So I've Heard

I‘m still obsessed with memories of Marino Formenti’s piano concerts at LACMA; you would be, too, if you‘d been there. On the third concert, he pulled off an acrobatic marvel, performing simultaneously on two pianos, tuned a quarter-tone apart, set at right angles behind him. The music itself was no mere trick: a big, clangorous piece called Hommage a Gyorgy Ligeti by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, consisting of a rat-a-tat of repeated notes in huge clusters that seemed to fade in and out around one another, with the tuning difference creating a fascinating new sound, part gamelan and part Martian, that gradually became its own language. The object of the ”hommage“ was well-chosen; Ligeti himself has experimented with all kinds of microtonal composition, from re-tuned pianos to the banshee wails of an ensemble of ocarinas set among the players of a ”serious“ symphony orchestra in his Violin Concerto. And by the way, back in 1923 our own Charlie Ives wrote a set of pieces for two pianos a quarter-tone apart (but for two performers).

There are those who protest that music’s downward path began with the adoption of equal temperament around the time of Bach — a series of compromises so that all 12 tones of the scale could be the same distance apart, enabling composers to compose for keyboard instruments in all keys and to drive their music forward on the interaction of harmonic consonance and dissonance. These protesters would ”free“ music from such tyranny and return to the earlier system of ”just“ intonation, which derived its tones from the mathematical logic of the overtone series as propounded by Pythagoras and his pals. With just intonation you end up with an infinity of notes, not the paltry 12-chromatic-tone scale of piano or harpsichord. The seventh overtone, counting upward from, say, a C, comes out to something like a too-flat B-flat, and that note would not exist on a scale starting from, say, D. Singers and players of string instruments can easily ”bend“ toward these microscopically varied tones. Keyboard and wind-instrument players cannot. Bach‘s Well-Tempered Clavier, besides containing some wonderful music, is a celebration of the newly won right to play B-flats in the key of D.

Digression here. It’s this ability or unwillingness to ”bend“ a note ever so slightly, to distinguish between, say, a G-sharp and an A-flat, that adds the emotional coloration to one performance, and not to another. When Viktoria Mullova performed the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Philharmonic a couple of weeks ago, the chill around her performance came to a large degree from the dead-on but deadening accuracy of her intonation; she might as well have been playing a xylophone. Listen to the 1926 recording of Mendelssohn‘s Violin Concerto, just reissued on Naxos, in which Fritz Kreisler’s willingness to bend — or obsession with bending, as some purists would have it — transforms the solo line into a loving message into your ears and mine and, or so it seems, ours alone. Or listen to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss (in the first of her two EMI versions) as if seated on your lap. That‘s what just an infinitesimal bending of the pitch can do.

Okay so far? The Haas work that Formenti played has nothing to do with overtones, of course; it was the controlled clash of two pianos meticulously tuned in equal temperament but out of tune with each other. The sound was wondrous strange, but nothing you’d want to live with. It did prepare my ears, however, for an entire evening of notes-between-notes later that same week.

This was the second event (of four) in MicroFest 2000, the latest in the annual series run by composerguitaristteacherKPFK commentatorimpresario John Schneider, exploring the many ways in which music can shake clear of the bonds of equal temperament and tantalize (or irritate) the ear in the mysterious realm that lies between the notes. Harry Partch was on the program, the rebellious autodidact who built his own instruments, with his own tuning systems, to assist in music‘s great escape. Lou Harrison, whose hand was guided by the intricate harmonic systems of Indonesia and India, sent along a new sonata for a harpsichord tuned to just intonation. But the sublime was touched even more firmly in the four works by Ben Johnston that filled the second half of the program.

Johnston, described by one perceptive writer as ”one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer,“ was born in 1926. Along the way he studied with Partch and with John Cage, absorbed and then rejected Anton Webern’s strict organizational principles, and since 1970 has worked with the ”purer“ tunings of just intonation. That, of course, suggests an easy path to non-fame, but if the beguiling and totally beautiful Suite for Microtonal Piano, which Phillip Bush performed on this MicroFest concert (in the comfortable small music hall at Pierce College in Woodland Hills) is any criterion, Ben Johnston‘s music needs — no, demands — your greater attention. The Suite, plus a craggier but no less fascinating Sonata and an earlier work in ”normal“ tuning and duller for that, are on a Koch International disc, played by the excellent Bush. And from that disc you can then graduate to just intonation’s true masterwork, LaMonte Young‘s five-CD The Well-Tuned Piano, on Gramavision, five hours, not a moment dull, hard to find but worth the search.

Gyorgy Kurtag’s Stele, which began Markus Stenz‘s recent stint on the Philharmonic podium, begins with a gleaming chord on G that, for its first couple of seconds, could pass for early Beethoven. Then it suddenly, fascinatingly darkens; there are glissandos across its surface that pull it out of ”normal“ tuning and into mystery. The rest of the work’s 14-or-so-minute length deepens the mystery. Kurtag demands strange instruments and puts them to strange uses: Four Wagner tubas on one side of the stage challenge, and are answered by, four trombones on the other side; the subtle difference in the intonations of these instruments sets up a clash. So do the infinitesimal discrepancies in the antiphony of grand piano, upright piano, celesta and cimbalom. The sounds pile up; ”stele“ is Greek for ”pillar.“ Then they disintegrate; the piece holds you in its grip, but is soon over. That‘s Kurtag’s way: the aphorism that sweeps quickly across your horizon, and then lingers to haunt you later on.

The Brahms Violin Concerto followed, the aforementioned performance with Mullova. Hearing this work is never one of my more cherished experiences, with its orchestration the texture of last week‘s brown gravy (the winds in the slow movement excepted) and its soloist yammering hysterically into your face at close range. But I don’t remember when I less wanted to hear it than this time, while still under the spell cast by Kurtag.

One hundred years after his birth, 50 years after his death, Kurt Weill can finally be measured. Against all the news about the abandonment of serious music by the giants of the recording industry, EMI Classics has produced the first-ever recording of Weill’s grandest, most ambitious stage work, Die Bürgschaft, in a performance worthy of the score. If you think you know the stature of Weill’s legacy from The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny and the richness of his later works for Broadway, you will need to adjust your estimate upward to include this huge newcomer to the list, an opera exhilarating in its musical sweep, exasperating in the imponderables of its plot, extraordinary in the sheer beauty of its many great moments.

Die Bürgschaft (The Pledge) dates from 1932. Weill’s collaboration with Bertolt Brecht had run its course, although they would join forces once again, as exiles in Paris two years later, in The Seven Deadly Sins. Caspar Neher created the libretto, a Marxist-existential-morality mishmash drawn from a parable by Johann Gottfried von Herder that, in turn, was based on a passage from the Talmud – all adding up to the message that money destroys rich and poor alike. That, of course, wasn’t so different from the sermons propounded
by the lowlifes in both Threepenny and Mahagonny. This time, however, Weill was on different ground: not the arse-kicking Brechtian satire with music to match, but a broad and tragic panorama of suffering and self-destruction.

The music is rich and dark, with turns of harmony that send shivers down your spine and turns of melody that can trouble your dreams for days after. There is music like this in the Sins; the opera, however, with its large cast and orchestra, and its complex choral writing that involves not only participants in the plot but also a separate ensemble that comments on the action, drew from Weill the most extensive dramatic writing he would ever attempt.

Die Bürgschaft had a few performances in 1932. Then came Hitler. Aside from a couple of truncated radio presentations, it remained in limbo until 1998, when it was taken up by brave operatic forces
in the small German city of Bielefeld. The recording is of the American premiere at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1999, under the warm and knowing leadership of Julius Rudel and with a cast led by Frederick Burchinal and Dale Travis as the two friends whose financial indebtedness ends in murder, Margaret Thompson as a suffering wife, and Ann Panagulias as a daughter driven to prostitution.

I won’t hang by my thumbs in hopes of seeing Die Bürgschaft on any local stage; however gripping the music, the drama bends under the weight of middle-European symbolism. Even so, I am baffled that so powerful a work, crucial to our understanding of one of the truly original masters of his time, has suffered complete neglect for so long. Kim Kowalke, head of the Kurt Weill Foundation and co-producer of this recording, suggests in his notes that since the opera had no role for Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, it didn’t make the agenda when the widowed Lenya embarked on her mission to hunt down and record (however inauthentically, with her haunting but aging vocal powers) the repertory of “lost” Weill.

One more “lost” work of Weill cries out for similar splendid restoration, the pageant piece Der Weg der Verheissung that the legendary director Max Reinhardt staged in New York in 1937 (as The Eternal Road), to a text by Franz Werfel that mingles a re-enactment of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac into the contemporary travails of a threatened Jewish community. As in Bielefeld with Die Bürgschaft, Der Weg was restored last year in a small German city, Chemnitz, with John Mauceri conducting. That production, in German, then came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I’ve seen the video from Chemnitz; the Weill score alternates with long spoken episodes, but the music, as in Die Bürgschaft, has a rolling, solemn eloquence that couldn’t be by any other composer. It needs a new English translation, and an editor’s scissors on the dialogue. Join me in praying that this may someday happen.

While you wait, linger among the pages of David Farneth’s Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents (Overlook Press), handsome, expensive and invaluable, as close a reproduction of the sound and spirit of this troubled musical visionary as a printed page can afford. It joins previous Foundation-sponsored projects – a Lenya volume, handsomely packaged with CDs of every note she ever recorded, and Speak Low, the letters of Weill and Lenya, a throbbing and powerful memento.

The pickings are rather slim so far for any local celebration of the Weill
anniversary. The Happy End at MOCA, partly underwritten by Krispy Kreme doughnuts and similar in texture, shouldn’t have happened. Audra McDonald sings the Sins with the Philharmonic next season. When I moved here in 1979, Los Angeles offered more. The East-West Players, in their little dive of a theater in Silver Lake, did several of the theater pieces, including a memorable Happy End. Ron Sossi’s Odyssey Theater produced a smashing version of Johnny Johnson, Weill’s first fully American theater work. There were still survivors here from Weill’s Berlin, most of them with memories intact and delighted to recount them into my tape recorder. Kim Kowalke was on the Occidental faculty at the time, and helped me put my interviews, and his own European tapes of music still little known back then, into a radio series for KUSC in its adventurous days now past.

Margot Aufricht, widow of the producer of the first Threepenny, sat in her Beverly Hills living room and talked enchantingly about the delirious infighting among that masterwork’s first cast, in Berlin, 1928. Felix Jackson, the Hollywood writer who married Deanna Durbin and did the script for Destry Rides Again, was formerly Felix Joachimson, and in 1926 had written the libretto for a Weill opera, Na Und?, that has been completely lost. He, therefore, was the last surviving link to that work. Hans Heinsheimer, who was Weill’s publisher at Universal Edition, claimed to be the one who ordered Weill to toss Na Und? into the Danube. In Santa Barbara, the wonderful Maurice Abravanel, who had studied with Weill in Berlin and later conducted his music on Broadway, talked and talked. In New York there was Lenya, with her home-cooked legend about the nonstop lovey-dovey life with Kurt, soaring free of such earthly matters as divorce, reconciliation and fornication.

They’re gone now, all those old people with the vivid memories and equally vivid fictions. They might put up a fuss now that so little Weill is happening here in this centennial year. Somebody should.

There was chamber music in town last week, the wrong pieces beautifully played. On Wednesday, three delightfully earnest and talented young musicians from overseas — the violinist Christian Tetzlaff, his younger sister the cellist Tanja, and the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes — played an evening‘s worth of lesser Schumann. On Friday, the estimable Emanuel Ax joined Philharmonic members in “other” Mendelssohn and Dvorak: not the former’s lustrous, familiar D-minor Trio but the inferior, lumpier C-minor; not the latter‘s radiant Piano Quintet — chamber music at its most feelgood — but his E-flat Piano Quartet, its poorer imitation. Even the venues were wrong. The soft, melancholic strains of Schumann’s last two piano trios became faint and distant voices on Wednesday in the vast space of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; the crowd was fair-sized, but its collective heart would have been better warmed in the intimate space of the Zipper Concert Hall down the street. At Zipper on Friday, Manny Ax played with the piano lid fully open, seriously outshouting the brave voices of the participating string players: a grand noise on its own, perhaps, but only distantly related to chamber music — performances, in other words, on a Pavilion-size scale.

What makes a piece of music “better” or “lesser,” at least in this one pair of ears that happens to be attached to a word processor? One easy criterion: “Better” works tend to get even better on repeated hearings. I could never conceive a time when I would not welcome a hearing of the one truly unchallengeable work in Schumann‘s considerable chamber-music legacy, the E-flat Piano Quintet. It dates from 1842, a happy time in the Schumann household. It is, in fact, one of Schumann’s strongest works in any medium. Its opening, the dialogues between the jagged angular and the suavely lyrical, grabs your attention and holds it. The music plays wonderful tricks; themes once heard keep popping up unexpectedly later on. The momentum is breathtaking; that element, above all, is peculiarly lacking in the later works. No matter that Schumann derived the template for the Quintet from Schubert‘s equally great E-flat Trio; the two works, side by side on a program, would not be a redundancy.

But I hear little of this strength in any of the three piano trios — the last two so eloquently pleaded by Tetzlaff and his colleagues, or the more familiar No. 1. Schumann’s hand is immediately recognizable not in any detectable originality in the music, but from the constant reminders of his well-known earlier works, including a few of the songs — a harmony here, a turn of phrase there, a patchwork of old friends. You have to wonder what in this music could attract such bright and valuable young players, who rank among the strongest portents of a splendid future for the great repertory of the past — Christian Tetzlaff for his Bach, Andsnes for a Beethoven Fourth Concerto here a couple of years ago that still resounds. Ending their concert, there was one encore, a single movement from Beethoven‘s adolescence. In five minutes it delivered a prophecy of mastery still to come, as the hour of Schumann had delivered a regretful nostalgia for mastery fast fading.

George Antheil’s Sonata Sauvage, which Marino Formenti included on the last of his four instantly legendary piano recitals at the County Museum, inspired another kind of nostalgia: a search in vain for memories of ever hearing a worse piece of music by anyone, anywhere. It conjures a sad picture: its 22-year-old composer, incomparably fair of face, petted and curried and journeying through between-wars European salon society as that new exotic toy, an American composer. His amateurish but startling clatter-and-bang doesn‘t mask the music’s appalling lack of content; enough that it fulfills the saloniste view of America. He is the Noble Savage redux, and a “Savage Sonata” serves as his calling card. Ezra Pound even devoted an entire book to Antheil‘s pre-eminence among composers of the day: pound-foolishness, if ever there was.

This final program, all-American, included far better music, of course. Charles Ives’ Three-Page Sonata was well worth reviving, with its first movement full of the same uncoiling, chromatic energy that fills the “Emerson” segment of the Concord Sonata with amazement. (The piece is not trivial, despite its title; the “pages,” the program note explained, are actually large manuscripts.) Framing the extraordinary evening were works of John Cage and Morton Feldman, music of notes and silences, of room exactly measured but with space into which you and I must enter. Without actually counting, I would guess that there are more notes in any 10 seconds of Antheil‘s infantile savagery than in the 20 minutes of Feldman’s Piano, and I have no difficulty deciding which package of notes constitutes music, and which lunatic noise.

I have had reason more than once to extol the work of the Minnesota-based American Composers Forum, notably for its Innova discs that honor a broad range of experimental music and for its particular attention — on disc, video and an impressive published documentary volume — to the music of Harry Partch. Beyond this, the ACF fulfills the “forum” aspect by helping composers in as many of their needs as limited funding can allow. There are ACF chapters in several cities, and the Los Angeles branch is officially launched next week, run by Heidi Lesemann, who shepherded the long-departed Arnold Schoenberg Institute during its happier days at USC. (Reach them at lacomposersforum@aol.com.) One crucial need, it has long seemed to me, is a way of circulating information; the last thing most new-music presenters (including, most emphatically, the County Museum) can afford is any kind of advertising budget. That‘s why there were fewer than 50 people at Formenti’s first concert here, and more only after word of mouth got around. To address this, the ACF plans to issue New Music L.A., a monthly calendar of new-music events covering the area from Orange to Santa Barbara counties. The first issue (MayJune) should be available at classical counters at Tower and Virgin next week. Even in this “doldrums” part of the music season, you‘ll be amazed at how much is going on.

A gap of 166 years separates the C-minor Piano Concerto of Mozart (K. 491) from the Piano Sonata of Jean Barraqué, but they share at least this: the ability to wreak sheer violence upon an audience, to numb the ears into disbelief by the power of innovation. Not all pianists are smart enough to recognize this in the Mozart, although the very opening notes – the jagged theme that pushes upward and further upward, not at all the shapely “classic” outline but rather something of a shriek – reveal the plan. Unlike any but a couple of other works in his huge output, Mozart chooses to end both first and last movements in the same minor key that they had begun, again turning his back on the classic ideal of a “happy ending.”

Christian Zacharias was smart enough; his performance with the Philharmonic, conducting from the piano, in the second week of a splendid guest stint, was outsized, rawboned, truly dramatic. Again, as in the previous week, he did something really interesting in the first-movement cadenza; recognizing this as the most richly scored of all the concertos, he turned what is usually a solo improv into another dialogue between piano and orchestra, going on brilliantly from what Mozart surely had in mind. Two Haydn symphonies framed the Mozart: No. 83, which also begins with a jagged, upward theme, and No. 103, in a performance larger than life and just right. He’s a find, this Zacharias.

As long as composers compose, critics criticize; seldom the twain do meet. Four centuries ago the critic G.M. Artusi turned his vitriol-laden pen upon the innovations of Claudio Monteverdi, and his fame clings to that slender thread of happenstance. In my own century I didn’t happen upon Constant Lambert’s 1934 Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline until I was old enough to winnow out the baloney. Two books by the late Henry Pleasants – the 1955 The Agony of Modern Music and the 1961 Death of Music? – struck me in their time as owners’ manuals for ulcer patients, while Norman Lebrecht’s 1997 Who Killed Classical Music? comes over as low-grade sci-fi.

There was another book in 1961 that also raised a fair amount of dust, and which a recent event has inspired me to dig out from under its own layer of dust on my back shelves. Its title is Since Debussy, A View of Contemporary Music, by André Hodeir, a performer and critic better known on the jazz side of the fence but obviously at home on this side as well. (It is currently out of print, listed on the amazon.com hierarchy-of-sales list as No. 1,057,652.) Most of the aforementioned broadsides assume a conservative stance against any and all abominations in the cause of advancing music’s frontiers. Hodeir’s household deities, however, included the young Boulez and Stockhausen, the elder statesmen Schoenberg and Messiaen, and one further figure who at 33 had still only produced a small body of work not yet very well known but whom Hodeir – and apparently Hodeir alone – recognized as “the only one great 20th-century disciple of Beethoven.” That emergent savior was Jean Barraqué – who died at a mere 45, leaving Hodeir’s prophesy unfulfilled – and it was the Piano Sonata of Barraqué, performed at the County Museum by Marino Formenti on the first of his four programs of 20th-century piano music, that left me in a state of exhilaration beyond any experience this season. And I’ve had some doozers.

I have to note here that Formenti’s performance may not have been exactly what Barraqué had in mind. It lasted about 25 minutes, while a recent and superlative recording on ECM, by Herbert Henck, runs 46; other performances, friends tell me, have run as long as 55. The work is in two movements, of which the second is meant to proceed at a pace preternaturally slow, its great misshapen sound blocks set apart by silences whose actual length the performer must decide. Henck’s decisions, which in his extended program note he links to the example of John Cage, run long; his projection of the entire work, thrilling in its way, is of an otherworld landscape, with vistas of vast crags gradually spaced out toward nothingness. “No music of this density,” Hodeir writes, “has been composed since [Beethoven’s] Great Fugue; that fact alone should suggest the kind of shock it can produce at first hearing.”

Formenti’s version was all about momentum, extraordinarily under control. The sheer power pinned you to your seat (“you” being the 50 or so brave souls spread through LACMA’s 600-seat Bing Theater that night), yet there was never a moment when the coiled-spring complexity of Barraqué’s writing, the interweave of gnarled, surging atonal lines, was in any way blurred or diminished. Of silence there was little; the ending – the sudden fall of the music’s curtain, as Barraqué gives us the bare notes of his tone row, slowly, one by one, resounding out of dark nothingness – was no less shocking than the mountainous pileups that had gone before. The two performances – insofar as any recorded performance can compare to the impact of reality stunningly delivered – are so unalike that you would need to own both to come at all close to this one-of-a-kind work.

Formenti, 34, northern Italian by birth, now lives in Vienna; he was here two years ago with the Klangforum Wien at the surprise-laden Resistance Fluctuations festival. The Barraqué ended a French program that also included all 12 of Boulez’s exquisite Notations and the superheated thunder of several parts of Messiaen’s Twenty Regards on the Child Jesus. Formenti plays with fingers, but also with brains; after the jillion notes of the Barraqué, the single encore was the air-clearing emptiness of Debussy’s Footsteps on the Snow. The second program, Italian, included the rich, dark fantasy of Luigi Nono’s . . . Sofferte Onde Serene . . . for piano and tape, and also Luigi Dallapiccola’s Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera, deep, fragrant music by a composer now unjustly neglected. (His Volo di Notte comes to the Long Beach Opera next month, and is not to be missed.) Formenti is an amazing pianist; all praise to the LACMA management that brought him here (and here alone) for four marvelously planned century’s-end programs. On the day this paper hits the stands, May 4, you have time to rush to LACMA for his final concert.

Confession: I wrote last week about Stockhausen’s Helicopter Quartet on the basis of information on the Internet. Now I’ve heard the Auvidis recording – the Ardittis sawing away in their flying machines, calling out the cues (“eins, zwei, drei . . .”), and the engines themselves, soaring, roaring and beautifully subsiding at the end. It may only be a studio mix; for the real thing you have to pay $55 to Stockhausen’s own company. It is also extremely beautiful, in ways you probably wouldn’t believe, so I won’t try. I’ve been playing it all week, alternating with the Barraqué Sonata, and I think I too am flying.

Will American opera audiences ever see the Light? I wouldn‘t count on it, not while the Mmes. Butterfly and Tosca fatten their lead in the audience polls, on Momma Domingo’s cooking.

The Light I refer to is the collective title of the formidable cycle of seven operas, now nearing completion, out of which we were vouchsafed about an hour‘s worth of teaser at the County Museum’s most recent Monday Evening Concert. Karlheinz Stockhausen began the project in 1977: seven operas named for days of the week, each the length of one of Wagner‘s Ring dramas and purporting — on a scale that dwarfs even Wagner’s scenario — to encapsulate the import of music, the several worldwide conceptions of the nature of divinity, mankind‘s ultimate strengths and weaknesses, and, for all anyone knows, the fluctuating price of tea in China. The operas themselves are less about singing, more about an integration of song, nonvocal sound both instrumental and electronic, stage spectacle and gesture. Stockhausen’s written scores detail not only the music but the most explicit intricacies of stage design, movement and choreography — the culmination of his lifetime obsession with total serial organization that makes Wagner‘s Gesamtkunstwerk seem like random dabbling. The music itself is a complex concept in which exact melodic formulas are attached to the dramatic and spiritual aspects of Stockhausen’s scenario; it, too, is a vast compendium into which elements of strict 12-tone composition, Buddhist chant, jazz ‘n’ rock and public hoopla are stirred. (The score for Saturday involves an American college marching band among the participants.) The word beautiful doesn‘t always come first to mind in this music; hypnotic does.

Most of the cycle has so far been produced in Milan — at La Scala or, in the case of Saturday, in a sports palace. There’s a fascinating video documentary on preparations for Monday, the first opera of the cycle, in the 1988 production at La Scala. A huge statue of Eve dominates the stage; she gives birth to 14 grotesque creatures who ride around to a ”Baby-Buggie Boogie“ but are ordered back into the womb by Lucifer. The womb is impregnated again by a grand piano (playing Stockhausen‘s Klavierstuck XIV, music originally written for Pierre Boulez’s 60th birthday). This time seven proper babies emerge, and their singing is converted to birdsong, etc. Get the idea?

Any or all of this might add up to a case for its creator as certifiably mad, except for one thing: the rich, intense power of the music. At LACMA, Markus Stockhausen, a phenomenal brass player who has also obviously inherited his father‘s showmanship genes, played the 27-minute ”Pieta,“ the solo ”aria“ for tape plus a tampered-with flugelhorn capable of quarter-tones, from Tuesday; he then joined Stefano Scodanibbio, the spellbinding double-bass magician whose frequent appearances here have won him a deserved cult following, in a long segment from Thursday. For almost an hour, in near-total darkness, the museum’s drab Bing Theater throbbed to the discourse of superhuman musical entities, set free in outer space. You got the impression, for the moment anyhow, that all the other music in the world has been trying to attain the condition of Stockhausen. Then the lights came on, and the planet reassumed its shape.

Stockhausen‘s star appears to be waning, at least in the marketplace. His entry in the latest Schwann catalog contains only nine compositions, down from 13 in the previous issue; there are probably more available from the Stockhausen Verlag in Germany, at higher prices. Resist his music if it pleases you, but listen at least to the distillation of pure sound into pure silence that makes up the hourlong essence of Stimmung, in the magical performance on Hyperion by a group that includes Paul Hillier. The Ardittis have been playing his ”Helicopter“ Quartet (from Wednesday), which is exactly what its name implies: four players sky-high in separate conveyances, cued by heaven-knows-what. A natural choice, you’d think, for the Hollywood Bowl this summer, but no such luck.

You didn‘t, of course, have to journey all the way to Stockhausen-land for operas on not-quite-rational subjects. At Costa Mesa’s Performing Arts Center there was Offenbach‘s The Tales of Hoffmann, the final offering in what has been, by some distance, Opera Pacific’s finest season. Music director John DeMain conducted with understandable pride; Vinson Cole, hobbling through his evening‘s chores with an injured knee and, therefore, a cane, was the splendid Hoffmann; Richard Bernstein sang the four avatars of Nemesis with slithery insinuation; Jan Grissom sang the four ladyloves of Hoffmann’s tormented existence, a little shrill for the tormented Antonia, perhaps, but kooky in her Marilyn getup as the mechanical doll Olympia. Ian Judge‘s staging, on a set magically and swiftly transformable, was a trove of smart ideas.

Hoffmann runs rather long nowadays. Recent scholarship, mostly by the editor Fritz Oeser, has restored some valuable music that for one reason or another had been dropped over the years. If you know the opera from, say, the wonderful old Michael Powell–Emeric Pressburger movie conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham — as indeed you should — the new version runs nearly an hour longer. It includes a lot of rediscovered music for Hoffmann’s companion Nicklausse that provides a whole ‘nother psychological dimension. One problem concerns the traditional ”Diamond Aria“ and big Septet, both in the Venice scene; they were not by Offenbach at all and, in the interests of ”authenticity,“ might well be dropped — except that they are also very good. At Opera Pacific, they were kept: enlightened tampering, a different species altogether from the sorry events detailed here last week.

On successive nights there were adjacent Mozart piano concertos, both led from the piano and performed in ways remarkably far apart. In No. 22 (K. 482), at the Philharmonic, Christian Zacharias seemed melted and made amorous by the miraculous songs welling up from Mozart’s winds; he even invited their soft singing into the first-movement cadenza he himself had devised. Next night, however, in No. 21 (K. 467) with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Royce Hall, Jeffrey Kahane seemed determined to withstand the blandishments even of the divine slow movement‘s endless melody. It was a steely sort of performance he gave, with tempos in the outer movements that blurred passagework now and then and left crucial melodic turns somewhat unfulfilled. I kept thinking of the late Robert Casadesus, whose crystalline, tinkly Mozart some people admired, others did not.

I have heard better Mozart from Kahane, and hope to again. In any case, his program also had French hornist Richard Todd in a romp through that sublime giggle, the First Concerto from Richard Strauss’ days of youth: glorious, restorative music by a composer who was soon to go astray but hadn‘t yet.

I have seen the operatic future — part of it, anyhow — and it makes me nervous. I view the L.A. Opera under the Domingo dynasty as a grandiose mom ‘n’ pop operation. Pop Placido nurses his aging voice, transposing the arias downward when necessary, and keeps his right arm in shape with a little stick-waving that might pass for conducting if you don‘t listen too carefully. Mom Marta, whose career as a professional stage director only goes back to 1991, makes up for lost time by rewriting and then restaging the repertory classics, tacking happy endings onto the tragedies and death scenes onto the comedies.

We have ample chance to sample the perfectly adequate ordinariness of Placido’s conducting over the years; it fits into the pattern of podium mediocrity that has haunted the company from the start. (His announced Aida next fall looks from here like more of the same.) Right now it‘s the diminutive Marta who looms large, in the colossally misguided version of Puccini’s three-legged puppy of an almost-operetta, La Rondine, currently sullying the air at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, that she not only directs but has also extensively revised in the name of correcting faults that she (and she alone) has detected in the standard version.

Puccini himself had his troubles with La Rondine. In one early version, never performed and later disowned, the reformed prostitute Magda, denounced by tenor Ruggero as he learns The Truth, faces the wreckage of her one true love ”alone and abandoned“ at the final curtain. It‘s not hard to understand why the final version, with the parting of the mismatched lovers both wistful and inevitable — as in Der Rosenkavalier, which Puccini admired — harmonizes far better with the rest of the work. Marta Domingo, however, has chosen to impose her own gloss onto the rejected version; her Magda, more Joan Crawford than Strauss’ Marschallin, walks out into a handy nearby ocean and sinks out of sight. Designer Michael Scott has provided a terrific tidal wave.

Marta‘s editorial hand falls elsewhere as well. Like a fond momma scattering tchotchkes, she has littered Puccini’s perfectly respectable score with useless bits: a scrap of text from Godknowswhere stuck onto an orchestral passage, a newly contrived add-on to a duet for Magda and her sugar daddy there. From another Puccini reject she has exhumed a first-act tenor aria, with a gut-busting high some-note-or-other at the end on which tenor Marcus Haddock foundered most ignobly. One should be polite about people unfortunately named, but Mr. Haddock‘s Ruggero was decidedly cold fish. And so was the Magda of Carol Vaness — wreathed in whore-frost, you might say — as a soprano still admirable in the classic repertory tries once again (as in her previous Violetta and Tosca here) to remake herself as an Italian romantic. Greg Fedderly and Sari Gruber managed the juvenile roles with charm and ease; newcomer conductor Emmanuel Villaume did some furious arm-waving that was fun to watch without significantly mitigating the overall gloom, the unshakable sense that none of this should really be allowed to happen — least of all at a $146 top ticket.

On this matter of wrong-head-edness, you might want to rummage around in your imagination’s darkest reaches in search of other deplorable musical ideas. A rewrite of Aida with a new score by Elton John? A parcel of Bob Dylan lyrics newly set to the typically shiny, slick, faceless music of John Corigliano? Neck and neck for wrong-headedness, wouldn‘t you say?

Well, the new-fangled Aida is doing okay, if not great, on Broadway, and the much-admired American soprano Sylvia McNair is traipsin’ the countryside with Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan, its attraction not at all impeded by its composer‘s recent Oscar (for more of the same typically shiny etc. music for The Red Violin). The crowd at McNair’s recent Dorothy Chandler Pavilion recital was on the paltry side, smaller than the splendor of McNair‘s proven artistry deserves, larger than the prospect of the evening’s major work held forth. Word does, after all, get around.

Corigliano‘s program note has it that he hadn’t heard a note of Dylan‘s songs until the Carnegie Hall commission (awarded to McNair for a song cycle, who then chose the composer) came his way; that, for a red-blooded American born in 1938, getting his own name around New York in the very time of Dylan’s glory days there, takes some doing. Whether from ignorance or malice, he has been keenly successful in circumventing the Dylan essence, the gritty insinuation that goes out from all the great lyrics to shape an inescapable, elementary kind of melody, simplistic but insistent. He has chosen his texts well: ”Mr. Tambourine Man,“ ”Blowin‘ in the Wind,“ ”All Along the Watchtower,“ all faves, and stifled them all under a suffocating blanket of Art.

The earth didn’t move very far under the Japan America Theater during the most recent Green Umbrella concert, but it quivered agreeably in place even so. Donald Crockett led his USC Contemporary Music Ensemble in a nicely varied program that included intricate, responsible music by Crockett himself and his faculty colleague Stephen Hartke. There was, as well, a nicely designed, exceptionally attractive work called Labyrinth by another academic not yet known here but obviously deserving: Indiana University‘s David Dzubay; remember the name. At the end came Randall Woolf’s Motown-tinged Shakedown, the kind of easygoing modernness you put at the end of a new-music program to reassure audiences that they haven‘t been witnessing the end of the world. The three major music compositional outlooks hereabouts are easily distinguishable: UCLA for its marketable blandness, CalArts for its winnowing of art forms out of chaos and the avoidance of marketable blandness at any cost, USC for its academic solidity. Taken together, they offer fair reassurance that music will be around for a while.

In common regard, the violin concertos — even the last three, which are the most often played — are a violinist‘s throwaway pieces, the easy music at the start of the program before getting down to serious stuff. Last week, Hilary Hahn played No. 4, with Jeffrey Kahane and his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, at Royce Hall, as a teaser before Edgar Meyer’s louder, longer new concerto. Two nights later, Vladimir Spivakov played and conducted No. 5 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with his Moscow Virtuosi, as curtain raiser for a mostly-Mozart program. In both cases I took home happier memories of these concertos than of anything else on either program. (They also made it harder to preserve any kind memories at all of Max Bruch‘s G-minor Concerto, despite Martin Chalifour’s honorable performance with Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the Philharmonic, which came between the other two programs and merely illustrated the sad state that violin concertos were to sink to in the century after Mozart.)

Common regard, however, risks our missing some miraculous happenings in these two concertos, which last week‘s performances drove home. The tricks right at the start of both works are astounding. No. 4 begins, like thousands of other works of its time, with a tune that’s nothing more than a fanfare, a D-major arpeggio up and down the scale that immediately — like far fewer works of its time — turns reflective, almost winsome. No. 5 also starts with an arpeggio, A-major this time, that later on turns out to be the accompaniment for the striding, grandiose real theme. Both concertos begin their slow movements with a Mozartian gambit that remained an earmark in later works as well: a theme that begins out in thin air as an unsupported single line, with the harmony kicking in only at the end of the phrase. (Listen to the opening of the K. 453 piano concerto for a wonderful late example.) The finale of No. 5 is famous, with its glorious intrusion of a ”Turkish“ episode that has the orchestral string players tapping out the rhythm with the wood of the bow; the last movement of No. 4 is no less remarkable, with its main theme broken into a real argument among players that never quite gets resolved. Both concertos end enchantingly: not with the expected big bang but with a final smile and a tiptoe offstage. So much for your ”throwaway“ Mozart.

Spivakov‘s program drew a large Russian-speaking crowd, most of it a ringer for your Aunt Minnie from Minsk and all of it apparently upset by the one contemporary work, the violin concerto (plus harpsichord) that Alfred Schnittke had fashioned out of one of his sonatas: strange, unsettling music with fascinating wide swings between mellow C-major triads and grinding dissonances. There was also more worthwhile early Mozart, but the wonderful A-major Symphony (No. 29, K. 201) was ruined by the conductor’s disinclination to honor the repeats or to mute the strings, as specified, in the slow movement. Isn‘t it late in the day to ignore such obvious guideposts in performing this kind of music?

Sooner or later someone will create for Hilary Hahn the concerto she deserves as the remarkably intelligent, dedicated violinist she has already, at 20, become. Edgar Meyer’s concerto, which Hahn has recorded and which — since she played it from memory — she has obviously been persuaded by whatever powers that be to take into her repertory, is not that work. Meyer is an admirable musical entertainer; he proved as much here the week before, with his pals Mark O‘Connor and Yo-Yo Ma, in another time-around in a sold-out Royce Hall of his country-fiddlin’ wingding. (He has also proved even more honorable credentials, as has O‘Connor, in sit-ins with the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center.)

But the Appalachian stuff (Waltz the first time and, now, Journey) is already hybrid, Meyer’s proof of his ability to absorb the figurations and the manic pizzazz of the country-fiddling style (itself a hybrid into which old-timey Brit and Irish jig-time is stirred along with an occasional Latin dip). The technique is familiar, but the revered Aaron Copland of Rodeo and Appalachian Spring puts it to shame; the wrong notes of vintage fiddling clash with the wrong notes that Meyer throws in to establish his originality. By all odds, it‘s Yo-Yo, perhaps the greatest string player among us today, who sells the tickets, and we can’t deny him that. You get the feeling that he could be playing Appalachian hoedowns with one hand and Bach suites with the other.

Meyer‘s Violin Concerto, as did his Double Concerto (for cello and bass) last year, aims higher and plummets further. Its tunesmithing is of the almost-French-wistful-modal stamp; names like Gerald Finzi come to mind, hardly a role model. It goes down easily; alas, it stays down. On the new Sony disc it is paired with the Barber Concerto, which has never sounded stronger.

Give Meyer credit, at least; he knows how to write for the violin, and how to make violinists happy. And Wonder knows how to make bread.

In another 75 years I might — just might — run out of things to say about Johann Sebastian Bach. Then again, I might not. The evidence is at hand that the Bach of 75 years ago — the Bach, say, of the footloose orchestral transcriptions by Leopold Stokowski and, for that matter, Arnold Schoenberg; of the lumbering, groaning sounds that passed for spiritual encounters in Albert Schweitzer‘s organ playing; the prissy rhythmic vagaries in Wanda Landowska’s performances on her oversize monster of an inauthentic harpsichord — existed on a different expressive plane from the Bach of Trevor Pinnock‘s ”Brandenburgs“ as delivered at UCLA’s Royce Hall last weekend. I also note with some trepidation that a ”world premiere“ recording now exists of the St. Matthew Passion in its form as it was first returned to the world, after a century of neglect, in the famous revival under Felix Mendelssohn: with a chorus of 400, re-orchestrated, cut to ribbons and otherwise romanticized to convince the Berlin burghers of 1829 that Bach was of their number. Have the record companies truly run out of music? Firmly ensconced in his unchallenged place in the cosmos, Bach moves back and forth in time.

This year we celebrate the anniversary of Bach‘s death (July 28, 1750), but last week’s birthday (March 21, 1685) sparked a busy few days as well. I was sorry to have missed the annual Bach Festival at the First Congregational Church, but not so sorry as I might have been if I hadn‘t attended the climactic event of last year’s festival and left midway in considerable anguish. (”When fa joins mi,“ a wise man wrote, ”the faithful flee.“)

The handsome domed space of the Second Church of Christ Scientist just north of USC — its paint flaking, its floorboards creaking — cries out for physical restoration to masterpiece status. It achieved that status, at least audibly, on a recent Saturday, with the Da Camera Society‘s ”Historic Sites“ presentation of the New York–based baroque ensemble called Rebel (accent on second syllable, named after an obscure French composer only now turning up on disc), which did great service to J.S. Bach by playing some of his own good music and some really bad music by others of his time. Included in the latter category was a comic piece by son Carl Philipp Emmanuel in which violinists ”Sanguineus“ and ”Melancholicus“ played weird and silly comic tunes at one another, and a ”Suite No. 5,“ clumsily written almost to the point of parody but which, however, some misguided scholars have attempted to ascribe to the good Sebastian. Two works by the ”authentic“ Bach, including the miraculous Suite No. 2, delivered the ultimate judgment on the preceding music. The flute solos, nicely played by Matthias Maute, circled like small, pure angels to bestow benediction on the vast surrounding space.

A day later, Trevor Pinnock and his English ”Concert“ (a legitimate variant, apparently, of the more customary ”Consort“) needed no sanctified ground to deliver their familiar benedictions: Bach’s ”Brandenburgs,“ all six, hovering endearingly in the Royce Hall air purified by their presence. All praise to the Brits — to Pinnock, and Roger Norrington, Andrew Parrott, the Tallis Scholars, etc. — for setting the sounds right in the world‘s vast and wondrous musical heritage. But is there something too clean, perhaps even bloodless, in the sheer exactitude of this meticulous, historically informed playing? One longs now and then for a little juice, for the oboe to sigh with audible pain over those miraculous dissonances in the First Brandenburg, for the flutes in the Fourth to giggle just a bit as they pace off their airy measures. (In a concession to acoustic problems, Jeff Kahane and the L.A. Chamber Orchestra had used the louder transverse flutes in their performance of No. 4 earlier this season; Pinnock used the stipulated softer recorders, and something was lost. Bach, after all, had no 1,829-seat house to deal with.) I had the feeling at times, in this generously laden afternoon’s worth of some of the best feel-good music the world has to offer, of being handed clean but empty pages, onto which I then must inscribe the wholeness of my own receptivity. Most performances at least provide hints. The ”Brandenburgs“ being what they are, however, I couldn‘t really begrudge the added task.

One further danger with these well-scrubbed, shiny-faced British performances is the impression they leave of an art form self-contained. Yet the overpowering strength of Bach, despite the neglect andor misrepresentation from ensuing generations, is the continuing hold his music has exerted throughout history and still does. No composer, not even Beethoven, challenges the strength of that hold. On Bach’s actual birthday last week, Leonard Stein took to the piano in the latest event in his ”Piano Spheres“ concerts to drive home just that fact. Two great works served to anchor his program, of almost exactly the same age but galaxies apart in style — the Sonata of Stravinsky and the Suite of Schoenberg — each a work of its time (the mid-1920s) and both throbbing with an inner Bach. In the Stravinsky you couldn‘t miss the crystalline, terse clarity of one of the keyboard toccatas; Schoenberg offered his homage to any of those haunting slow arias where the wayward right-hand melody floats toward infinity above the insistent left. There was all that on Leonard Stein’s program to engage (mostly with success) the pianist‘s 83-year-old fingers, along with diversions by Shostakovich, Birtwistle and the madcap Conlon Nancarrow, and, as final benediction, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, in which Bach addresses his world in language more profound than it will ever fully comprehend.

The Piano Spheres series has been a distinguished addition to our concert life: five pianists every year, each in programs challenging and dangerous, including several commissioned works, in the lovely setting of Pasadena’s small Neighborhood Church, enhanced further by splendid Fazioli pianos brought over each time by the noble David Abell. Now David has given up the Fazioli franchise, which included cartage costs, and the loss of that sum is enough to put the concert series in jeopardy. Once again, virtue is in desperate need of reward.