So I've Heard

Robert Beaser isn’t what you‘d call a sublime composer, but in that one tiny scene at least he seems to suggest that he knows what opera is all about. His opera is the final part of Central Park, a trilogy of short operas by American composers — Deborah Drattell and Michael Torke are the first two — produced last summer by the enterprising Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York, later by the New York City Opera in Lincoln Center, and now, in performances videotaped at Glimmerglass, scheduled for KCET next Wednesday (January 19). McNally, Wendy Wasserstein and A.R. Gurney provided the librettos. Drattell Wasserstein’s The Festival of Regrets reunites a mother and her estranged daughter during a Rosh Hashana ritual at the park‘s Bethesda Fountain; the TorkeGurney Strawberry Fields has a fantasy-possessed old woman finding sympathetic resonance among younger fantasists at the John Lennon memorial. Professionalism is everywhere; the idea — three contrasting works sharing a common and famous Manhattan setting — is clever enough. The presence of two remarkable singers particularly adept at portraying unhinged women at any age — Lauren Flanigan and Joyce Castle — wraps the venture in cloth of gold.

All that’s missing — but, alas, it‘s an indispensable ingredient — is the music that draws the listener into the drama of human interaction that opera can be, from Figaro and Susanna exchanging smoochy-poo to Isolde pouring Tristan the fateful mickey. All three of these operas build toward some kind of climax involving a lot of people singing at the same time. Only in Beaser’s work, however, is there any sense of using attractively varied dramatic material — a small crowd standing in as a cross section of typical springtime Central Park visitors — as subject matter for a convincing musical portrait. At that, the rest of Beaser‘s music, here and in other works I’ve stumbled across — he is, would you believe, head of composition at Juilliard — comes up as a sequence of punch-card tune-formulas. The whole trilogy, in fact, running a painless two hours, seems designed to assure an audience that it may be modern but it won‘t bite. The assurance works; Central Park was the New York City Opera’s hottest ticket last fall. Since the alternative next Wednesday night is Faust at the Los Angeles Opera, you might as well tune in.

You can‘t deny, however, that new American opera is hot stuff these days. At the Metropolitan Opera there was John Harbison’s musicking of Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby, higher in cleverness level than the paltry trio across the Lincoln Center Plaza, but afflicted with the same syndrome of the impersonal tune-formula that gets us from A to B with little sense of how we got there or why. There is a streak of splendor in Harbison’s works; his Mirabai Songs, as Dawn Upshaw sings them on Nonesuch, have the enchanting, intense lyrical flow that I waited in vain to hear on the Met‘s Gatsby broadcast. There is an undeniable ingenuity in Harbison’s blending of unalike idioms: the jazzy bits that sound from afar, even from a prop radio, during the party scenes; the kicky way Harbison has fragmented Mendelssohn‘s “Wedding March” into the Plaza Hotel episode. Upshaw’s Daisy came over as a wondrous synthesis of Violetta and Salome; Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, in her long-overdue Met debut, found the resource — not in the pallid tunes but within the magic of her own voice — to transmute the Myrtle Wilson character into towering tragedy.

For now, at least, Gatsby has its fling; next season it goes to Chicago‘s Lyric, in a swap for William Bolcom’s A View From the Bridge, which I wish I‘d heard and will someday. But then what? I discern a rather large trash bin, with its accumulation of tinsel and sawdust growing ever higher. Will anyone ever bother again with Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles, without the expensive glitz of its Met premiere? What happens to Previn‘s Streetcar as the initial fame fades and there is no longer a Renee Fleming for a larger-than-life Blanche? Has hope vanished — as it should — for the ghastly Fantastic Mr. Fox that our own company got saddled with last millennium?

Meanwhile, there were Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner for the Met’s unforgettable Tristan broadcast, followed not much later by PBS‘s Marriage of Figaro telecast made miraculous not only by Cecilia Bartoli’s playing the eye game but also by Dwayne Croft‘s wonderfully urgent Almaviva. Such bygone treasures gleam ever brighter in the dusk of these contemporary befuddlements.

A year ago I listed Esa-Pekka Salonen’s LA Variations as music to be revisited during the next century; last week‘s “Green Umbrella” concert proved me right — the music itself, and its continued power to drive an audience (in Mark Swed’s matchless choice of word) bananas. Local pride may play a part; still, I don‘t know another new piece in which a complex musical language, masterful in its choice of “resting” points (a tuneful moment as plateau) but basically challenging to ear and intellect, can simultaneously engage a hearer’s emotions.

The program — all Salonen, including the enchanting Five Images After Sappho, sung by Laura Claycomb as first heard at Ojai last summer — was an extraordinary affirmation of the treasure we possess in Salonen family, and the civic urgency in continuing their happiness here. The Philharmonic in Royce Hall, by the way, sounded like a million dollars. Why can‘t we just move that splendid building downtown and save a few Disney dollars in the process?

Something in the air at holiday time impels me to write about Bach, and why not? Any one of his choruses shames the fraudulent warblings of the carolers on Muzak at the Mall. Any single fugue from his reams of keyboard music proclaims respect for the hearer’s brain that violates the primeval pap of the ad writers and the telemarketers. Any triumphal blast from one of his orchestral adventures betrays the falsity of the glitz and gimmickry and the fear-peddling exploitations of the Y2K bogeyman that haunts the air around us these days. We need Bach — every day, but never more than now.

Alongside the Y2K trepidations is the awareness that 2000 — provided, of course, that we get there — is a Bach year: the 250th anniversary of his death, coming so soon after 1985 (the 300th of his birth), and 1950, 1935, etc. In 1935 the company we knew then as Victor Records issued a single Bach anniversary album (M-243, all you collectors out there!), a gathering of Leopold Stokowski‘s Wagner-size re-orchestrations of various Greatest Hits. The 2000 celebrations loom larger: The flood of complete box sets from several companies, bearing such solemnly simplistic titles as The Bach Edition, will probably require your adding another room to premises already burdened with such encyclopedic surveys as the 180-disc Mozart set from his last anniversary or the more recent mastodon releases of Artur Rubinstein’s Every Note on RCA and Philips‘ homage to everyone else in the pianistic realm. A massive pile of Bach from Germany’s Hanssler label, under the distinguished and watchful eye of Helmut Rilling, has already taken shape. France‘s Erato promises comparable mountainous rewards under Ton Koopman’s supervision. That country‘s Harmonia Mundi sends along a handsome down payment, a treasury of choral performances led by Belgium’s Philippe Herreweghe that includes the St. Matthew Passion and two box sets containing two dozen cantatas, plus one other disc which by itself epitomizes the triumphant joining of the summit of musical art of the past with the radiant enabling of contemporary technology.

That disc is a CD-ROM (French: cederom — don‘t you love it?) that comes as a bonus with Herreweghe’s new recording (his second) of Matthew. Slip it onto your computer (PC only, alas), and set out on an “interactive journey” through the life of Bach, the life of the Germany of his time, including musical matters in both the Catholic and Lutheran churches, a probing examination of the words of this one work — Bach‘s choice of biblical passages, and their cementing into a continuous text by Christian Friedrich Henrici alias Picander — and, most important, a “Visit Into the Heart of the Work.” By some technological wizardry far beyond my comprehension, the entire 161 minutes of Bach’s masterpiece, which in the rest of the album lies across three CDs, has here been squeezed onto this single disc, in such a way that you can instantly call up and compare specific passages from anywhere in the score — not quite in the spacious stereo of the full recording, but close enough. One chapter takes you through all the Evangelist‘s recitatives, so that you can trace the expressive outgrowth of Ian Bostridge’s miraculous, haunting performance. Another enables you to explore Bach‘s instrumentation from the inside: the interplay between the two choruses and orchestras. You want to hear some individual number — countertenor Andreas Scholl’s “Erbarme dich,” for example, which will surely break your heart? The music plays, and the words scroll — in three languages — across one of the disc‘s gorgeously designed screens. At the end, Herreweghe himself delivers a long, detailed and fascinating talk on the stylistic vagaries of Bach performance over the decades and, more to the point, the emergence of Herreweghe’s own attitudes: his 1993 Matthew, in which the concept of phrasing largely derived from the way the instruments played, and his 1999 version, where he has altered his thinking to accord with vocal techniques. His new greater sense of legato, he claims, comes about from his closer association with singers.

This disc forms an extraordinary appendage to a performance no less extraordinary. More to the point, the creation of such a program — like Harmonia Mundi‘s similar CD-ROM for Cosi Fan Tutte — assumes the continued existence of a public dedicated to the listening experience as participation, not merely a bath in sound. It’s the same assumption that goes into the best of those movie DVDs, with their outtakes and director‘s interviews and the chance, any day now, to hear John Wayne speaking French.

Herreweghe makes his American debut next summer at Lincoln Center’s “Mostly Mozart” series; his Harmonia Mundi discography is vast and mostly wonderful, ranging over the choral literature from Monteverdi to Faure and venturing as far afield as a Beethoven Ninth, sober and sensible. His take on Bach does, indeed, suggest a new emergence, a step beyond (or, perhaps, back from) the bristling clarity of performances we once hailed as “authentic” — Trevor Pinnock, Gustav Leonhardt, et al. The two boxes of cantatas (nine discs, priced as five) include the one work — No. 8, “Liebster Gott, wann werd‘ ich sterben” — that I gushed over a year ago (and will gladly do again anytime); it now comes in a box called Les Plus Belles Cantates, and it certainly belongs there. The set also includes a superb performance of No. 35, with Markus Markl’s winged playing of the great organ solo and Andreas Scholl for the vocal solos. And then there‘s the Cantata No. 78, with its duet for high voices that comes as close to out-loud giggling as anything in Bach. These aren’t “all the Bach cantatas you‘ll ever need,” to quote some recent promotional garbage, but they’re an excellent beginning.

We haven‘t exactly suffered choral deprivation hereabouts lately. Helmut Rilling, frequent Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra guest conductor, brought us Haydn’s The Creation in a lusty reading to stir the soul, abetted by a chorus of young voices from USC who sang as if they believed what they were singing. The even-younger voices of the Paulist Boys participated in the annual Messiah at Westwood‘s St. Paul the Apostle, with regular conductor Dana Marsh off on sabbatical and Martin Neary, recently of Westminster Abbey, standing in. The sounds were, as usual, resplendent; the reading, if more Westminster solidity than Westwood bright lights, still illuminated the power and the glory of Music’s Greatest Hit.

BY RIGHTS, HANSEL UND GRETEL SHOULD have been cast onto the discard pile generations ago. The opera simply doesn’t work. Some of the tunes by Engelbert Humperdinck (the First) are pretty enough to blend into shopping-mall Muzak; on the opera stage, however, they clash with the characters themselves, and clash more fatally with the fetid, Wagner-tinged orchestration. The opera survives on its presumed appeal — open to question in this day and age — as a work for children. Yet the custom, observed to ghastly extent in the current Los Angeles Opera production, is to weigh the work down with extraneous “adult” gimmickry, starting with the transmogrification of the Witch into a drag queen — Judith Christin in the present version, Ragnar Ulfung the last time around at the Music Center, Anna Russell in a New York staging of fonder memory. A better idea, I should think, would be to hand the name roles over to singers of Wagnerian proportion — the cast of the Met’s current Tristan und Isolde, for example; then, at least, there could be some matchup between the characters and the orchestra.

At the Music Center — oops, I forgot; it’s now the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, henceforth PACOLAC (take two at bedtime) — the Grimm Brothers’ forest is now New York’s Central Park, in a pretty set like Citizen Kane‘s snow globe. The “14 angels” are done up like guests on their way to a Jay Gatsby lawn party; the homeless Sandman has so far eluded Mayor Giuliani’s cops; the Witch’s cottage could pass for the Dakota Apartments, with an oven Julia Child might envy.

Okay so far? It gets worse. Everybody converses in English, then lapses into German for the tunes, or at least so we are told. Aside from Paula Rasmussen’s Hansel, who deserves better surroundings, the singing might as well be in middle-high Urdu. Are the kiddie audiences expected to crane their dear little necks to follow the supertitles, projected as they are high above the stage and difficult enough even for aging music critics? The company might be advised to install a few resident chiropractors for the rest of the run.

Enough; it’s a lousy show, riddled with poor judgments, soggily staged and conducted, a disgrace at a $146 top ticket. A couple of days before, I had taken in some far superior operatic merchandise: the USC Opera Workshop’s staging of Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus, charming, delightfully directed, nicely sung in a comprehensible English translation, admirably faithful to the sight, sound and comic spirit of the original work — with tickets at a $10 top.

SCHUBERT LOOMED LARGE LAST WEEK: the String Quintet in a stupendous performance on Monday, and the little-known chamber chorus Gesang der Geister über den Wassern on Zubin Mehta’s Philharmonic program on Thursday. The choral work, a setting of a Goethe poem lasting about 12 minutes and scored for eight male singers and a quintet of low strings, suffered from being triply inflated to fit the proportions of a symphonic program, and suffered even more as a group from the Master Chorale sang with the texture of a wet paper towel. Still, the remarkable shape of the music, with its chains of sideslipping key changes to mirror the dark chills of Goethe’s poetry, was an interesting addition to an interesting program that I’ll get back to in a minute.

The quintet, performed by four Philharmonic members, plus Lynn Harrell sitting in at first cello, was the week’s — or the month’s, or the year’s — miracle. The impact of this work, as I realized more than ever this time, is from its scoring for the two cellos: the throb as they restate and enrich the opening theme, their fierce drive through the development until the first theme’s return becomes an apocalypse, and the flashes of dusky flame as their pizzicatos surround the unstoppable flow of melody — sorrow and ecstasy improbably melded — that holds an audience breathless at the start of the slow movement. Harrell’s playing — and no less that of his partner, the young Ben Hong, whose every gesture mirrored his capture by his music, and of Martin Chalifour, Lyndon Johnston Taylor and Evan N. Wilson right alongside — shaped the drama and the passion as completely as any reading I have ever heard or could conceive. And that, from someone who once sat enthralled as this music was set forth by the Hollywood Quartet, is no small tribute.

This was the first of the Philharmonic’s new chamber-music series in the Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School of the Performing Arts, catty-corner to PACOLAC on Grand Avenue, which will alternate with the ongoing concerts at the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium. Zipper — named after Herbert, the late, much-loved conductor and teacher — seats about 400, the right size for a chamber hall. The surroundings are handsome if you don’t look at all the busyness on the ceiling; more important, the sound is warm, friendly and clear, especially when they wheel out the school’s gorgeously resonant Fazioli piano. A hall this size has been badly needed; there was originally one in the Disney Hall plans. It’s good news that Zipper has already been heavily booked.

MEHTA’S PHILHARMONIC PROGRAM BEgan with the notes (but not much else) of Beethoven’s Second Leonore Overture, went on to embrace the rich radiance of Anna Larsson’s singing of some expendable Brahms (the Alto Rhapsody) and wound up with the heaven-storming whoopee of Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata, again with Larsson’s lovely delivery of the work’s one solo movement. Nevsky, I realize more all the time, is a one-of-a-kind piece. Many movie scores over the years have been reshaped into concert pieces, among them William Walton’s music for Sir Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, clearly influenced by Prokofiev. But the genius of Sergei Eisenstein and Prokofiev produced in this one work a confluence like nothing else in film and very little else in music. Even if you don’t know the film, the remarkable pictorialism embedded in the music becomes a multidimensional experience. Buy the video (laser disc, preferably) with the score newly reconstructed, and you’ll derive even more from this remarkable interweaving, which transcends the poster propaganda of the film itself and creates an artistic entity unique unto itself.

I don’t get to the movies nearly enough, but two recent films out of Hollywood caught my attention on musical grounds, a rare experience. One is American Beauty, with Thomas Newman’s score uncommonly participatory in the twisted emotional fabric of the film. The other is The Insider, whose score moves in and out of cognizance in a remarkable way, involving an array of pop tunes from here and there, but also music that I’ve recently raved about, with the saxophonist Jan Garbarek in some of his brain-rattling improv and participating with singers in music by, among others, Arvo Pärt. Somebody out there has been working with cleaned-out ears, and it shows.

THE FIRST THING TO KNOW ABOUT SOLO percussion concerts is that they are fascinating to watch, in ways that piano-virtuoso displays or trained-dog acts couldn’t begin to approach. The stage for Steven Schick’s three-concert “minifestival” in the County Museum’s Leo S. Bing Theater last week was a glorious display of noisemaking hardware, from the lordly copper-and-brass circumferences of a quartet of matched kettledrums, to a gathering of wooden boxes and small ding-dingers set at rakish angles atop high poles, to a couple of small cacti that gave off feathery tones when stroked, to the bare chest of Schick himself, which, under skillfully massaging hands (his own), became all the orchestra needed for one whole composition. Composers of percussion music have to be skilled choreographers as well. It’s one thing to fill a stage with a gorgeous array of kitchenware; then you have to know how to move your performer from one gadget to the next without losing a beat. Schick’s concerts at LACMA proved that his awesome abilities include mastery of some very fancy footwork.

Music for percussion-and-nothing-but is relatively new to the Western concert repertory. Most of our music, after all, hangs on melodies and harmonies that enable listeners to find their place during the course of a composition, and to whistle what they’ve heard on their way home. Earlier percussion solos — the stupendous dialogue between chorus and timpani at the start of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio or the big bangs in the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth — made their stunning momentary impact, but real percussion music began in the hands of the American pioneers Henry Cowell, John Cage and Lou Harrison, whose inspiration came from their thrilled discovery of indigenous music of the Far East and whose tools consisted of resonant ironware (trolley-car springs, brake drums and the like) unearthed from California junkyards. That all happened around, say, the 1940s; now, finally, composers here and in Europe are building a broad and eclectic repertory. Schick has said that when he gave his first solo recital, in 1978, he could choose from just about a dozen solo works. Now the 18 compositions that he performed on these programs stand for a mere fragment of the available repertory. Schick — Iowa-born, early-40-ish, phenomenally talented and delightfully communicative — has been a strong catalyst, as have our own local heroes Amy Knoles and Art Jarvinen, luminaries of the EAR Unit.

I heard the first two of the three concerts; the prospect of a live performance of Schubert’s C-major Quintet further downtown proved an irresistible alternative to the last in the series. What I found especially fascinating in the two programs I heard was the distinction between the dabblers and the dedicated. There was Elliott Carter in the 1950s, for example, clearly fascinated by the newly proclaimed legitimacy of the new medium, trying his hand at short pieces for four timpani and turning out a couple of amusingly no-brain, predictable exercises in hootchy-kootchy rhythms at odds with everything else we know from this master of complexity. There was the 1995 Watershed I by Roger Reynolds, obviously delighted with a much more diverse collection of noisemakers, but putting them to paltry use in an agonizing half-hour of disconnected sound effects.

Better than either of these were two works of Iannis Xenakis — the Psappha of 1975 and the Rebonds of 1989 — which suggest that for this composer of fiercely driven, intricately structured music the move into writing for percussion was an act of liberation. Kaija Saariaho’s Six Japanese Gardens, delectable, quiet pieces that Schick had also performed at Ojai in 1997, proclaimed once again the wondrous spectrum of soft beguilements that lies deep in percussion’s world. And then there were the works of the enlightened madcap Vinko Globokar — the 1985?Corporel, which explores the resonant capabilities of the human body as self-sufficient percussion instrument, and the 1972 Toucher, delightful for reasons almost beyond the reach of words. Let me try some words, however: It’s a recitation — live, by Schick, in French (!), delivered in what you might call an elegant hippe-hoppe — of lines from Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, including stage directions, accompanied — nay, illuminated to a blinding glow — by a full panoply of percussion. Any juggling act you may ever have seen pales to butterfingers against the magic of this live event.

Let it be noted, furthermore, that in a wise and unprecedented stroke of managerial enlightenment, these three concerts were free to anyone with legitimate student ID; the hall, therefore, was properly full. I do not advocate economic suicide as a lifestyle; still, considering the depressing size of the crowds at some of the best of the County Museum’s new-music offerings, installing this free-to-students policy as standard practice — for a year or two, say — might be a wise investment.

STUDENT-RUSH TICKETS FOR PHILharmonic concerts, on the other hand, have recently been pushed up to an unconscionable $15 (from the previous $10 that was already too high). A strong new management team takes over at the Philharmonic next month; building (or repairing) bridges to the student-age audience should take high priority. Surely last week’s concert, by some distance the season’s most imaginative and forward-looking program, should with proper managerial insights have done turn-away business with the same young-in-heart audience that had turned up at the museum concerts.

David Robertson — Santa Monica­born, Paris-based, ecstatically remembered for his concert here last season with the Ensemble Intercontemporain — conducted. His program was entirely drawn from this century but greatly varied even so: Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England (the usual mix of radiant-beauty-plus-hokum); Witold Lutoslawski’s Cello Concerto with Lynn Harrell (arrogant, prickly, sheer genius); Leos Janácek’s Sinfonietta (genial, brassy bluster, but perhaps better off in Dodger Stadium than indoors); and one total stranger, the short Sinfonia by the late Netherlands composer Tristan Keuris, full of other people’s music — Ravel, mostly — with not much, at first hearing at least, to arouse interest in Keuris himself.

A program, in other words, for listeners with two ears and something in between, something to stay awake during and to discuss afterward, infinite refreshment after, say, the dank blanket of the Shostakovich Eighth as defused by Paavo Berglund two weeks before. Robertson on the podium is a bright, enkindling presence; at the pre-concert lecture he afforded some memorable insights into the thinking of a musician devoted to cutting-edge repertory. He and Steven Stucky carried those insights further at one of the Philharmonic’s valuable Sunday-morning “Surprising Encounters” at the Zipper Hall in the Colburn School — free three-hour talk fests including a buffet breakfast donated by heroic man-of-all-food Joachim Splichal. Again, however, the turnout was disappointing: a crowd of reasonable size but dwindling drastically after the first break, and noticeably deficient in the young ears that should be reached by the music of their own time — and who constitute our only assurance that a concern for today’s and tomorrow’s music deserves a place on the symphonic agenda.

A MILELONG TOY SHOP, A SELF-REFILLING box of Godiva chocolates, an entertainment both profound and giddy: Each of the above can pass as an accurate metaphor for any one of the half-dozen orchestral concertos by J.S. Bach generally but inaccurately known as the “Brandenburgs.” Compound that estimate by six, and you’ll come close to the impact of hearing all of these magical exercises at a single sitting — the very miracle that transpired at Royce Hall a few nights ago, handed off in the able ministrations of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and its multitalented, near-genius leader, Jeffrey Kahane.

Something not easily defined sets these concertos apart from the dozens of other orchestral works created at various times in Bach’s career. There’s a joyousness, an outpouring of inventive fantasy that leads to seemingly implausible sound combinations: one whole work scored only for low strings, another built around a pairing of a piercing high trumpet and the mild-mannered burble of an alto recorder. We tend to shy away from attributing an element of daring to Bach; he stands in the annals as the stick-in-the-mud who wrote in the accepted manner of his time, only better. Yet every one of these six concertos is some kind of step into unexplored shapes and sonorities; No. 5, for example, is the world’s first-ever keyboard concerto — the ancestor at some remove, in other words, of the Rach 3 and Rhapsody in Blue.

We don’t know the particulars of these works, beyond the information that they figure among the voluminous music Bach composed for his virtuoso orchestra in the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen sometime before 1720, and that in 1721 he made a fair handwritten copy of these six works and sent it off to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, in hopes of getting a better job at that illustrious court. The Margrave never acknowledged the offering; chances are that his own band wouldn’t have been up to the music’s demands. Later there were legends: that the music ended up as a butcher’s wrapping paper, or that the Margrave’s entire library was sold for 24 groschen; these stories belong on the shelf next to Georgie Washington’s cherry tree. Bach himself held on to his original copies, and even recycled some choice passages. If you think of the first movement of No. 3 as a fascinating study in string-ensemble busyness, check out its later version in the Cantata No. 174 (“Ich liebe den Höchsten”), where Bach has crammed horns and oboes in among the strings to create a texture busy to the point of explosiveness.

“Brandenburgs” come today in staggering profusion — nearly three pages of small print in Schwann — and in all sizes: full symphony orchestra, authentic baroque ensemble, even (shudder!) Max Reger’s version for piano duet. The version I grew up on (because there was no other) is still listed: Adolf Busch’s eloquent leadership from the concertmaster’s chair, modern winds, Rudolf Serkin’s piano. Jeffrey Kahane’s version incorporated wise compromises, including modern flutes in Nos. 2 and 4 in a room where recorders mightn’t carry. Tempos were on the brisk side, but such sublime moments as the exchange of dissonances between Margaret Batjer’s violin and Allan Vogel’s oboe, in the slow movement of No. 1, were granted time to raise goose bumps — as was Kahane himself, at a splendidly resonant harpsichord, in the astonishing cadenzas in No. 5. The sense, through all this rewarding evening, was of being present at the creation — not to be confused with being present at Haydn’s The Creation, which happens to be the next program offering by this valuable, cherishable ensemble.

AMONG MOZART’S 30 OR SO SONATAS for piano and violin there are childhood ventures of negligible worth and mature works large-scale and eloquent. In between comes one great work that I had forgotten about until a recent performance at one of MaryAnn Bonino’s “Historic Sites” concerts: a two-movement work in E minor (K. 304), terse and devastating. The music dates from 1779, the time of the death of Mozart’s mother and of the remarkable Sinfonia Concertante (K. 364) with its tortured, prophetic slow movement. Its key, E minor, bespeaks an elegiac state of mind; I cannot think of another E-minor work by Mozart, and only one by Haydn. Even its ending is unusual; minor-key works by classical composers usually swing around to the major at the end; this doesn’t.

In a room that seemed put on Earth to house loving and authentic performances of Mozart sonatas — Pasadena’s Le Petit Trianon — Stanley Ritchie and Steven Lubin, two-thirds of the splendid trio known as the Mozartean Players, turned Mozart’s tragic tensions into a chilling experience I cannot get out of my head. The program was altogether fine; cellist Myron Lutzke joined his colleagues for two Mozart trios. But it was that E-minor Sonata, tracing dark matters of the heart whose outlines we can only surmise, that remains with me these many weeks.

PAUL HILLIER EXPLAINS HIS CHOSEN title for his “Theatre of Voices” as a way to “explore the notion of a ‘theatre’ where the scenery is the sound of voices and the action consists of words.” Good enough, and at the group’s recent concert at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, much of the amazement stemmed from just that “action,” the way, for example, the 14th-century Johannes Ciconia constructed his craggy, mystical-sounding vocal pieces out of the clash of words — of one text in spaced-out long notes doing battle with a troping, explanatory text zooming along at a rapid pace.

A stupendous concert, built out of music full of that kind of inner conflict, and then with musical styles clashing on another level of conflict: some amusing John Cage seguing into a couple of 12th-century bits, Arvo Pärt and Russian Orthodox chant conjoined, or John Tavener with Guillaume Dufay though 500 years apart. Hillier — who with most of his six-member ensemble is currently based at Indiana University — is an extraordinary musician on his own whose works are crowned with an adventurous spirit that delights especially in crossing uncrossable boundaries and making unworkable relationships work. All the world’s his stage.

While maintaining his official residence in the frozen wastes of Cornell University, Steven Stucky remains one of the major shaping forces in our local new-music scene. He served as the Los Angeles Philharmonic‘s composer-in-residence starting in 1988; four years later he became the orchestra’s new-music adviser. He has composed commissioned works for this orchestra and several others. Alongside Esa-Pekka Salonen he has planned, programmed and produced the “Green Umbrella” concerts, whose continued popularity most other orchestras might well envy; he emcees the pre-concert discussions with the visiting composers, and does yeoman work in keeping those talks sane and informative. His essays in the program books on the content of specific concerts, blended into more general thoughts on what it‘s like to play a part in the endangered world of the contemporary arts, need to be gathered into a book.

Stucky turned 50 on November 7, and received the deserved tribute from the Philharmonic: American Muse, a commissioned new work for baritone and orchestra, and a “Green Umbrella” program that included two works by Stucky and three others by composers close to his heart — his teacher, the late Witold Lutoslawski; a current student at Cornell, Joseph Phibbs; and one of the last scores by the late Jacob Druckman, a close friend and fellow prime mover.

There was a time when I found myself trapped in the mental set whereby the term “conservative,” in reference to a composer’s chosen musical style, was tantamount to the Mark of Cain. My duty, or so I once saw it, was to preach the gospel of liberation whereby the only right moves were steps into the unknown, and the greatest of sins would be to repeat what you or someone else had done once before — even if as recently as last week. I have come to realize — and Stucky‘s music was an important aid toward that awareness — that a composer’s chosen language is far less important than what that language is made to express. I like to invoke the criterion I found in Virgil Thomson‘s essay on judging a new work: “Is this merely a piece of clockwork, or does it also tell time?”

Stucky’s American Muse is, by accepted judgmental standards, a conservative work. He takes four American poems — by John Berryman, e.e. cummings, A.R. Ammons and, inevitably, Walt Whitman — each of them a precious small scene painted in elegant words, and transfigures those paintings up one level into suave, gracefully persuasive lyric lines for a singer (Sanford Sylvan) with a special gift for turning the English language into spun gold. Never merely a supporting accompaniment, Stucky‘s orchestra becomes a participant, a panorama of color onto which the words may dance. One trick might strike you as obvious: In the setting of Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” each of America‘s singers gets a distinctive instrument to sing along with. Any five composers might have come up with this trick; it is Stucky’s gift to carry it off with fresh surprise and delight at every twist. Never mind about “conservative” or “liberal,” “left” or “right”; this is music that tells time.

It had better be made clear right off that the King Arthur that brought Orange County‘s “Eclectic Orange” to a triumphant close last week has nothing to do with Lancelot, Guinevere or the Knights of the Round Table. John Dryden (1631–1700) served as poet laureate at a time when Britons needed reaffirmation of their national heritage after the turmoil years of the plague, Cromwell and the Restoration. His Arthur wanders through a world of staggering beauty, gorgeously reflected in Henry Purcell’s music. At the end the clouds part, the British shore is revealed, and Venus proclaims the work‘s best-known aria, “Fairest isle, of all isles excelling.” Obviously, Dryden earned his royal salary.

Purcell’s incidental scores for several of Dryden‘s plays are the only reason to attend to such jingoistic foofaraw; two years ago the Long Beach Opera dressed the PurcellDryden Indian Queen in mariachi drag, and that was all right. In the rickety old auditorium of Santa Ana High School, William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants, in their first-ever Southern California visit, did something different with King Arthur, but also exactly right, dispensing with most of Dryden‘s verbiage, substituting a paraphrase narration by Jeremy Sams, and offering the two hours of Purcell’s rich and fancy-laden music more or less intact but without scenery or costumes. A nine-member vocal ensemble, informally dressed, shared the dozens of roles, bolstered by a 16-member instrumental ensemble led from the harpsichord by Christie. Oh Lordy, it was beautiful; you had to be there.

Every operatic soprano makes her own kind of peace with the music of Giuseppe Verdi. Far rarer and more precious, however, is the singer with the innate, essential Verdi in her voice: the throb, the marvelous iridescence as the simplest, purest melodic line whose accents of heartbreak transfigure the stage and the audience as well. There was Licia Albanese in her prime, Leontyne Price, Maria Callas . . . who else? As Elizabeth Futral sang Violetta‘s spare, devastating lines of surrender and resignation in La Traviata’s sublime Act 2 duet two weeks ago with Opera Pacific at Orange County‘s Performing Arts Center, some tingling in my neck hairs told me that another singer had come to join those ranks.

Elizabeth Futral: In less than a decade the young American soprano’s career has ranged far and wide. Last season she was the Stella in Andre Previn‘s A Streetcar Named Desire at its San Francisco premiere, a role of high drama but musical impoverishment. This was her first Violetta, but she fulfilled the opera as though she’d lived in it all her life. Opera Pacific‘s Costa Mesa audiences are only slowly overcoming the Orange County image of cultural reluctance, but the crowd this time knew to stand and cheer.

On a handsome production borrowed from the San Francisco Opera, Linda Brovsky created a lively and genuinely provocative staging, from the crossed lines of social hostility among guests in the opening party scene to the chill grayness of the final scene. David Miller, the handsome, believable Alfredo, sang with a young-sounding voice if not yet fully supported; Louis Otey was the elder Germont, hearty of voice and sympathetic of manner. Best of all, the performance fairly glowed under the baton of John Mauceri, whose shaping of the opening prelude, even with an undernourished pit orchestra, gave notice of a careful, loving exposition of Verdi’s wondrous score. Traditional cuts — the second-act cabalettas for Alfredo and Germont — were opened, at least one of two stanzas each; the first-act backstage music was played backstage, as is proper but doesn‘t always happen.

As the Los Angeles Opera faces its iffy future under incoming leadership, 50 miles down the interstate there are signs of some healthy competition from the reborn Opera Pacific. So far, at least, so good.

Between the movie screen and the concert stage, traffic moves in both directions. During the month of October you could have watched two great bygone film classics, Carl Dreyer‘s 1928 silent The Passion of Joan of Arc and Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, being weighed down with latter-day musical concoctions by Richard Einhorn and Philip Glass. At the Music Center you could have heard that excellent aggregation of freelance musicians, John Mauceri‘s Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, playing indoors and unmicrophoned for the first time locally, in an evening’s worth of music from various Alfred Hitchcock masterworks.

The Einhorn score, which carries its own title and credentials — Voices of Light, an ”operaoratorio“ recorded in 1995 on Sony — has been given here before with Dreyer‘s film, at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater and also at UCLA. It turned up again last month in Costa Mesa as part of ”Eclectic Orange,“ the extraordinary and ambitious — if wildly variable — entertainment package, still going on, put together by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. I had seen the previous performances, along with the recently released DVD, and took this as license to forgo the mixed pleasures of I-405 at rush hour this time around. I find the whole thing distasteful, up to the borderline of sacrilege; you have only to watch the film in silence, capitulating to the staggering emotionality in just the face of Maria Falconetti’s Joan, to realize the redundancy of any kind of accompanying music, and certainly of the Technicolor pseudo-piety of Einhorn‘s gaudy creation. Dreyer himself had recognized the self-sufficiency of his film in silence, but reluctantly allowed that Gregorian chant might serve as the one permissible musical background.

Yet this perversion could pass for high and noble art compared to the goings-on at UCLA’s Royce Hall, the bloodletting inflicted upon Dracula, which Philip Glass has managed to convert from a fine old Transylvanian goulash to warmed-over noodle soup. ”Noodle-noodle-noodle“ went the strings of the Kronos Quartet (its first time here with its newcomer cellist, Jennifer Culp), with the composer at the piano — visible behind the screen and, thus, intrusive to the eye and the ear — as the warmed-over arpeggios and gurgles wound their way up and down the scale: generic Glass, only minimally responsive to the action onscreen. Browning‘s original shocker managed its bloodcurdling biz with no music except the mellifluous Transylvanian purrings of Bela Lugosi in the leading role. This latter-day upgrade only proves the rightness of Browning’s decision. At least the new DVD release, slated for December, gives listeners the option of turning off the music. The crowd at Royce Hall on Halloween night, caught up in the appropriateness of the celebration (and dressed for the occasion), wasn‘t so lucky.

At John Mauceri’s Music Center concert three nights before, the 10 minutes of his own arrangement of Bernard Herrmann‘s music from Psycho, preserving the eeriness of Herrmann’s scoring for muted strings alone, needed no onscreen help in scaring the bejesus out of everyone present. Arguably, Herrmann‘s collaborations — with Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese — took Hollywood’s music to a level of seriousness, complexity and emotional intensity beyond the reach of his talented but more humdrum colleagues. Certainly Mauceri‘s program, with its share of corn and goo by Franz Waxman and Dimitri Tiomkin, offered no refutation to that argument — nor, for all its gesturesome rhetoric, did the deliriously awful Spellbound Concerto of Miklos Rozsa, despite the eager championing of pianist Scott Dunn. The orchestra — which, of course, isn’t an orchestra at all, but an ad hoc gathering to demonstrate the collective talents of the local freelance pool — sounded just fine. I know of a few so-called ”major“ orchestras that could profitably study the energy level of our locals.

The notion of a cultural kinship between the phenomena of serious opera and television talk show may not readily occur to the dedicated operaphile or couch potato, yet the considerable and delightful triumph of Mikel Rouse‘s Dennis Cleveland — most adventurous of all the ”Eclectic Orange“ offerings — is in the cementing of just such a relationship. Originally produced — and greatly acclaimed — in 1996 at the Kitchen, lower Manhattan’s shrine to the far-beyond, Cleveland‘s five-night run at the Orange County Performing Arts Center was enough in itself to transform that traditionally cautious venue into a hotbed of arts exploration.

Designer John Jesurun converted the Center’s small Founders Hall into a believable TV studio, festooned with monitors and logos, in which talk-show host Dennis Cleveland (Rouse himself) welcomed four couples of lovelorn misfits and set them to bickering among themselves in a dense, explosive counterpoint. Cleveland, meanwhile, moseyed around through the audience, several of which were also cast members, cued to cast further aspersions on the guests onstage and, in the process, to spill some of their guts into the studio monitors and out to the presumed-spellbound nationwide audience.

Maybe it‘s an opera, maybe something else for which no name has yet been coined; whatever, I found the sheer energy in Cleveland irresistible, exhilarating. The vocal lines — sung, spoken, sometimes yelled — ride on a throbbing, bubbling taped underpinning of hip-hop. The cast, each in hisher own way phenomenally adept at acrobatics both verbal and bodily, carried out their special battles in wildly veering rap-style ”arias.“ One of the planted audience members, Japanese performance artist Ryuji Noda, communicated not with words but with his harmonica, a nice musical touch, a gleaming, floating descant.

This season’s ”Eclectic Orange“ playbill has offered such diverse elements as Stravinsky‘s Oedipus Rex blended into the seductive doublethink of a filmed Leonard Bernstein lecture on that work, visiting orchestras from Moscow and Washington, a bluegrassclassical mix titled Short Trip Home, an evening of theater melding Canadian and Italian talent into a pageant on nothing less than the History of Mankind, and — still due, on November 16 — a first-ever local visit from Les Arts Florissants, the hot-ticket Paris-based baroque-opera troupe. The event’s sponsors, with media artist and impresario Dean Corey as spark plug, have their eyes on Brooklyn‘s multifaceted and greatly successful ”Next Wave“ festival as inspiration; so far, so good.

Mnemosyne is the Goddess of Memory, the mother (by Zeus) of the nine Muses, and the title of a magical two-disc release on ECM that might persuade you to discard all your other CDs and stay with this album alone. The performers are the four Brits of the Hilliard Ensemble plus the saxophonist Jan Garbarek — those wonderful people who brought you Officium a few years ago, now back with more of the same and equally wondrous. The repertory this time is broader than on the previous disc, a haunting mix of ancient liturgy — Greek ritual, Hildegard von Bingen, Thomas Tallis — and music from folk sources as diverse as Estonian and Iroquois. Some manic genius has arranged the order of these pieces, which last anywhere from two minutes to 11, so that totally unalike music juxtaposed can seem to arise from a single unifying impulse. The abiding sense is not so much what you‘re listening to but how you’re listening — with your ears, with your gut and with everything in between.

Am I making complete sense? Probably not; I just played the set again, and so I‘m writing under hypnosis. Just a few seconds into the first disc, and you could already be hooked. A distant, throbbing harmony among the four voices resounds among the stones and pillars of an ancient monastery (Austria’s Propstei St. Gerold), whose ambiance the sound engineers have miraculously captured. Then, like a shaft of sunlight through a high window, Garbarek‘s sax proclaims an ecstatic descant, and this is answered in turn in a solo line by the ensemble’s countertenor David James. The music is a fragment from a Peruvian folk song, obviously created on a mountaintop, although the program note doesn‘t say so. (The booklet — handsome, in the usual ECM manner — delivers a higher level of relevant information, in the form of stills of seascapes and vast distances from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.) Much of the music consists of mere fragments from larger works, chosen and improvised around on the spot: five guys miraculously in tune with one another, journeying through a timeless treasury amassed out of many musics, ending up not so much merely shaking the dust from the music as entering into enlightened conversation with it.

I cannot, of course, proclaim that the one-of-a-kind performance art on these discs tears the veil of time from these ancient repertoires; you still need the Tallis Scholars and Anonymous 4, along with the Hilliards‘ many other discs, for the straight historical skinny on Hildegard and her pals. Mnemosyne is all about a latter-day state of mind toward an important part of our musical past, the state of mind that guided the hands of Hieronymous Bosch and the makers of those marginal grotesques in ancient prayer books, perhaps even the state of mind that brought the picket lines to the Brooklyn Museum last month: the timeless power of ancient art to generate new art.

Some other music performed recently hereabouts also relates to this timeless power. Two of the four works at the County Museum on the Monday Evening Concert by Xtet, that splendid group of local freelancers — IX regulars or XIII with guests — turned out to be attractive new paraphrases of very old music: Eve Beglarian’s Machaut in the Machine Age twisted a few new contrapuntal lines through the gnarled texture of a 14th-century chanson, a congenial trifle. Stephen Hartke‘s Wulfstan at the Millennium, a work of greater length and substance, used the outlines of liturgical pieces by the Anglo-Saxon cleric Wulfstan, of just about a millennium ago, as frames for new music that somehow manages to stay interestingly close to its ancient inspiration — in, for example, the antiphonal back-and-forth answerings in several sections. A lovely concert all told; it also included a wonderful work from the recent past too seldom revived: Vicki Ray as soloist in Manuel de Falla’s crisp, jaunty Harpsichord Concerto, with its slow movement that, secular in intent, nevertheless showed the hand of God.

Morten Lauridsen‘s Lux Aeterna began the Master Chorale’s concert at the Music Center, and rendered the ensuing Brahms Requiem redundant. Lauridsen, who teaches at USC, is what you would call in today‘s lingo a compassionate conservative. His best music, most of it choral, holds no more terrors than that great clod of Brahmsian turgidity and makes its points with far greater ease. Out front, it goes down smoothly; it’s also probably fun to sing — as the Brahms, I know from experience, is not. Much of the vital organism in Lauridsen‘s 25-or-so-minute piece is grafted onto old roots: bygone harmonic modes, an occasional cantus firmus of Gregorian origin, long passages in that archaic harmonic style known as faux bourdon that always makes you think of spires and domes and eternal light through stained glass. Its performance demands are modest, which serves the purpose of Paul Salamunovich’s pretty-good chorus and his only-fair pickup orchestra, for which it was composed.

If the Hilliards‘ and Lauridsen’s music evokes models from a millennium or so ago, those are the new kids on the block compared to the amazements concocted by Harry Partch, who came to the conclusion early on that music had taken a wrong turn around 1000 A.D., and that the only salvation lay in restoring the elaborate but eminently logical principles preached and practiced by the ancient Greeks. It mattered not, of course, that these principles have survived only as speculation; what mattered far more was that Partch went on to invent what he imagined as an evocation of the old ways — including a scale with a possible 43 tones as opposed to the familiar 12 — built his glorious instruments (out of glass, bamboo, tuned stones and assorted found objects) to perform his imaginings, and put them to work in music wacko perhaps but also irresistible beyond belief. His stupendous stage work Delusion of the Fury was first performed at UCLA in 1969 under the benevolence of the noble patron Betty Freeman, and recorded at the time by Columbia Records. Now that recording, unavailable for years, has been reissued on the Minnesota-based Innova label as part of its ongoing series of Partch discs, books and videos. Hallelujah!

Partch concocted his Delusion from a couple of folk legends, acted out on stage by dancers with occasional chanting, with his fantastic “orchestra” led by his longtime associate Danlee Mitchell. The sounds range from sozzled gamelan to boiler factory to the swoopings of great predatory birds; what holds the work together is its exuberant rhythmic sweep. If the music of Mnemosyne transports you into a happy trance, Partch makes you want to fly. Both recordings, it seems to me, are essential.

Around me at the Music Center, the crowd stomped and cheered. The forces onstage had aimed a dazzling rocket into their midst, and the sparks flew. Whatever the more substantial virtues (if any) of the composer Rodion Shchedrin, whose Fifth Piano Concerto got its first-ever performance at last week‘s Philharmonic all-Russian bash, or the pianist Olli Mustonen, the work’s dedicatee and soloist, they proved themselves masters beyond challenge in the art of crowd zapping. Think back to the concerto‘s final movement: 10 or so minutes of nonstop perpetuum mobile, jillions upon jillions of notes zooming dizzily up and down the keyboard, the pianist’s hands and arms weaving to and fro as if fashioning a batch of invisible taffy in midair; could anyone resist participating in the leaps and the whoops that greeted the perpetrators of this glittering slab of ear- and eye candy? What stunning reassurance was doled out that night!: that music by a living composer — the fearsome commodity — could uncoil its dreaded measures but still leave its hearers unscarred, even exhilarated, at the end.

Those familiar with Shchedrin‘s reputation as a composer of relatively unpresumptuous stature beside the musical giants of today’s Russia — not to mention the past masters Borodin and Stravinsky, splendidly conducted that night by Esa-Pekka Salonen as compatriot companions — should not, of course, have entertained qualms about this new work. Those who have raised an eyebrow (let‘s say) or downright deplored (more to the point) the overwrought musical and visual antics of Olli Mustonen on his previous visits might have readily surmised that this pianist and this composer were put on Earth to make music with each other. The new concerto is an occasionally appealing bag of tricks, many of them familiar but some worth repeating. The opening is Prokofiev redux, the thudding tread of the Love for Three Oranges music or the Second Piano Concerto, but nowhere the lyric elegance of, say, the violin concertos or the ballets. The slow movement struck me on first hearing as a turgid, gray wash; nothing in a later perusal of the score changed that estimate. But that finale — oh boy! There is music in the grand tradition of audience seduction, empty but masterful virtuosic rhetoric; it leaves you no time to catch a breath, or to realize the emptiness of it all. Being of a certain age, I let my mind wander back to a Friday afternoon at Boston’s Symphony Hall — 1943, wasn‘t it? — when a then-unknown young pianist named William Kapell stormed the barricades with a then-unknown piano concerto by a certain Khachaturian and, with music of comparable glitter and deficiency of brainpower, wrung cheers from that grandmotherly audience. The Messrs. Shchedrin and Mustonen delivered their massage to the same nerve endings.

From the Philharmonic’s new score I expected no more; from Laurie Anderson‘s night at UCLA’s Royce Hall I expected much more and was let down. I cannot dispute her life mission, which has always been to explain America to itself in selected bits and pieces, chosen and grouped with genuine wit and love and set to music of wonderful, broad fantasy. She has attempted exactly that in her Songs and Stories From Moby Dick, brought it off on a stage drenched in sea-swept imagery, but weakened its impact in music that is, for her endearing talent, a backward step. Just the beginning, a projected ocean backdrop where birds fly toward one another, then collide and disappear into the seam between the screens, is pure Melville, and that spell holds through 90-plus intermissionless minutes. But the songs ruin things; they are not the dark, cynical lyrics of the great early stage works, but a long list of short, pretty pop tunes, a musical gloss that actually conflicts with the terrific visuals of her piece. Last year at Royce, in a simpler but more profound solo work called The Speed of Darkness, Anderson redefined the role of the contemporary artist as that of “content provider.” To those who love her work, her new piece casts her as a provider of discontent.

I was repulsed by my first hearing of Meredith Monk in the 1970s, astonished by the sheer chutzpah of her tuneless gibberish, baffled by the outpourings of adoration in the capacity crowd around me. Since then she has waxed even mightier, composed operas, transfixed audiences worldwide. In the forlorn belief that I must be missing something, I keep going to hear her. Her concert at the Getty Center, given — for God‘s sake — as a part of the World Festival of (!) Sacred Music, again drew the usual pilgrimage, who provided the usual measure of adulation. I hated every minute. Someone please tell me what I’m missing.

At Glendale‘s Alex Theater, however, I heard some truly stunning singing from another musician, in her local debut: Pamela Helen Stephen, performing one of Benjamin Britten’s last works, the cantata Phaedra, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under guest conductor Richard Hickox (who just happens to be the singer‘s husband). This is strong, eloquent music; the text, from Racine’s drama translated by Robert Lowell, demands no less: to illuminate the tragic heroine‘s final rumination on her fate before her suicide. Janet Baker, who inspired the work, sang it here in the 1980s under Carlo Maria Giulini; Stephen’s impassioned, beautifully colored performance challenged those memories. She sings the Maddalena in the Los Angeles Opera‘s Rigoletto next March, again with Hickox conducting, a role far too small for the artist I heard at this concert.