So I've Heard

It is quite possible that I was the only unhappy soul, among 3,000 or so ecstatic well-wishers, who failed to recognize the San Francisco Symphony’s recent appearance
at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion – a.k.a.
The MTT Homecoming – as a conflation of the Apocalypse, the Return of the Prodigal and a ninth-inning unassisted triple play at Dodger Stadium. Sure, the noises that night were pretty terrific – onstage and, at the end, among the helots out front. What any of this had to do with music, however, is the question I was obliged to face that night, and haven’t yet resolved.

It had been 16 years, give or take a couple of weeks, since Michael Tilson Thomas had last led a concert at the Pavilion. In 1984 he was the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor, while also playing footsie with other orchestras around the world. His legend in this, the city of his nativity, was already overpowering, dating back to the days when, as a beardless USC undergrad, he served as spark plug to the Monday Evening Concerts; he seemed to have a hand in every progressive musical activity in town. He was our Lenny, in other words; his career, like that of Bernstein, had skyrocketed on the fact of his having stepped in for an ailing conductor (William Steinberg, of the Boston Symphony) at a big-time New York concert. By 1984 there were no limits to his horizon . . .

Except, that is, among a few unreconstructed grumblers who clung to the notion that great music making included a sense of respect for great music. Philharmonic honcho Ernest Fleischmann was one of these. During a guest-conducting stint here in the winter of ’84, Tilson Thomas seemed driven by strange demons; there was a performance of the Beethoven “Eroica” that I’d like to forget but can’t, grossly distorted, showoffish, bratty. When it was over, so was MTT’s career with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The Philharmonic survived, and so did MTT. The forces of destiny ordained the San Francisco Symphony connection, and it flourishes. Even the muse of architecture has smiled on the union; the rebuilding of Davies Symphony Hall, coincidental with MTT’s arrival, has endowed the orchestra with an acoustic setting of fearsome efficiency. Every whisper on the stage comes out smack into the audience’s face; there’s none of the usual leakage of sound into the wings. An in-your-face sound for an in-your-face conductor: Talk about marriages made in heaven!

The Los Angeles gig suffered, as do all orchestras’ tour performances, from the Pavilion’s less-friendly acoustics, but not by much. The program here was pure in-your-face MTT. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was the centerpiece, the requisite offering to the gods of respectability, in a reading full of impressive brass orgasms but curiously devoid of the inner energy that should create the breathless onrush in the first movement, and terrify the hearer with spooks and mutterings in the amazing third. (Much as I hate the thought of bracketing these two podium panjandrums, this kind of static, shapeless performance
is also exactly the way Zubi conducts Beethoven.) Aaron Copland’s Inscape began the evening; John Adams’ Harmonielehre ended it. Neither work particularly enhances its composer’s stature; both offer a conductor the chance, handsomely exploited by MTT that night, to raise the roof.

Copland’s brief (13-minute) score also provided MTT the chance to chat up the crowd – at the pre-concert talk and again from the podium – with “Aaron ‘n’ me” anecdotes. Inscape, dating from 1967, has Copland in a sad final attempt to come to grips with 12-tone writing and turning out – as in the previous Connotations and the Piano Fantasy – an academic exercise in managing a technique for which he had little real sympathy. Why did he bother? Better Copland exists, and better Adams as well. Harmonielehre dates from 1985. Since then Adams has deepened and enriched his style to the point where this 40-minute “Great Prairie of Non-Event” (Adams’ words) seems like a canvas about to receive its first paint. Its orchestral noises are impressive, but we have heard them – better used, it breaks my heart to admit – in otherwise unrewarding works by Strauss and Sibelius. Why did MTT bother?

The papers and the slicks want us to believe that the future of the symphony orchestra lies along MTT’s paths, and he has in fact accomplished a fair amount to rekindle the love affair of city and orchestra that I remember from when I bused glasses in the Opera House bar in return for standing room at concerts led by Pierre Monteux. But the current talk of the dearth (or death) of great conducting – the notion that salvation lies only in the slick surfaces of MTT’s musical visions, however high the stack of Grammys – seems premature, to say the least.

Esa-Pekka Salonen will return soon enough; meanwhile, there is much to admire in the orchestra’s associate conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Two weeks ago I heard strong, beautifully balanced performances – best of all the Dvorák Eighth Symphony – under Mark Elder, in a program that, by some quirk of scheduling, was given only once. Last week Franz Welser-Möst managed to keep me awake and interested in the full span of the Bruckner Sixth; I also admired the crisp, nicely balanced sounds he drew from the cut-down orchestra behind young Till Fellner’s bright, sensible reading of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. Earlier in the season I heard splendid music making under David Robertson and Yakov Kreizberg, and a ravishing account of the Fledermaus Overture (no easy work, that) under Manfred Honeck. Ingo Metzmacher and Adám Fischer come to the Philharmonic later this season. The phenomenal small dynamo Junichi Hirokami is listed among this summer’s conductors at the Hollywood Bowl. All this, in my book, counts as conduct becoming.

IN SELF DEFENSE: Last week some words by me – not in this publication – were quoted out of context in The New York Times and made into a rave review of the L.A. Opera’s Rigoletto, and my phone has been ringing with “How could you?” calls ever since. I couldn’t, and I didn’t. In my day at The New York Times, we had to learn to read before they let us write.

The greatest of the romantic operas — the panoramas of lovehate, deceptionredemption, hearts broken and hearts aflame that drew the sellout crowds in Verdi’s time and sent them home singing the tunes — gleaned their life force from one basic plotline, the ages-old struggle between love and conscience. The slavey Aida casts goo-goo eyes at the warrior-general sworn to eliminate her father and his people. Spain‘s Queen Elizabeth struggles against the hots for her former lover, Don Carlos, who has now become her stepson. The jester Rigoletto collects his paycheck from the aristocratic philanderer he both abets and loathes. Time and place — plus considerable help from their music — make these conflicts plausible, so that in worthy performances we find ourselves sharing the very breaths of the stricken heroes and heroines.

We are separated from the Mantua of Verdi’s Rigoletto by hundreds of years; Bruce Beresford, in his first directing stint on the Los Angeles Opera‘s stage, may imagine that by transporting its characters and story to the contemporary fairyland of Hollywood’s movie industry he has brought the opera closer to today‘s audiences. He has actually done just the opposite. His recent interview in the Orange County Register reveals, probably more clearly than he intended, the fallacy behind his approach. “If you presented the same films to the public year after year, you’d soon be out of business. But the same operas keep getting produced . . . and directors feel obliged to reinterpret them somewhat.”

Therewith, the difference between the John Wayne rerun and the lasting majesty of Verdi, and between the couch potato and the opera-goer who realizes that the commanding passions in past masterpieces, when respectfully revived, will always have something new to reveal. “Bruce Beresford Transforms Verdi‘s Rigoletto” screams a headline in the program book, but the baloney he has created is an insult to the opera itself and to its potential audience. He asks us to accept as an act of responsible transformation the notion that partygoers at one of the Duke of Mantua’s (excuse me, “Duke Mantua”‘s) bashes will drop everything (Armani-designed pants included) to the strains of a sweet Verdian minuet; that calling the paid assassin Sparafucile a “stuntman” actually makes him one (although he performs no stunts and does commit a murder for hire); that even though the title character laments his life as jester and procurer, true to Verdi’s text, the scenario lists him as “an agent,” assuming that this will strengthen the bond between him and us yahoos out front.

Don‘t take this as a blanket dismissal of the practice of operatic updating. In 1984 the English National Opera brought over its English-language Rigoletto — first to Texas, later to New York — for which Jonathan Miller had devised a setting among Manhattan mafiosi that had the consistency that the Beresford version lacks. (Mark Elder was the conductor, by the way; more about him later.) Peter Sellars relocated Don Giovanni in a New York slum, and translated convincingly into contemporary visuals the impact that opera must have had on its first audiences. Both attempts damaged the works and betrayed their pristine creative impulse, but there were minds at work that had probed the vital juices in the original scores and reacted intelligently to those findings. I see no such quality in the mindless tinkering currently (through this weekend) on display at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

What joy this Rigoletto affords rings clear and beautiful in the ear, even through Richard Hickox’s workaday conducting: the crystalline beauty of Inva Mula‘s Gilda (including a moment of sheer enchantment as she acted out her newfound infatuation, just before her gorgeously sung “Caro nome,” with sweet little girlish steps), the decent clarity of Frank Lopardo’s Duke, the occasional strengths — in between some disconcerting slips — of Haijing Fu‘s Rigoletto.

This wasn’t the only Rigoletto in town of late; on a recent Sunday afternoon I joined some 300 aficionados at the Casa Italiana (on Broadway just north of Chinatown) for a sensual reward that included a hi-cal sit-down dinner, raffles and door prizes (with impresario Mario Leonetti peddling tapes of his own singing, circa 1970) and, finally, something that called itself Rigoletto and occasionally came close. Maybe the opera can be sung and played more opulently; maybe a few more rehearsals and a few more strings in the orchestra could have pulled the enterprise back from constantly looming chaos. I have the feeling, however, that for every overpriced production at Rome or La Scala, there are dozens like this one across the Italian landscape, preserving their country‘s great lyric heritage as a sing-along folk art. You go for the pleasure of being part of a genuinely happy crowd, and every so often something else emerges, like a nightingale in the hen house, to make the trip even more worthwhile. The Duke in this mostly shreds-and-patches Rigoletto was a young tenor of elegant voice and superior musical sense with the unfortunate name of Donald Squillace (look it up). His remarkable performance included — for the first time in my experience — both stanzas of the murderous Act 2 cabaletta “Possente amor,” which most companies either omit altogether or cut in half.

Next: La Gioconda, June 4.

By one of those coincidences that defy explaining, another Verdi masterwork was in town that week, the Requiem, in a performance beautifully conceived and controlled in all but one respect under Mark Elder’s vibrant leadership, with the Master Chorale getting the words out with more than their usual proficiency and the Philharmonic — its strings properly seated for once (fiddles down front) — depicting the flames of Verdi‘s inferno burning high and bright. Three of the vocal soloists performed with zeal, brilliance of voice and intelligence of spirit: Metropolitan Opera mezzo Stephanie Blythe, tenor Marcello Giordani (the L.A. Opera’s splendid recent Faust) and Denis Sedov, new to these ears, an astounding 7-foot-or-so Russian bass.

The fourth, alas, was the soprano Alessandra Marc, beloved sacred monster to an addlepated few, enigma to the rest, who howled and screeched her glorious music, violated any sense of ensemble with the other singers and, near the end, belted out, fortissimo, squillace, the pianissimo, diminuendo high B-flat that should float like a final benediction over the 85 minutes of hair-raising drama that Verdi has unfurled into our welcoming ears. By what standard can such brainless performance values claim a place in the firmament of lyric art? (I‘m told Marc had not sung out at all during rehearsals, so that her antics must have shocked the conductor no less than the rest of us.) Did she entertain the barest conjecture of where she was that night, or what singing?

I rushed home and dug out my treasured GiuliniSchwarzkopf to reassure my offended ears. Eventually, sanity returned.

I smoked my first joint to the Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper, and my second to George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children. The year was 1970 or thereabouts, and I was already pushing 50; I had been slow to ripen. These two works — the Beatles‘ urgency to inject their exuberant art into every cranny of the hearer’s head; the small, still notes of Crumb, spread like star trails through vast and uncharted space — defined their time and still do, as Beethoven‘s ”Eroica“ and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring define theirs.

George Crumb was in town late last month for three Philharmonic events — two concerts and a Sunday-morning QA with more music — to celebrate his 70th birthday (which had actually occurred last October). His onetime pupil Steven Stucky, who is now the Philharmonic‘s new-music adviser, surely had a hand in arranging the event. The crowds — gratifyingly, surprisingly large — seemed to include old codgers with memories contemporary with mine, and a fair number of younger codgers as well. I say ”surprisingly“ only because Crumb hasn’t produced much new music in the last few years and might have receded somewhat into the shadows. But the Kronos Quartet had performed Black Angels — their iconic work — here not long ago, and Dawn Upshaw had sung Ancient Voices; and so people remembered.

He‘s a phenomenon, this beaming figure in the tattered cardigan with the easygoing West Virginia twang, looking more like a favorite uncle just in from puttering in the barn than the sophisticated innovator who names Bartok, Ligeti, the poetry of Garcia Lorca and the ”singing“ of humpback whales among his inspirations. One of his big new pieces, the 1994 Quest for guitar and small ensemble (performed at the last of the Crumb concerts), weaves fragments of ”Amazing Grace“ into a texture that is otherwise wondrously, typically Crumb: the iridescences and delightful divergences that often hover at the edge of silence. Even more recent, and on a different scale altogether, is the precious little Mundus Canis, for a junk-instruments percussionist (Crumb himself at these concerts and on disc) and solo guitar, a set of portraits of Crumb family dogs past and present (four dachshunds and a bichon frise).

No composer I can think of, not even Webern, has been as adept as Crumb in devising ways of decorating silence. The ensemble for Ancient Voices includes a toy piano and a set of tuned stones; one movement of Music for a Summer Evening starts off with a contrapuntal exercise for two dime-store slide whistles. He has no qualms, however, about visiting the other end of the spectrum. One truly mighty piece, Star Child, enlists a huge orchestra requiring four conductors, with the strings seated away from the others for antiphonal effects, a speaking men’s chorus, a singing children‘s chorus and a soprano soloist, all delivering a ferocious trope that blends the ”Dies Irae“ chant into a retelling of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents. The four players of Black Angels — amplified string quartet plus a battery of gadgets to bang on — whip up an even greater racket, in tune with the sense of this 1970 work as an abrasive personal condemnation of the Vietnam War.

In the 40 years since formulating his stylistic decisions, Crumb’s musical language has remained remarkably consistent; he does not, in his words, ”see the need some composers have to redefine oneself with every new piece.“ Even so, there were no blatant repeats on the Philharmonic programs, with pianists Vicki Ray and Lorna Eder on hand to create an enchanted Summer Evening, and visiting guitaristproducer David Starobin for Quest and the doggy pieces. (His company, Bridge Records, has just released those two works plus Star Child.) The Philharmonic‘s Barry Socher led three colleagues in a Black Angels properly terrifying. Neither Ancient Voices nor any of Crumb’s other vocal works were included, but the miraculous Nonesuch version of the former work (plus Summer Evening) remains: music I regard as essential — an evaluation I would also extend to its composer.

Somewhere between expectation and actuality, some marzipan apparently got sprinkled over Anne-Sophie Mutter‘s Royce Hall recital program, and ended up with sweetness but not the expected light. Mutter, a violinist of sovereign skill and taste, has earned high praise from critics in New York and elsewhere on her current American tour for service to contemporary music. She has, indeed, inspired a number of important composers to create for her over the years, with results as close at hand as your nearest record store. Her Royce program two weeks ago was to include one of these, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Metamorphosen. It did not, however; the sunny-tempered but depressingly bland D-major Sonata of Prokofiev, simmered down from the flute-and-piano original, took its place, prettily played but so what? Before that had come an even worse case of simmering-down, the Suite Italienne that violinist Samuel Dushkin had fashioned for his own, not-quite-first-rate talents out of Stravinsky‘s Pulcinella. Arvo Part’s ubiquitous Fratres began things, its mysterious surface barely touched in the excessive gleam from Mutter and her colleague, the usually trustworthy Lambert Orkis. That left Shostakovich‘s Second Trio to provide the evening’s substance, with Orkis and the promising young cellist Daniel Muller-Schott, but with Mutter performing standing up and thus betraying the chamber-music balance musically, visually and psychologically.

Downtown at the Colburn School‘s Zipper Concert Hall — and have I told you what a fine small room this has turned out to be? — there was music-making last week more modest than the above, and in many ways more rewarding: the first of three programs by the violinist Margaret Batjer and the pianist Jeffrey Kahane, surveying Beethoven’s 10 violin-piano sonatas. (The others: March 15, 30.) Even by itself this first program constituted a survey: the very young Beethoven in his Opus 12, grinding out music bouncy but predictable; the master fully arrived in the Opus 47 ”Kreutzer,“ dazzling — perhaps even terrorizing — players and listeners with music of wild turns and mood changes. There was no high-salaried virtuosity here, but a sense of dedication to the music‘s own kinds of adventure. Kahane leads the L.A. Chamber Orchestra; Batjer is the current concertmaster. Together — as well as separately, on other occasions — they spell out some of the reasons this crack little orchestra is in such splendid shape.

Obiter Dictum: Rigoletto also happened, not once but twice; more next week. If you must have advance word on the L.A. Opera’s version, it‘s this: Go, but take along something to read.

Hotshot gangster meets pure-at-heart Salvation Army lass; they kiss, they sing, they fall in love; at the curtain, the gang vows to abandon its evil ways. Guys and Dolls? Yes, but no. Twenty-one years before Frank Loesser’s snazzy musical won the delighted hearts of its first Broadway audience, another item, called Happy End, the fashioning of the agitprop dramatist Bertolt Brecht and the multitalented composer Kurt Weill, suffered a somewhat less happy end: a mere three-day run at the same Berlin theater where their Threepenny Opera had taken off like gangbusters a year before. Why? Weill‘s songs were (and are) wonderful; the book (despite Brecht’s attempt to repudiate his work and to use the pseudonym ”Dorothy Lane“) not all that bad. Find out for yourselves when Happy End starts a two-week run in the galleries of MOCA‘s Geffen Contemporary, a lively kickoff to this year’s celebration of the Weill centenary.

No, it was the times themselves that wiped out any hopes of a happy ending for Happy End in its 1929 incarnation. Passionately in love with the Chicago of Al Capone and his gangsters, Brecht set the action in that toddlin‘ town; Weill’s music managed a fascinating synthesis of jazz and old-timey American hymn tunes. Did it matter that neither of the two had yet set foot in this land? Not a bit. In a Germany stirring to a demagogue‘s call for a regained nationality, a surfeit of American icons did not make for happy theater.

Worse yet, at the final curtain on opening night, the actress Helene Weigel, star of the show and Brecht’s wife, pulled a paper out of her pocket and started reading a full-blast, down-with-everything communist tract. The audience rioted; in a land fearful in the deepening shadow of Hitler‘s gangsters, there was less and less room for the freethinking Brecht or the eclecticism of Weill’s musical mastery. A couple of the show‘s songs — the heart-rending ”Surabaya Johnny“ for one, which more than a few trustworthy critics have dubbed the greatest of all theater ballads — were sneaked into print and recorded in 1929 by Weill’s wife, the legendary Lotte Lenya (who was never actually in the show). Happy End gathered dust until, thanks to the admirable proselytizing by the widowed Lenya to restore her husband‘s fame, Weill’s old publisher, Universal Edition, finally issued the score that had sat in its vaults since 1929. Lenya — her voice by her own admission ”two octaves below laryngitis“ — recorded the complete score that year, and the world found itself possessed of a brand-new wacko masterpiece.

Happy End had its American premiere in 1972, in Michael Feingold‘s splendid Englishing, an unerring mix of elegance and slang that exactly matches the substance of both words and music. That translation will also be used at MOCA, in a production that foretells mucho snazz: puppets intermingling with live actors and filmed cameo appearances by Mayor Richard Riordan and the one-and-only Angelyne (you know, the car). Sets, promises director Randee Trabitz, will move around to fill the entire 18,000-square-foot gallery space. Under music director Joseph Berardi, the Eastside Sinfonietta — formed in 1998 for the Brecht centenary — will be augmented this time with brass and piano. Soprano Weba Garretson gets to sing three wonderful BrechtWeill songs (”Lieutenants of the Lord“ and ”Sailor’s Tango,“ plus ”Surabaya“); actors Dan Gerrity, Elizabeth Ruscio and Chris Wells head the ensemble.

For more Brecht-Weill, the Museum of Television Radio presents ”Threepennies and a Touch of Venus: The World of Kurt Weill,“ a screening series of selected American and European productions of their work, including Happy End, through March 19. See Museum listings for details.

photo by Fredrik Nilsen Daniel Marlos

HOTSHOT GANGSTER MEETS PURE-AT-HEART SALVATION Army lass; they kiss, they sing, they fall in love; at the curtain, the gang vows to abandon its evil ways. Guys and Dolls? Yes, but no. Twenty-one years before Frank Loesser’s snazzy musical won the delighted hearts of its first Broadway audience, another item, called Happy End, the fashioning of the agitprop dramatist Bertolt Brecht and the multitalented composer Kurt Weill, suffered a somewhat less happy end: a mere three-day run at the same Berlin theater where their Threepenny Opera had taken off like gangbusters a year before. Why? Weill’s songs were (and are) wonderful; the book (despite Brecht’s attempt to repudiate his work and to use the pseudonym “Dorothy Lane”) not all that bad. Find out for yourselves when Happy End starts a two-week run in the galleries of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, a lively kickoff to this year’s celebration of the Weill centenary.

No, it was the times themselves that wiped out any hopes of a happy ending for Happy End in its 1929 incarnation. Passionately in love with the Chicago of Al Capone and his gangsters, Brecht set the action in that toddlin’ town; Weill’s music managed a fascinating synthesis of jazz and old-timey American hymn tunes. Did it matter that neither of the two had yet set foot in this land? Not a bit. In a Germany stirring to a demagogue’s call for a regained nationality, a surfeit of American icons did not make for happy theater.

Worse yet, at the final curtain on opening night, the actress Helene Weigel, star of the show and Brecht’s wife, pulled a paper out of her pocket and started reading a full-blast, down-with-everything communist tract. The audience rioted; in a land fearful in the deepening shadow of Hitler’s gangsters, there was less and less room for the freethinking Brecht or the eclecticism of Weill’s musical mastery. A couple of the show’s songs — the heart-rending “Surabaya Johnny” for one, which more than a few trustworthy critics have dubbed the greatest of all theater ballads — were sneaked into print and recorded in 1929 by Weill’s wife, the legendary Lotte Lenya (who was never actually in the show). Happy End gathered dust until, thanks to the admirable proselytizing by the widowed Lenya to restore her husband’s fame, Weill’s old publisher, Universal Edition, finally issued the score that had sat in its vaults since 1929. Lenya — her voice by her own admission “two octaves below laryngitis” — recorded the complete score that year, and the world found itself possessed of a brand-new wacko masterpiece.

Happy End had its American premiere in 1972, in Michael Feingold’s splendid Englishing, an unerring mix of elegance and slang that exactly matches the substance of both words and music. That translation will also be used at MOCA, in a production that foretells mucho snazz: puppets intermingling with live actors and filmed cameo appearances by Mayor Richard Riordan and the one-and-only Angelyne (you know, the car). Sets, promises director Randee Trabitz, will move around to fill the entire 18,000-square-foot gallery space. Under music director Joseph Berardi, the Eastside Sinfonietta — formed in 1998 for the Brecht centenary — will be augmented this time with brass and piano. Soprano Weba Garretson gets to sing three wonderful Brecht/Weill songs (“Lieutenants of the Lord” and “Sailor’s Tango,” plus “Surabaya”); actors Dan Gerrity, Elizabeth Ruscio and Chris Wells head the ensemble.

For more Brecht-Weill, the Museum of Television Radio presents “Threepennies and a Touch of Venus: The World of Kurt Weill,” a screening series of selected American and European productions of their work, including Happy End, through March 19. See Museum listings for details.

HAPPY END | At MOCA’s GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY,
152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo | February 23­27, March 1­5

I left the Paris Opera on a damp November night in 1983, bored out of my gourd. I made it to the last Metro with only seconds to spare, determined to spend the rest of my time on Earth avoiding any further contact with Olivier Messiaen‘s Saint Francois d’Assise, whose world premiere I had just endured at considerable cost to both patience and posterior. Now a complete recording is available — four CDs on Deutsche Grammophon of a live performance from the 1998 Salzburg Festival — and with surprise and delight I find myself under the spell of every one of its 235 minutes of piercing, almost painful beauty.

Messiaen, at 75, had never before composed an opera. Even though Parisians were not exactly whistling his abstruse, convoluted music in the streets, he had attained regard as a revered and popular figure in a way that no American composer of similar stature — Elliott Carter, say — ever could. The press had conferred Major Event status on the new opera; it had become front-page stuff even in the tabloids. At the bar near my hotel, I was surrounded by people wanting a firsthand report, and I struggled to contrive polite answers.

Now I no longer struggle. In Paris, the spacious contemplations in Messiaen‘s loving pageant of moments in the life of the most human of all saints seemed to float unconnected to the drab staging accorded the work at the Opera’s Palais Garnier, with Seiji Ozawa conducting what sounded like a sight-reading orchestra. Peter Sellars created the 1992 Salzburg production, his staging consisting mostly of a vast array of video monitors; Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic served as the pit band, and people who were there still rave about it. Kent Nagano and Britain‘s Halle Orchestra took over for the 1998 revival; the photographs in DG’s lavish booklet suggest that the Sellars staging was retained, although his name nowhere appears.

Whatever its look onstage, the full impact of Messiaen‘s opera lies in its music, and this the new recording splendidly serves, in the orchestral performance under Nagano and the presence of Jose van Dam (who has owned the role since the beginning) as St. Francis and Dawn Upshaw as the Angel — singing best described as saintly and angelic. From the recording you glean the extraordinary range of Messiaen’s unique blending of ancient chant into his own convoluted melodic manner, the diatonic simplicity of much of his harmonic practice, and the way in which a simple progression of old-fashioned major and minor triads takes on a blinding radiance from the flickers and glints in the orchestration. I remember the Paris audience stirring uncomfortably, with some booing mixed in, during the 45 minutes of Francis‘ sermon to the birds, the chirring woodwinds, an array of percussion culled worldwide and, worse yet, the keening of not one but three Ondes Martenots (the pre-synthesizer synthesizer that Messiaen favored to distraction). On home stereo the sounds are dazzling, the scene not a second too long.

I am not alone in deriving a certain discomfort from much of Messiaen’s music over the years, above all the mix of divine afflatus and human flatulence in the gesturing of much of his sacred stuff. Yet the composer of the Quartet for the End of Time and the orchestral Chronochromie — the one an affirmation of the purity of simple beauty, the other a demonstration of the expressive potential in pure complexity — cannot be set aside. It‘s tempting to look at Saint Francois as a summing-up for Messiaen: a 75-year-old creative spirit, far more acclaimed than damned, daring to assume a kinship with the noblest of all the saints who have trod the planet. It’s not an easy-listening kind of opera; Wagner‘s Parsifal, to which it is often linked, is downright frisky by comparison. Don’t wait for Saint Francois to show up at the Los Angeles Opera; the work is now at hand, at least, in the best conceivable format. It is magnificently served, and so are we.

Alexander Scriabin died in 1915, at 43; the world was thus spared his completion of the work he had dreamed about and tinkered with over his last dozen years. Mysterium, or so the work had been modestly called, was to unfurl over a week‘s time, part of a mystical ceremony that would elevate mankind to a higher consciousness. The performance would take place in a grand new temple to be built in northern India, with bells hung on nearby mountains. Death’s hand — in the form of an infected pimple that turned septic — stilled the project. All that remained were 58 unnumbered pages of sketches, some little more than doodles; if you think, however, that this paltry legacy has rescued the world from Mysterium, you don‘t know about Beethoven’s 10th Symphony, the Elgar Third or the uncomposed finale of the Bruckner Ninth.

Enter Alexander Nemtin (1936–1999), Russian composer of minor legacy, who came across Scriabin‘s bits and pieces in 1970 and immediately envisioned a glory of his own from the process of piecing them together, adding a considerable amount of his own glue over 25 years of ardent labor. The result, nearly three hours of a work that Nemtin titled Preparation for the Final Mystery — in three movements modestly titled ”Universe,“ ”Mankind“ and ”Transfiguration“ and enlisting the services of pianist, organist, solo soprano, mixed chorus (singing wordlessly) and orchestra — forms ”a single organism that lives and breathes, like an ocean.“ (These, at least, are the words of Julia Makarova, Nemtin’s widow, who collaborated on program notes for the new three-disc LondonDecca recording.)

Strange to relate, the results — with Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting the massed hordes and the pianist Alexei Lubimov (who has performed more interesting programs here) — turn out better than you or I might have feared. Up against the familiar horrors of Scriabin‘s own ”Poems“ (of Ecstasy or of Fire), some of this music is downright pretty, right up there with some of the better scores from movie music’s glory days. All the right things seem to happen: the rumblings of far-off phenomena, the cataclysmic outbursts as the Universe is hammered into shape by Forces far beyond, the ending as a single note (Scriabin‘s ”favorite“ F-sharp) hangs alone, amid distant bells. I cannot imagine sitting down and paying close attention to three hours of this golden glop, but in a world that supports the fraudulent virtuosity of a Yanni, and pays homage to the classical aspirations of a Paul McCartney, this kind of honest pretension takes on the gleam of a masterpiece.

Down in the depths of Lower Manhattan there stands the Knitting Factory, a dilapidated four-story walkup where Avon Products once stored its lipsticks and bubble baths, and, since 1987, a shrine where aficionados of multimedia now keep tabs on the arts of tomorrow and the day after. Affectionately and accurately thought of as ”the backstage of cyberspace,“ the Knitting Factory is where you go to hear music whose ink is not quite dry, and to marvel at the purposeful blur of the video image not quite in focus. A West Coast outpost is slated for a Hollywood opening come May.

On one night last month, however, the Knitting Factory‘s premises turned positively retro, with what was announced as a festival of ”classic“ electronic music. Composers on hand included such wired-music pioneers as Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick, along with minimalist Tony Conrad — whose place in the experimental-music firmament has already been secure for three decades and more.

”It was amazing,“ said Subotnick into his telephone a day or two after the concert. ”The crowd was the usual gathering of 20- and 30-year-olds, and I expected to be greeted with a little quiet respect as one of the new-music gray eminences. Instead, there were cheers. Dozens of people had brought some of my oldest music for me to autograph — Silver Apples of the Moon, for example — and not just the CD reissues. Most of them had the original Nonesuch LPs, in what looked like brand-new copies. Talking to some of them, I got the impression that lots of people these days are actually listening to this pristine electronic music for its content: not for drugs, not for Madison Avenue chic — just sober listening, the way we might listen to Brahms. This concert made me realize that electronic music has, in fact, been around long enough that we can talk about there being a history, a lore, a repertory of ‘classics.‘“

A recent anthology disc, Early Modulations: Vintage Volts on the New York–based Caipirinha label, offers a quick sweep though the wonderfully varied early years of the medium: from 1953 (a spray of bloops and bleeps from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, whose equipment took up a whole warehouse on Manhattan’s West Side) through the musique concrete experiments in Paris, a John Cage ”Imaginary Landscape,“ past a delicious bit of the sampled voice of Max Mathews (clear progenitor of the creature on the phone who gives you the menu of push buttons), and ending in 1967 with an extended excerpt from Subotnick‘s Silver Apples of the Moon, an authentic 20th-century milestone.

By the time of Silver Apples, Subotnick was already an eager player in the fast-evolving electronic language. In 1961, he had joined hands with composers (Oliveros and Ramon Sender), dancers, filmmakers and beat poets to found the San Francisco Tape Music Center, the prototype of latter-day experimental beehives like Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris and anti-establishment performance spaces like the Knitting Factory. Programs at the Tape Music Center‘s cramped quarters on Divisadero Street became hot-ticket events. ”We had to swear everybody to secrecy,“ Subotnick remembers, ”so that the police would never know our address. We were sure they suspected us of doing drugs, which, by the way, we weren’t.“

The toy of choice at the Tape Music Center was Donald Buchla‘s ”Electric Music Box,“ an amazing package of circuitry that managed to squeeze the potential of the old monster synthesizer into a portable apparatus not much larger than a suitcase, that could be played live on the stage and could sit on a table in a composer’s lab. In 1966, Subotnick was commissioned by Nonesuch Records — then as now a model of enlightened programming and marketing — to create on the Buchla box music of symphonic scope. Silver Apples was the first result, followed soon after by The Wild Bull, both among the world‘s most acclaimed ear-openers. (Both works have been reissued complete on Germany’s Wergo label. True believers, however, prefer the Nonesuch LPs.)

To Subotnick, the fact that each LP disc of these works represented the totality of a musical composition, with no piano soloist or symphony orchestra acting as intermediary, demanded a drastic redefinition of the nature of music. ”If you picked up a recording of one of my pieces,“ he says, ”what you‘d have isn’t a recording of someone‘s performance; it’s the work itself, unadulterated, untouched by human hands until you tear off the wrapper.“ The next step for Subotnick, however, was to reverse direction and blend some kind of human element into this self-contained musical unity. The mechanism that made this both possible and practical was another miracle of space-squeezing: Apple‘s Macintosh, which came onto the scene in the early 1980s, replaced the room-filling mainframe computer now deemed prehistoric, and remains the handiest musical tool since the invention of middle C.

At California Institute of the Arts, where he had founded one of the world’s first electronic-music teaching facilities, Subotnick set the Mac to work to humanize the splendid spectrum of new electronic sounds he had fashioned. Among his colleagues at CalArts was the new generation of fearless performers — people like cellist Erika Duke, flutist Dorothy Stone and percussionist Amy Knoles, who still perform together as part of the California EAR Unit; with them he worked out a series of elaborate, throbbing ”ghost“ pieces in which live performance and taped electronic sounds would interact in relationships controlled by a computerized program. ”I used to think of myself as the Wizard of Oz,“ Subotnick says. ”There‘d be all this musical activity out in front, lines of counterpoint, tremendous virtuosity, but if anybody looked behind the curtain, there I’d be, alone with my computer, making it all take shape.“

Trying to keep track of Subotnick these days also demands a kind of virtuosity. Santa Fe is his home base; so is New York, and he has been known to look in on activities here as well. The best of his music has to do with combinations: computer-generated sounds interacting with live performers via ”intelligent“ software. His Key to Songs blends a live chamber ensemble into MIDI technology, and grabs at a Schubert melody for further leavening. His All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis, produced on a CD-ROM by the Voyager Company, surrounds one of Max Ernst‘s Surrealist collage works with a MIDI score and changes in sight and sound that the consumer can control at the computer. Two other computer programs produced for Voyager, Making Music and Making More Music, are ostensibly designed for children but have been known to enthrall certain older types as well (present company by no means excluded); you compose, you orchestrate, you mess around with harmonies, you work out convoluted counterpoints, you stay up late and miss deadlines.

You can think of these do-it-yourself programs, in fact, as a kind of return to the sense of those early LPs as a self-contained musical experience, but with a difference. Subotnick’s latest project is a software program whose working title is Gestures; the whole purpose of my words, in fact, is to get you to the bookstore at MOCA on Thursday, February 17, at 6:30 p.m., when he will be demonstrating his work-in-progress. ”Those early electronic pieces,“ he says, ”particularly Silver Apples, I see as a kind of chamber-music package for the home. Now I‘ll be getting back to that idea, but with all the extras that the computer allows. Now we can unwrap the package.

“Here’s how it works. The program will come on a DVD-ROM disc, which every computer will eventually be able to play, and which holds a fantastic amount of music, much more than a CD. You play the music, but you use your mouse to control what you‘re actually hearing. With your mouse you can change the location of the music in the space of the room. You can change the speed. You can change the relative intensity of the sounds, the way a conductor can change the emphasis of different instruments within a symphony orchestra. The computer can read your gestures, the way you’re actually using the mouse, and these gestures also affect the way the music occurs. On the screen, the animated story will also change as it relates to your own gestures. Every piece, therefore, and every image can become an infinite number of pieces and images.

”My God, I just realized,“ says Subotnick, ”the Wizard of Oz has become a mouse!“

THERE’S SOMETHING TO BE SAID — although I’m not sure exactly what — for the process of confronting the spirits of eminent dead composers with the less-than-eminent works that they themselves disowned or at least surpassed. Some will argue that latter-day stagings (whatever the cost) of Verdi’s early versions of, say, Macbeth or Don Carlos help us assess the stature of his later revisions. We cannot be truly moved by the Beethoven Ninth, others will claim, until we digest the banalities in his Triple Concerto. Sir Michael Tippett reaped his share of acclaim for the music he composed a decade or two after his early choral piece A Child of Our Time; therefore, to some musical minds at least, that justifies resurrection of the terribly earnest but hopelessly clumsy early work that sprawled across most of the Phil­
harmonic program a couple of weeks ago, in a presentation as misguided as the work itself. Last weekend the Pasadena Symphony dug down into the mothballs and dragged out the 11th Symphony of Shostakovich, a blotch on the composer’s memory that would serve him far better unexhumed. That sorry excuse for a symphony, at least, fared better under Jorge Mester’s probing baton than Tippett’s mournful exercise had at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

You cannot question the impulse behind either work. On the one hand there is Tippett at 34 — card-carrying pacifist, deeply shocked by the rise of Nazism and specifically the “Kristallnacht” pogroms perpetrated in 1938 to avenge a young Jew’s murder of a minor Nazi official — moved to fashion a broad, humanitarian statement, an oratorio with Bach and Handel as role models but addressed to its own time and, therefore, drawing upon languages of contemporary tragedy: spirituals, Hebrew chant, blues. Then there is Shostakovich, older and battle-scarred from his struggles for self-fulfillment against official Soviet repression, his hand now strengthened by the death of his nemesis Stalin, cutting loose with this unruly venture, the worst by far of his symphonies before or after, a 65-uninterrupted-minute glob of orchestral poster art to honor the memory of a similar atrocity, the 1905 massacre of civilians by the czar’s legions at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Okay, so both works (of exactly the same length, by the way) — and a long list of similarly undeserving revenants that I may get around to deploring one of these days — give off a certain aura that might pass for historic allure. The Tippett is a one-of-a-kind hybrid that seeks to mingle the accents of black gospel singing with Britain’s long-standing fetish for big, blocky choral music by the truckload; surely the possibility of mining multicultural gold occurred to whichever of the Philharmonic’s recent managements dreamed up the event. Two things got in the way. One was the prissy prosody in Tippett’s own attempt to re-create a gospel-singing style from an ocean away — as Virgil Thomson had managed so well, on more congenial turf, in his Four Saints in Three Acts. The other was the Philharmonic’s egregious goof in not booking an authentic, roof-raising gospel choir to sing along with Sir Roger Norrington and the folks onstage, perhaps energizing their music making a tad. Instead we got the polite, ecumenical accents of flat-out concert singers, the Gwen Wyatt Chorale, which blended seamlessly into the familiar mush of the Master Chorale and which, on its own, gave half a program of hit tunes about as authentically gospel as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is baroque. Later in his career, by the way — best of all in his opera The Knot Garden, with its distinctive infiltrations of American and Afro pop and blues — Tippett achieved a far more artful reconciliation with the many musics of his world. A Child of Our Time, however, was not yet of his time.

THE SHOSTAKOVICH 11TH DESERVES SHELF
space, I suppose, simply to avoid a possible blank in the numbering — although the symphonies of Schubert have survived a similar fate. I find the work just this side of hideous, its quotations of folk material positively lurid, its tendency to whiz past logical ending places arrogant and brainless. Its actual ending, of course, is unerringly designed for bringing down houses, and so it did: brass and the big drums up the bazooty, and everything else up to — and, for all I know, including — the panoply of white doves, Roman candles and the banners of the Four Freedoms. Jorge Mester and his Pasadena Symphony loom large among our most capable noisemakers; I came away on Saturday night with eardrums tingling, if somewhat bent.

That was not, however, the week’s only Shostakovich. Two days before, we had the Ninth, infinitely cuter at less than half the length. Nobody has yet fully explained — and nobody needs to — the rationale of the work, with its sweet skitterings surrounding the fragile eloquence of its two slow movements, a curious follow-up to the blunderbuss-size (“large bore,” says Webster’s) Seventh and Eighth. Guest conductor Yakov Kreizberg — an impressive young guy with a clean, sharply defined podium manner that is also great fun to watch — shaped a nicely balanced performance of this work, and also of a brief, beautiful Cantabile for strings by Latvia’s Péteris Vasks, an interesting recent arrival on the scene and worth further investigation. (The Kronos Quartet has recorded some of his music.)

Better than any of the above, however, was that program’s opening work, the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the hands of Hilary Hahn: a performance so wise, so beautifully proportioned, so immaculately delivered that I had to rethink all the sad thoughts I once entertained about this work (the blandness, the stretched-out slow movement, the trivial tunes in the finale). At her last season’s Philharmonic appearance, Hahn had also obliged me to rethink and upgrade my take on the Brahms Concerto, a work I have been known to deplore even more vehemently than the Beethoven. If it’s possible to repeat a revelation, that’s what this performance achieved. She’s a mere 20, this handsome, cool, wonderfully communicative musician who can explain with a stroke of her bow, better than all the tomes about music that you and I can read or write, the matchless joy of going to concerts.

Do I gush? Find out for yourself on Wednesday, April 5: Hilary Hahn with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at UCLA’s Royce Hall, with concertos by Mozart and Edgar Meyer. Top ticket $100 and, I’ll bet you, worth every cent.

Comes a time when even the youngest at heart among the critical confraternity simply runs out of new ways of expressing the awfulness of Gounod‘s Faust — the drabness of its musical invention, its lurid insult to Goethe’s great poetry it purports to honor, its sheer arrogance in holding an audience captive for hour upon hour. My colleague and onetime protege Tim Mangan, now calling the shots at the Orange County Register, got it exactly right. ”If Gounod‘s opera were food,“ he wrote, ”we’d spray it from a can onto crackers.“

You have to admit, however, that a Faust snazzily produced, with lots of scenery and lung power, can be one Devil of a show, and on this premise you might like the current Los Angeles Opera revival, a production co-owned by the Chicago Lyric Opera and first seen here in 1994 — if, of course, that‘s the sort of thing you like. Christopher Harlan has staged a respectful revival of Frank Corsaro’s original production; it runs (if that‘s the word) through February 5. Never a man to shy away from the chance to seduce an audience with an overdose of stage biz, Corsaro loads his larger-than-life Faust with light-and-shadow tricks, prop tricks, people-props and people-prop tricks, all deployed around Franco Colavecchia’s larger-than-life scenery.

Then there‘s the Mephistopheles of Samuel Ramey, who currently and deservedly owns just about every diabolical role in the repertory — most of them far more interesting musically than Gounod’s tawdry tunesmithing. Marcello Giordani is the Faust, Leontina Vaduva the Marguerite, both (along with Ramey) in their L.A. Opera debuts, both capably loud, neither above an occasional wandering off the pitch, at least on opening night. The lively, appealing Siebel was Megan Dey-Toth, a member of the L.A. Opera‘s Resident Artist program; even her good work, however, couldn’t justify the restoration of her second aria, a pallid affair that any sensible producer would have cut and buried. At least we were spared the dreadful ”Walpurgis“ ballet; praise be for small favors. Philippe Auguin conducted, in his American debut, a nicely shaded, propulsive performance in, alas, a hopeless cause.

You don‘t, of course, need an immersion in Faust to point up the sublimity of The Marriage of Figaro. Still, experiencing both works on successive nights — I saw the second Figaro of four — demonstrated the vastness of the realm of opera. (And the visiting Beijing Kunju Opera Theater, which I had seen and thrilled to the previous weekend, extended that vastness beyond measure.)

Figaro was the latest in a growing list of great good deeds that have marked the development of Orange County’s Opera Pacific since the accession of John DeMain as artistic director and principal conductor two years ago. On a modest set dwarfed by the Segerstrom Hall stage, and with an orchestra similarly dwarfed in the pit, DeMain shaped a performance beautifully integrated, an evening of idealized chamber music without a single loose end or false note. Richard Bernstein, the Figaro, grows in strength and assurance every time he comes around. (He‘s next season’s Figaro, as well, with the L.A. Opera.) John Hancock was a forceful if somewhat young-looking Count. Christine Brandes was a twinkly delight as Susanna; Marie Plette‘s Countess was just a smidge below full color; the Cherubino of Rinat Shaham, hilariously agile and gorgeously responsive to the throbbing, adolescent passions of the role, won everybody’s heart.

I hope Orange County realizes what‘s happening in its midst: the emergence of an opera company for which no geographical apologies are necessary; the resident orchestra, the Pacific Symphony, also moving up; and a concert management — the O.C. Philharmonic Society — with the bravery and enterprise to bring in Chinese opera, contemporary chamber music, a whole range of new and old. From what I pick up in conversations around me, at Segerstrom and at the smaller Irvine Barclay Theater, where some of the high-adventure programming takes place, the old image of Orange County as a place for conservative dodos sequined and suited seems to be crumbling. There’s still work to be done — to discourage the white-haired matron who crumpled cellophane in Row L during the exquisite, ethereal ending of Susanna‘s ”Deh, vieni,“ and the depressingly large number who, during the heartrending forgiveness music at the opera’s end, found laff-provocation in the supertitles.

Oh well, you gotta start somewhere.

At the Irvine Barclay, the Beijing troupe performed a ”hits of the show“ program of scenes from a repertory that extends back four and more centuries: not the same as the enthralling, 18-hour Peony Pavilion that seems to have seeped out of its native turf despite official reluctance, but a wonderful foretaste. The ”orchestra“ of seven players banged and tootled on the side; the sets were simple and, when the drama demanded, transformable as if by magic. The acrobatics were, as expected, breathtaking, from the hurtling, tumbling opening moment through an evening far too short for its stock of the wondrous. The garish splendors captured in films like Farewell My Concubine were missing; the female roles were sung by women, not the tradition-ordained male falsettos and boys. Rather than rekindling memories of that splendid film, this troupe brought back something even more glorious, the visit here of Ariane Mnouchkine‘s Theatre du Soleil during the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, and its performances of Shakespeare in Asian theatrical styles.

Will we ever see their like? Miracles can happen; after all, the Los Angeles Opera has announced, to open its next season, that most-often-announced, most-often-canceled of all great operas, Verdi’s Aida. See what a little faith can do?

By the end of the first millennium — around 999, say — California could boast a “politically stable, sedentary and conservative” population (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 13, Page 327), with a strong sense of community that included avid cultivation of the arts. These early Californians built apartment complexes where several families lived in adjoining spaces, and “sweat houses,” earth-covered proto-saunas that the males frequented daily. They also built communal, ceremonial performance spaces, holding several hundred participants who sang songs — some short, some lasting several days — about victories in battle and in lovemaking, accompanied by rattles, whistles and drums. The men and women managing these rituals functioned as a power elite, whose white deerskin clothes, adorned with such showoff items as hand-chipped obsidian knife blades, affirmed their social rank. In their lands near the present Santa Barbara, the nation of Esseles could have feasted on wild peccary, and so could the Salinans. (You can look it up.) According to theories as yet unconfirmed, they later underwent minor spelling changes and migrated to Los Angeles via Finland.

Some things changed over the next thousand years; some things didn’t. Today‘s ceremonial spaces are known as “performing arts centers”; while the music performed there seldom lasts several days, it often seems to. The aggregation of “rattles, whistles and drums” has evolved into the symphony orchestra, and while some will argue that this is an improvement, some will not. Communal ceremonies continue, notably in the annual “Messiah Sing-Along.” The place of performing-arts ensembles in society, the prestige assumed by their board chairpersons, and the skins and blades they employ to proclaim that prestige, remain about the same.

Construction began on the Disney Concert Hall last month: a link between millennia, forged in masonry and stainless steel. Its firm foundation is more than just a parking garage; its walls remain upright (or at whatever angle is prescribed in Frank Gehry’s marvelous design), bolstered by the widespread understanding that the arts are a good thing in the abstract, and an even better thing when expressed in structures tangible and visible.

The communal need for Disney Hall was never expressed in the abstract. Were there kinds of music that needed a different physical configuration than what the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion afforded? Will they be better off in Disney, which for all its imaginative design still preserves the implicit boundary line between performer and audience? (A real chamber-music hall, which the city does need, came and went rather early in Gehry‘s plans.) Were the Pavilion’s acoustical problems — not horrible, merely rather drab — so far beyond solving as to necessitate a new hall? (The relatively minor readjustment of the stage area, accomplished last summer, has already brought about noticeable improvement in the hall‘s sound. Perhaps more could have been accomplished along those lines, but no: Build We Must!)

Does Los Angeles need, want or even deserve a full-time opera house, which the Pavilion could now become? (Think back to the recent Hansel und Gretel, and a depressing parade of ailing shows prior to that one, and ask yourself whether this city’s fondest cultural aspiration is for more of the same, in a hall to contain it twice the proper capacity. The most interesting thing that happens in opera these days is the risk-taking in the way of imaginative stagings of repertory beyond the sing-along masterpieces. Even if the company‘s incoming management displays a passion for experiment so far undetected, how do you take risks with 3,000-plus seats to fill?)

The city is excited about the new hall, and should be. Gehry’s design — even if the final decision is to surface it in Grape Nuts — will draw crowds, which will include a fair number of ticket buyers, and that‘s all swell. But where are the announcements of the new works, the commissions (which surely should have gone out by now) to create an inaugural blast that will define how the new tenants regard their new playing field? What is to be their message of hope and cheer for an innovative future, as an orchestra, now hailed and envied worldwide, anoints a new century with its own dedication to adventure and integrity — and as classical music’s most sanguine supporters fight to save their art from the twin monsters of bankruptcy and banality? (Yes, banality. Read the reports of the two grandiose large-scale symphonies, by reputable young American composers, recently commissioned by Disney for — and played by — the New York Philharmonic, and you may want to keep your life preserver handy.)

Acoustic design being the variant of Russian roulette it has proved more than once, you may also check the lifeboats as the predictions of sonic splendor ricochet even before the cornerstone is laid. Right now is a good time to check out the history of Lincoln Center‘s early days. Philharmonic Hall, the first building to open (in 1962), confounded the prognosticators of acoustic glory by turning out a disaster; several make-overs have only brought the sound in the hall up to not-quite-disgraceful. The fiasco was the first intimation that Lincoln Center might actually be founded on clay — that a corporation boasting a couple of Rockefellers among its exalted ranks could actually falter in the realm of acoustic prediction. Within a couple of years practically every component of the cultural complex had been riven by firings, resignations, recriminations . . . whatever battle formats that the cultural elite, in white deerskin or white tie, indulge in when faced with matters that threaten their assumed immaculate powers. The saving grace was the fact that Carnegie Hall, which had been adjudged redundant as soon as Lincoln Center was conceived, escaped the wreckers’ ball and survived triumphant — as, some four decades later, it remains.

I have no reason to doubt the projections of Disney Hall as a sonic marvel to match the splendor of its design, but I cradle my ancient ears in cotton every night to keep them in shape for “Judgment Day, the Disney Version.” I don‘t, in any case, envision the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as a triumphant survivor. The recent sale of the Ambassador College campus does provide a glimmer of hope — however faint — for its long-lamented, acoustically splendid auditorium. But the buyer, Legacy Partners of Orange County, is in the realty business, not an enlightened concert management. It cannot have escaped its notice that the Ambassador campus — a handsome property handy to freeways, thriving Old Pasadena, museums, etc. — is a real estate bonanza like few others. Does an altruistic soul still exist, willing to maintain that fine performing space in its merited glory, rather than as a pile of condos?

Don’t hang by your thumbs on that one.