So I've Heard

Up north, Good Friday came late this year. Three daunting artworks translate Christendom’s central tragedy into music that churns in the hearer’s gut. Bach wrote two of them, the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, works that surround the telling of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion from the respective Gospels with music that stands in for us all, the awed and shocked witnesses to the drama. The third, Wagner’s Parsifal, forms a symbol-laden gloss around that drama and carries us further toward a promise of Resurrection. All three works take up a lot of time and demand comfortable seating; you can reckon your own arrival at a musical state of grace from the moment when none of them seems a minute too long. They didn’t to my ears, a couple of weeks ago: not one but both Passions at the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene, Parsifal at the San Francisco Opera.

Oregon’s Bach Festival has just ended its 31st year: 55 events spread over 20 days, in the tidy little Beall Concert Hall on the University of Oregon campus and the 2,430-seat Hult Center downtown. I remember a visit in the early
’70s, with conductor Helmuth Rilling using what seemed like occult powers to draw fond and loving renditions of Bach cantatas out of performing forces mostly regional, enthusiastic but only semiproficient. Royce Saltzman, a local educator and Bach nut, had lured the then-little-known Rilling from Stuttgart with the chance to start a festival as bait; it was one of those lovely, rare instances of the right idea in the right place at the right time. Now Rilling, 67, commutes between Eugene and Stuttgart (with stopovers in Los Angeles, where he has been a regular guest with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra and will take the St. Matthew to the Philharmonic next April) and has made his mark worldwide.
In Stuttgart he heads the Internationale Bachakademie and masterminded the 172-disc Hänssler release of the compleat Bach.

Snugly secure under the protecting aegis of the U.O.’s enterprising School of Music, the so-called Bach Festival has expanded far beyond its boundaries. Bach maintained his
centrality, only proper in this anniversary year. Rilling’s St. Matthew struck a nice balance
between the old-timey Big Noise – with a chorus half again too large – and a latter-day respect for momentum and overall shape. The B-minor Mass (Rilling again) was also on the agenda, as were Jeffrey Kahane’s playing of the Goldbergs, Robert Levin discoursing and playing parts of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and an ensemble version of Musical Offering. The St. John was made the project for a conducting master class, given complete but piecemeal over four afternoon concerts, each session preceded by Rilling’s beautifully thought-out spoken program notes.

Visiting choruses from Israel, Sweden, Uganda and Cuba serenaded audiences in concerts large and small, and joined conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya (whose many hats include conducting the Eugene Symphony) in the Beethoven Ninth. Other major events included Mendelssohn’s Elijah (which is, after all, sort of Bach) and an all-day “Composers Symposium” with Third Angle, a new-music group from Portland, playing some works from a student-composer master class and some big pieces by wise old Lou Harrison, onstage beaming his approval. Add to these wonders a couple of evenings with the astonishing art of Thomas Quasthoff: a song recital of Mozart and Debussy – shared with a marvelous German new-
comer, soprano Juliane Banse, and with Justus Zeyen’s shrewd and loving piano collaboration – and another kind of recital that included a Sinatra tribute and some solid, loving jazz with a combo.

Rilling had brought Quasthoff to Eugene in 1995 for his American debut, and he has returned nearly every year. This was his workaholic summer: the aforementioned recitals plus the Ninth, the St. Matthew, the B-minor Mass and Elijah. In the St. Matthew he sang the bass arias, rising to full stature with every note, wrapping every phrase in the mantle of heartbreak; then he found an entirely different voice for the bitter words of Pontius Pilate. We chatted briefly; he spoke of singing Amfortas in a Simon Rattle–led Parsifal at Salzburg in 2002. I don’t recall speaking to another artist so completely at peace with himself and with music, and this irresistible eloquence is what comes through in his art.

San Francisco’s Parsifal was excel-
lently led by Donald Runnicles, the company’s music director, who wove something close to gold out of the tatters of his pit orchestra. (Surely he, not to mention that gorgeous Opera House, deserves better!) The new production was
by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, who had created San Francisco’s Ring in 1985. I’m not willing to swear that it might be possible to stage an “authentic” Parsifal; the productions I remember best –
the Hans-Jürgen Syberberg film, Robert Wilson’s staging in Houston – strayed rather far from Wagner’s rubrics. So, to lesser effect, did Lehnhoff’s. Raimund Bauer’s unit set, a curved wall pierced here and there with window holes of various sizes, lit mostly in a flat gray, didn’t become truly offensive until the third act, when out from the lower hole came a segment of railroad track ending in dust: the Knights of the Grail at the end of the line. There were no springtime colors for the Good Friday music; go look at the Syberberg movie for the perfect visual translation of that music. At the end, rather than
finding her release in death as ordained, Kundry trudges back down the train track, followed dutifully by Parsifal – on their way, perhaps, to the domestic bliss that will someday produce the baby Lohengrin.

Britain’s Christopher Ventris, the Parsifal, came on like Tarzan and sang with a clear
but somewhat harsh bright tenor. Catherine Malfitano, in her first Kundry, sang well enough but was hampered in the second act by designer Andrea Schmidt-Futterer’s ludicrous layered costume that she was obliged to shed, piece by piece, like the pupal stages of some monstrous insect out to put the sting on Parsifal’s innocence. Better than any of this, as you might expect, was the Gurnemanz of Kurt Moll, a
spectacularly wise and knowing artist, no longer young perhaps but – as above – irresistibly eloquent.

”Someday we shall all be free,“ Garth Brooks sang at the end of his stint at the Hollywood Bowl the other night, and the crowd of 11,000 or so sang along. The great entertainers do that: create a community around their art, whether Mitsuko Uchida holding a silent audience enraptured in a Schubert slow movement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, or Garth Brooks in a cornball song anachronistically accompanied by a symphony-size orchestra. Going to the Garth Brooks concert wasn‘t a part of my regular beat, which is defined by the no-longer-workable term ”classical music.“ But I’m glad I went to the ”Opening Night Gala“ — in which Brooks and John Williams were inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame — because of that moment of togetherness near the end, which reminded me of the uniqueness of hearing music, any music, at the Bowl. The fireworks were pretty swell, too. (Don‘t go looking for the ”Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame,“ however. It’s not a building, like baseball‘s at Cooperstown; ”fame“ out here, as East Coast newspapers delight in pointing out, is fleeting.)

Under my so-called ”classical“ hat, I’m supposed to look down on the Bowl, and I have to admit that that‘s easily done. I’m willing to bet that Martin Bernheimer left the L.A. Times because he‘d run out of nasty ways of describing the Bowl experience — e.g., ”slushpump“ as the catchall word for Russian Romanticism. The problems remain: the hazards of hearing music through outdoor amplification no matter how state-of-the-art, the air traffic, the bottles rolling down concrete steps, and now the cell phones — which have lately become an indoor hazard as well. It’s ironic, sort of, that these days, when the only chance of hearing music free of outside interference is on the stereo at home, the classical-record industry is drifting toward oblivion.

Okay, so it isn‘t easy to love the Bowl wholeheartedly. Love it at least partially, however, and you should be able to derive some heartsease in what lies ahead. Let’s examine the schedule. Four Beethoven symphonies (Nos. 3, 6, 8 and 9)! That‘s one more than we got during the entire winter season downtown, and don’t try to tell me that any performance of a Beethoven symphony isn‘t an event. A great and too-seldom-heard Mozart piano concerto (K. 503)! The Bartok Concerto for Orchestra: Do you think that counts as ”light summer listening“? Or the Dvorak Eighth? Or what about a complete Madama Butterfly, this very weekend?

No, Madama Butterfly isn’t my favorite opera, and maybe it isn‘t yours. But look at the fine print. John Mauceri will conduct, with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra that was formed as his personal plaything nine years ago. Mauceri is known as a major opera conductor the world over, has led performances as close as Costa Mesa and San Diego, but not in Los Angeles. Two years ago he had a Turandot scheduled for the Bowl, but was obliged to cancel it when the Philharmonic’s incoming-and-now-outgone managing director, Willem Wijnbergen, determined (wrongly) that the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra wasn‘t up to performing complete operas. For that reason alone (and there will surely be others), this Butterfly is certainly worth your attention. Besides, where else can you hear live Italian opera set in Japan, while dining on sushi or pasta at the same time?

I like this summer’s list of guest conductors. We start with Leonard Slatkin, a hometown boy now world-famous. I wish he were doing more serious American music, which is his forte. I wish he weren‘t doing Pictures at an Exhibition — music I’m just plain tired of hearing; but at least he‘s doing his own version of Mussorgsky’s album of chromos. Paul Daniel, who conducts the second week, is new here, but he has recorded a lot (for Naxos and Decca) and is music director of the English National Opera. Robert Levin, a marvelous Mozart player, will be soloist in the aforementioned K. 503 on the Tuesday program (July 18). On Thursday — solid concert programming — Ursula Oppens, heroine of piano music new and old, will play Beethoven‘s ”Emperor“ Concerto, and Daniel will end the program with the Bartok Concerto.

Junichi Hirokami, the remarkable, diminutive Japanese conductor who has inspired rave notices from me in the past, indoors and out, takes over in the third week. His repertory for both Tuesday and Thursday is somewhat on the slushpump side (including, alas, the Rach 3, by a pianist with the interesting and appropriate name of Lang Lang), but I’ll bet Hirokami will make the Tchaikovsky Fifth sit up and dance if anyone can. Bring binoculars; he has the most expressive left hand in the business.

Denmark‘s Thomas Dausgaard conducts Cesar Franck’s D-minor Symphony on August 1: noisy pretentiousness that seems to have dropped out of favor in the repertory but might be worth hearing just once more, especially with the excellent Louis Lortie to render an antidote via Chopin‘s F-minor Piano Concerto later in the program. Dausgaard himself makes amends the next Thursday with Beethoven and Brahms; the landscape around the Bowl, with its many ”secret“ places, affords the perfect hiding place for the offstage trumpet in the Third Leonore Overture. The Netherlands’ Hans Vonk, currently head of the St. Louis Symphony and, therefore, a man to conjure with, begins his stint on August 8. Vonk made a fine debut here a few months ago; I would expect eloquent readings of the Beethoven ”Eroica“ on Tuesday and the ”Pastoral“ two days later.

And so it goes. Mexico‘s Enrique Diemecke, who has been here before, gets one Latino program (including the inevitable Bolero) and one pure slushpump; guess at which one you’ll see me. The roster of incoming conductors also embraces Stefan Sanderling, son of the much-loved Kurt; the San Jose Symphony‘s Leonid Grin, who stepped in for the ailing Franz Welser-Most two seasons ago; and Zdenek Macal, who has built the New Jersey Symphony into an important organization in recent years. And finally — as if he needed another string on his bow — none other than Itzhak Perlman turns up for the Bowl’s last classical week, conducting and playing, and surely imbuing both aspects of his work with the robust romanticism that is his musical signature.

All this and not a single preteen fiddle-sawing moppet on the horizon; the prospect up in Cahuenga Pass looks, well, passable. Bring on the copters, bring on the emptys; I‘m ready, and you should be, too.

”We were playing in Fargo,“ Amy Knoles remembers, ”and there was this old woman in the front row who wasn‘t very happy with what she was hearing — it was Art Jarvinen’s Sextet for Amplified Handcuffs. And so she yelled out, ‘Where’s the music?‘“

Well might she ask. The ”we“ of that dark and stormy Fargo night was the California E.A.R. Unit, whose percussion contingent lists Knoles as a charter member, and this is one of those special ensembles flourishing (sort of) across the landscape whose aim in life is to challenge notions of what constitutes a piece of music, and to lay down an infinite range of possibilities for redefining it. Founded — by a process of osmosis, you might say — at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1980s, the E.A.R. Unit joins such similarly intentioned groups as New York’s Bang on a Can, Philadelphia‘s Ensemble Relache and Germany’s Ensemble Modern — or, in fact, that country‘s Quartett Avance, which performed at the County Museum during the recent ”Resistance Fluctuations“ minifestival — in the ongoing campaign to shatter accepted musical boundaries and plunge onward toward a resounding if undefined future.

There’s nothing all that novel in the fact of composers and performers pushing past previously accepted limitations. Monteverdi‘s operas constituted a major breakthrough; Mozart and Haydn kicked out against the ”correct“ practices, and Beethoven demolished them. So did Wagner, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Stockhausen.

Things move faster these days. Six and seven decades ago, when John Cage and Edgard Varese broke through by creating whole pieces for nothing but an ensemble of percussion, those pieces needed a stageful of drums, gongs, cymbals and assorted hardware. When Amy Knoles played her multimedia percussion piece TwoXTenXTenXTen+One (=2,001) at the L.A. Theater Center a couple of weeks ago, she began with a thwack on an actual ashcan, a kind of tribute to the avant-garde spirit of time immemorial. But mostly she got her fantastic range and variety of sound by banging with small sticks on an unimposing, boxy gadget on a table in front of her, ”K.A.T. MIDI Mallet“ by name, that had been preprogrammed to send forth a galaxy of sounds beyond the reach of ”normal“ instruments, infinitely variable, infinitely fascinating, made all the more magical by puffs of stage smoke, and by a video display that included some fancy dance steps by Amy’s pet cockatiel Fu Fo Shit Shit (honest!). Where was the music this time? All around, it was, and you‘d better get used to it.

Knoles — this slender, blond Diana of the Big Bang — remains a mainstay of the E.A.R. Unit while building a couple of parallel careers on her own. One of those involves teaching; I spent a rewarding day with her not long ago at Chino State Prison, where she had guided an eager group of prisoners into building their own instruments and composing on them. She has performed with Bang on a Can, and has recorded Varese’s Ionisation, a cornerstone of the percussion repertory, with the Ensemble Modern — unreleased so far, for reasons somewhat baffling. Her solo disc on Echograph, Men in the Cities, is a collection of works written for performance with various multimedia installations, including the Robert Longo exhibition at the County Museum that gives the disc its name.

The E.A.R. Unit grew out of a larger new-music group at CalArts, the Twentieth Century Players. ”We worked really hard,“ Knoles remembers, ”the way you do when you‘re a student and having a ball. When we came up to graduation in 1982, some of us decided that it just felt right to stay together, so we did. When it came to a name, we decided on EAR, but then we found that another group up north, the East Area Rapists, had already taken that name, so we added the periods. We never decided what it meant. When we gave that concert in Fargo, the critic decided we were Evil Alien Robots, and maybe we were.“

The group started out under the CalArts umbrella, since most of its members had moved on to faculty jobs. ”Those were great times,“ says Knoles. ”Mort Subotnick was working with filmmakers on multimedia pieces, and there were great composers coming through that we could hang out with for a couple of weeks at a time — Steve Reich, Mauricio Kagel, Morty Feldman. Steve Lavine came to one of our concerts, before he became president of CalArts, and I remember him saying, ‘If you can do that here, I belong here.‘ People still think of us as CalArts; some of us — [cellist] Erika Duke, for example — still teach there. We’ve continued to work with Mort, a on his Key to Songs and on the interactive CD-ROM All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis.“ Nevertheless, CalArts eventually saw fit to cut the group adrift, and in 1987 E.A.R. became the resident ensemble at LACMA — a strange but fruitful marriage between the most experimental musicians and the deadest painters.

The group has remained remarkably consistent: Amy, Erika, percussionist Dave Johnson, violinist Robin Lorentz, flutist Dorothy Stone, pianist Vicki Ray. Just this month pianist Lorna Eder dropped to part-time to attend cantorial school, and percussionist Art Jarvinen has recently departed to compose full-time. ”He‘s decided he doesn’t like other people‘s music,“ Knoles reports.

What holds the group together? ”Mostly,“ says Knoles, ”we’ve managed to remain each other‘s best friends. When we’re together, rehearsing, it‘s like a party. When we began, ‘Lucky‘ [Steven] Mosko was the leader, and he had a way of making us care. We’ve held on to that pretty much, and Lucky does come back fairly often. The other thing that holds us together is the fact that music is changing so fast. We never get onto the treadmill that you get with dead composers. There‘s always something new and interesting. Techniques and circuitry that someone might have used five years ago may be obsolete by now — unless, of course, the music itself is good. Over the years, we’ve built a kind of repertory; there are works we‘ve played before that we go back to. We’d love to do more revivals. That rain-forest piece, Amazonia, with Rachel Rosenthal — wasn‘t that a hoot?

“But there’s so much new stuff; a lot of notes to learn for a job that still isn‘t full-time and certainly doesn’t pay full-time. In Frankfurt, Ensemble Modern earns a yearly salary. In New York, Bang on a Can is run by its three composers, but they also have an office staff and a connection to Sony Records. We tried working with a management for a while, but they ran us into the ground and we were never able to explain our repertory to them. Now Dorothy and I pretty much run the group; we handle the bookings, and we produce the ads, the post cards, the faxes. We keep busy, but a lot of our bookings are hectic: not enough long tours, too many one-shot runouts to Kiev, Reykjavik.”

Next season promises more of the same — the same spirit of exploration, that is, not the same music. Electronic performance artist Paul Dresher comes down for an all-technology bash; live-processing performer Mark Gray will put on the MIDI-gloves; one entire evening will feature an accordionist, lying on the stage, seen in profile — or so Amy Knoles would have us know.

“Let me tell you one more thing that holds us together,” says Amy. “You know how hard it is for a composer, especially an experimenter, to get performances these days — even here in Los Angeles, where the Philharmonic‘s service to new music is above average. It may sound corny, but we really, sincerely believe that we are making history with what we play, even the bad stuff. If you want me to define what we do, it’s really very simple: We play music by living composers. The new music that we play isn‘t any one thing; it’s always different, according to who‘s writing it. We’re here to go along with those differences.”

The Motherland reclaimed some of its territory these last few weeks: Benjamin Britten rampant at the L.A. Opera and some magnificent noises from two of his younger compatriots at the 54th running of the Ojai Festival. Britannia rules — or comes closer, at any rate.

Britten‘s operas have been a triumphant thread through the local company’s 14 years under their compatriot Peter Hemmings: four operas to date, and Peter Grimes on the agenda next fall, all splendidly staged and, under Roderick Brydon‘s earnest if unspectacular musical leadership, honorably performed. (Robert Duerr conducted the first Midsummer Night’s Dream, Brydon the revival.) The Billy Budd comes from London‘s Royal Opera, in Francesca Zambello’s smashing production. On Alison Chitty‘s set, the decks of the HMS Indomitable rise, fall and tilt, revealing a starry infinity at one juncture, and cramping down to form an imprisonment of its principals, both physical and psychological, at another: the saintly Billy, the desperately lovelorn Claggart and the benevolent but catatonic Captain Vere.

By so doing, designer and director have given the interlock of symbols in Melville’s agonized parable — over whose exact meanings scholars will forever haggle — a compelling and convincing shape. E.M. Forster‘s libretto, while taming Melville’s visionary prose, touches up its unspoken homoerotic undercurrents in word-painting sharply defined. (The similarity to Thomas Mann‘s Death in Venice, which Britten turned into his final opera, is made inescapable in Forster’s setting.) Zambello‘s propensity for freeze-framing Rodney Gilfry’s Billy in a set of tableaux worthy of any Sunday-school calendar, rendered celestial in Alan Burrett‘s ecstatic lighting, does, however, project a rather gaudy illumination at times onto another of the story’s disturbing, captivating undercurrents.

Rodney Gilfry, whose career has been nurtured from the L.A. Opera‘s start-up — a walk-on as the Herald in the inaugural-night Otello — now owns the role of Billy worldwide: brilliantly in command of the heartbreaking poignance of his final haunting ballad, as well as the physical ease in climbing foretops and ladders. As his antagonist and ultimate victim, Jeffrey Wells creates a hulking, horrific Claggart, his inner ambiguities constantly gnawing at his ironclad exterior; Robert Tear’s Captain is exactly right in its tone of incertitude blended into nobility. Among his cohorts, the character of Mr. Redburn, sung by veteran baritone Richard Stilwell — the Metropolitan Opera‘s first Billy Budd and still an eloquent figure on deck 22 years later — is worthy of particular notice. And so, for that matter, is all of this new Billy Budd, a distinguished note of departure for Peter Hemmings, proof of the potential that, when circumstances permit, can be glowingly fulfilled on our local operatic stage. It runs through June 17.

The newly minted Brit eminence exploded in everyone’s eardrums during the extraordinary Ojai weekend, not once but repeatedly, with the presence and the works of two young (or at least young-at-heart) composers, Thomas Ades, 29, and Mark-Anthony Turnage, 40, under the curatorial aegis of their 45-year-old compatriot Sir Simon Rattle, his rise to world-master status sealed by his recent appointment to lead the Berlin Philharmonic. Under Rattle‘s exuberant leadership, huge new works by both composers howled and sizzled in Ojai’s sublime evening air. Both works, incidentally, are available in recent recordings on the EMI and Argo labels.

Of the two, Ades‘ Asyla has, in its three-year existence, piled up the greater reputation, ranging from horror to ecstasy: a hugely affirmative four-movement almost-symphony, running some 20 breath-stopping minutes, bristling with positive energy, not above a dig or two at music’s past — or do I just imagine those Brahmsian bits growling their way through the first movement? — fearless in its demands upon performers and listeners. Turnage‘s Blood on the Floor, its title from a Francis Bacon canvas, ranges, if anything, even further — wildly, unevenly perhaps, but with an eagerness to get it all out front that can hold you spellbound if you let it. (Even the recording, which arrived only a few days before Ojai, is a shattering experience.)

Running just over 70 minutes, in nine movements ranging from rowdy-dowdy to intense eloquence, Turnage’s score enlisted a jazz combo (guitarist Mike Miller and, from the recording, drummer Peter Erskine and Martin Robertson on soprano sax made harrowingly beautiful) on a raised platform above the full Los Angeles Philharmonic on an already crowded stage, mingling abrasive modernist orchestral outbursts with the composer‘s acknowledged adoration for the jazz of Miles Davis. One other Turnage work, Kai, a 10-minute cello concerto (again with jazz combo), began the Festival’s first evening event: dark, rumbling lyricism, its solo lines rhapsodically delivered by the Philharmonic‘s Ben Hong. As ear balm there was sublime surcease in two short French works from earlier days, in concert performances led by Rattle: Ravel’s The Child and the Magic Spell rerun from the downtown performance the week before, and the delicious nose-thumbing of Francis Poulenc‘s The Breasts of Tiresias, to Guillaume Apollinaire’s surrealist, pun-drenched text on the joys of procreation. Even without stage setting — aside from what Ojai‘s sylvan scenery provides on its own — both works radiated enchantment. Once again the Ravel’s delights included Israeli mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham as the Child; in the Poulenc, Heidi Grant Murphy was a sheer delight as the feminist who gives up bust and motherhood in the cause of women‘s lib.

The four young men of New York’s Flux Quartet brought on a fascinating program of experimental chamber music, including a collage work for strings and tape by first violinist Tom Chiu and a curiosity by none other than Benjamin Franklin; pianist Gloria Cheng, the Los Angeles treasure, tied the Festival to-gether with a solo recital of music by French and British composers; Japanese-born, USC-trained composer Naomi Sekiya‘s Deluge, winner of Ojai’s new ”Music for Tomorrow“ award, gave pianist Vicki Ray and the Philharmonic a bracing 10-minute workout. For the young of any age, a ”family program“ offered Saint-Saens‘ familiar Carnival of the Animals led by Rachael Worby, with sprightly 13-year-old pianists Jessica Ou and Valerie Lau, and actor Peter Bellwood delivering clever narrative verses created by Stephanie Fleischmann, daughter of Festival director Ernest. A true ”family“ program, in other words.

By any measurement, then, it was a full and wondrous weekend. Next year promises an all-American sweep, including music by Harry Partch, the most original of all homegrown mavericks, with the Philharmonic’s own Esa-Pekka Salonen in charge. And next year‘s prospects at the Opera have also suddenly turned glowing, with the appointment of Kent Nagano as principal conductor, a position much needed where none existed before. Onward!

There’s no space to deal with the Long Beach Opera‘s latest production — a double bill of Italian one-acters by Puccini and, better yet, Luigi Dallapiccola’s Volo di Notte — but I‘ll do so in a week or two. There’s one more performance, Saturday, June 17, at the Carpenter Center at Cal State Long Beach, and I urge you to make tracks. Even by this brave company‘s usual high standards, this is a terrific accomplishment.

A London coal dealer named Thomas Britton had a loft above his shop, reachable by ladder, where, for several decades starting around 1680, hired musicians gave weekly instrumental concerts for a paying audience. Britton’s concerts were a hot ticket; the illustrious George Frederick Handel was often in attendance. More important, they marked a turning point in the history of music consumership. Never before had concerts — the diversions until then of invited elite audiences in a nobleman‘s estate — been made accessible to anyone with the price of a ticket. Never before had composers been cast into a direct relationship with a public that would pay if they thought the music would be good and would stay home if they didn’t.

Three hundred years later, the situation remains basically unchanged; now comes Michael Chanan‘s From Handel to Hendrix to trace the occasional joys and frequent sorrows in that relationship. His title plays on the coincidence that the great Handel and the sublime Jimi Hendrix, centuries apart, occupied adjacent London digs — Nos. 23 and 25 Brook Street. (Hendrix, Chanan reports, was obviously aware of the stature of his erstwhile neighbor. He regarded Handel’s music, he once said, as ”a homework type of thing.“) Separated by centuries, their worlds still often touched. Some of Handel‘s best tunes, including religious pieces, were quickly co-opted into Britain’s music-hall repertory. And that adventurous contemporary concert ensemble, the Kronos Quartet, has been known to inject one or two of their own Hendrix arrangements, best of all ”Purple Haze,“ between the more formidable works on their programs — again effecting an at-least-momentary sealing of the gap between the ”serious“ and ”popular“ arts.

A London-based filmmaker, writer and teacher, Chanan has applied himself in previous volumes — Musica Practica and Repeated Takes most notably — to the ”social history“ of music both in concert and on recordings heard at home. His purpose in this new book is to survey the damage perpetrated — by three centuries of dealing with the reality of the marketplace — upon the psyche (and the purse) of the composers of classical music, purveyors of unreality at its most dangerously evanescent. His findings, one gratefully notes, are not entirely downbeat; compared with the lubricious mendacity of Norman Lebrecht‘s Who Killed Classical Music? of two years ago, From Handel to Hendrix peals forth like a paean of thanksgiving.

The world is well-supplied with histories of music in many shapes and lengths, most of them variants on the Bach-begat-Beethoven-begat-Brahms leitmotif. Chanan takes another tack, with eloquence and a welcome lack of academic ologies. He applies his ax to a few myths old and new: the old one about Mozart’s dire poverty (perpetuated in the loathsome Amadeus, which Chanan rightly impales); the notion unfurled by the new breed of sexist-musicologists that the imputed homosexual leanings of Handel in the 18th century, or of Schubert and Chopin (ahhh, those feminine phrase-endings!!!) in the 19th, had any bearing on their music. What is more significant in the Schubert instance is his reluctance to attend or even acknowledge those few occasions where his music was publicly performed. Whatever the scenarists might have us believe, there were other reasons for composing music than the need for the public ego massage.

Chanan‘s span is vast, from the paltry gatherings in Thomas Britton’s loft to the staggering plenitude listed in Bill Schwann‘s CD catalog. And some bridges remain standing. Right here in Los Angeles, Britton’s accomplishment achieved a resonance 250 years later, when a local hero named Peter Yates built a studio atop his house and staged the ”Evenings on the Roof“ concerts — where, as in 1680, small paying audiences heard the day‘s latest music. (The ”Roof“ concerts continue today, renamed the Monday Evening Concerts, at the County Museum.) The emergence of music into public awareness, precisely and warmly detailed in Chanan’s splendid, valuable study — with, however, a depressingly hit-or-miss index — gave that public something new to think about and, more to the point, obliged the fashioners of that music to readjust their own sense of purpose.

Schubert‘s diffidence aside, that sense also included an awareness of image. What Jimi Hendrix stood for in his shenanigans at Monterey and Woodstock, Niccolo Paganini also stood for a century and more before in the concert halls of Paris and Vienna; and so did the preening male sopranos of Handel’s operas a century before that. Caught up in the spell of music, the most mystery-laden of all the fine arts, audiences could always easily swallow the notion that derangements of any sort — the singer with his supersonic screech, the fiddler with his Mach 4 runs and scales, the rock star who smashes guitars and turns ”The Star-Spangled Banner“ into a freak show — somehow signalized some kind of demonic possession. It sold tickets in Handel‘s time and in Hendrix’s. It still does.

The quiet blessing that ends Mahler’s Fourth Symphony receded into silence, and the Philharmonic’s season was over. The last weeks were glorious. A few days earlier, in the final concert of the orchestra’s “Green Umbrella” series, splendidly dispatched by Markus Stenz (who had led the Kurtág Stele with the full Philharmonic the week before), there had been glowing, grinning, glinting new noises from the often big and bad – but this time benevolent – Pierre Boulez, apparently turned mellow in the process of arriving at 75. (I know the feeling.) Then came Mitsuko Uchida in a Philharmonic-sponsored solo concert, drawing her own kind of magic from the piano, earthbound only at the moment when, among the divine whispers of ethereal Chopin, there came the ghastly clangor of not one but two summoning cell phones. (Has anyone considered issuing firearms to ushers?) And then came Sir (must I?) Simon Rattle, once boy prodigy, now world master, drawing from the Philharmonic and a band of helpful singing angels noises sublime and profound like nothing heard since – well, since Esa-Pekka Salonen began his sabbatical.

Like many of his recent works, Boulez’s sur Incises builds upon (sur) the 1994 piano piece Incises. Its performing space, a stage with three harps fronting three pianos, with three gatherings of percussion across the back wall, took your breath away even before the music started. You had to wonder: Can anything be more beautiful than this visual setting? The music answered: Yes, something can. The music swirls and swoops: vibrant and pulsating here, dreamlike there. You think back to the obsessive percussive clatter of the Mallarmé settings, of the Répons that fills vast spaces like an erupting volcano; this new work has all those colors, but also something more: charm, ease, the urge to ingratiate that must signal a new Boulez. Earlier on the program there was music by Brett Dean, Australian composer and violist, performing a solo piece and beaming at his Carlo led by Stenz, a collage of sampled fragments of vocal lines culled from the eminent Renaissance composer/murderer Carlo Gesualdo imaginatively worked into a shifting, disturbing contemporary context. I wanted to hold on to it for more than merely an intermission’s length, but the Boulez swept all before it.

There’s nobody quite like Uchida
anymore (Martha Argerich perhaps excepted), a musician miraculously able to convey a love of what she’s doing in a way that seems to unite serenity and hysteria. I’d never heard her Chopin before; there’s nothing on disc, at least not currently. I couldn’t imagine her at home among the waltzes or the nocturnes, but I’d give a lot to hear her taking on the B-flat minor Scherzo. She tore into the Sonata in B-flat minor with hurricane force, stupendous but amazingly in control; the finale, which is nothing but hot wind, left me gasping. Yet the crown of this extraordinary performance was the serene midsection of the Funeral March, with its one-finger melody like a stream of starlight surrounded by deep, black quiet – until, alas, the cell phone very nearly ruined the moment. Could its owner be the same brute who schedules the helicopters during slow movements at the Hollywood Bowl?

Later on the program came Anton Webern’s Variations: softer, dark points of light in an even darker void; then, in a moment of endearing wisdom, Uchida simply segued into the B-minor Adagio, darkest and most mysterious of all of Mozart’s piano works. Schubert’s D-major Sonata filled the second half; it, too, is a mysterious piece, with its first movement an almost-
successful homage to the Beethoven “Hammerklavier” and its slow movement inflamed with urgent passions that stop just short of words. For dessert there was Bach and another dab of Mozart, and I left with the sense that Uchida had, all evening, expressed not only her happiness in being privileged to play the piano so well, but her respect for the intelligence of her listeners. Back home I revisited the Philips video of Uchida explaining, then performing, six Debussy Etudes: the warmest, wisest capturing of the art and the joy of music making that I know. I wish I knew her, but think I do.

Childhood, it has often been
noted, is an excellence wasted upon the young. Yet the meeting of minds that produced L’Enfant et les Sortilèges – the music of Maurice Ravel, the fantasy and the words of Colette – hands off the essence of childhood as if to share the elixir of youthfulness with hearers of any age. Just the wonder of Ravel’s orchestra as realized under Rattle’s leadership – the dragonflies in the enchanted garden, the wind sighing through trees, the breath of olden days in the pastorale of the shepherds – had to instill the tears of delight that make us all start life over. The work in concert may have lacked the ultimate magic of, say, the David Hockney staging at the Metropolitan Opera or the Balanchine on video, yet Simon Rattle’s cast on the Philharmonic’s concert stage succeeded remarkably in suggesting the visions in the work. (Ravel had expressed the hope that Walt Disney would take it up – the fresh, lively Disney, that is, of the early 1930s.)

Rinat Shaham, whose Cherubino I had adored in Opera Pacific’s Figaro, carried that same rich and bubbling spirit as Ravel’s Child; a dream cast also included Marietta Simpson as the Mother and the Teacup, Christine Brandes dispensing coloratura enchantment as the Fire and the Nightingale, Cynthia Clarey as the White Cat, and François Le Roux as the amorous Black Cat. I write these words on the eve of Ojai, where this work will be reprised under a new moon and the blessing of starry skies. I only hope the woodpecker is back on his usual sycamore to join in.

The Mahler Fourth was the inspired finale; I can’t think of another work that could sound so right after L’Enfant. Rattle moves toward coronation as the new century’s first great conductor of Mahler. Like Salonen, he sees the Fourth whole and pure; they both observe the extreme tempo flexibilities throughout – metronome changes sometimes every eight bars – and understand how Mahler meant these changes as a way to create a uniquely lithe and supple melodic line. Rattle has, I think, a surer vision of the work’s folksiness: the slides in the strings delicious but ever so slightly obscene, the winds in the scherzo delightfully ill-mannered. Heidi Grant Murphy, the Princess in the Ravel, was the angelic visionary in the fourth movement. The orchestral sound throughout the evening was, well, “sublime” will do for starters.

It was billed as a “gala”; the ticket prices bespoke “gala,” and so, I’m told, did the fancy sit-down dinner upstairs after the music ran out. The farewell entertainment concocted by the Los Angeles Opera last week to wish Godspeed to its founder/honcho Peter Hemmings turned out, to its credit, less of a “gala” in the sense of the typical all-star international assemblage of entertainment tidbits that run on and on until the wee hours, and more of a modest and serious family celebration, short and snappy, relatively free of verifiable trash. Above all, it added up to a remarkably accurate portrait of the company that Hemmings has created here in his 14 years – strengths, weaknesses, warts ‘n’ all.

One of his major accomplishments goes beyond the company itself, in the creation of a heightened operatic consciousness throughout Southern California. When I came here in 1979 there was, to be sure, the beginning of an awareness. Tito Capobianco’s San Diego Opera had launched a project to do all the Verdi operas, but that stopped short when Tito was lured away to darkest Pittsburgh. (Mrs. Capobianco, a.k.a. Gigi Denda, trod upon a few toes in San Diego with her ambitions as designer/director, in a manner not uncommon among spouses of opera impresarios. So what else is new?) The Long Beach Opera in its early days ground out a few re-warmed repertory chestnuts with minor-league casts. The opera “season” in Los Angeles consisted of a month of the New York City Opera squeezed into the Philharmonic season, a situation detested quite publicly by the Music Center management and which ended precipitously not much later with a short, sharp shock from executive hatchet man Tom Wachtell, the limits of whose operatic wisdom were broadcast with his famous putdown of Plácido Domin.go: “Well, after all, he’s no Pavarotti.”

Even without Pavarotti (whose career in staged opera hereabouts consists of one La Bohème at the Hollywood Bowl in days of yore), the Hemmings years have seen the area’s emergence as an operatic beehive. Costa Mesa’s Opera Pacific, the same age as the L.A. Opera, started off as a farm club for David Di Chiera’s companies in Dayton and Detroit, went off-key for a time, and is now admirably resurrected on its own. Michael Milenski’s Long Beach Opera, dangling at the end of a shoestring for as long as anyone remembers, miraculously pulls itself together year after year with fringe repertory chosen and staged with resource and sheer gall. (Check it out on June 11: Luigi Dallapiccolla’s Volo di Notte.) San Diego seems in good shape; I don’t get down there often enough, but the sound of Renée Fleming’s Russalka is still in my ears.

The operatic underbrush flourishes; I write these words a few hours after a lively, imaginative Magic Flute, the inaugural offering of Opera Nova, with young voices, a surprisingly capable orchestra, and a make-do but adequate staging in a dowdy school auditorium in Santa Monica. You can’t write off their ambition; they promise a Marriage of Figaro next season. Ambition, in fact, blossoms all over town. I’ll be sorry to miss La Gioconda at the deliciously unreal Casa Italiana this weekend, but Ojai beckons. USC’s opera workshop has become a local necessity; UCLA’s Susannah this season, for a school with a drastically understaffed voice program, gave the opera better than it deserved.

You can’t hang all this activity on Hemmings, yet the presence of his company, and the particular scope of its activity, has to be some kind of catalyst. The example of Rodney Gilfry, Richard Bernstein, Suzanna Guzmán and Greg Fedderly, all of them distinguished alumni of Hemmings’ resident-artist program and now active worldwide, looms large on the horizons of the young singers in that Magic Flute. The Tamino and Sarastro, in fact, already have their toehold, via membership in the L.A. Opera’s permanent chorus. You gotta start somewhere.

As much as anything, the Hemmings “gala” honored the high level attained by those “graduates,” with Guzmán blatantly stealing the show. It also bore sadder testimony to the company’s real failing over the years: its inability – or unwillingness, if you prefer – to build a major operatic production around the musical leadership it deserved. Sure, there were exceptions: Simon Rattle’s Wozzeck, Zubin Mehta’s (yes, Mehta’s) Tristan, Charles Dutoit’s Les Troyens, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Pelléas, Julius Rudel’s Seraglio. For every new conductor of genuine merit turned up during the Hemmings administration – Evelino Pidò comes first, and perhaps only, to mind – there was the sad string of time-beaters, many of whom figured in last week’s celebration. How do you honor the head of an opera company who entrusted Die Frau ohne Schatten to a Randall Behr? a Tristan revival to a Richard Armstrong? or, for that matter, the company’s inaugural Otello to a Lawrence Foster?

Edgar Baitzel summoned me to lunch a few weeks ago, shortly after I had expressed terminal displeasure at the company’s Rigoletto and La Rondine. Baitzel is the company’s new artistic administrator, a post newly created as, perhaps, an admission of the limits of Plácido Domingo’s horizons; in Europe he’d be known as a Dramaturg. He has held that post with several European companies, and worked for a time with the late, great (if greatly controversial) stage director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. He’s a man of consummate charm, with an impeccable talent for handing out bits of information that any arts consumer surely wants to be true. Among the hors d’oeuvres was a recitation of Marta Domingo’s considerable achievements as an opera director, spiced with frequent references to Plácido’s long-standing friendship with superconductor Valery Gergiev. Dessert consisted of pie in the sky: a complete Ring in the spring and summer of 2003; Moses und Aron. There might have been more, but I’m dieting.

I’ll miss the other lunches. Back in the days of open warfare, Hemmings used to subpoena me to lunch once or twice each season to hand me my latest report card. He had graded Martin Bernheimer’s and my reviews according to an intricate numerical system. Sometimes Martin would win, sometimes I would. I never cared that much about the figures; what stayed with me was the knowledge that a mover in the musical world took my writings (yes, and Martin’s too, if you insist) seriously enough to concoct that kind of numbers game. Without my ever once singing a note on his (or anyone else’s) opera stage or standing on a podium, Peter Hemmings regarded me as important. May his tribe increase.