So I've Heard

Bertrand Desprez

Five years ago I used some of this space to exult over my discovery of the French composer Pascal Dusapin at his first appearance on disc – a pseudo-operatic gloss on the Medea legend in a Harmonia Mundi release conducted by Philippe Herreweghe. I can’t claim that my words at that time have elevated Dusapin to hit-parade status, but a new work of his, Granum Sinapis, performed last week at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall (and recently released on France’s Naïve label, also distributed by Harmonia Mundi), reinforced my high regard for his music.

Granum Sinapis, as I surely don’t have to tell you, is drawn from the speculative writings – God, the soul, etc. – of Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century German mystic, 20 minutes of mystery-drenched singing for a cappella choir, much of it hovering at the brink of silence until a final whammo declaration comes over like the fires of Creation. It was composed for and sung here by the 32-member French chorus called Accentus, founded in 1991 and led by Laurence Equilbey, another of those courageous ensembles that take on the most daunting demands today’s composers can dream up. In Dusapin’s case, those demands include an intricate interplay of several levels of pianississimo and a willingness to deal with microtones, polyrhythms, the works. The results, deeply stirring, were like a revelation of a huge and complex soundscape of silence. At
UCLA, the problems for the audience – largely Francophone, and considerably diminished after intermission – were compounded by the total omission in the program book of
information about the evening’s composers (Schoenberg and Poulenc alongside Dusapin), the music or the sung texts. That’s no way to run a concert, especially one as challenging – and, despite the odds, rewarding – as this.

By one of those coincidences that seem to come about without any help from Above, last week was a time of music very old (the Sequentia concert at UCLA and the better half of an Eclectic Orange event in Irvine) and very new (Les Percussions de Strasbourg at
LACMA, the Dusapin and the lesser half of Eclectic Orange). Founded in 1977 by the Americans Benjamin Bagby and the late Barbara Thornton but based in Cologne, Sequentia ranks among the noblest and most active of the very-early-music performing groups. What I admire most about them is their willingness to apply a certain amount of contemporary imagination to the objects of their exhumations, their assumption of the license to fill in between the dots in ancient manuscripts when necessary. Their work trumpets the belief, in other words, that oldness doesn’t have to mean dullness. I’m not sure the world cries out for all eight CDs of their “complete” perusal of the music of Hildegard von Bingen (with a ninth disc on the way), but their performance zeal almost makes me believe I can tell one of her songs from another.

Four members of Sequentia showed up at Schoenberg Hall this time, including Bagby as a congenial host, in a program of secular music from the 10th and 11th centuries: love songs, philosophical songs, a bit of ribaldry now and then, their passions laid bare in the elegance of their melodic lines and the pungency of the parallel fourths and fifths of their harmonies. Strangest and, in many ways, most provocative was an 11th-century Icelandic recitative detailing an episode from the Nibelung saga that would later find its way across time to Wagner and, more specifically, to the great Fritz Lang silent cycle. A splendid evening, all told, of music to revel in – and to think about.

The Irvine program, at St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church – with its huge, brand-new mosaics that will need a few centuries’ accretions before they can challenge Ravenna’s – looked good on paper: Anonymous 4 and the Chilingirian String Quartet in an “End of Time” concert of music old and new. “Old,” however, won by an impressive margin. “New” was another slice off the ambling, purring musical rhetoric of England’s Sir John Tavener, a piece called The Bridegroom co-commissioned by Eclectic Orange, and not much different from Tavener’s last piece or the one before: Philip Glass plus incense but, at least, shorter. The text – the symbolism of Christ-as-bridegroom better deployed in Bach’s Wachet auf!
cantata – rolls along, chokingly perfumed in Tavener’s redolent harmonies. Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, also on the program in the string-quartet version, speaks the same language of spiritual minimalism but manages exactly what Tavener’s doesn’t: It moves – as music and as a message of and to the spirit.

By themselves, Anonymous 4 began the program all aglow, in passages from their latest CD, a Mass dating from, give or take, A.D. 1000, delivered in that cherishable Anonymous 4 manner that manages at once to sound both pure and wondrously rich, that makes everything they sing sound newly composed. Starting a program with music on that level inevitably imposed a burden on the music that ensued – the Tavener, a reworking of Britten’s lightweight Missa Brevis (originally for boys and organ), and Stravinsky’s spicy, short string-quartet pieces.

The Strasbourg six, strong of arm and fleet of foot, almost didn’t make it to LACMA; their journey south from their previous gig in Vancouver was intercepted by a trigger-happy customs bureaucrat who chose to ignore thoroughly-in-order documents and had to be called off at the last minute through the intervention of Senator Barbara Boxer. The delayed arrival necessitated a program change, but no real loss. François-Bernard Mche’s Aera
began it, a marvelous, airy piece filling seemingly infinite spaces with the whispers of Thai gongs, bells, marimbas and soft timpani rolls. Iannis Xenakis’ heaven-storming Pléiades – composed in 1979 for the city of Strasbourg and for this ensemble – ended it, a work (said the program) about “multiplicity and undefinability” but also (to these ears) about the raw power of music’s elementals to inspire . . . maybe not love, but at least awe.

What an extraordinary work this is: nearly 45 minutes of proclamation and exploration into the way banged-upon instruments can
uplift and exhilarate. The Strasbourg six have recorded it, on Denon: a must-have item. The sounds are amazing, even when they don’t pound you into submission; some of them come from the sixxen, newly invented for this work (six +Xena.kis), a glorious spook of an instrument made up of metal plates played with a keyboard and wailing like a banshee. Who else but Xenakis could devise such exquisite torture? I only wish the guy from customs had been there, bound and gagged in the front row.

I had forgotten — if, indeed, I ever knew — the somber, deep beauties of On Wenlock Edge. Nothing of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music, I must confess, has been a boon companion the past few years, perhaps as my expiation for a youthful crush on a couple of his early symphonies. Ian Bostridge‘s singing of this song cycle, to end last week’s magical program by the Philharmonic‘s Chamber Music Society at Gindi Auditorium, was a double exhilaration — the power of the music and the extraordinary quality of the performance.

The songs date from 1909: six poems from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, composed for and first sung by the English tenor Gervase Elwes, whose 1917 recording of the cycle remains in Schwann; the only other listed recording is by Bostridge, with full orchestra. Last week, however, Bostridge sang it as written, with string quartet and piano, and the results were exquisite: the small, lean sounds of four Philharmonic string players perfectly matched to the gleam of this wonderful young singer‘s pure yet intense re-creation of Housman’s gales and fogs and distant bells, all riding on the dark billows from Julius Drake‘s supporting piano.

Someone from the Philharmonic told me that subscribers to the chamber-music series, and perhaps to the orchestral series downtown as well, don’t like it when vocal music is mixed into the programs; this attitude is echoed by the managements of our two ”serious“ (ha-ha) radio stations, which strive mightily to keep their prime hours free of human intrusion. If there is a more ravishing sound anywhere in music than the singing of Bostridge that night (in the Vaughan Williams and in Faure‘s equally enchanting La Bonne Chanson), or two nights later at Costa Mesa’s Eclectic Orange festival (in songs of Schubert and Wolf), it could only be from some other human throat: Renee Fleming as Dvorak‘s Russalka, perhaps, or Thomas Quasthoff’s Mozart. Beside any of this, the most beautiful instrument in the world remains what it basically is, a machine.

Bostridge, 35-ish, is amazing, and so is his story: a singer endowed with an intelligence that penetrates deeply into the nature of songs and of the way to sing them — all emerging fully formed, to start a full-time career on the run no more than five years ago. Before that he had earned his doctorate in history and philosophy; you can order his thesis, Witchcraft and Its Transformations 1650–1750 (Oxford), from your favorite dot-com. My colleagues have exhausted the metaphors warehouse in describing his stage manner, which seems to be no manner at all except an earnestness of presentation aimed more at the music than the audience. At Costa Mesa, in the intimate and agreeably improv setting of the Performing Arts Center‘s Founders Hall, he had a different way of sharing his Schubert from his way with the more extroverted Hugo Wolf group; in neither case was there anything about his performance that didn’t relate clearly to the music. Onstage he is the winsome but eager postgrad; I kept thinking of Alec Guinness in his white suit. But neither Guinness nor anyone else you can name could summon the witchcraft to transmute Schubert‘s ”Nacht und Traume“ into the ethereal presence that it became that night in Costa Mesa. I returned home, took down Bostridge’s Schubert disc on EMI, and died happy, more than once.

Between these sublime events there came Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica. Perhaps it was the chronology, perhaps not, but I found myself among the few who remained unenchanted in the almost-full Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that night. Something about Eight Seasons, Kremer‘s new project, recorded on Nonesuch and much-hyped, spanning the centuries to blend the spirits of Antonio Vivaldi and Astor Piazzolla into a single, highly seasoned concoction, just doesn’t work for me. Yes, both Vivaldi and Piazzolla composed sets of pieces celebrating the passage of the four seasons, in Venice and in Buenos Aires. At the Hollywood Bowl two summers ago, Kremer and his attractive young ensemble from Baltic lands showed off a nice, bright way of energizing Vivaldi‘s delirious set of fantasies that blew away the detritus of overfamiliarity. Now, however, they play the piece zebra-fashion, with Piazzolla’s less familiar but also charming set interspersed between Vivaldi‘s, and with a few licks stuck onto the music in Kremer’s re-fashioning to simulate some kind of relation between the two. Well, I‘ve lived a long time with Vivaldi, and not yet long enough with the Piazzolla; at home I can program my player to hear all of one or the other. In concert, however interesting the music, it came over as a sequence of jolts.

A suite of bits from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock‘s Psycho began the program; Alfred Schnittke’s Sixth Concerto Grosso came midway and became by some distance the evening‘s most powerful music. Someone — perhaps Esa-Pekka or someone else that good — needs to take Herrmann’s acid-drenched score and work it into a continuous piece; as a series of short bits, none over two minutes, separated by pauses — as at Kremer‘s concert and as on Salonen’s admirable Sony disc of Herrmann‘s music — it also seemed like a sequence of jolts.

In a remote land called Springdale, Utah, there live two citizens whose lives intertwine. One is Garland Hirschi, an old codger who raises cows. The other is Phillip Kent Bimstein, a younger codger who raises money by composing. ”You wanna know a little bit about my cows?“ said Garland Hirschi into ”Flip“ Bimstein’s microphone, and Bimstein took the tape and processed it, along with copious cow sounds recorded live or synthesized, into a tone poem in three ”moo-vements“ (his word, not mine), and while my description mightn‘t sound that way, the results are delightful. Garland Hirschi’s Cows exists on a Starkland CD, and it was the kickoff work at the California EAR Unit‘s latest concert at the County Museum. It set a tone for the entire concert, which was full of hijinks, high energy and, for the most part, high quality.

Most of the program kept the group’s percussion contingent — Dan Kennedy and Amy Knoles, the god and goddess of the big bang — particularly busy. I was least taken by Steven Mackey‘s new Micro-Concerto for Percussion and Five Instruments, excessively long (despite its title) for what it had to say. There were also tidy, short works by David Lang and the much-missed Jacob Druckman, a marvelous, atmospheric new piece by Ching-Wen Chao and, best of all, a gloriously complex piece by master percussionist John Bergamo — dating from 1986, the oldest music on the program, and the youngest at heart.

Only 16 years (1945–1961) separate Benjamin Britten‘s Peter Grimes from his War Requiem; they are alike in many ways but different in many more. Hearing them both on the same day, last Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, underlined their common bond and their differences.

Both are the works of a deeply reactive man with his own nerves rubbed raw from society-imposed frictions: Britten the pacifist, Britten the homosexual, Britten the artist defining a distinctive personality within an area of style that he was obliged to invent work by work. In his magnificent legacy, these two works stand together as the ones motivated by concerns deepest within his own personality. They are the two, out of all the splendor of Britten’s bequeathal, in whose presence it is the most difficult to remain unmoved.

They are works drenched in rage. The misanthropic Grimes is rendered catatonic by the narrow-minded misjudgments of his villagers. The rage in the War Requiem is on a far broader scale, as the bitter cynicism of Wilfred Owen‘s poetry, interspersed among the texts of the Latin Requiem, snarls at those classic verses and mocks them into meaninglessness. Both scores become curdling experiences, because their composer is close behind each of them, revealing his own pangs in the only way society would permit, through these intensely personal analogies.

Within their century, they are also terminal works. The genre of the grand, romantic opera, set into a time and place remote from our own, whose populace turns its realities into artifice by forming itself into a chorus, with characters etched by their own music and by goings-on in a large orchestra, came to its end with Peter Grimes; Britten himself later worked with smaller models superb in different ways. I can’t name a later opera comparable to Grimes in size and shape that belongs on the same shelf: not Gatsby; not The Ghosts of Versailles; possibly Dialogues des Carmelites; what else? In the same way, there are no large-scale choral works after the War Requiem aimed at reaching out to a hearer‘s conscience; this work ends the cycle that began with Handel, was variously nourished for the next two centuries, and, after Britten, fizzled ignominiously with the Paul McCartney Liverpool Oratorio and its unworthy clones.

Not everybody looks to Britten as one of his century’s prime innovators. Some things, to be sure, he did better than anyone else before or since, most of all demonstrating his marvelous insight into the nature of English words, their rhythms and their resonances. Dig into his music anywhere, into my own favorites — which include the Tennyson moment (”the splendor falls“) in the Serenade, Grimes‘ ”Now the Great Bear and Pleiades“ or almost any line in The Rape of Lucretia — or any hundred thousand other choices, and you are in thrall to one of the greatest vocal composers ever to try to transmute English language into high art.

It is this mastery of language, of course, that lends a special thread to any group of performers once they have mastered the pitfalls and potholes of English words. One of the amazements in this splendid glut of Britten these past few days was the consistent high level of declamation — from the Brits (Philip Langridge’s Grimes, and the sounding brass of Owen‘s defiant words as sung by the remarkable Ian Bostridge, about whom more next week) but from the non-Brits as well (Richard Stilwell’s sturdy Balstrode and Suzanna Guzman‘s delicious Sedley in Peter Grimes, the excellent German baritone Thomas Mohr in the War Requiem). One other Brit, film director John Schlesinger, staged a violent, edgy Grimes on Luciana Arrighi’s ade-quate but rather stodgy sets. Richard Armstrong‘s conducting committed no egregious errors but contributed no egregious momentum either.

The L.A. Opera has more than held its own in its adventures into the Britten repertory over the years, and this latest — co-produced with the Washington Opera and La Scala — counts as a distinguished addition. Antonio Pappano, who takes over the Royal Opera’s podium season after next and who has visited the Los Angeles Philharmonic before with variable results, did everything needed to turn the War Requiem into a memorable occasion, with strong work from a huge Master Chorale contingent and, as one miscalculation, the children‘s choir placed somewhere offstage almost to the point of inaudibility.

On the night before my Britten immersion, within the same walls, I found myself listening to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with more pleasure than I had believed possible, discovering delight in small moments (e.g., the winds‘ soft reprise of the main tune after the first-movement cadenza and the kicky off-the-beat accents in the finale). Part of my reaction came from hearing an orchestra gainfully employed once again, after the dreary monochrome exercises of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 5, Etc. in Costa Mesa the week before. Part of it was the serene, elegant, intelligent performance by Midori, whose playing I seem to enjoy every other time I hear her and deplore the times in between. Intelligent playing of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto? An oxymoron, I know; you had to be there.

Sharing the stage that night was the visiting NDR Symphony from Hamburg, with its conductor, Christoph Eschenbach, whom every orchestra in the world seems anxious to kidnap for its own these days. As near as I could tell from a one-shot hearing — a process complicated when the woman in J-31 smuggled her drink into the hall and chewed ice all through the Tchaikovsky (and you thought idiots only brought in cell phones!) — the NDR is a solid, clean, precise ensemble, and is thus a fair mirror of Eschenbach‘s own strengths.

Unfortunately the program also included a work I dislike far more than the Tchaikovsky, Arnold Schoenberg’s worthless orchestration of the Brahms G-minor Piano Quartet: an overstuffed monstrosity imposed upon a work that, in its original condition, is one of the less-unlistenable of Brahms‘ chamber works. What Schoenberg has done — most likely to attach his name to a piece that might pass for pretty and thus earn performances — is to inflate to one further stage the worst aspects of Brahms’ own orchestral writing. How bad the latter can be was nicely underlined in the dances by Dvorak and Smetana that the NDR played as encores: beautifully shaped, mellow orchestrations full of built-in smiles. The orchestra was scheduled to play a better program the next night in Costa Mesa, but Britten beckoned.

There is comfort in the news that millenniums don‘t occur very often. The accumulated ”Year 2000“ observances already loom large, and there is no guarantee that the year 2001 — which some sticklers insist is the real turning point — won’t produce a comparable pileup. Add to that this year‘s Bach stuff, the 250th anniversary of his death, which can hardly be said to have passed unnoticed. One composer, the former rice planter and current culture assimilator Tan Dun, has made a cottage industry of churning out big, eclectic, ecumenical anniversary pieces, starting with his Symphony 1997, Heaven, Earth, Mankind for China’s annexing of Hong Kong. For this year‘s celebrations he has produced two major scores: the millennial ”world symphony“ 2000 Today, which was aired on PBS over last New Year’s celebrations and is now at hand on a Sony release, and one of the four big ”Passion“ settings introduced in Germany this past summer for the Bach 250th. If I read the omens correctly, this is also headed for the recording studios and the charts.

But you also can‘t have a millennium without Philip Glass. Now, trailing its own clouds of hoo-hah, comes the Fifth Symphony — or, to note its full title, Symphony No. 5, Requiem, Bardo, Nirmanakaya — unveiled before cheering throngs at the 1999 Salzburg Festival, recorded on a two-disc Nonesuch set released two weeks ago, slated to inaugurate Orange County’s Eclectic Orange Festival in Costa Mesa this very weekend. Mark Swed‘s words from his review of the Salzburg premiere, ”. . . glorious, inspiring . . .,“ fly high on the promotional banners. The very title is calculatedly awesome; if you read the press releases, and the composer’s own invocation, the urge to kneel while listening becomes virtually irresistible. Resistance, however, might be worth the effort.

First, those words: Requiem we already know; Bardo and Nirmanakaya are the Buddhist in-between state and the state of enlightened spiritual rebirth, respectively. In its 12 movements, running just under 100 minutes, a chorus, a children‘s chorus, five vocal soloists and a large orchestra deal with a vast assortment of text fragments from, among other sources, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, aboriginal and African chants, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit and indigenous languages, tracing the trajectory of life from pre-Creation to the Apocalypse and beyond. The text reads wonderfully: an amorous fragrance that spans the passions of Hebrew and Bengali, or a Greek vision of Paradise blending into the Hindi. Everything is translated into English, which is the first mistake; it turns a multicolored text into doggerel.

And everything is translated into music by Philip Glass, which is the second mistake. It all melts, alas, into the steady, lukewarm flow of cloying, diatonic harmonic sequences, riding above the obsessive throb of the hemiolas (da-DAH-DAH-da) that are by now the Glassiest of all his tired devices. I have sat enthralled through five complete performances of Einstein on the Beach (at the Met and the Brooklyn Academy) and would gladly do another five; the strength — and, above all, the variety — of this music was and remains spellbinding. Twenty-five years later I hear from Glass — in this new work and in most of his recent output — only tired formulas, undeniably pretty but also pretty blah. There are a few strong moments in this Fifth Symphony, when the solo vocalists rise above the choral muck and provide a momentary wave of contrapuntal energy; one or two of the solo songs might enjoy a life on their own, but they don’t last long. Believe me, I have nothing but envy for those blessed with the power to derive their own Nirmanakaya from this greatly hyped, splendidly packaged new product from the Glass assembly line.

I have nothing but envy, as well, for the sharers of communal ecstasy at Royce Hall Sunday before last, the sellout crowd that whooped and hollered and cheered at the playing of Evgeny Kissin, demanding and being granted encores up the bazooty, probably cheering still. It was 10 years, almost to the day, since the dour Russian with the major hair, then 18, electrified his first American audience at Carnegie Hall — and if he hasn‘t fulfilled the extravagant expectations of that time, he hasn’t wilted away, either, like all those Cliburn contest winners. Who among pianists packs ‘em in these days? Perahia, Pollini, Argerich maybe, Volodos any day now — and Kissin: slim pickings against the current overstock of machine-made teenage violinists.

The fingers were all there that night, and the piano — not Kissin’s much-publicized instrument, not UCLA‘s own, but a local rental — was properly responsive and resonant. But responsive — that’s what I missed through long stretches at this concert. It doesn‘t bother me all that much that Kissin’s way of greeting an audience is to glower like a headwaiter at a client who‘s just requested ketchup. What matters more is the suspicion that he greets his music in the same manner. Beethoven’s ”Tempest“ Sonata went past like the wind; there was none of the fantasy in the first movement, where the piano seems almost to speak in coherent and passionate sentences. I heard impressive fingerwork in Schumann‘s Carnaval, but waited in vain for the smaller portraits in the work — Chiarina, Estrella or Coquette — to wink out at me as Schumann meant them to do. The Brahms F-minor Sonata, its four gnarled, cranky movements clustered around the one exquisite Andante, served Kissin, as expected, as a five-course banquet, and at the end there were bonbons for one and all: Liszt, Chopin, an Albeniz tango and the pure marzipan of half a dozen Johann Strauss waltzes played simultaneously.

Next morning I succumbed to the urge to rerun Richter, the Enigma, Bruno Monsaingeon’s marvelous film (on Warner Music Vision) about Kissin‘s illustrious countryman, the late Sviatoslav Richter, full of wisdom both in the great pianist’s playing and in his reminiscences. I thought back to hearing Richter at Carnegie Hall in 1960, his first time in New York, where, like Kissin 30 years later, he had arrived preceded by ecstatic word of mouth and long lines at the box office. Will Kissin grow into the kind of poetic insights that established Richter as a supremely wise and cherishable musician? Or will he be content to let his fingers do the walking, as they do so remarkably already? Man or machine? For all its irresistible flash, Kissin‘s concert was about wheels going around, which — as in the somewhat similar case of Philip Glass’ new symphony, come to think of it — is not exactly what I think of as music.

Certain performances go beyond mere greatness; they serve to define both the music and the act of perceiving it. This is, of course, a personal matter; you cherish your list of defining events, and I cherish mine. I can never hear Mahler‘s Das Lied von der Erde without the remembered presence of Kathleen Ferrier as she sang it at Carnegie Hall in her American debut in January 1948. The Seventh Symphony of Dvorak is, for me, forever anchored to Carlo Maria Giulini’s performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on a Sunday afternoon in October 1979. I can‘t imagine any time in the future when I will hear Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire without the memory of the way Phyllis Bryn-Julson performed it on the Southwest Chamber Music program at the Norton Simon Museum Theater two weekends ago.

That Bryn-Julson is of that hardy band of new-music conquerors is, of course, no longer news. Recordings — Boulez, Schoenberg, but not nearly enough — confirm her awesome gifts. Like Jan De Gaetani and Phyllis Curtin before her, and alongside today‘s remarkable Susan Narucki, she has that marvelous ability to find and project the melodic shape in the most fearsome, jagged vocal line; to vest that melody, furthermore, with stunning immediacy through a flawless command of the rare art of vocal insinuation. In addition to the aforementioned heroines, another of Bryn-Julson’s companions in my personal pantheon has to be the gloriously insinuating Ella Fitzgerald.

Schoenberg‘s moonstruck masterpiece retains its newness. Bryn-Julson didn’t so much sing the music — with its dazzling, intricate intermix of speech, song and the infinity of gradations in between — as carry it into a whole new dimension. She became the moon-possessed idiot of the haunted poetry, her whole body agonized within the ”thrice-seven“ straitjackets of Albert Giraud‘s obsessive versifications. The five Southwest players bathed her remarkable presence in an ethereal wash of color: now the moonlight-silver of Dorothy Stone’s flute, now the blood-red of Jim Foschia‘s bass clarinet. Eighty-eight years after it scared the daylights out of its first audience, Pierrot Lunaire in a superior performance can still be a transforming experience; this one was.

Southwest is one of our more curious musical assets. Its programs — nine this season — are adventurous, a nice blend of familiar and middle-distance challenging. This year’s concerts are in the small, charming, newly restored theater at the Norton Simon — unused since William Kraft put on new-music concerts there 25 years ago — and at the Colburn School‘s Zipper Auditorium, which has turned into one of the city’s best places to hear small-scale music. Southwest has brought out a 12-CD box of its new-music performances, including 25 world premieres, and the list of names is impressive.

But Southwest has also been known to overreach, and I‘ve heard performances — standard repertory and new — that should never have been wished on a paying audience. This first program began with Darius Milhaud’s own smaller version (strings and piano) of his fragrant, jazz-drenched La Creation du Monde, which in this reduced version can still be made to fizz, but which the players this time turned into minor-league Faure. A charming trifle by Kraft made partial amends, and the Pierrot Lunaire, of course, saved the show. Southwest evenings haven‘t always been that lucky.

The new season zooms into shape. Just around the corner from the Norton Simon at Pasadena’s attractive Neighborhood Church, Gloria Cheng began the seventh season of Piano Spheres a few days before in a replay of the fabulous recital she gave at Ojai last summer. Music by Olivier Messiaen was at its core: short character pieces with a veritable impasto of piano color. Around them was music claiming Messiaen as ancestor and spiritual essence: works by France‘s Tristan Murail and by England’s enfant terrible (and enfant merveilleux) Thomas Ades. At the end came Jonathan Harvey‘s remarkable Tombeau de Messiaen, for piano and tape, which seemed to extend Messiaen’s already lavish color spectrum into another dimension. Wonderful, ecstatic playing it was, of music that itself touched upon ecstasy and communicated much of same to the large, ecstatic crowd.

The next night, across town in the Bing Theater at the County Museum, the Italian flutist Roberto Fabbriciani played music by compatriots, most of it for flute involved in one way or another with electronic enhancement. Like his countryman the great bassist Stefano Scodanibbio (another frequent participant in the County Museum‘s music making), Fabbriciani has earned his fame dreaming up new contexts for his old instrument; the playing was phenomenal, even when the uses to which it was put were less so. One of the composers, Nicola Sani, was also listed as ”sound director.“ One or two of the works really did intermingle the live flute with its electronic surroundings: the Passacaglia by Aldo Clementi in which the soloist seemed to sink into a writhing mass of flute sounds and then emerge for a sporadic blast; and a gloriously rich late work by Luigi Nono in which bass flute and processed sound were participants in each other’s music making. In other works, including a dizzying Cadenza by Ennio Morricone, the separation between live flute here and tape sounds there came off more like an updated version of those old Music Minus One discs.

The audience was the usual new-music-at-LACMA size: far too small. The lineup for this season teems with promise. It includes a retrospective of California-based creativity including remembrances of the early years before ”Evenings on the Roof“ became the ”Monday Evening Concerts,“ and of that hotbed up north, the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Scodanibbio will be back; so will the astonishing pianist Marino Formenti, for three concerts. I‘ve probably told you all this before, but you need reminding: these LACMA concerts are as beckoning as any musical events in this part of the planet, and God knows the price is right: a paltry $15, even less for us dodderers. Even the time is right; too many people showed up late for the 7:30 start time, so they’re back to 8. Be there.

In Japan, an estimable guidebook informs us, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is the end-of-the-year music of choice, even ahead of “Auld Lang Syne” in public affection. “Concert performances are held everywhere,” we are told, “and many amateur singers look forward to singing in these choruses. This can probably be a phenomenon peculiar to Japan.”

I would hope so. Considering the implacable demands the choral writing in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony imposes upon its singers – the curdling chromatic lines for tenors at the start, the sopranos cranked up for 10 throat-stretching bars of repeated high A’s later on – a worldwide outbreak of amateur-society Ninths around New Year’s Day (or any other time) could only result in an epidemic of nosebleeds. Shed a tear, furthermore, for the agony visited upon parents of all those amateur singers shanghaied into attending in this avalanche of holiday Ninths. They sit there for nearly 50 minutes of Beethoven’s fist-shaking orchestral music before their loved ones onstage ever get to open their mouths for Beethoven’s famous tune. Is that any way to share the joys of the New Year’s holiday? (Strange, isn’t it, how many of classical music’s Top 10 – Messiah, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Beethoven Ninth, say — derive their fame from episodes that take up only a tiny percentage of their full length.)

Yet the Ninth deserves its place in the pantheon of music’s most honored icons. Its appearance on an orchestra’s schedule is almost always as a special event: the start of the season – as with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend – or a reflection of a larger event. A year ago, having been accorded honorary sacredness for the day, it shared the Hollywood Bowl stage with the Dalai Lama in the “Festival of Sacred Music.” Its mighty brass served as Joshua’s trumpets to help blow down the Berlin Wall, with a new text for the vocal forces in the finale concocted by a latter-day Joshua, Leonard Bernstein.

At the movies it has underscored one hero’s madness (in A Clockwork Orange) and another hero’s victory over terrorists (in Die Hard). It may be one of music’s great liberating forces, but it has been an intimidating force as well. Anton Bruckner died working on his Ninth Symphony. Gustav Mahler, music’s most illustrious hypochondriac, was so terrified of embarking on his own Ninth Symphony that he tried to bamboozle the gods by giving it another name – The Song of the Earth. Its shadow even falls upon modern audio technology: The planners of the compact disc, so the story goes, took an 80-minute Wilhelm Furtwängler recording of the Ninth as the optimum length for the new product. (Be glad it wasn’t the Benjamin Zander recording, which clocks in at 58.)

Beethoven, the Man Who Freed Music . . . Beethoven and the Voice of God . . . Beethoven, Life of a Conqueror . . . The bookshelves bulge with salivating adulations. Anyone familiar with Bach’s St. Matthew or St. John Passion, the Messiah or Mozart’s Don Giovanni might question the notion that music lay in some kind of bondage awaiting Beethoven’s liberating hand. Even so, just the contrast between the real-life antisocial alcoholic Beethoven and the genius Beethoven whose inner voices penetrated his deafness and produced the Ninth Symphony – and its eight predecessors (plus quartets, sonatas, etc.) – has raised a monumental accumulation of fact and fantasy that must needs resound in larger-than-life language: thus, “liberator,” “messiah,” “conqueror.” Now approaching its own two-century mark, the Beethoven foofaraw remains grander and noisier than a comparable encrustation around any other figure in the arts before or since (Elvis possibly excepted). An early surviving review describes the Second Symphony as “a crass monster, a hideously writhing wounded dragon.” It dates from 1804, and we might as well hail its uncredited Viennese ——–
AUTHOR as the founder of a Beethoven industry that has continued uninterrupted ever since.

None of the above is meant, of course, as belittlement; even when winnowed out from the centuries of superheated music-appreciationese, the Ninth is one of those imponderable acts of daring that light up the artistic landscape all too seldom, sharing the top shelf with such other imponderables as Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, Shakespeare’s King Lear and, yes, Beethoven’s own Eroica. A liberating force? That can be argued; yet I don’t know another work of art that so vigorously flings open a window of possibility for all the art that was to follow. The greatest testimony to the stature of the Beethoven Ninth resounds in the galaxy of later works, some of them masterpieces and some not, whose direction was clearly affected by occurrences in this work.

Start at the beginning. According to the Classical ideal, exemplified in 104 different ways by that many Haydn symphonies, or 41 ways by Mozart, a proper symphonic first movement begins with a clear and memorable theme in a clearly defined key. Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony hits you immediately with the F-majorness of its first grand, swinging tune. The Ninth, however, starts on a distant planet: a faint throbbing that could be in any number of keys, with a theme that takes shape somewhere out in space, one note at a time. Long after Beethoven, that way of starting a big piece of music – out in Nowhere-land, mystery-drenched, rumbling into shape only gradually – became entrenched in the language of high Romanticism: most of Mahler, all of Bruckner, Wagner’s Ring.

Beethoven’s first theme is its own kind of miracle. It crashes in on you, out of the mists of uncertainty, like the Titanic‘s iceberg, massive and gruff. Later, it splits apart in wondrous ways: now halting and melancholy, now a horn solo like a distant benediction. Midway in the first movement, its fragments knock against one another and, with terrific energy, coalesce once more in a recapitulation both sardonic and triumphant. The interweave of counterpoints – close at hand, in the middle distance and afar – is staggering; time and again you have to remind yourself that all this incredible detail is the fashioning of a mortal totally and tragically deaf. At the movement’s end, Beethoven’s incomparable theme pulls itself once more out of a mumbling, eerie blackness and hurls itself against us, against the gods.

In that multilayered, deliriously pregnant theme, so classic and so suggestive, lies the first of the Ninth’s many greatnesses. During its creation, Beethoven toyed with another last movement, a purely orchestral “tragedy” that later became the finale of the A-minor String Quartet. The epic challenges of the first movement, he eventually realized, and their continuation in the demon dances of the second movement and the fragile serenities of the third, demanded another kind of resolution. While the chorus still cools its heels onstage, another fierce battle rages in the orchestra as, among themselves, the players review, discuss and reject everything they have performed in the last 50 or so minutes. It’s a strange drama; confronted with, and having rejected, the fragmented reminders of the symphony’s terrific opening, the demonic scherzo and the seraphic slow movement, the orchestra falls in instead behind the simple, folkish D-major tune that, to many admirers, is the Beethoven Ninth, the way the “Tonight We Love” tune is the Tchaikovsky Concerto.

“Enough of this,” the solo baritone proclaims (in words by Beethoven himself), and everybody joins in a final 20 minutes of joyous, declarative, tonsil-wrecking working out of the sweet little tune. By itself this final movement – the most famous part of the Beethoven Ninth, the part all the folks have been waiting for – is an overcomposed, clumsy essay in variation technique whose most delicious moment happens when the music stops – the colossal fart from the contrabassoon out of darkness, just before the tenor solo, after the chorus has yelled itself hoarse in the first of several climactic anticlimaxes.

If this finale deserves exceptional acclaim, it has been so ordained by what came before. In those first three movements, longer by themselves than any of Beethoven’s earlier complete symphonies, a challenge has been thrown down: to what must then happen to bring this one work safely home, and to the directions music might take in its future. Both ways, the challenge has been handsomely met.

Photo by Peter Mountain

First there was the promise: “Operalia,” Plácido Domingo’s contest teeming with enough spectacular young singing talent to run half a dozen opera companies. Then there was fulfillment: Aïda at long last, imperfectly sung but strongly led; Wagner at long last, heaven-sent. Then came the reward: big money allocated by philanthropist Alberto Vilar with wisdom and enthusiasm, lavish enough to stand as a declaration of restored faith in an art where crises of faith have become a way of life. This all happened in little more than a week, earlier this month, during which Domingo staked out the Los Angeles Opera as his empire grand beyond expectations – even beyond hopes. Peter Hemmings had laid the company’s foundations 15 years ago, and, even with a wobble here and there, they have held firm. Now they have been spectacularly built upon.

There had been reasons to question the L.A. Opera’s destiny under its new artistic director, and some of them have been expressed on this page from time to time. History has not been kind to superstar performers recast in management roles, in opera and in other fields as well. Domingo’s first major moves here since taking office, as noted in not one but two press conferences a couple of weeks ago, have been particularly shrewd in addressing some of the most-discussed company weaknesses in the Hemmings years. One concerns holes in the repertory, and so the 2001-02 season starts by filling two of them: the company’s first-ever Russian opera, Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame, once before promised but dropped, followed a week later by Lohengrin to cancel out a hitherto inadequate attention to Wagner’s music dramas. Another concerns the lack of a consistently strong podium; and so superconductor Valery Gergiev, czar of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky (a.k.a. Kirov) Opera and of points west, will lead the Tchaikovsky opera, and the splendid Kent Nagano – the company’s new principal conductor – will lead the Wagner.

On the whole, the next season as announced, and the snippets of ensuing seasons that have been allowed to leak out, promise a higher measure of enterprise than in the recent past – in some ways better balanced than the high-adventure programming of the first years under Hemmings, and in some ways not. (Where’s the Janácek?) Credit Domingo with the awareness that his own starry presence – on the stage, on the podium, or on the rostrum at fund-raisers – will enable a certain amount of innovation, even if taken one step at a time, as in the one-performance-only Moses und Aron on next year’s agenda.

Inevitably, the majority of the upcoming repertory is in shared productions with companies in Madrid, the Kirov, Paris, Berlin, wherever. This is one of opera’s current realities; no house, not even the Met or La Scala, can survive without sharing. But if one announced production, the George Lucas–designed Ring of the Nibelung planned for 2003-04, comes in as spectacular as it promises, it will define the uniqueness of Los Angeles opera for all time. Why else do the Ring, in these times of only so-so singing talent, unless from the hands of Lucas and his Industrial Light and Magic wizards? Isn’t this the final proof of what we already suspect, that the whole of Star Wars is basically the reaffirmation of Wagner’s grandiose creation, and of the legends that guided his hand? Eat your hearts out, Seattle and Bayreuth; this is where the Ring belongs, where the “total artwork” of Wagner’s dreams took shape on storyboard and sound stage.

The Kirov connection is fascinating. It was baptized in no uncertain terms in the Wagner concert that capped the first week of local opera: complete acts from Die Walküre and Parsifal with Domingo as both Siegmund and Parsifal, respectable supporting casts, and Gergiev’s wild and wonderful Kirov Orchestra brought over for the event, its bronzed resonance a virtual mirror of the state of Domingo’s voice these days. Domingo has edged into Wagner for several years; his German vowels have a decidedly Mediterranean cast, but the ardor in both roles – opera’s most illustrious nincompoops – was genuine and moving. No casts have yet been announced for next season, but I wouldn’t count on Domingo’s not taking on a Lohengrin or two. He’s entitled.

Both Los Angeles and St. Petersburg will bask in Alberto Vilar’s fabulous benefice: $24 million to underwrite new productions – opera and, for the Kirov, ballet – as well as touring and young-artist training programs. Vilar is 59, of Cuban-American background, founder and head of New York’s Amerindo Investment Advisors, an arts patron on a scale that I thought had gone out of style, benefactor of nearly every opera company you can name plus the Vilar Center for the Arts in Beaver Creek, Colorado. An eyebrow or two might be raised at the notion of two major performing forces on opposite sides of the planet being heavily bankrolled from funds out of somewhere midway between the two. I would hope that one result of this magnanimity would be an increase in local support, as the L.A. Opera’s cultural relevance is strengthened under its new management. It’s fun to read reviews of brand-new operas at Salzburg financed by the Los Angeles patron Betty Freeman; it would be even more fun to read that the L.A. Opera’s newfound enterprise might also merit her support. It has never made sense to me, furthermore, how little, or how misguidedly, the Hollywood crowd has participated in opera production over the years. With a Lucas Ring on the far horizon, plus William Friedkin and Maximilian Schell among next season’s announced directors, some kind of entente might well be in the works.

Domingo cornered me one day, during a break in the “Operalia” competition. My negativism toward some of his moves with the company had hurt, he said; it was time to start thinking positively. Well, okay; but Domingo doesn’t need the critics to write his publicity, and I still think last season’s La Rondine was a mistake, and a scary one at that. Right now my positive feelings toward the company – after the far horizons revealed by this month’s announcements, the extraordinary level of talent displayed by the top contenders at “Operalia” (the best of them, by the way, clustered around age 26 and therefore well enough along to rank as finished artists rather than merely promising kids) and the brassy-bronze glories of Gergiev’s conducting – have raised my hopes as high as at any time since the company started. A few months ago I was lunched by Edgar Baitzel, the company’s artistic administrator, who tickled my expectations with promises of a Ring and Moses und Aron and Gergiev. I wrote it off at the time as pie in the sky. Now that pie is on the table, à la mode.

Finally Aida, worth the wait if not quite worth the weight. The auspices are splendid: the 15th opening night for a company that some had predicted wouldn’t reach its second; the inaugural effort for a new artistic director, and, for him at least, an unqualified success.

Aida is not the grandest of Verdi‘s grandissimo operas; I hold Un Ballo in Maschera as worthier of that acclaim. Still, it has a certain iconic quality above the rest: the archetypal Italian romantic opera, the one that promises both love duet and elephants. In Los Angeles it has been buffeted by the fates to a ludicrous degree since its last real performance here (by the San Francisco Opera in 1964). Often announced, just as often canceled, it has been the toy project of hopeful but hopeless producers. I still have the T-shirt from one press conference announcing an upcoming Aida at the Coliseum; it was held, logically enough, at the Egyptian Theater, and there were a live camel, an elephant and, if memory serves, a giraffe tethered outside.

Our new Aida contents itself with plastic elephants, proscenium-high. The production comes in from Houston, where I saw it in 1987 at the opening of that city’s Wortham Opera Center (followed the next night by the world premiere of Nixon in China — some weekend!). It shows its age in a tattered seam here and there, but it is nicely lit, and the Nile Scene remains a thing of extraordinary beauty. It is the work of Pier-Luigi Pizzi, the first setting by him to show here; the stark, monumental lines and the imaginative use of verticality are representative of the great Pizzi settings I‘ve seen elsewhere.

Unfortunately, these designs are not well-used at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Perhaps they couldn’t be; given the pair of cubically overendowed leading singers that has been wished upon him, it is probably the better part of valor for director Stephen Pickover to fall back on the old stand-and-deliver blocking that once passed for operatic acting. It does, however, inject a note of dreariness into surroundings that deserve better. Daniel Pelzig‘s choreography fulfills the hootchy-kootch that Verdi’s music, alas, demands (I can never witness an Aida ballet without summoning the name of Albertina Rasch from my earliest moviegoing memories). But this time, at least, there was also a terrific acrobatic moment in the Triumphal Scene, with swords and leaps and gold-lame boxer shorts.

And, oh yes, there is also the singing. I have had reason to admire Deborah Voigt in the past — her Sieglinde last year in San Francisco, her new EMI disc of Wagner duets with Placido Domingo. But there was no Aida in her voice the other night, no throb or heartbreak, none of the seduction in her duet with Radames that could get people to listen rather than look: loud and pretty in tone, but not the tragic heroine, one of Verdi‘s most powerful creations, whom we have known and been made to love in the past. Her Radames, South Africa’s Johan Botha, was of similar volume (audible and visible). The night was carried, however, by the impressive Amneris of Nina Terentieva — although, as with her Azucena two years ago, she took a scene or two to find the proper pitch — and the eloquent Amonasro of Simon Estes.

Eloquent, too, is the word for Domingo‘s musical guidance throughout the long evening — the best conducting I have yet heard from his baton, a shaping and a pacing formed out of regard for the music itself and for its singers. If Domingo has, indeed, outgrown his splendid Radames of times past — a role he truly owned not so long ago — he proved in this most promising performance on the podium that he still has something to contribute to the work itself.

Two nights later came La Cenerentola, opera neither grand nor iconic, but standing tall in its own class and, more to the point, a sheer delight. As Rossini’s comedies go, perhaps The Barber of Seville is subtler, and The Italian Girl in Algiers juicier, but this delirious gloss on the Cinderella story has more bubbles, and the fizz at last week‘s performance was everywhere apparent. I can see purists climbing the walls and screaming “heresy” at Thor Steingraber’s production, and beside his splendid Figaro and CapuletsMontagues, this one is something of a mess — but an endearing one. The time is everytime; Cinderella‘s rotten sisters sport their Victorian ball gowns around a kitchen table right out of IKEA (perhaps bearing the label “schlumpf”); the chorus, apparently determined to get in everybody’s way, comes bounding out of closets and from under banquet tables. The lighting cues shift constantly, sometimes with every downbeat. Perhaps someone at the L.A. Opera believes in overkill as the way to produce Rossinian comedies; at least compared to the 1996 Italian Girl, this one is positively monastic. In any case, I laughed a lot.

Jennifer Larmore is the Cinderella, splendidly in command of the bristling difficulties that are the delight and the terror of this music. I do find her work somewhat cold; I‘m spoiled by Cecilia Bartoli, who has the command plus the power to enchant. What I miss mostly in Larmore is whatever is encompassed by the term “winsome.” In the mostly American cast, baritones Richard Bernstein and Rodney Gilfry walk off with the honors, as they usually do; tenor Kurt Streit, a little dry of voice, is close behind. The Italian basso buffo Simone Alaimo brings in an alien element in more ways than one; his eyeball-rolling, lip-smacking delivery of his big patter songs is of the old school, where singing the notes as written is of minor importance. Gabriele Ferro’s conducting is merely okay.

So are Riccardo Hernandez‘s sets: a hovel for Cinderella and family, angled like something out of Caligari’s cabinet, a ballroom into which snow is falling — while the chorus sings of birds. Never mind; Rossini‘s marvelous music transcends mere earthly frailties. I had a ball.