So I've Heard

By late August, most of my crack-pot enthusiasm about the Hollywood Bowl and its contents has worn pretty thin. On Tuesday of last week, for example, I took it as a reprieve that the day of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony dawned chill and rainy; could the Powers That Be have read my mind on the subject, lavished their watery benefice upon my unwatered rosebush and granted my overwatered ears a night‘s surcease? But no; despite my impassioned rain dances and the pleading from my parched Rosa mutabilis, the clouds were gone by teatime, duty sounded its usual summons, and I found myself by day’s end making the customary common cause with 5,200 or so of the faithful.

Here, however, my sad tale takes a curious twist, because the music makers of the Los Angeles Philharmonic delivered one helluva Fourth to those aforementioned burdened ears of mine that night, a performance — under the knowing baton of visiting conductor Leonid Grin — that turned Tchaikovsky‘s spavined warhorse into a flashing, swift steed, dazzling in color and power. It was the kind of restorative (of the music and its hearers) that, without anything changed or distorted in this well-worn score, caused familiar moments to resound like first-time discoveries, turned simpering tunesmanship into outpourings from the heart, and whipped up a fine brass-tinted froth at the end that made my few remaining hair roots positively tingle. The first-desk wind players — oboist David Weiss, clarinetist Michele Zukovsky and bassoonist David Breidenthal — translated their many solos into something close to poetry. And while it sounds like adolescent gush, one of the hoariest cliches in the critic’s phrase book, I had the feeling that I was hearing the Tchaikovsky Fourth, if not for the first time, at least for the first time in a new way. (I have to note that one of the lesser scribes from the Times in attendance that night was of a different mind — if mind isn‘t too strong a word — but that’s his problem.)

Leonid Grin has been here before: last year as a replacement at an indoor Philharmonic concert, where he took on and mastered a tough assignment — the Shostakovich 15th, which he was learning at first sight — and in the early 1980s as one of the conducting fellows in the much-mourned Philharmonic Institute. He currently heads the San Jose Symphony, where, I am told, he is doing just fine. My words last year for his Shostakovich performance — solid, properly proportioned, beautifully balanced — are appropriate once again. His program this time also included Shostakovich: the first of the two violin concertos, with the orchestra‘s concertmaster, Martin Chalifour, as the reserved but eloquent soloist; and the delightfully trashy Festival Overture, music designed to gladden Stalin’s heart, but which worked pretty well on mine as well. (I hope, by the way, that you caught the Sunday New York Times of August 20, with Irina Shostakovich‘s earnest and passionate refutation of Solomon Volkov’s Testimony, his highly suspect concocted ”memoir“ of her tormented husband‘s struggles against the Stalinist oppression that continued long after Stalin’s death.)

The much-loved Kurt Sanderling, who guest-led the Philharmonic many times during the 1980s, had been close to Shostakovich, and delivered a performance here of the Fifth Symphony that remains, on a deviously obtained tape, my favorite way of hearing this well-worn score. Sanderling‘s son Stefan, another alumnus of the Philharmonic Institute and a fast-rising figure on the European orchestral landscape, had taken on the preceding week’s Bowl concerts, and I can‘t entirely blame him for my feeling that neither concert challenged the best he could offer.

If ever a piece has outlived its usefulness, Gustav Holst’s The Planets is surely that piece. In simpler, happier times, when there were still new planets to be found within our solar system, and H.G. Wells was inventing his genteel brand of sci-fi fantasy, a pretty orchestral celebration of the spirit of interplanetary exploration might have scored points, especially with Holst‘s wordless chorus mysticus to intone celestial evocations at the end. Along came Star Wars, and smart promoters — our own Zubi among them — invented clever light-show productions to go along with Holst’s score, indoors and out, that could take people‘s minds off the dreariness of the music. At the Bowl, however, without any such visual props to buttress the mystical otherworldly warblings, The Planets of Gustav Holst added up to an hour dull beyond redemption. Before, on this first of Sanderling’s two concerts, had come Elgar‘s Cello Concerto, a work with far more to say (in half the time) and with the Philharmonic’s recently retired principal cellist Ron Leonard to say it simply, elegantly and beautifully.

Two nights later there was neither elegance nor beauty, in a program that called out for those qualities above all: waltzes and waltz songs by several composers named Strauss, related or not, plus one named Lehar, deflated by the orchestra and flung forth by the evening‘s soloist with all the lightness of a collapsed souffle. A suite of orchestral bits from nonrelated Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier began it, an overextended, leaden affair in which most of the opera‘s best waltz tunes (e.g., the ”Breakfast Waltz“ of Act 1 and the ”Nein, nein . . .“ waltzes of Act 3) had been omitted in favor of a few unsung orchestral versions of vocal numbers.

Then came the evening’s soloist, the Korean soprano Sumi Jo, whose presence had brought out a huge compatriot crowd but who serenaded those admirers with singing cold, inflexible and just plain unloving — this in such lovable material as the ”Vilja-Song“ from The Merry Widow and the ”Laughing Song“ from Die Fledermaus. At the L.A. Opera, I admired Sumi Jo for her Queen of the Night but deplored her lack of identity as Lucy of Lammermoor. This time neither she, nor Sanderling‘s frequent resorting to shifts of tempo in a vain attempt to simulate the famous Viennese lilt, came within miles of the high-class schmaltz the program had promised on paper. By intermission’s end, for the first time in many seasons, I too was no longer within miles — of the Bowl, that is.

To my generation of budding musicologists, ardently perusing the heavily footnoted scholarly literature on Bach and Before, Dave Brubeck was the bridge to What Lay Beyond, the first jazz performer we could listen to and still preserve our self-respect. Himself a composer with serious credentials, a prize student of the formidable Darius Milhaud in the 1940s at Oakland’s Mills College, Brubeck composed and proposed a new kind of jazz, respectable as none of the popular arts had been hitherto. It had — for God‘s sake! — counterpoint. It snaked along in rhythms and meters that only the most abstruse masters had practiced. It even Took Five, and bragged about it in its title. Milhaud himself, decades before, when jazz was the latest thing on the block, had broached the notion of dolling up the new arrival in matching socks and escorting it over the bridge to the “serious” side; his jazz-infused “ballet negre,” La Creation du Monde, remains one of the 20th century’s seminal works, as much for its quality as for the alliance across the bridge that it implied.

One year Milhaud‘s composition seminar consisted of eight students; they first called themselves the Jazz Workshop Ensemble, but in 1949 they recorded on the Fantasy label as the Dave Brubeck Octet. By the mid-’50s, out beyond the walls of academe, the Octet had shrunk to its enduring classical shape, as the Dave Brubeck Quartet — Brubeck on piano, Paul Desmond on alto, drummer Joe Morello and bassist Eugene Wright; they played college towns for the most part, and on most nights you couldn‘t get near the place. When Brubeck came to the Hollywood Bowl a couple of weeks ago with his latest quartet, Eugene Wright also sat in on a couple of numbers, and the years just fell away.

Never mind that the very smartness of Brubeck’s music (much of it actually Desmond‘s music) raised suspicious eyebrows in the realm of “pure” jazz; he also carried the curse of West Coast–ness, while the East Coast nurtured its own jazz intelligentsia — the MJQ. Gary Giddins’ recent Visions of Jazz, the best jazz overview I know, brackets Brubeck with the “popularizers” Wynton Marsalis and Paul Whiteman — thereby also handing out lumps to Gunther Schuller‘s scholarly Early Jazz, whose hero by and large seems to be Whiteman. Giddens may be right; I only write about what I like.

All I know is that Brubeck’s half of that Hollywood Bowl program, with the old boy just a few months short of 80, was more than just beautiful; it had the kind of inventive freedom and vitality that had hooked me on his music nearly half a century ago. Its strength was all the more appealing after the program‘s first half, in which the Bowl’s resident Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra delivered tidy, dead musical packages that even the trick virtuosity of guest trumpetertrombonist flugelhornist (sometimes all at once) James Morrison couldn‘t bring to life. Brubeck’s current group — with drummer Randy Jones, bassist Alec Dankworth (John and Cleo‘s kid), Bobby Militello on winds — offered a fine, varied program, including a couple of new pieces not yet named and, at the end, a great zoom through Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” with Eugene Wright also onboard. One of my vivid memories from that night, however, was the simple, elegant beauty of Brubeck‘s piano in a sentimental old standard called “All My Love,” floating, floating under a full moon, conquering the noise-afflicted air of Cahuenga Pass not with noise but with near silence.

New on the job, Esa-Pekka Salonen confessed to me several years ago, on these very pages, that the music of J.S. Bach was still for him a dark area awaiting discovery. A new Sony CD with the Los Angeles Philharmonic suggests that he has entered this territory, but along a strange and tortuous path: via the orchestral transcriptions inflicted upon several of Bach’s works — for keyboard or chamber ensemble — by self-proclaimed if misguided Bachmeisters of generations past. Salonen‘s program, some of which figured in a Bowl concert a year or so ago, includes the inevitable orchestral bacchanale — Leopold Stokowski’s version of the D-minor Toccata and Fugue (of Fantasia fame) — along with Arnold Schoenberg‘s well-intentioned but ponderous take on the “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue, Anton Webern’s dissection of the Ricercar from the Musical Offering, and a curious hodgepodge of movements from two of the Orchestral Suites, rescored and cobbled together by Gustav Mahler as a single work. One further travesty that‘s missing, but which I hope somebody digs out someday, is Sir Henry J. Wood’s version of the D-minor TF, with full percussion section — which that other dedicated Bachian, Arturo Toscanini, used to perform but which needs recording of the quality that Sony‘s engineers have accorded Salonen on his new disc.

As a documentation of Bach envisioned by bygone musicians, Salonen’s disc has its value, and his performances are clear and properly robust. Surely we are inundated these days with Bach-anniversary recordings from all imaginable points along the authenticity spectrum. My latest favorite, by the way, is John Eliot Gardiner‘s Archiv disc of two cantatas for Easter, Nos. 6 and 66, performed by Gardiner’s own group the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists. There is an astounding moment in the opening chorus of No. 66, a chromatic, twisting setting of the words “mourning, fear and timorous hesitation,” that‘ll knock your socks off; an equally strange duet later on, for countertenor and tenor, gives the ultimate lie to the image of stodgy old Bach in his dusty organ loft. I’m not always fond of Gardiner‘s slick, dancing phrasing, but this new disc is close to heavenly.

Sony has also been kibbling, remastering and reissuing its own particular Bach treasure, the legacy of Glenn Gould performances recorded over the span from the 1955 “Goldberg” Variations to the same work 26 years later. The latest issue, a two-disc “best of” collection consisting mostly of kibbles and bits, would be unworthy of notice except that the second disc also contains about half an hour of CD-ROM (Mac or PC) featuring Gould at work on several sections of The Art of the Fugue not included on the previous laserdisc release. This is truly fascinating: the fingers, the massive, troubled countenance and, of course, the groaning accompaniment from deep inside, drawing out of the uncomplaining piano a full range of wisdom and fantasy, surging upward from both the music and the musician.

The best operatic performance I’ve seen this year took place not in Los Angeles, Long Beach or Costa Mesa, but in Santa Barbara. There, since 1947, the Music Academy of the West has topped its summer festival with some kind of staged production involving the services of the Academy‘s students, faculty and an occasional guest. I didn’t think I‘d ever enjoy opera more than at last summer’s production of Handel‘s Rodelinda, and perhaps I won’t. But the Ariadne auf Naxos two weekends ago came close.

Richard Strauss for people who don‘t like Richard Strauss: Ariadne is a treacherous bag of tricks, a series of stylistic collisions that plays for laughs but also touches upon profound matters of artistic conscience. Read the history of great artworks purposefully mutilated to gain public acceptance — Mozart adding laff numbers to Don Giovanni to appease the Viennese; Orson Welles acquiescing to murderous cuts in his Magnificent Ambersons — and you know the miseries visited on the Composer in the Prologue, who must make room in his Ariadne tragedy for the troupe of comedians the patron has also engaged. In Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto, the Composer appears only in the Prologue, but in Santa Barbara, stage director Chas Rader-Shieber had the good idea of leaving him onstage during the ensuing opera as well, silently delighting in the tragic moments, tortured during the rest: a small point perhaps, but an intelligent and likable touch.

The production was on the cheap but blissfully adequate — no rocky and cavernous Island of Naxos itself, merely what might have been the rich patron‘s own parlor, with enough doors and mirror panels to allow for entrances and exits. Randall Behr, whose take on other Strauss operas I have been known to deplore, led a beautifully balanced performance, reaching deep into Strauss’ iridescent score to shape lovely, soaring melodic lines, pacing the work so that even the final Bacchus-Ariadne duet, which can be torture, didn‘t overstay its welcome this once. Liesel Fedkenheuer was the passionate, extraordinarily moving Composer; Karen Wierzba sailed with remarkable ease in the stratosphere of Zerbinetta’s music; Heidi Bieber‘s Ariadne, with a couple of slightly strained moments, was only one or two points below this level. And old Heinz Blankenburg, whose fan I have been since his 1957 Harlequin in a San Francisco Opera Ariadne, vested the spoken role of the Major-Domo with exactly the right insidious mix of sleaze and pomposity.

Apropos sleaze . . . Only a couple of choked phrases from under Zubin Mehta’s baton and you know that in PBS‘s new video of La Traviata, which turns up Sunday night on KCET, the eloquent Verdian breath is going to be in short supply. This is another of those gadgety productions, like the Roman travelogue in the Tosca of a couple of years ago or the Aida filmed at the pyramids. This one takes place all over Paris: four scenes, four venues; I can’t wait for a Fidelio on Alcatraz. Heroine and father-in-law do their big scene while chasing each other through the woods around Versailles; the party scenes are so populated with ephebes that you expect Oscar and Bosie to show up in matching bath towels.

Argentinean tenor Jose Cura is the splendid Alfredo, a role ideal for the smooth, elegant middle of his voice. Russia‘s Eteri Gvazava, the Violetta, comes in under the pitch now and then, but I like the somewhat dark quality that works particularly well in her scenes with the elder Germont. He, alas, is the veteran Italian baritone Rolando Panerai, now 76, given to eyeball rolling to cover the notes he no longer commands. His Act 2 cabaletta has been excised, the better part of wisdom in this case. One of the two verses of Alfredo’s often-cut “Oh mio rimorso” has been left in, filmed with the camera about two inches from his nose. Has it never occurred to camerafolk that the human mouth while singing is seldom if ever a thing of beauty?

Do we need another Don Giovanni? Well, yes; I suppose that in one sense we do and always will. Even so, my current Schwann lists 20, and the one I most often retire to is the earliest of these, Glyndebourne 1936.

The latest, on Virgin Classics, is a live recording from last year‘s Aix-en-Provence festival, staged — for what that information can be worth on an audio release — by Peter Brook. Daniel Harding, the very young — 23 at the time — conductor, who has been here with the Philharmonic and at Ojai, leads what comes over as a 23-year-old’s performance. The music zips by; the singers — Peter Mattei as the Don, Veronique Gens as Elvira, Mark Padmore as Ottavio — look very young in their head shots, although no bios are included. But, as they say, speed kills, and there are times — the concerted moments most of all — when the subtlety of Mozart‘s miraculous settings of Lorenzo da Ponte’s words becomes gibberish. I have the feeling that everyone involved in this undeniably high-spirited enterprise will beg on their knees, five years from now, for another go at Don Giovanni. The question will be, will Virgin, or any other record company, still be around to grant that chance?

Meanwhile, back at the Pass: In 1993 I wrote of Enrique Diemecke, after a regular Philharmonic subscription concert, as a “flashy but self-indulgent conductor, out to establish his individuality with fancy effects and distortions unrelated to the music,” and his latest Latino program at the Hollywood Bowl didn‘t inspire me to eat those words. And now, I hear, he’s up for consideration for the Long Beach Symphony job.

Smitten with what we might as well call Virus Mauceri (except that John Mauceri‘s audience pep talks are far better), Diemecke felt called upon to slather nearly every one of the works on his program — including Revueltas’ substantial and serious Homage to Garcia Lorca — with a smear of “Look, Ma” cutenesses that included mucho jabberwock (some of it factually erroneous as well) and, during one piece, some deep knee bends that just looked stupid on a middle-aged conductor in formal getup. If there was anything noteworthy about his stint from a musical point of view, it was simply his remarkable feat in making Ravel‘s Bolero dull. Where were those helicopters when we needed them?

Phopto by Christian Steiner

There is a magical moment – one of many, actually – midway in the first movement of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. The orchestra has come through a furious battle punctuated by shrieks and howls, horrendous offbeat accents and a whole new tune that has dared to intrude in an outrageously “wrong” key (E minor – horror! – for a movement in E flat). Now, their energy spent, the players seem to rock back and forth on their heels for a moment of near silence. But a horn player grows impatient at the sudden calm, and bursts in with the main theme four bars too soon. (Beethoven’s assistant, at the first rehearsal, tried to “correct” this premature intrusion, and earned from Beethoven a stern rebuke.) It’s a glorious moment, still startling 197 years after the fact.

I have to tell you all this because, if you were at the Hollywood Bowl last week when Hans Vonk and the Los Angeles Phiharmonic gave their greatly respectable version of the “Eroica,” you didn’t hear it. With awesomely accurate timing, a small airplane cut a diagonal trajectory across the Bowl and exactly across the time frame of Beethoven’s startling innovation, obliterating that one sublime moment. Now, I defer to nobody in my rejoicing at the existence of the Hollywood Bowl. I have, in my 20 years on the local scene, smiled tolerantly at those who would applaud between movements – it’s preferable to snoring, after all – and at the occasional descent of a happily emptied wine bottle down the concrete steps. I have even been known to shrug off the intrusions into the Bowl’s air space – at least on Rachmaninoff or Richard Strauss nights – assuming that the brave souls in the LAPD’s copter squadron were hot in pursuit of desperadoes that deserved to be caught, drawn and quartered. That night, however, I was angry.

I fear that my tolerance toward the flawed amenities of Bowl-going is showing signs of wear. Some years ago the Bowl management gave me a guided tour of its battle stations: hot-line telephones to Aviation Central, radar, sworn promises from local airports in writing to warn pilots away from the area. There are searchlights that define the Bowl space, although their gleam seems to vanish into the marine layer on some nights. I haven’t checked to discover whether these fortifications are still in place; they didn’t work all that well then, and they surely don’t now. One consequence of all our lovely prosperity that I hear about in the media is that more people own planes now than ever before. Who are we, therefore, to deny all these new tycoons the pleasure of an early-evening airborne jaunt to witness the lights of Los Angeles, including the stage lights up in Cahuenga Pass? Only a gathering of cranky music lovers, numerous enough on some nights to fill three Dorothy Chandler Pavilions, in seats priced up to a hundred bucks, that’s who.

Otherwise, it’s been a superior Bowl season in the good-conduct department: Paul Daniel and Junichi Hirokami, whose praises have already graced this page; Thomas Dausgaard and Hans Vonk more recently, both particularly admirable in the meat-and-potatoes stuff. Dausgaard, a great but not at all melancholy Dane, led a knockout Brahms First on the second of his two programs: rawboned and large-scale. Just the opening salvo – fast, hard-driving, inexorable – was enough to make even the most devout anti-Brahmsian sit up straight and pay attention. The young Canadian James Ehnes delivered a tidy account of the Beethoven Violin Concerto; what I liked even more than his clean, elegant playing was the lovely blend of woodwind tone that Dausgaard had fashioned with the orchestra. His first program, I’m told, included the woeful César Franck symphony, but since my medical benefits don’t include a sanity clause, I sat that one out.

The Netherlands’ and the St. Louis Symphony’s Vonk had conducted the Philharmonic indoors in April 1999; I admired him then, and I did again last week. He cuts an ungainly figure on the podium; he looks to be on stilts not completely under control. But he makes marvelous music, a kind of throwback to the solid, European-based musicianship for which words like probity were invented. He gave us two Beethoven symphonies (the “Eroica” and, two nights later, the “Pastoral”) in exceedingly attractive, warm-hearted readings – but, alas, without the first-movement repeats that help define the stature of both works. There were amplification problems both nights that created particular pitfalls for Beethoven’s wonderful scoring: the horns overmiked, the winds poorly balanced. Worse yet, the Great Bassoon Joke in the third movement of the “Pastoral” was totally inaudible both times around.

Jaime Laredo played the Bruch G minor Concerto at Vonk’s first concert, suggesting only that both violinist and concerto cry out for pasture. Someone at the controls turned up the volume on Laredo’s violin about halfway through; that made it louder but not better. On Thursday came the inevitable, the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, with a merely okay – and far from note-perfect – delivery by Jean-Yves Thibaudet.

Back East the arrival of the seed catalogs in midwinter announces the prospect of warmer weather ahead. Out here the arrival of the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites brochure in midsummer announces the prospect of cooler weather ahead. Both publications bear the message that this is, or is trying to be, the best of worlds.

Once again, founder, artistic director and blithe spirit MaryAnn Bonino has put together an alluring parlay: 28 events – string quartets, early-music groups, jazz, Bach, kid stuff – each one in a setting as if God and the architects had first heard the music and then done the designs. There’s Union Station for jazz, the Queen Mary for a chamber orchestra, churches all over town, the glorious rotunda at the Doheny Mansion for a whole series of enchanted Fridays. Next time a visitor from beyond the mountains starts in about Los Angeles’ lack of class in the arts, MaryAnn’s brochure is what you brandish. Ask for one at (310) 954-4300, and prepare to salivate.

Anyone who attended the Glynde-bourne Festival Opera‘s 1996 production of Handel’s Theodora is probably still talking about it; the event has assumed the stature of legend. Now we all can sample its splendors; the complete performance is finally available on two cassettes from Kultur Video, priced at a heartwarmingly low 30 bucks. Its release at this time is weirdly appropriate.

Peter Sellars directed, redeeming himself with Glyndebourne‘s implacable audience after his, let’s say, curious Magic Flute set on a Los Angeles freeway. Not that Sellars set his Theodora as written, in the fourth-century pagan Rome of Thomas Morell‘s libretto; his Christian heroine and her lover Didymus suffer martyrdom in a 21st-century America where orthodoxy is defined by a right-wing militarist society and heresy is any act of believing otherwise. His thought-police march in bomber jackets and latter-day patriotic insignia, and they indulge in strange calisthenics of some unidentified significance that are, at least, fun to watch. The simple set, a row of oversize urns of undefined provenance and age, adds to the message: The tyranny and persecution that the fourth-century Romans employed to clear their streets of nonbelievers are timeless phenomena.

You couldn’t dream up a finer performing group, almost all American, by the way. William Christie conducts the elegant small ensemble known — deservedly — as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Dawn Upshaw is the Theodora, noble, pure and immensely moving; Lorraine Hunt (now Hunt-Lieberson), her companion Irene; the spectacularly gifted countertenor David Daniels is Didymus. (On the Harmonia Mundi Theodora conducted by Nicholas McGegan, Lorraine Hunt sings the title role; the experience of hearing this one-of-a-kind dramatic artist in both major roles transforms the extravagance of owning both versions into a privilege.)

The fluidity and fervor of Handel‘s great score, one of his last works and his only overtly ”Christian“ oratorio besides the Messiah, justifies the work’s being staged at all, plumbed for its eternal message and set forth at Glyndebourne as fiery, passionate human drama. Opera on video is inevitably a half-a-loaf proposition, and Theodora, be warned, runs 206 minutes. Give it to yourself, and give yourself to it.

And while we‘re on the subject of compassionate conservatism — which, in a sense, we are — consider Ned Rorem, whose music I consider paradigmatic in proving that a composer’s chosen style means less than the uses to which it is put — or, in other words, that paradigms don‘t always work. More Than a Day, the song cycle he wrote in 1995 for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on a Betty Freeman commission, has now found its way to disc; countertenor Brian Asawa is again the eloquent singer, as he was at the premiere here; Jeffrey Kahane conducts. Jack Larson’s poetry, love songs to his companion, filmmaker James Bridges, takes on a new beauty in Rorem‘s setting as a memorial after Bridges’ death. If ever ”compassion“ could take shape as music, it would be here. (With all the talk these days about major producers abandoning classical recording, this RCA disc may be another kind of memorial as well.)

Among journalists and other list makers who endure anxiety pangs when confronted with unlabeled merchandise, Rorem counts as a conservative; that can be taken to mean that his music tends not to frighten small children as do the works of the fearsome Webern or Stockhausen. Once in a while, we can rest assured, we might even come across something in his music that sounds like something else we‘ve heard. Another recent disc, on Erato, offers Susan Graham’s singing of 32 Rorem songs, settings of poems of Whitman, Tennyson, Stein, Yeats — a veritable anthology of the lyric impulse, each poet differently and memorably colored in iridescent music. The collection then becomes no less a portrait of Rorem himself, a sublimely reactive artist in a world that may not entirely deserve him.

Heiner Goebbels‘ Surrogate Cities, newly out in ECM’s usual handsome black-and-white packaging, counts as unlabeled merchandise, and all the better; I find it exhilarating, on a purely gut-grabbing level. Commissioned to celebrate the 1,200th birthday of Frankfurt, and given its first American performance at Charleston‘s Spoleto Festival last June, it is truly a work about cities. If Surrogate Cities is about anything else — and I’m still working on that — it‘s about its own energy, pounding, uncoiling, as bleak as the empty cityscape on the jacket, somehow irresistible.

An opening ”Suite for Sampler and Orchestra“ blends hard urban noises (Berlin, New York, Tokyo) into a collage of recorded voices — including one of an ancient Jewish cantor in the coloratura-falsetto manner long out of style and thus sounding as if from another world. The vocalists, David Moss and Jocelyn B. Smith, mostly sing songs about murder and the madness of cities. Peter Rundel conducts the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, with the percussion practically in your lap. The very denseness of the work’s content develops an explosive energy; you want to seek shelter, or at least stand back. It lasts about 70 minutes. When it‘s over, you’re going to need some Schubert.

Franz Schubert‘s F-minor Fantasy for piano duet was another product of that inexplicable flowering of expressive genius in his last year. My amazed discovery of that work as a student in Berkeley gave me the thesis topic of my dreams; I still cannot hear, or even think about, that F-major modulation on the third page without going all shivers. In Sunshine, one of this summer’s more commendable films, Schubert‘s Fantasy is the recurrent icon, although the actors who perform the work never make it to the man-eating fugue at the end (nor do I). But the director, Istvan Szabo, does the right thing by that modulation; it occurs only at the film’s end, when the sun truly shines.

In Time Regained, another of the summer‘s superior films, the music is truly bad, and that, too, is exactly right. Scholars usually assume that the composer Vinteuil in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is based on Saint-Saens; maybe so, in terms of the character‘s glib opportunism and prodigious musical output. But Jorge Arriagada’s film score is all slither and the rustle of silks, beyond the reach of the perpetrator of Samson et Dalila. It comes to its climax as Vinteuil‘s latest violin sonata is introduced at a belle-epoque gathering: a keenly observed, absolutely right-on parody of the worst piece of salon bathos ever to flow from the pens of the Messrs. Hahn, Samazeuilh, Duparc and their ilk. Go from that splendid film to your stereo; put on some chamber music by, say, Ernest Chausson, and try to keep a straight face. I’ll bet you can‘t.

The concert at the Getty Center two weekends ago, the second of three events this summer tied into museum exhibits, came as close to perfection as any since . . . well, since the last time I saw Michael Eagan’s Musica Angelica in performance there (Handel‘s Acis and Galatea two summers ago). Eagan and his forces were again the stars, and it was one of those nights when you could lose yourself in sensual seduction; you wanted it not to stop, ever — even if it meant missing the Getty’s last tram.

The tie-in this time was the museum‘s exhibit of illuminated pages from an early Renaissance Book of Hours, honoring the Gualenghi-d’Este, a noble family of rulers and art patrons based in Ferrara. That handsome walled city — whose inhabitants swear by salama da sugo, a curious dish of boiled salami that you eat with a spoon, a favorite of Lucrezia Borgia — had become by 1500 a major arts center rivaled only by Florence. Its composers were the greatest masters of their time, Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prez. At the Getty the plain-Jane Harold M. Williams Auditorium was made magical with slide projections of the art from the Gualenghi-d‘Este Hours, and with music mostly by those composers, elegantly sung by an eight-member ensemble, supported by a few instruments including Eagan’s lute and a lovely small organ.

Juxtaposing the music and the art of a certain period doesn‘t always work. (What artwork could you add to Beethoven’s ”Eroica“ that could in any way ”explain“ that self-sufficient music? Music, Mirror of the Arts, my book on that subject, is, I‘m happy to report, out of print.) This time it did. The fantasy in those illuminations — the tiny world of warriors, minstrels, demons and beasties wound around an initial letter in a text, spilling as doodles onto the margins of every page and ”illuminated“ with splotches of gold leaf — was exactly mirrored in the sinuous contrapuntal lines in a four-part Dufay rondeau, its harmonies on a fascinating cusp between the archaic and the tonal. At the end came the famous ”Hercules“ Mass of Josquin, which shows up in every music-history textbook because of Josquin’s trick of creating a repeating cantus firmus from the vowels of the name of Ferrara‘s Duke Hercules. It was music to float in, half an hour of radiant, devotional beauty.

Last weekend’s concert, the series‘ finale, attempted a similar tie-in, this time with the Getty’s display of Albrecht Durer‘s exquisite stained-glass designs. That, however, came nowhere close. Lucidarium, a Basel-based early-music group, turned up with a solid program of Reformation-inspired music, both secular and sacred, some of it interestingly intricate — e.g., three tunes with three texts sung simultaneously — but with the intricacy of the cuckoo clock rather than the astounding rich detail of Durer’s designs. A tendency toward stiffness, with the tenor of the ensemble conducting the whole group eins, zwei, drei, vier, merely underlined the squareness of the music itself. After an evening of sauerbraten-mit-potatoes, I found myself actually longing for more of that Ferrarese boiled salami.

This seems to be my penitential summer at the Hollywood Bowl, and my hair shirt is beginning to itch: Ein Heldenleben one week, the Rach Three the next. Pianist Lang Lang, despite his rather unpromising name, made some difference in Rachmaninoff‘s murky opus; he’s 17, still a student — but aren‘t we all? — and his lollapalooza reading deserved and earned cheers. On the podium, Junichi Hirokami shared the honors. Among the work’s many problems is its thick orchestral kasha; getting the sound of a piano through that ponderous goop needs the strength of a tractor driver no less than the skill of a 20-fingered virtuoso. With all the problems in the Bowl‘s merciless rehearsal restrictions, however, this really sounded more like a performance than a chance meeting. On his own, furthermore, the young Lang delivered a knockout performance of the first-movement cadenza; he had me wanting to listen.

No such favorable auspices were attendant on Andre Watts’ stint at the Bowl two nights before. At the relatively tender age of 54, Watts has already begun to sound depressingly like a pianist over the hill — this time, and in several recent appearances. One has to wonder: Was he ever any better, and has the cuteness and the dreamy PR of his early years simply worn off? I could not expect profound revelations from Cesar Franck‘s dopey Symphonic Variations or the Liszt Second Concerto, the two works — similar in form and musical language to the point of redundancy — that he struggled with that night. I could, however, expect some awareness that all those handfuls of notes have some relation one to another; this, despite some brave prodding from Hirokami’s eloquent baton, was nowhere evident.

I‘ve spoken my piece on Hirokami before, and happily do so again. Nowadays he’s my favorite conductor to watch, with that marvelous left arm that seems to draw the exact lines of the music in midair. Before and after the Watts performances he led the two best-known Strauss tone poems, an eager, intense Don Juan and a Till Eulenspiegel full of high-energy scamper, though both were somewhat clipped in flight on a bad horn night in the orchestra. After the Rachmaninoff was the Tchaikovsky Fifth, with the horn department recovered: a beautifully formed performance, honest if somewhat sober. We need to hear Hirokami in other repertory — a German classic or two — to fill in the picture, but so far I think of him as one of the age‘s truly good conductors.

I came to the opening night of Beyond Baroque’s Sound Festival III a stranger in a strange land, but I‘m getting used to that. The content was beyond reproach even when baffling. The space — filled on this night with the kind of all-knowing, participating, mostly young audience that opera companies and symphony orchestras dream of attracting (or should) — is one of the most valuable active arts venues in the area. That’s what Ferrara might have been like in 1500.

I wasn‘t quite all-knowing, but Lord knows I tried. Something called the Joe ColleyCrawl Unit was beyond me: a tall guy wrapped around his tableful of gadgetry, sending out audible daggers and bulldozers, never sparing an outward glance at his presumed targets. (Were we even there? Were we needed there? What about music as communication?) Kraig Grady’s retuned mallet instruments wrapped the room in a soft gossamer of indeterminate (and, alas, interminable) almost-harmony. Germany‘s Achim Wollscheid had wired the space with a network of small microphones and speakers, so that every audience move — words, breathing, perhaps a snore — got processed and sent around the room: John Cage’s 4‘33” in other words, writ large.

At the end Pauline Oliveros sat with her great zillion-button accordion, drawing out long, oozing chords that transformed the entire space, both as sight and sound, into a kind of breathing, which I could identify — for the first time, that night — as music.

Well, that was more like it. Two nights of Paul Daniel‘s conducting at the Hollywood Bowl last week were enough to bring the Philharmonic out of its opening-week funk, back to the major orchestra it can be under the right breezes.

Orchestras are tricky beasts. Gatherings as they are of highly skilled and well-paid professionals, they represent the ironic image of a well-oiled machine constantly on the brink of breakdown — of mutiny, even. Put someone on the podium who, however skilled in the fine art of relating to the public and radiating unchallengeable mastery over certain corners of the repertory, fails to interest the players in the works on their music stands, and the finest orchestra money can buy will still play like the sophomore class at Pinole High. Some few orchestras — in Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam and, not so long ago, Cleveland — have become so famous for the quality of their playing that they will maintain that standard even with the board chairman’s brother-in-law on the podium. Most, however, will not, and even the best of them can, once the leash goes slack, sound the way the Philharmonic did under Leonard Slatkin two weeks ago.

It may be that the crisp, meticulous, vivid playing the Philharmonic gave Paul Daniel, starting with Mozart‘s Figaro overture on the first of his two concerts last week, was partially intended to prove a point; in any case, it was a balm for the ears. Daniel is 42; he’s music director of London‘s lively English National Opera, where he recently conducted a much-praised production of John Adams’ Nixon in China. Tall and slender, with arms that seem to encompass the whole Bowl stage, he is great fun to watch. Robert Levin was soloist on the first night, in Mozart‘s astonishing C-major Piano Concerto No. 25 (K. 503), a fine, inventive performance that turned the vastness of the Bowl, on a balmy night, with the Big Dipper clearly in view overhead, into a setting that was exactly the right size for Mozart. (That would, of course, make it the wrong size for Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben, which ensued, but actually there is no place on Earth, only in the netherworld, suitable for that excruciating work.)

”Astonishing“? You can say that, of course, about any of the dozen or so piano concertos Mozart produced during his last 10 years. K. 503 comes late in that series, when Mozart‘s works in that form had become so challenging and subtle for Vienna’s frivolous tastes — the heartbreaking slow movement of the A-major, K. 488, for example, or the stern drama of the C-minor, K. 491 — that audiences had begun to dwindle. Just the opening of K. 503 is a step forward: the blocky, C-major, festive opening chords followed by the dark shadows of a minor-mode scurrying in the strings. That dichotomy, between brilliant and somber, major and minor, dominates throughout; I get the picture of a huge statue that weeps. And that magical, unexpected moment in the finale, the deeply comforting F-major tune that comes out of nowhere and then vanishes, is in a sense a resolution for the entire work. It always gives me the shivers. What I particularly admire about Levin‘s way with Mozart is the mix he has achieved of ”authentic“ performance practice — improvised embellishments to enhance the melodic line and the sense he projects that a cadenza can actually be a creative venture — and a recognition that the beauty of the music transcends the boundaries of its time.

Ursula Oppens was the soloist two nights later, not in the craggy contemporary piano repertory that is her acclaimed specialty — she is the East Coast’s Gloria Cheng and Vicki Ray — but in Beethoven‘s ”Emperor“ Concerto, where she seemed a little less at home: nothing wrong, just not very much right. Again, Daniel and the Philharmonic shared the glory.

Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra shared the evening. It‘s hard to believe, but this extraordinarily vibrant, rich music from 1943 is the latest large-scale orchestral work of its century to find a permanent place in the repertory. (I can still feel the pressure of Bartok’s handshake backstage at Boston‘s Symphony Hall, at the world premiere.) Daniel’s performance was as fine as any I remember, splendidly attentive to the wonderful details in the music‘s iridescent orchestration, and in balancing the solos within the orchestra — especially in the first and third movements, which people tend to undervalue — against the full orchestra. Was the amplification somewhat turned down? From my seat, about halfway back, the orchestral tone seemed exceptionally — let’s say — orchestral.

The extraneous roar from air traffic, however, was unusually brutal that night and, as usual, keenly timed to the music‘s softest moments. Also, for what may have been musically the most rewarding program of the summer, the attendance fell below 6,000 for the first time this season.

At the Getty this summer, the evening concerts have been moved indoors to the Harold M. Williams Auditorium, an overdue realization that the outdoor stage was unworkable for reasons climatic and acoustic. Last weekend’s concert was French, tied to Eugene Atget‘s wonderful photographs of turn-of-the-century Paris on view at the Museum. Karen Benjamin, an endearing and resourceful singer, romped her way through French songs — cabaret, Debussy, what have you, many of them un peu bleu; the L.A. Opera’s Greg (newly ”Gregory“) Fedderly did likewise; Robert Winter played piano, and talked and talked. But that was only half the evening. The other half was a clutch of 19th-century bits — Saint-Saens, Wagner, Berlioz — in wind-band arrangements such as might have resounded on Atget‘s streets. But Paris, as any Conservatoire refugee will attest, is the city that makes a fetish of perfect pitch and impeccable bandsmanship. Perpetrators of the kind of wobbly, tentative playing inflicted on a $22-a-ticket audience at the Getty by the UCLA Wind Ensemble would probably have been marched off to the guillotine, and not a moment too soon.

Late-breaking news: The second Getty concert (of three) was an improvement by several thousand percent. Watch this space.

The week began with Madama Butterfly, not my favorite opera. Four days later came Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which I had successfully avoided for several years. In between, on the Tuesday-night concert that, two weeks into the season, is always billed as the official “opening night” at the Hollywood Bowl – meaning, actually, the night on which the press gets bought off for the summer with
free food and drink, and on which the Philharmonic returns to take up its residence at this home-not-very-far-away-from-home – Frederica von Stade came out onstage and persuaded an elegant, seductive Offenbach aria to nestle in that honey-textured voice of hers. For those few minutes I knew, or thought I knew, that the Bowl could do no wrong.

There were, alas, only a few such minutes in the first “classical” week at the Bowl. Leonard Slatkin, a local boy now making good worldwide – head of the National Symphony Orchestra, son of two founding members of the Hollywood String Quartet of glowing memory – seemed
unable, or at least unwilling, to energize
the Philharmonic’s players after their month’s vacation. The orchestral work was mostly blaaah, despite Carolyn Hove’s elegant English-horn solo in Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture and Donald Green’s ditto trumpet work in Copland’s An Outdoor Overture. Better than either of these was the four-minute span of Walking the Dog, which George Gershwin fashioned from his score to the Astaire-Rogers Shall We Dance, with Lorin Levee’s solo clarinet providing the evening’s best solo singing by some distance.

“Flicka” von Stade and Sam Ramey sang; I have admired them both, sometimes to distraction, for years, but “years” was the operative word this night. They sang “Là, ci darem la mano,” the seduction duet from Don Giovanni, as what they were: two middle-aged singers fulfilling an assignment, and trying without success to keep time with the orchestra. (Did they rehearse this? Does such tired, slack work deserve airing before a 7,102-member audience in seats costing up to $83?) Slatkin’s much-advertised forte is his attention to American music; how could he, then,
allow his two soloists to turn five of Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs into an exercise in terminal cutes? Yes, Ramey had his moments, especially in the diabolical “Ecco il mondo” from Boïto’s Mefistofele, and von Stade’s encore, Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” brought something like tears. (But that song does it for me every time, anyhow.)

Two nights later, Slatkin perpetrated something even more bizarre: a traversal of Mussorgsky’s Pictures, not in Maurice Ravel’s familiar and perfectly adequate orchestration from 1922, but as a pastiche: the 16 pieces in the hands of nine different orchestrators, from Mikhail Tushmalov’s first version in 1891 to Vladimir Ashkenazy’s extraneous effort from the 1970s. Slatkin prefaced his bland if efficient performance with a congenial chat, orchestra members demonstrating the fine points of the
various embellishments imposed onto Mussorgsky’s piano originals. All told,
however, it was an exercise in futility; whatever individuality one arranger’s version might have over another – Ravel’s
saxophone vs. the trumpet of Sergei Gorchakov’s take on “The Old Castle,”
for example – was nullified by the Bowl’s amplification system, adequate of its kind but hardly an appropriate medium for examining orchestrational subtleties. If the Pictures deserve a conductor’s attention at all, which I will dispute, why not at least preserve the integrity of a single orchestrator? The Ravel version, brought in for the final two sections, including the “Great Gate at Kiev,” rose far above everything that had come before. (I did, however, like the cowbells in Sir Henry J. Wood’s “Oxcart.”) Where were Emerson, Lake and Palmer when we needed them?

Korea’s Han-Na Chang, all of 17,
got through Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo” Variations okay, all the notes in place but the music somewhere else, proving nothing except that she can play the cello. In any case, I’m afraid I’m developing an allergy to teenage string players from either side of the Pacific (Hilary Hahn alone excepted). Slatkin’s program began with a suite from Shostakovich’s satiric Age of Gold music. The audience, which applauded loudly after the long and dreary first movement, didn’t crack so much as a yuk at the antics in the Polka, something I ascribe not to the music (which is genuinely funny), but to the sleepy way it was performed.

Before all this, and better than any of it, came Sunday night’s Butterfly, a happy return for John Mauceri as an opera
conductor after the fiasco of the Turandot cancellation two years ago. There was no scenery, and no real attempt to simulate a visual performance (except for the fancy stage lighting, which did a nice sunrise to begin the last scene, followed by a blood-red finale). The hills around the Bowl, down which Wagner’s Valkyries once swooped and whooped in outdoor opera’s happier days, are now taken up with condos.

Never mind. Russian soprano Natalia Dercho, the Butterfly, sang with rich, powerful tone better suited to a Tosca, perhaps, but nicely reflective of the passion – if not the girlish innocence – in this Puccini weeper as well. Mexico’s Alfredo Portilla, the Pinkerton, squalled some and sang some; Louis Otey was the sturdy Consul Sharpless, and Zheng Cao, the Suzuki, gets better all the time at scene-stealing. The real hero, however, was the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, whose presence on the stage (rather than in an orchestra pit) gave Puccini’s orchestral effects – the tinkling small bells, the whiplash percussion outbursts, the tendency of strings to wrap themselves sexily around the vocal lines – a considerable profile. If there must be Butterfly — which, again, I will dispute – let it be like this.