bathed in fantastical, dazzling light.
Swedish tenor Gosta Winbergh was the Lohengrin, clarion-voiced and acceptably heroic in stature; Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka was an Elsa of heartbreaking purity and melancholy; as Telramund, baritone Tom Fox added one more item to his impressive scrapbook of villains. Only the veteran Eva Marton, an aging soprano cast in a role where the dark menace of a true mezzo-soprano is ordained, seemed outclassed by her writhing, slithering music.
It didn’t take much beyond the first shimmering chords of Wagner’s much-beloved opera to sense the company launched into a new era in orchestral discipline and tone control. Throughout the famously broad and eloquent – if occasionally posterior-threatening – expanse of Wagnerian rhetoric the strength of Nagano’s command was clearly apparent. At the final curtain calls, even among the generally splendid singers and the beaming Max Schell, Nagano earned — and deserved – the most tumultuous cheers.

Pick Dam

Alan Rich — Wed, 05 Sep 2001 22:47:08 +0000

The Placido Domingo era at the Los Angeles Opera got off to a sensational start this week, and how! In press conference after press conference, the incoming artistic director/tenorissimo had promised that attention would be paid in areas where scant attention formerly existed. The opening-night “Pique Dame” marked the start of the fulfillment of those promises – in, as they say, spades.
It was, for one thing, the company’s first-ever dip into Russian opera. This has been accomplished now in high style, under the probing, propulsive baton of migratory Russian superconductor Valery Gergiev and with a mostly-Russian cast. The innovative German director/designer Gottfried Pilz has come on in both capacities, to design and execute a terrific piece of contemporary musical theater. All that bodes well for the future of opera in Los Angeles; neither strong conducting nor daring stagecraft had hitherto been the norm under Peter Hemmings’ cautious leadership.
And “daring” is, indeed, the word for the treatment accorded the work before a cheering full house on Tuesday. Gottfried Pilz dispenses with the libretto’s scenic suggestions (which are, by the way, nicely fulfilled in the video of the opera from the St. Petersburg Kirov, also under Gergiev). He has, instead, created a single performing space, a huge room raked from right to left, dominated overhead by a huge crystal chandelier. A dark area down front at stage level serves as a kind of limbo where the hero, a mere wraith in the darkness, contemplates his personal demons and eavesdrops on everyone else. The one main space serves as park, ballroom, the Countess’ bedroom and – with shadows eerily projected onto the rear wall — gaming house. Everything moves, usually at feverish pace; more than once a chorus bursts into the scene like a flood from a broken dam; the crowds literally dance to Gustavo Llano’s whirlwind choreography.
And so, in fact, does the opera itself, under Gergiev’s propulsive leadership, with the frazzled bedazzlement of Domingo’s 60-year-old pipes in near-pristine condition. Russian soprano Galina Gorchakova, her smallish voice nicely colored toward the dark side, was the touching Lisa; soprano Suzanna Poretzky, a recent winner in the Domingo-sponsored Operalia competition, offered a delightful take on her one big aria. The evening’s loudest, longest cheers, however, went to the veteran (64) Elena Obraztsova, who is allotted little actually to sing about in the opera but whose silent enactment of her death scene – starkly punctuated in Pilz’s production by the fall of her cane onto the resonant floor – was one of the evening’s breath-stopping moments.
A brilliant beginning, therefore, and a promising one.The season continues with next week’s “Lohengrin” – again, healing the company’s previous short shrift accorded to Wagner – and moves onward through an admirable variety of offerings. The musical range is spectacular, from the seductive strains of Lehar’s evergreen “Merry Widow” to the twelve-tone asperities of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron” to the curious phenomenon of a staged version of Bach’s churchly B-Minor Mass. So far, so good.

L.A. STRAVINSKY FESTIVAL

Alan Rich — Sun, 04 Mar 2001 22:50:42 +0000

Operating on the brave but often-challenged principle that an audience still exists for, and cares about, the music of the recent past, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s current “Focus on Igor Stravinsky” festival focusses broadly. Over four weeks ending March 12, there have been orchestral concerts, chamber-music events, discussions, symposiums and art shows; following the final event the performing ensemble moves on to New York’s Lincoln Center, for a cut-down reprise over the weekend March 16-19.
There is no anniversary date involved; in Los Angeles, none is needed. Stravinsky was a vivid presence there for over 30 years, longer than at any of his other adopted hometowns. People who were involved in his music are readily available to reminisce, even to reenact. (A tribute to Stravinsky’s sad run-ins with the Hollywood movie machine is, understandably, missing from the current tribute.) At one Philharmonic pre-concert gathering John Clifford, who had danced in George Balanchine’s choreography of “Agon,” and Carole Valleskey, the Chosen Maiden in the Joffrey Ballet’s restoration of the original “Rite of Spring,” recreated some of their movements on a small stage; the crowd could then hear Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performances of those works with refreshed eye and ear.
Salonen is a marvelous conductor of Stravinsky’s quirks and brainy adventures; something jells, and there are records to prove it. The “Agon” performance was a revelling in icy pinpoints, with the cheeky imitations of antique dancing subtly colored and the music’s momentum nicely proportioned. Salonen’s familiar take on the “Rite” on the same program is, simply put, one of the great performances of anything, by anybody, in our time – not merely for the “what-hit-me?” impact of its final “Danse sacrale” but for its projection of mounting terror that makes that opening bassoon solo as much a dire prophesy as an instrumental trick.
Alongside the expected “Firebird” and “Rite,” the Los Angeles planners have ventured somewhat afield, if not always successfully. Between “Agon” and the “Rite” came “Mavra,” a delicious trifle of a comic Russian folk-opera, sung with high gusto by visitors from the Kirov Opera. On opening night the “Symphony of Psalms” was magnificently set forth, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale superbly prepared by its conductor-designate Grant Gershon – a rebirth for that venerable institution. But this was followed by the seldom-heard “Perséphone,” a work from that Stravinskian plateau of the mid-1930s dotted with works diatonic and, if truth be told, rather bland. A narration (in English by a husky-voiced Holland Taylor) and the labored French of John Aler’s tenor solos did little for this revival of André Gide’s mystical text (a kind of “rite of spring” on Olympus’ slopes).
The final orchestral program, to be repeated in New York, lists pianist Olli Mustonen in Stravinsky’s three short piano-plus-orchestra works, including the wondrous Concerto for Piano and Winds, eminently deserving of the revival zeal that has sparked this whole event. The final chamber program, also slated for New York, includes such bracing early fare as the neo-classic Octet and the “Dunbarton Oaks” concerto. And whatever the ups and downs of Stravinsky’s reputation over his long lifetime and into recent years, the Philharmonic’s festival has been drawing capacity crowds. Somebody must be doing something right.

“GIULIO CESARE” AT THE L.A. OPERA

Alan Rich — Sat, 24 Feb 2001 22:32:23 +0000

Handel has earned his place – a century late, perhaps, but decisively. The most convincing of the old arguments, that a world enlightened by more benign attitudes toward surgery had therefore cut itself off from the requisite singers for this repertory, has been laid to rest. Promotion for the Los Angeles Opera’s “Giulio Cesare” made merry with the fact that the cast would boast that magic parlay of three, count ‘em, countertenors; the entertainment last Friday on the Music Center stage (which runs through March 10) had nothing to do with Pavarotti-etc., and everything to do with extraordinary performing skills, in the proper vocal registers, applied to sublime musical drama. The four hours of “Cesare,” as near to uncut as never mind, whiz happily by.
Yes, there are three countertenors and yes, they are wonderful. (They never sing together, by the way.) David Daniels is the Caesar, burly, buzz-cut and sporting a Don Johnson almost-beard. His voice doesn’t quite attain the far reaches of a 3085-seat operatic venue, but what there is is extraordinary in beauty and agility. Bejun Mehta — who in the bloom of a phenomenal career need not ride on his second-cousinhood to Zubin – is the evil Ptolemy, his hard-as-ice stainless-steel tones match the sword he wields. David Walker is the slimy go-between Nirenus, a delightful squeak in a smaller role. Suzanna Guzmán is the Cornelia, Paula Rasmussen the Sesto, both estimable mezzo-sopranos whose current nationwide careers were launched as members of the L.A. Opera’s training program.
Above any of these, however, is the Cleopatra of Elizabeth Futral – the Stella in André Previn’s “Streetcar” in 1999, an even more touching Violetta in last season’s “Traviata” in Orange County – and now beyond doubt a newly arrived star of blazing distinction. Her voice is radiantly pure over a phenomenal range, her command of coloratura immaculate. On opening night she delivered the kind of career-building Cleopatra that Beverly Sills delivered at the New York City Opera in 1966, with the difference that nowadays people sing this music with greater awareness of the rubrics of Handelian vocal style. Oh yes, there was one other difference as well; during her second-act seduction aria “Venere bella” she stripped down to the altogether (behind a decorously draped bath towel, of course) and stepped down into her bath, kicking up a few suds and singing all the while.
Handel’s 1724 audience might not have countenanced such shenanigans; what is remarkable about the current Handelian revival, aside from the satisfactory supply of singers, is the growing realization that “authenticity” in performance values need not clash with adventure in production. The “Cesare” production comes in from Sydney’s Opera Australia; Anthony Baker is the designer, Francesco Negroni the director, and the anachronisms are copious and delightful. The set is a series of slabs that slide around and create performing spaces large and small; Caesar and Cleopatra act out some of their hot business on a runway downstage from the orchestra pit. Caesar’s booted legions could pass for headwaiters at a shashlik joint; Cleopatra’s gowns would have gotten her into the Grammies.
Purists of bygone generations, when Handel operas were regarded either as fodder for connoisseurs of the dry-as-dust or fair game for the rewrite crew, might have climbed walls at the notion that four hours of Handelian opera seria might pass for delightful, but the evidence is here. For a company whose season so far has included a snore-packed “Aida” and a “Bohème” almost unimaginably dreary, this “Giulio Cesare” is just that, a major step toward enlightened opera.

An Energetic, Electric, Eclectic Orange

Alan Rich — Tue, 14 Nov 2000 22:43:34 +0000

COSTA MESA, Calif. — When last we visited California’s Orange County, that high-property-value enclave just to the south (and far to the right) of Los Angeles, the Orange County Philharmonic Society’s first “Eclectic Orange” Festival had run its course. Local audiences may have seemed surprised at their having survived (and even derived a certain prickly pleasure) from a month’s exposure to music very old and very new, experimental, and challenging, but the best news is that they came back for more.

The second run began with high decibels on Oct. 13 (Philip Glass’s new Fifth Symphony in its West Coast premiere [see previous review]) and ends on a similar volume level with worthier fare (Mahler’s Second), on Dec.1. In between there has been something for everyone, at least for everyone endowed with proper tolerance for horizon-stretching and high musical adventure.

By accident or design, “Eclectic Orange 2000″ bore striking resemblances to its predecessor. Once again, there was one long and useless evening-filling symphony (the reconstructed Elgar Third last year, the Glass Fifth this year). The marvelous early-music ensemble Anonymous 4 joined forces with instruments in a new venture into spiritual affectation (last year’s “Voices of Light,” this year a new commissioned work by England’s Sir John Tavener). Downtown New York composer Mikel Rouse, whose astounding media opera “Dennis Cleveland” drew cheers last year, drew more of same this time with another new work, “Failing Kansas.”

Like “Cleveland,” “Failing Kansas” is an opera mostly because its composer says so. Its story line is the famous murder of a Kansas family in the 1950s, the capture and execution of its perpetrators, as retold in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” One live performer, Rouse himself, speaks and sings material relevant to the story; other voices on tape create a panoramic collage of ordinary lives invaded by horror. On screen, Cliff Baldwin’s films invest the drama with a visual counterpart. Why it works is not easily explained, why the power, the tragedy — even the beauty — combine for a compelling 75-minute drama. But it does.

The term “more of same” also applies, alas, to the new Tavener piece for Anonymous 4 and the Chilingirian String Quartet, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic Society: 20-or-so minutes of Tavener’s familiar juicily harmonized syllabic chug-chug as a setting of the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins — which Bach turned to better use in his “Wachet auf!” cantata.

Far more stimulating, if poorly attended, was one other of the festival’s excursions into current creativity, a splendid duo-piano evening by Ursula Oppens and Aki Takahashi, demonstrating Richard Teitlebaum’s creation of super-pianos through electronic processing. Boston’s splendid young Borromeo String Quartet introduced Steve Mackey’s “Ars Moriendi” in its world premiere: nine movements, 23 minutes of soft (if, at times, rather spongy) death-meditation.

Not everything at Eclectic Orange turned out all that eclectic, or that fresh-out-of-the-box. Pianist Andras Schiff’s wonderful take on the “Goldberg Variations” served to establish Bach, as if anyone still doubted, as a composer for all centuries. And, as the ultimate demonstration of music’s power to move the immovable and draw the tears of the hardest of heart, there came the Southern California recital debut of the miraculously gifted young tenor Ian Bostridge, in a Schubert-Wolf song program given, as proper, in the kind of improvised small space where this music belongs.

Eclectic Orange

Alan Rich — Mon, 13 Nov 2000 22:31:27 +0000

When last we visited California’s Orange County, that high-property-value enclave just to the south – and far to the right – of Los Angeles, the OC Philharmonic Society’s first “Eclectic Orange” Festival had run its course. Local audiences may have seemed surprised at their having survived (and even derived a certain prickly pleasure) from a month’s exposure to music very old and very new, experimental and challenging, but the best news is that they came back for more. The second run began with high decibels on October 13 (Philip Glass’ new Fifth Symphony in its West Coast premiere) and ends on a similar volume level with worthier fare (Mahler’s Second), on December 1; in between there was something for everyone, at least for everyone endowed with proper tolerance for horizon-stretching and high musical adventure.
By accident or design, “Eclectic Orange 2000” bore striking resemblances to its predecessor. Once again, there was one long and useless evening-filling symphony (the reconstructed Elgar Third last year, the Glass Fifth this year). The marvelous early-music ensemble Anonymous 4 joined forces with instruments in a new venture into spiritual affectation (last year’s “Voices of Light,” this year a new commissioned work by England’s Sir John Tavener). Downtown New York composer Mikel Rouse, whose astounding media opera “Dennis Cleveland” drew cheers last year, drew more of same with another work, “Failing Kansas.”
Like “Cleveland,” “Failing Kansas” is an opera mostly because its composer says so. Its story line is the famous murder of a Kansas family in the 1950s, the capture and execution of its perpetrators, as retold in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” One live performer, Rouse himself, speaks and sings material relevant to the story; other voices on tape create a panoramic collage of ordinary lives invaded by horror; on screen, Cliff Baldwin’s films invest the drama with a visual counterpart. Why it works is not easily explained, why the power, the tragedy – and even the beauty – combine for a compelling 75-minute drama. But it does.
“More of same” also applies, alas, to the new Tavener piece for Anonymous 4 and the Chilingirian String Quartet, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic Society: 20-or-so minutes of Tavener’s familiar juicily harmonized syllabic chug-chug as a setting of the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins – which Bach turned to better use in his “Wachet auf!” cantata. Far more stimulating, if poorly attended, was one other of the festival’s excursions into current creativity, a splendid duo-piano evening by Ursula Oppens and Aki Takahashi, demonstrating Richard Teitlebaum’s creation of super-pianos through electronic processing. Boston’s splendid young Borromeo String Quartet introduced Steve Mackey’s “Ars Moriendi” in its world premiere, nine movements, 23 minutes of soft (if, at times, rather spongy) death-meditation.
Not everything at Eclectic Orange turned out all that eclectic, or that fresh-out-of-the-box. Pianist Andras Schiff’s wonderful take on the “Goldberg Variations” served to establish Bach, as if anyone still doubted, as a composer for all centuries. And, as the ultimate demonstration of music’s power to move the immovable and draw the tears of the hardest of heart, there came the Southern California recital debut of the miraculously gifted young tenor Ian Bostridge, in a Schubert-Wolf song program given, as proper, in the kind of improvised small space where this music belongs.

Benjamin Britten

Alan Rich — Sun, 22 Oct 2000 22:29:13 +0000

By accident or by design, two of Los Angeles’ major musical organizations have taken on Benjamin Britten simultaneously this month. If you were at the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County – the mouthful of a new name for the former perfectly well-named Music Center – last Saturday (October 21), you could have bathed in Britten practically nonstop: the L.A. Opera’s “Peter Grimes” in the afternoon, the Philharmonic’s “War Requiem” at night.
The experience, I can personally vouch, would have left you exalted and exhausted. Nothing in the Britten canon cuts closer to the bone than these two extraordinary scores, sixteen years apart and yet alike in their quotient of violent outcry and pure rage. It has taken the quarter-century since Britten’s early death (at 63, in 1976) to assess the balance between the man and his music. Pacifist, unruly and sometimes unquestioning advocate of leftwing causes, homosexual – and citizen of a troubled nation at a time when any or all these attitudes constituted actionable offenses – Britten let his music speak for his soul, its joys and its torments. “Peter Grimes,” in its anatomical dissection of its hero driven to suicide by the misunderstanding of his fellow villagers; the “War Requiem,” in its setting the sardonic, nihilistic verses of the martyred Wilfred Owen in among the acceptances preached by the classic Latin service – both these on a single day under Los Angeles’ serene skies made for an experience not easily forgotten.
Britten has fared well at the L.A. Opera, from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the company’s second season to this year’s triumphant “Billy Budd.” For “Grimes” the company brought in Hollywood’s (but Brit-born) master director John Schlesinger, augmenting a relationship with the other neighborhood industry too feebly pursued in previous years. On designer Luciana Arrighi’s workaday sets – she had worked with him on “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” – Schlesinger devised a powerful, raw unfolding of Britten’s tale, one in which the huge chorus was particularly successful in standing in as a village of flesh-and-blood residents. All breathing stopped out front in that devastating moment in Act 3, as that chorus, transformed into a lynch mob, rushed downstage and screams out its “PE-TER GRIMES!!!!” at the footlights; you’d have thought the waves from an actual North Sea tempest were battering out into the hall.
Scottish Opera’s Richard Armstrong conducted, solidly if unspectacularly. Philip Langridge was the Grimes, the role he inherited from Peter Pears and Jon Vickers and now owns; Nancy Gustafson, looking somewhat young for a widowed schoolmarm, was the sweet-voiced Ellen; Richard Stillwell was the sympathetic Balstrode, proving that an American can hold his own among Brits.
Antonio Pappano, soon to take on the Royal Opera’s music directorship, conducted a splendid reading of the Requiem, with L.A.’s Master Chorale and its splendid Paulist Boychoir (the latter located, alas, far backstage and not fully audible).Britain’s other great tenor of the moment, the young former Oxford Don and authority on baroque witchcraft Ian Bostridge, made his Southern California debut in the “War Requiem,” and that, too, was an extraordinary experience. His was the brunt and his the thread of gold, in his recreation of Owen’s harrowing condemnations, the sardonic twists to the retelling of the Abraham-and-Isaac fable, the hollow horror as the dead British soldier encounters “the enemy you killed, my friend.” German baritone Thomas Mohr was an eloquent partner; as the two joined voices at the end, and the boys’ voices sounded a distant “requiem aeternam,” you got the sense of how overpowering a musical experience can be under proper circumstances. These were.

Domingo/Wagner

Alan Rich — Mon, 11 Sep 2000 22:30:20 +0000

Los Angeles, September 11. To the small but ardent hordes of compleat Wagnerites hereabouts, denied sustenance over the years – a mere two productions in 14 seasons – by the Los Angeles Opera’s favoring glances toward other repertories, this past few days’ activities have come as a mingling of manna from heaven and redemption here on earth. First there was Sunday night’s all-Wagner concert under the company’s banner, with supertenor, superconductor, super-orchestra and super music: complete acts from “Die Walküre” and “Parsifal” with Plácido Domingo as the Siegmund and the Parsifal, excellent supporting casts and master conductor Valery Gergiev drawing torrential and glorious noises from his Kirov Orchestra visiting from its St. Petersburg home base. At next morning’s press conference, it turned out that the concert was only a teaser for what’s to come: the company’s first “Lohengrin” slated for September, 2001 and, more wondrous yet, a brand new “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle, with designs from George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, birthplace of “Star Wars” and, thus, the logical inheritor of Wagner’s grandiose visions of 135 years ago.
For Domingo, the company’s newly anointed director, the concert capped a week of empire building: his sensationally successful “Operalia” vocal competition, his excellent leadership of the opening-night “Aïda” and now, all the Wagner. Actually, Domingo has been systematically moving into Wagner territory for several years, while maintaining his ability to knock ‘em dead in the Italian repertory. This past summer his Siegmund at Bayreuth was greatly admired, and in Los Angeles these days – the concert repeats on the 13th and 15th – he demonstrates why. Never mind that his German diction is vividly colored by Mediterranean vowel-values; he proved this time that he still has the role’s tragedy-tinged ardor well in hand, and in voice as well.
The circumstances were irresistible: the pure, dark-hued velvet of the magnificent Kirov players, the surging insistence of Gergiev leadership. The silvery-voiced Danish soprano Eva Johansson was the passionate Sieglinde in the “Walküre” love music; American soprano Linda Watson was a fearsome Kundry in the “Parsifal” garden scene – where the ring of Domingo’s tenor, however, was occasionally buried by the Kirov’s volcanic brasses. The smaller bass roles were well managed by Fyodor Kuznetsov, the Hunding in “Die Walküre” and Alan Held, the Klingsor in the “Parsifal.”
Adding to his strongholds in St. Petersburg and at the Met, Gergiev has been setting down new roots in Los Angeles as well. He will conduct next season’s opening-night “Pique Dame,” and the 2003/04 season’s “Love for Three Oranges,” both co-productions by the L.A. and Kirov Operas. The “Lohengrin” will be staged by actor/director Maximilian Schell, led by the company’s newly anointed principal conductor, Kent Nagano. Other productions for next season, announced at Monday’s press conference, include a “Merry Widow” presented both in English and Spanish (with Domingo as the Spanish-language Danilo), a Nagano-conducted concert performance of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” a staging by German director/designer Achim Freyer of Bach’s B-minor Mass, the company’s first “Turandot,” also conducted by Nagano, and a double-bill of Bartók’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” and Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi,” also conducted by Nagano and staged by Hollywood filmmaker William Friedkin. Revivals of the company’s “La Traviata” and “The Magic Flute” round out the season, the first to show the planning hand of Domingo himself, an impressive start.

LA OPERA “AIDA”

Alan Rich — Thu, 07 Sep 2000 22:26:38 +0000

Any opera company worth its music stands, or so you’d think, would honor “Aida” as a the crown jewel in its repertory; no other opera, after all, so fully epitomizes everything embraced under the term “operatic.” Still, it has taken the Los Angeles Opera all the years from its shaky start in 1986 until this week to take the measure of Verdi’s glorious pageant of love and betrayal beside the Nile. Has it been worth the wait? Yes, somewhat.
In his time, Plácido Domingo has owned his share of the opera; no tenor was ever more clearly born with the music of Radames in his soul and his tonsils. For his inaugural outing since coming on as the L.A. Opera’s artistic administrator, Domingo appeared under another of his hats, conducting a beautifully paced, neatly balanced reading, by some distance the most eloquent piece of musical leadership he has yet displayed here. Would, alas, that the cast assembled under his baton were worthy of its place. On opening night, at least, there were problems.
American soprano Deborah Voigt was the Aida, South African tenor Johan Botha, the Radames, both in their company debuts, both well matched at least physically and both, alas, equally worthy of one another’s audible deficiencies. For all her eloquence as a Wagnerian – including her recent duet disc with Domingo on BMG – Voigt seemed little more than a singer with a pretty voice outclassed by the grand melodic line, the throb of heartache and torn loyalties that turn Verdi’s heroine passionate and memorable. Nothing in Botha’s performance came across as anything but a hard-edged, uninvolved delivery, impressively loud with a few gulped tones here and there.
What vocal gold there was on opening night was mined by the Amneris of Russian mezzo Nina Terentieva and the Amonasro of Simon Estes: she with a fiery onslaught that took a scene or two to settle onto accurate pitch, he with a thread of eloquence still wound around a voice that has been around for a while. Smaller roles were adequately managed by Louis Lebherz, Jaako Ryhänen, Cynthia Jansen and, as the Messenger, Bruce Sledge who, a day before, had been a finalist in Domingo’s Operalia competition.
Better than any of its cast was the production itself, the first local viewing of the work of Italian stage designer Pier-Luigi Pizzi, beautifully showing off Pizzi’s flair for etched, monumental lines and forms, handsomely highlighted in sharply contrasting colors, with a couple of proscenium-high elephants for extra laffs. First built in 1987 to inaugurate Houston’s Wortham Opera Center, the production has had some use over the years, and a seam or two attests to that; as starkly defined in Alan Burrett’s lighting designs, however, this was a handsome, up-to-date “Aida” setting, free of overstuffed traditional encrustations.
Those latter qualities were, alas, abundantly evident in Stephen Pickover’s blocky staging, and in the traditional hootchy-kootch of Daniel Pelzig’s choreography of the opera’s oversupply of dance episodes – except, that is, for one terrific acrobatic number in the Act-Two celebrations. Given an Aida of, shall we say, less-than-sylphide proportions, and a Radames of matching ponderosity, Pickover may have had no choice but to limit his stage movements to the old-timey stand-and-deliver manner; still, the discrepancy was hard to ignore, between Pizzi’s handsome sets and the stage biz that filled them.
Never mind; the big news for “Aida”-starved Los Angeles operagoers – tantalized over the years by a ludicrous number of announced and then cancelled productions by several equally ludicrous producer-wannabes – was that the opera of choice has arrived, that it sounds pretty good, and looks like a million dollars. That, at L.A. Opera’s current $148 ticket top, almost sounds like a bargain.

OPERALIA 2000

Alan Rich — Wed, 06 Sep 2000 22:46:10 +0000

Along about nine o’clock on Tuesday night, a slender young soprano with the tongue-twisting name of Isabel Bayrakdarian – Lebanese-born, now Canadian — came onto the stage at UCLA’s Royce Hall, wrapped her honey-textured voice around the equally tongue-twisting divisions in Rossini’s killer aria “Bel raggio lusinghier” (from “Semiramide”) and gave off the star quality that would be confirmed a couple of hours later – that she had earned and deserved top spot in the latest running of Placido Domingo’s “Operalia.” Domingo concocted his young-singers’ competition in 1993; previous turns had been in Paris, Mexico City, Tokyo, Hamburg, Madrid, Bordeaux and San Juan, The scuttlebutt this week has it that the event will now stay put in Los Angeles; this, after all, would jibe with the establishment of the latest outpost of Domingo’s empire (“Placidalia”?), this week’s opening of his inaugural season as the L.A. Opera’s artistic director following the departure of founder/honcho Peter Hemmings.
Forty-one hopeful singers, ranging in age from 19 to 30, came to Los Angeles to endure the peeling-off process through several days of quarters and semis, dealing out some of opera’s well-roasted chestnuts (with disturbingly few novelties) with piano accompaniment. One of the accompanists was Larissa Gergieva, the sister of Russian superstar conductor Valery Gergiev; she also sent along three of her vocal students to join with ten other Russians (plus two Ukrainians and one Armenian) in a somewhat overweighted list. Seven Russians survived to the finals; only one, however, made it to the winners’ circle: tenor Daniil {cq} Shtoda, who tied for second with Chinese soprano He Hui.
In their seven years, the Operalias have done their bit toward rekindling an operatic golden age. Soprano Elizabeth Futral, the Stella in Andre Previn’s “Streetcar Named Desire” got a boost from a previous running; so did tenor José Cura, the Alfredo in the recent PBS “La Traviata,” and so did the remarkable Los Angeles-born countertenor Brian Asawa, whose career extends worldwide. They have also pulled in some prestigious support; philanthropist and opera-fanatic Albert Vilar, who has been with the project from the start, Los Angeles meat-tenderizer tycoon Lloyd Rigler, and such corporate names as Rolex Watches U.S.A. and Grand Marnier. Just the prize-money budget for this year’s outing came to nearly $200,000.
That included a $50,000 first-prize check to Isabel Bayrakdarian, $25,000 checks to both second-prize winners, and $15,000 each to third-prize winners, The Ukraine’s tenor Konstyantin Andreyev and Canadian bass Robert Pomakov. Lloyd Rigler donated a separate $10,000 prize to a stage-burning Argentinian soprano Virginia Tola, who had earned the loudest cheers at each of her stints during the week, and who also took a “people’s prize” in that amount, determined by paper ballots from the Royce Hall audience and e-mail from listeners to the broadcast event. No finalist went home empty-handed, in fact, thanks to a $5,000 across-the-board handout.
The ten-member judges’ panel included the singer Marilyn Horne, herself greatly dedicated to training young singers at her Santa Barbara-based Music Academy of the West. Other panelists included heads of opera companies in Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Mexico and the U.S. Among them was Eva Wagner Pasquier, currently artistic consultant to France’s reborn Aix-en-Provence Festival and one of the several Wagnerians now in the fray to head their ancestor’s Bayreuth Festival — and, thus, no stranger to the world of operatic competition.
And at the end, pushing toward midnight, singers, judges, donors, Marta and Placido Domingo and L.A. mayor Richard Riordan joined forces with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra – which had provided the requisite oom-pa-pahs under Domingo’s baton for the long evening of opera’s greatest hits –in the granddaddy of operatic anthems, the “Va, pensiero” chorus from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” confirming once again that, when all is said and sung, there’s nothing like a grand tune to make opera worth the sweat, the tears, and the cash.

Hollywood Bowl Opener

Alan Rich — Fri, 14 Jul 2000 22:33:17 +0000

There are two ways of regarding the Hollywood Bowl, that vast unroofed monument to the senses that looms large above the unreality of its hometown and beguiles visitors over a 14-week stretch each summer – and which finally got down to business in its 79th season earlier this week with the last of two weeks’ worth of “opening nights.” One way is to deplore the fact that a mere 7,500 of the 17,900 seats get filled on a classical-music night — the weekend pops-plus-fireworks events draw better – leaving enough empty space in the stands to stage road races. The other is to marvel that, in a city which still chafes under its long-outmoded title of “cultural desert,” serious music-making at the Bowl can still attract the capacity of three or more indoor concert halls.
This final “opening night” – following upon the “opening gala,” the “opening family night” and “opening jazz” – marked the return of the Los Angeles Philharmonic to its summertime home-not-too-far-away-from-home. Until then, the venue’s other band, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra – a tidy assemblage with a not-quite-permanent membership drawn from the area’s lavish pool of studio freelancers – had held sway, in events ranging from a backup for country singers Garth Brooks and Glen Campbell to a complete if unstaged “Madama Butterfly” – splendidly led by HBO’s permanent conductor, John Mauceri.
Tuesday’s opening Philharmonic concert – let’s see how to put it mildly – fell somewhat short of the standards often if not always attained in previous seasons. Local boy Leonard Slatkin – whose parents were the founders of the legendary Hollywood String Quartet – conducted a ragtag program: short orchestral works and vocal selections ranging from Mozart to Sondheim. Frederica von Stade and Samuel Ramey were the soloists, eminent artists in their day but, on this occasion, providing the sad spectacle of former eminences struggling against the ravages of time.
The evening had begun promisingly: von Stade curling her honeyed tones around a couple of Offenbach arias (from “The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein”) that have been her personal domain since her cherishable LP. The spell didn’t last, however. Ramey’s delivery of the “Catalogue Aria” from “Don Giovanni” was a routine affair, and the singers’ collaboration on “La, ci darem la mano” seemed like nothing more than a couple of middle-aged performers struggling, with little interest, against an orchestra headed in its own direction.
Matters hardly improved. Slatkin, who has rung up a good reputation for service to American music, seemingly acquiesced as von Stade and Ramey turned a brace of Copland’s “Old American Songs” into a display of the cutes. Actually, Slatkin’s most successful contribution to an otherwise below-par evening was the five-minute orchestral piece called “Walking the Dog,” fashioned from George Gershwin’s film score for the Astaire-Rogers “Shall We Dance.” Nothing else, alas, danced.

OREGON BACH FESTIVAL

Alan Rich — Wed, 05 Jul 2000 22:42:42 +0000

In the fertile soil of Oregon, the natives obsessively proclaim, everything grows better than anywhere else: tomatoes, strawberries, tall corn and music. Nothing better confirms the thesis than the Oregon Bach Festival, whose 31st season concludes this weekend [July 9] after three weeks, 55 events, joyously devoted to the music of Bach and far beyond. From its modest beginnings – in 1970, when University of Oregon educator and enthusiast Royce Saltzman persuaded the then-little-known German conductor Helmuth Rilling to join him in building a festival from scratch in the idyllic college town of Eugene – the Festival has flourished mightily.
Rilling, 67, has been from the beginning the Festival’s benevolent spirit; Oregon has been as good to him as he to it. The growing fame of the Bach Festival has sparked Eugene’s year-round musical awareness, including the building of the 2430-seat Hult Center to house the city’s fast-growing symphony and opera company. Stuttgart remains Rilling’s “other” home, where he now heads the International Bachakademie and is currently masterminding (and, for the most part, conducting) a 170-disc Haenssler release of Bach compleat. For previous Bach Festivals at Eugene Rilling has also commissioned and performed major new scores by Krzysztof Penderecki and Arvo Part.
Bach maintains his summertime centrality at Eugene, especially so in this 250th-anniversary year when the agenda included both of the great Passions plus the B-minor Mass. But the festival bore the subtitle “Music Beyond Boundaries,” and that regard, too, became a driving force. Visiting choruses brought in music from the pre-Bach centuries; a new-music group down from Portland played works with their ink still wet. And while the “Saint Matthew Passion” received the full treatment in a stunning, harrowing reading under Rilling, the “Saint John” was also at hand, given over as the project for a young conductors’ master class and then performed piecemeal over four “Discovery” afternoons.
The phenomenal bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff first came to the U.S. at Rilling’s behest for the 1995 Festival, and has been a regular performer there ever since as his worldwide fame has grown. His body drastically foreshortened by his mother’s pre-natal use of Thalidomide, he rises to full stature in every sung phrase, his voice both powerful and velvety. In the “Saint Matthew” he wrapped the bass arias in a mantle of heartbreak, then found an entirely different voice for the bitter words of Pontius Pilate. Something of a workaholic, in weeks at Eugene Quasthoff also sang the bass solos in Bach’s B-minor Mass, shared a song program with the splendid German soprano Juliane Banse, took on the title role in Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” and also delighted another sell-out audience in an evening of Sinatra songs and some strong and heartfelt American jazz.
An all-day “Composer’s Symposium” gathered young composers to sit at the feet of much-loved innovator Lou Harrison and to hear their music played by Portland’s adept ensemble “Third Angle.” Visiting choruses from Cuba, Uganda, Israel and Sweden serenaded audiences in Eugene and surrounding small towns, and joined forces with Eugene Symphony Orchestra conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya in the inaugural Beethoven Ninth (again with Quasthoff among the soloists).
The Festival’s origins comprise one of music’s great right-thing/right-time/right-place phenomena, tucked from the start under the supporting aegis of the University of Oregon’s enterprising School of Music. Early concerts drew upon nearby talent, as Rilling managed with sublime insinuation to convince local forces to play and sing far over their heads in what were virtually sightreading performances of Bach cantatas and major choral works. Major soloists came, including the late, great American soprano Arleen Auger who – like Quasthoff in later years – earned her first American plaudits in Eugene after a European beginning. The excellent chorus and orchestra, many rungs up from the tentative forces of 31 years ago, draws professional performers from all over, including a large contingent from the splendid Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. As one violinist of 20 years’ experience at Eugene noted, over a plateful of Oregon’s matchless veggies, “It’s like summer camp. Only better.”

Nagano-san

Alan Rich — Fri, 09 Jun 2000 22:40:43 +0000

With the announcement of Kent Nagano’s appointment as principal conductor, the Los Angeles Opera’s new leadership took a major step toward rounding out its team. The announcement was made Thursday (June by incoming artistic director Plácido Domingo; Nagano joins incoming artistic administrator (=dramaturg) Edgar Baitzel and executive director Ian White-Thompson to command the direction of the company following the departure of its founder and general director Peter Hemmings, O.B.E., who returns to England shortly.
Nagano, 48, was born in California of Japanese ancestry. A one-time protégé of Seiji Ozawa, he enjoyed his first acclaim as director of the Berkeley (CA) Symphony, turning a small, church-based semi-pro orchestra into a hot-ticket innovative ensemble. He understudied Ozawa at the Paris Opera for the 1983 premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint Francis” and conducted some of the performances, and developed a relationship with the venerable composer during his last years. He holds the conducting post at Britain’s Halle Orchestra, which he will leave next season, and is slated to take charge of Berlin’s Deutsche Symphonie this fall; in 1998 he resigned as music director of the Lyon Opera, with which he made several recordings. He had also been reported in line to take on Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, but dropped that prospect in favor of Los Angeles.
Nagano takes on the Los Angeles post on July 1, 2001. In his first season, according to an L.A. Opera spokesperson, he will conduct from 35-40 percent of all performances. Currently the company mounts eight productions each season, and presents six to eight performances of each. Those figures will increase when the company takes sole command of the 3000-seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, following the completion (slated for 2002) of the Disney Symphony Hall which will house the Los Angeles Philharmonic – the Opera’s current hall-mate.

Nagano began piano studies at age 4, graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz somewhat later with degrees in sociology and music, followed by a master’s degree from San Francisco State University. His career skyrocketed in the manner now regarded as traditional, when in 1984 he conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a Mahler symphony on one day’s notice. He currently lives in San Francisco, with his wife, pianist Mari Kodama and daughter Karin Kei, now pushing two.
Nagano’s position with the Los Angeles Opera is newly fashioned; the company has not had a principal conductor in its 14-year existence. Despite sporadic appearances by celebrity guests on the podium – Charles Dutoit, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen for one production each – the company has encountered frequent criticism for its reliance on, let’s say, middle-of-the-road musical leadership. An upgrade in that regard is, therefore, long overdue.

CARLISLE FLOYD'S "COLD SASSY TREE"

Alan Rich — Mon, 17 Apr 2000 22:38:57 +0000

(Premiere: Houston Grand Opera, Brown Theater, Wortham Theater Center, April 14, 2000. Future performances: April 16 (m), 19, 22, 25,28, 30 (m), May 6.)

Life goes on, and so does Carlisle Floyd. “Cold Sassy Tree,” which brought a clearly delighted audience to its feet at Houston’s Wortham Theater Center last Friday, is the fourth of his big works – of more than a dozen over-all — to be commissioned and premiered by David Gockley’s Houston Grand Opera; it is also the 25th brand-new work by anyone nurtured into being by the company during Gockley’s leadership. It was a performance in Seattle of Floyd’s operatic setting of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” says Gockley, that determined him to launch his own company with the avowed passion – 28 years’ worth so far, and counting – for new and newer operas that has given it a unique position among worldwide opera companies.
New and newer? That may need a little backing down in Floyd’s case. His first major score, “Susannah,” pushes on toward the half-century mark. A canny distillation of Pucciniesque bathos and grass-roots Americana; it lifted a burden of concern from audiences terrorized by “Wozzeck,” and announced that opera could, once again, be the people’s friend. So successful was (and is) this initial foray that the need for further stylistic development seems never to have occurred to Floyd. There are no surprises in “Cold Sassy Tree”; its composer, now 74, was born full-panoplied.
As is his wont, Floyd wrote his own libretto, a free gloss on the late Olive Ann Burns’ deliciously garrulous folk-portrait of life in the north Georgia village (hard by Floyd’s own South Carolina hometown) where once the sassafras trees turned cold. His own words well capture the novel’s brimming talky-talk; his own musical craftiness shows. He has changed the name of the book’s leading character from Blakeslee to Lattimore. It makes for a better rhythm.
Floyd’s “Cold Sassy Tree” is, then, a work of sureness and craft. Of eloquence there is far less. In between the big choral numbers in a manner little changed since “Floradora” the action moves in a kind of parlando, now and then cresting in a shapely cadence, then subsiding. There are splendid happenings; old Rucker Lattimore, implausibly married to Love Simpson half his age, finds the love in her after all. Shunned by the town’s uppity churchgoers, the old codger conducts a hellfire sermon at home. Grandson Will tells his sweetie what’s inside him, but it runs cold in its music, and not a bit sassy.
The opera runs long , an unconscionable 3 1/4 hours on opening night; whole scenes could easily be lost, except for the impression you get that Floyd has promised a Big Aria to every cast member of whatever worth. There is good work: a glorious roar or two from Dean Peterson as old Rucker, Patricia Racette’s appealing Love Simpson. John McVeigh, attractively light-voiced the way Broadway juveniles used to sound before body mikes, carries forward the bulk of the narrative, spoken and sung. Patrick Summers’s conducting delivers a fine load of sass; Michael Yeargan’s sets and costumes radiate authenticity and charm. Australia’s Bruce Beresford, whose “Driving Miss Daisy” proved his surefootedness in the rural South, continues his invasion of the operatic world – with results a fair piece more commendable than his Hollywoodized “Rigoletto” in Los Angeles last month.
Okay, it’s another Carlisle Floyd opera, no better and probably no worse. It wants terribly to be loved, and there’s nothing about it that you can’t at least like. It will make the rounds, and folks will stand and cheer and decide that modern opera isn’t so bad after all. And Wonder will keep on making bread.

“LA RONDINE” REVIEW

Alan Rich — Sun, 16 Apr 2000 22:49:20 +0000

Times were, when a serious opera was considered properly staged when the time-and-place coincided with the libretto’s stipulation, and the words and music coincided with the composer’s final view of the work. Consider, now, these three productions by the Los Angeles Opera during its current season: a “Hansel and Gretel” with the moppets at large in New York’s Central Park; a “Rigoletto” set among Hollywood studio execs, with the title character identified as “an agent”; and now, a distortion of Puccini’s “La Rondine” in which Magda, the reformed-prostitute heroine, denounced by her one true lover upon his learning The Awful Truth, no longer faces up sadly but acceptingly to life’s ironies but instead drowns herself in a convenient nearby ocean. If you want to guess whether the company’s final seasonal offing, Britten’s “Billy Budd” will take place, as proper, on the HMS Indomitable or the Starship Enterprise, you’re on your own.
This redux “Rondine” is the concoction of Marta Domingo, about to assume her place as dynasty den-mother when husband Plácido assumes command of the L.A. Opera in June. The production was first seen at the Bonn Opera in 1995, and moved thence to the Washington Opera, the other outpost in the Domingo domain. In a published statement Marta Domingo avows a certain disquiet about the opera’s ending – which Puccini himself had struggled to achieve, to his ultimate satisfaction, after a couple of sidetracks. Rummaging in Puccini’s discards, she found an earlier ending that does include the scene of denunciation; the suicide, however, is her own gloss, and designer Michael Scott has given her a dandy tidal wave.
Marta’s diggings also turned up a discarded first-act aria for Ruggero, the romantic hero, which she spatchcocked into the performance although it lies out of range of tenor Marcus Haddock, and some scraps of insignificant duet material for Magda and her most recent sugar-daddy. The questions, therefore, are these: at what point in the creation of a performance are the producers exempt from the composer’s final intentions? and does marriage to an eminent tenor/impresario serve to qualify an ambitious spouse (with less than a decade’s directorial experience and no particular identity as a Puccini musicologist) to superimpose herself upon those intentions? Otherwise put, does the Los Angeles Opera, upon the departure of Peter Hemmings on June 1, turn into a mom’n’pop operation for the Domingos?
Marcus Haddock, as noted, had his problems (although he had sung the role in Washington). Carol Vaness has used the L.A. Opera on other occasions to practice taking on romantic Italian roles — for which she is unsuited by both voice and temperament – and did so once again. Emmanuel Villaume’s podium gyrations were great fun to watch, but lent little to the air of dispiritedness that overhung the evening. “La Rondine” may be the three-legged puppy among Puccini’s operas, but its charms can grow warm and lovable under proper treatment. This, alas, it did not receive in Los Angeles this past weekend.

"LA TRAVIATA" AT OPERA PACIFIC

Alan Rich — Fri, 19 Nov 1999 22:45:14 +0000

Every operatic soprano makes her own kind of peace with the music of Verdi. Far rarer and more precious, however, is the singer with the innate, essential Verdi in her voice: the throb, the marvelous iridescence as the simplest, purest melodic line whose accents of heartbreak transfigure the stage and the audience as well. Licia Albanese had that command in her prime; Leontyne Price, Maria Callas… who else? As Elizabeth Futral sang Violetta’s spare, devastating lines of surrender and resignation in “La Traviata” ‘s sublime Act Two duet this past Thursday night at Orange County’s Performing Arts Center, one could easily recognize this radiant newcomer to the exalted ranks.
Elizabeth Futral: in less than a decade the young American soprano’s career has ranged far and wide. Last season she was the Stella in Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” at its San Francisco career, a role of high drama but musical impoverishment; she has sung Lucia at the Met to considerable acclaim, taken on major roles in Chicago, Geneva and Munich, braved some of Philip Glass’ dippiest music in his “Hydrogen Jukebox.” This was her first Violetta, but she fulfilled the opera as though she’d lived in it all her life. Opera Pacific’s Costa Mesa audiences are only slowly overcoming the Orange County image of cultural reluctance, but the crowd last week knew to stand and cheer.
The company, founded in 1986 as something to occupy impresario David Di Chiera’s left hand while he ran Detroit’s Michigan Opera with his right, had slumped somewhat in recent years since its founder’s departure, but came to life late last season as newly anointed music director John DeMain (formerly the musical stalwart at Houston Grand Opera) came on with a spellbinding “Flying Dutchman.”
The “Traviata,” which ushers in a fairly safe 1999/2000 playbill — with “Figaro,” “Manon Lescaut” and “Hoffmann” still to come – was anything but merely a routine go at a well-roasted chestnut. On a handsome production borrowed from the San Francisco Opera, Linda Brovsky created a lively and genuinely provocative staging, from the crossed lines of social hostility among guests in the opening party scene to the devasting grayness of the final scene. David Miller, the handsome, believable Alfredo, sang with a young-sounding voice if not yet fully supported; Louis Otey was the elder Germont, hearty of voice and sympathetic of manner.
Best of all, the performance fairly glowed under the shaping baton of John Mauceri, whose shaping of the opening Prelude, even with an undernourished pit orchestra, gave notice of a careful, loving exposition of Verdi’s wondrous score. Traditional cuts – the second-act cabalettas for Alfredo and Germont – were opened, at least one of two stanzas each; the first-act backstage music was played, as is proper, backstage.
As the Los Angeles Opera faces its iffy future under incoming leadership, fifty miles down the Interstate there are signs of some healthy competition from the reborn Opera Pacific. So far, at least, so good.

HOLLYWOOD BOWL PIECE

Alan Rich — Sun, 12 Sep 1999 22:34:12 +0000

With the grand, brassy rhetoric that ends Johannes Brahms’ First Symphony, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic also sounded the final notes last Thursday for the 78th season of “Symphonies Under the Stars” at that one-of-a-kind piece of real estate known as the Hollywood Bowl. There was more to come at the Bowl: two weekends of pop-concert fare ending in splendid fireworks displays, and a night of jazz – what you’d expect, in other words, in a town known as a world-renowned shrine to terminal titillation. But the ten-week Bowl season had, as usual, included twenty programs of solid classical stuff, much of it actually challenging. The crowds had numbered anywhere from six to ten thousand, small potatoes in the 18,000-seat expanse that usually fills to capacity for the weekend pop, but impressive by symphonic standards.
There’s nothing quite like the Bowl: a summertime outdoor venue within the boundaries of a large city, reachable by public transportation, comfortable and even, given the proper attitude, delightful, offering a panorama of musical events night after night, some of them even worthwhile. The area itself bestows its benefits; the air above Cahuenga Pass cools down to a benign 65-or-so as the evening breezes blow the smog out to sea. Rain is virtually nonexistent. “Under the stars” may, however, be overly hopeful on most nights.
It’s possible to have a lousy time at the Bowl, and there are those who pridefully assert that they wouldn’t be caught dead in the place. A picknicker’s dropped wine bottle can clank down half-a-mile-or-so of concrete steps; an L.A.P.D. helicopter can choose the symphony’s most solemn slow movement to stake out a claim directly overhead; the sound quality even on high-quality outdoor amplification is no better than anywhere else; on several nights this season a resident skunk made clear its own criticism of proceedings. It’s also true that concert planning for the Bowl season tends to skirt much that smacks of hard-core in favor of more familiar fare.
Yet this summer’s take on the “familiar” had its own sense of adventure. The “oh, no, not Tchaikovsky again” crowd might have noted that there was only one of that master’s symphonies listed – and that the relatively unfamiliar Second. No apologies are needed for programming that included all five of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos, the long and gritty First Violin Concerto of Shostakovich (spectacularly played by Vadim Repin), over an hour’s worth of Prokofiev’s music for “Ivan the Terrible” with excerpts from Sergei Eisenstein’s masterful movie flung onto the big screen overhead. After a parade of guest conductors – among them the excellent Indonesian Jahja Ling and France’s Emmanuel Krivine, plus others less worthy of mention — and a one-week stand by the touring Russian National Orchestra, Salonen himself led the last six programs; they included his first-time-ever knockout performance of the Mahler First (an out-of-town tryout, you might say, for his Music Center performance next month), a Bach program offering a clutch of “authentic” performance plus half a program of the great, bloated orchestrations (one by Mahler, two by Stokowski), a keen reminiscence of what used to pass for Bach in times past. For those who proclaim that sheer exquisiteness has no place in the vastness of Cahuenga Pass, there was Dawn Upshaw’s radiant singing of Ravel’s “Shéhérazade” that seemed to encapsulate the very essence of the evening air.
One further entry during Salonen’s stint did, indeed, stretch the “something for everyone” Bowl philosophy: a multimedia program devised with the connivance of Los Angeles’ resident madcap Peter Sellars. The list was scary enough: Stravinsky (the abrasive little cantata “King of the Stars”), Scriabin’s “Prometheus,” Ligeti’s enchanting little tick-tock piece “Clocks and Clouds,” and Edgard Varèse’s orchestra-plus-electronics “Déserts.” As visuals for the Scriabin (which was originally designed to go with color projections) Sellars had made the weird choice of Edward Curtis’ 1914 black-and-white documentary of Vancouver Indian rituals; for the Varèse, the local video artist Bill Viola had created a far more appropriate counterpart which actually earned cheers at the end. But the Ligeti work, 14 minutes of spun gossamer performed with no visual meddling, really got the crowd’s collective back up. There were boos, then cheers, then both at once; it might have been Paris on the “Rite of Spring” premiere. Cynics who tend to dismiss the Bowl’s offerings as no more than music to picnic by should have been there that night as this cherishable piece of real estate turned into a living, fire-breathing, roofless concert hall.

LA Opera Samson

Alan Rich — Thu, 09 Sep 1999 22:35:25 +0000

This is the week of Los Angeles’ annual identity crisis. On Tuesday and Thursday, in shorts and tee-shirt, I load the picnic basket and head for the Hollywood Bowl. On Wednesday I fish out a pair of matching socks and head downtown to the Music Center, where the Los Angeles Opera starts off its season with the usual opening-night gala. At neither venue is the dress code absolute; in with the black tie and sequins there were jeans and Nikes at the opera on Wednesday, and you can occasionally spot a suit at the Bowl. But this week’s intermingling takes getting used to: all the more so since Saint-Saens’ “Samson et Dalila,” which kicked off the opera season on Wednesday, is a lot closer in level of thought to the typical Bowl fare than is Ravel’s subtle, exquisite “Sheherazade,” which Dawn Upshaw sang enchantingly at the Bowl the night before.
“Samson” marked the start of the L.A. Opera’s 14th season, the last for outgoing founder and general director Peter Hemmings; it served as well to trumpet the imminent arrival of incoming artistic director Plácido Domingo (with the rest of the new administrative team as yet unannounced). In a sense, the “Samson” also celebrated the sweep of history within the company. Lawrence Foster, who conducted the inaugural “Otello” (with Domingo) in October, 1986, was again on the podium, as he has often been in the intervening years. Domingo was the Samson; he has sung opening-night leads in nine of 14 season, and conducted two others. Two singers in lesser roles, Richard Bernstein the Abimelech and Louis Lebherz the Old Hebrew, are alumni of the company’s training program now well along in world-class careers.
Tattered baggage though it be, “Samson et Dalila” maintains its place in the repertory on the strength of its glittering surface. Sure, it has only its one tune worth remembering; its ballet is the ancestor of all operatic hootchy-kootch. Given a fair serving of charismatic lung-power in its two name roles, however, and a stage setting evocative of the imagined Loew’s Babylon lobby of everybody’s dreams — all of which it got at the Music Center on Wednesday – it can still dupe an undemanding audience into an illusion of witnessing some kind of masterpiece.
Credit composer Camille Saint-Saens as the opera’s masterful string-puller. Samson is a role fashioned in tenor heaven, from his first lurching onstage with his mighty battle-cry to his heartrending laments in Philistine captivity. Does it matter that neither musical substance, or anything in between, remains in the memory once the song is sung? No; what remains is the sound, if not the shape, of Plácido Domingo’s white-hot outbursts: opera at its most elemental.
Dalila is fashioned out of friendlier stuff; she has her one great tune in the Act Two love/hate duet, although it’s a long time in coming. Denyce Graves, apparently put on earth to take over and inflame all of opera’s bad-girl mezzo-soprano roles (of which there are many), with flashing eyes that could seduce any tenor within miles to abandon home, hearth and hairdo, was, in a word, sensational: lavishly endowed in voice and in everything else as well. (She even tried a few dance steps during the Bacchanale, a welcome contrast to choreographer Daniel Pelzig’s Muscle-Beach stuff.)
Douglas Schmidt’s production, on loan from the San Francisco Opera — garishly lit by Kurt Landisman from Thomas E. Munn’s original design — nicely matched the music’s tendency toward the ponderous overstatement: a heavy impasto of burnished color, as from watching ten Gustave Moreau paintings at once, and, for the final temple scene a terrific jumble of pseudo-Oriental statuary where you’re tempted to seek out the popcorn stand. Nicolas Joël’s staging, tidy and unremarkable, at least nicely accomplished the final catastrophe that everyone sits still for; it brought down the house.

OPERA REVIEW

Alan Rich — Mon, 14 Jun 1999 22:38:01 +0000

Adventurous, exasperating, illuminating and just plain off-the-wall: the 21-year saga of the Long Beach Opera has been all of these and more. Its operation is strictly shoestring; its stagings over the years have included a “Boris Godunov” done in street clothes around a large bureaucratic desk, and a “Death in Venice” whose only scenery was a television monitor. The bravery of its founder/general director Michael Milenski has earned it a cult following in the Los Angeles area, eager to deplore and forgive, cherish and forget.
This year’s two offerings, produced last weekend in the 1100-seat Carpenter Arts Center on the Long Beach campus of California State University spanned a vast difference in music and style. One wasn’t an opera at all: the Molière comedy-ballet “The Imaginary Invalid,” with the play done complete including the danced interludes to music by Marc’Antoine Charpentier; the other was a small (but very large) operatic masterpiece, Béla Bartók’s one-act “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.”
Long Beach and the Baroque repertory have long been a fruitful marriage; the company can boast acclaimed stagings of all three of Monteverdi’s surviving operas; last year Purcell’s “Indian Queen” was blown up into an incongruous but irresistible Mexican fiesta. Purists who complained last year may have been placated by this season’s treatment accorded the Molière/Charpentier parlay: both play and music done straight and, alas, uncut, cantilevering far, far into the night.
Matthew Maguire’s staging, on the clean designs of Craig Hodgetts’ futuristic set, leaned heavily on laff content. Susan Mosakowski’s choreography, lightly honoring the manner of seventeenth-century French court dance and backed by the delectable playing of the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra, provided the only fresh air during a long and otherwise stifling evening.
No such problems afflicted Bartók’s intense, gorgeously orchestrated 50-minute setting of Béla Balász’ symbol-laden gloss on the ancient legend of the amorous but uxoricidal Bluebeard – sung in Long Beach in Chester Kallman’s elegant translation. Marsha Ginsberg’s stage setting – wall-size panels seemingly ripped from wrecked buildings, a few spotlights cleverly deployed, an onstage movie projector sending forth psychological designs – exactly complimented the Bluebeard (Pavlo Hunka), in a modern business suit and his Judith (Kathleen Broderick) in plain black sheath.
Hunka, a tremendous young bass in his American debut, may have more resembled Henry Kissinger than the renowned ladykiller, but his singing, throbbing from the intensity of both poem and music, became a part of Bartók’s dark psychodrama. Broderick’s Judith also captured the other-worldliness of the lovelorn woman who deserts her marital bed for the life (and death) of Bluebeard’s love-slave; her diction, however, showed a few patches of incomprehensibility. A further hero of both performances was conductor Andreas Mitisek, who presided at the harpsichord in the Molière, and drew the full color spectrum from a freelance orchestra in the Bartók. More than any of the excellent participants, it was Mitisek’s inspired leadership that, once again, put the Long Beach Opera on a sound basis.
Alan Rich

OJAI FESTIVAL REVIEW

Alan Rich — Tue, 08 Jun 1999 22:28:11 +0000

Tucked into a valley northeast of Ventura (which
served filmmaker Frank Capra as site for the original version of
“Lost Horizon,”) the town of Ojai (pop. 7500) is no more than a
90-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles. One weekend a year,
however, as this rural enclave of horse farms and orange groves
houses one of the world’s most sophisticated and adventurous
music festivals, it might as well be the far side of the moon.

This past weekend was one such time. Founded in 1947, the
Ojai Festival has from its inception concentrated on the
cutting-edge musical repertory more grandiose European festivals
would fear to touch. Innovative composer/movers Aaron Copland,
Igor Stravinsky and Pierre Boulez have been frequent Ojai
luminaries, to the extent that they are now household names among
veteran festival attendees. Ojai thrives on true grit.This year’s
offerings, consisted of an extraordinary (and spectacularly
successful) feat of bridge-building: America meets Finland, and
finds much in common.
In Southern California, of course, that is no longer news.
Esa-Pekka Salonen has made the Los Angeles Philharmonic one of
the world’s most irresistible orchestras, and a sounding board as
well for the hard-edged, bristling, intensely energetic music of
a generation of Finnish composers who, apparently, work without
fear – and (for what the information is worth) choose to live
outside Finland. For his first-ever Ojai stint, Salonen brought
over the intrepid new-music ensemble called Toimii, which he and
Magnus Lindberg had founded in Helsinki in 1981; Toimii, in turn,
brought over a week’s worth of new music mostly stupendous: music
by Salonen himself and his two near-contemporaries Lindberg and
Kaija Saariaho. They also brought an hour’s worth of delicious
operatic spoof for a morning “family concert” whose catalog of
delectables included the rare spectacle of Salonen himself, in a
Bunny costume, screeching out a few notes in the soprano
stratosphere while leaping after invisible butterflies.
Of the new works Lindberg’s 30-minute “Kraft” sent the
crowd most immediately woozy: a huge sound panorama enlisting
both the Toimii membership and the L.A. Philharmonic in full
panoply, much of it techno-derived enlisting percussion galore
(including a gathering of banged-upon auto parts worthy of early
John Cage), with musicians dashing to improvised performance
spaces all around the audience area, with twittering piccolos
serenading (and being serenaded by) Ojai’s regular avian
contingent. The work dates from 1985 (and was recorded on the
Finlandia label two years later); this was its U.S. premiere, and
the ground at Ojai may still be shaking.
Lindberg’s music made a lot of noise at Ojai; it also
included a cello concerto that showcased the phenomenal talent of
Toimii’s cellist Anssi Karttunen – who was kept busy the next
night by another killer solo work, the “Amers” by Saariaho. A new
work by Salonen himself, his “Five Images After Sappho,” won
hearts with subtler means: music of elegant, long melodic flow,
set for soprano and small ensemble and – since Salonen is about
to start work on a large-scale opera – encouragingly responsive
to the mysterious art of writing for voice. Salonen had composed
the cycle for Dawn Upshaw, but that most lovable of singers
underwent emergency spine surgery and was replaced by another
American soprano less well known but eminently capable, Laura
Claycomb. Remember her name.
A program by the Philharmonic’s own New Music Ensemble
(also founded in 1981) had the aspect of an east-meets-west
confrontation: John Adams’ “Chamber Symphony,” much of it
vibrating with a quasi-European contrapuntal intricacy, as close
to a “bridge-building” work as anything of Adams. A program by
Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen, Bach and Shostakovich Preludes and
Fugues interwoven, was Ojai’s one expendable item; the young (and
terminally cute) pianist works with an absurd range of stage
mannerisms, which have now begun to permeate the sounds he makes:
false shadings, mannered accentuations, the old-time style – more
salon than Salonen – that one had thought (hoped, even) was a
thing of the past.
Ojai’s fortunes are obviously on the rise; in this
second summer of leadership by former L.A. Philharmonic honcho
Ernest Fleischmann, most events drew sellout crowds to the small
amphitheater in Ojai’s Libbey Park and to the lawn areas behind
(Tanglewood-in-miniature). There was even a pre-festival
festival: three “Sundowner” concerts earlier in the week, of
considerable scope and virtuosity. Next year’s star conductor
will be Simon Rattle, and the soloists include the irreplaceable
Lorraine Hunt. It’s not too early to reserve.

RE: BEETHOVEN

Alan Rich — Mon, 24 May 1999 22:39:56 +0000

An all-in-one festival of the Beethoven Nine is one of music’s can’t-lose propositions. The size is right: five concerts of leisurely length, with room here and there for an overture or two. The music, needless to say, is also right: “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.” wrote E. M. Forster.
Beethoven is “of all composers,” a wise critic once wrote, “the one who most insistently tells us that we cannot do without him.” The sublime efficiency of the hype machine – now well into its second century – further guarantees sellout crowds. They mustered last week at Orange County 3000-seat barn of a Performing Arts Center for the sublime Nine in the first-ever California visit by John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, brought in for an exclusive American stint by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. The parlay of Beethoven the genius and Beethoven the public-relations icon – however variable the performances themselves — made for an irresistible force.
Gardiner himself, now 56, is an important part of that parlay; so is his mostly-youthful orchestra founded in 1990, with its recorded legacy (including the Nine) well-received and voluminous. Part of that generation of Brits whose work purports to reconstruct the music of past masters as the masters themselves had heard it – strings of gut rather than steel, woodwinds actually made of wood, valveless horns and trumpets that invoke the twin gods of music and plumbing – Gardiner has been more successful than some colleagues in folding the sounds of his historically-informed orchestra into a more modern need for the bone-rattling and the whizbang. It cannot be mere coincidence that the hottest tickets around town last week afforded admission to battlefields: the expanse of the “Star Wars” landscape or the no-less-fantastic realm as an intruding C-sharp in the “Eroica” marks the invention of modern music for all time.
It was the struggle-’n'-strife in this music that brought out the best in Gardiner’s week of performances: the brutal upheaval in the “Eroica’s” first movement that hurtles into vastly “wrong” keys; the blaze in the brass that bursts upon the spook-ridden scherzo in the Fifth; the manic rhythmic obsessions throughout the Seventh. The relatively small size of the orchestra (60 or so) and the silken clarity of old or quasi-old fiddles, beautifully broke apart the music’s complexity; rare indeed, the listener who found nothing new in Gardiner’s splendidly thought-out readings.
There were other moments not so fine. Whatever Beethoven’s own (and often challenged) tempo indications, it is neither possible nor worth the effort to breed certain expectations out of an audience: the chilling outcry of grief in the “Eroica’s” Funeral March, the celestial soft harmonies in the slow movement of the Ninth. These moments, and others of quieter, more mystery-laden lyricism in the Fourth and Sixth, brought out lesser insights on Gardiner’s part – and a surprisingly high quotient of instrumental bloops in the winds and brass as well.
At the end, the Ninth drew a standing, stomping, cheering 15-minute ovation. The miracle of Beethoven – one of them, at any rate – is the variety of sheer narrative momentum in each of the symphonies, each different, each leading to terminal exhilaration. Hearing the Nine as a unit – in a single sitting, you might say – produces another kind of momentum, from the Haydnesque trickery of the first two symphonies to the Ninth’s ultimate triumph – marvelously voiced, by the way, by Gardiner’s own small Monteverdi Choir. Great music never loses its power to surprise, to reveal something you never noticed before. The week of supremely familiar Beethoven became an exercise in constant surprise. – Alan Rich