So I've Heard

AT 8, MICHAEL ROUSE CHANGED HIS FIRST NAME TO “Mikel” because, he says, he liked the spelling. At 15, he ran away from home — in the “boot-heel” area of southwestern Missouri — and joined a carnival. “I did all kinds of odd jobs,” he remembers. “I ran the carny tricks, handled the fake hoops, painted, worked out front once in a while. It wasn’t the traditional kind of work, and when I decided to become a composer, I didn’t do that traditionally, either.”

How untraditional? That will easily be proved next week (November 2­6) in the Founders Hall of Costa Mesa’s Performing Arts Center when, as one of the highlights of the Orange County Philharmonic Society’s Eclectic Orange Festival, Rouse’s opera Dennis Cleveland gets its first West Coast performance. It’s an opera, says Rouse, “because you can’t call it anything else.” Actually, it’s an operatic takeoff on another indigenous, entrenched art form, the television talk show — yes, talk show, as in Oprah, Sally or Jerry.

And why not? After all, wrote the astute Peter G. Davis in New York magazine after Rouse’s opera had a well-received run at Manhattan’s The Kitchen, “The whole talk-show ritual, with its aggressive confrontations and confessional aria-and-ensemble format, is already operatic by nature.” In Dennis Cleveland, the invited “guests” form an eight-member chorus onstage, while the eponymous host, played by Rouse himself, talks to the bank of video cameras, which then project his image onto the various monitors and screens in the “studio.” Dennis roams the aisles and spars with other cast members spotted through the audience who stand and hurl challenges at the guests. One member, a Japanese tourist, antagonizes the crowd by insisting on playing his harmonica. Tension mounts; the guests onstage bare their souls-in-torment; the whole audience hankers to join in, and some do. Haven’t you ever wanted to stand up and vent your spleen at Don Giovanni’s duplicity, or perform some CPR to save Aida and Radamès from death by suffocation?

It’s more than just talk, of course; Rouse’s jack-of-all-trades music keeps participants on edge, and could do the same for you. To the background of a rock combo heavy on percussion, the four onstage couples, all of them trapped in an assortment of emotional crises, set their voices into conflict in a complex and tortured ongoing counterpoint. At many points Dennis himself, not quite the master of his destiny, joins them in soul-searching arioso. At the end, as his guests hail their 90 minutes of salvation through the privilege of purging their innards on camera, Dennis is driven to confess that televised reality, shallow though it be, is reality enough for most people. “And the line that I walk is just to calibrate/all the time I spend alone and out of date . . .”

OVER SAVORY NOODLES IN WEST L.A.’S “LITTLER Tokyo,” the 42-year-old Rouse — neatly shirted, shod and necktied, strange getup for a composer known to be most at home among the shaggy hordes of Lower Manhattan — ticks off his own musical origins, which are widespread. “I’ve been everywhere, at least briefly: Thelonious and Miles certainly at the start. Then there was Stravinsky. Then, John Cage — not so much for the music, which nobody can imitate, but for the permission to do anything, everything. Rap has been a definite influence. I would go so far as to claim hip-hop as the most interesting of all music right now. I’ve never been what you’d call a minimalist — I think my music is too complex harmonically — but Steve Reich’s music also had a big effect on me, the way he can use rhythm as a structural base for even a long piece.”

The son of a Missouri state trooper, Rouse followed his carny career with studies in music and art in Kansas City, formed a band, moved to New York in 1979, studied African drumming and the controversial, math-based compositional methods of Joseph Schillinger (who had also taught George Gershwin). In the mid-1980s his new ensemble, known as the Mikel Rouse Broken Consort (keyboard, bass, drums, and lead guitar or MIDI saxophone), had become a staple of the downtown scene, a strangely suave but exhilarating conflation of Schillinger, atonality and rock. By 1991, Rouse had begun to stir poetry — his own, of course — into the mix.

The renegade Robert Ashley had by then demonstrated that the term “opera” could signify other things than fat sopranos and large orchestras; some of his abrasive scores involved little more than a reading with tape and a few miscellaneous voices. For Rouse, these vocal philosophies became a role model; Dennis Cleveland is dedicated to Ashley. The work is actually the second in a trilogy, each of the three short “operas” set into a frame that reflects the miasmic spread of media madness. Failing Kansas, the first, is based on the true story, novelized in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, of the senseless murder of a small-town Kansas family, and the tracking-down, capture and execution of the perpetrators. The work is performed by Rouse alone, assuming the roles of the two murderers and the society around them, reading his convoluted, tortured “counterpoetry” (his own description) on a multitrack tape against a taped counterpoint of unpitched voices intoning a jumble of images, all to a film by Cliff Baldwin projected in a multidimensional environment.

Dennis Cleveland advances the anti-media attack through the addition of “live” technology, the video cameras grouped on designer John Jesurun’s TV-studio set, which transmute the flesh-and-blood of the human participants into media-ese. “What I’m trying to show here,” says Rouse, “is the way television has become the kind of ceremony we once associated with religion. You could say, in fact, that television is the closest thing to religion that we have today.”

The End of Cinematics, the final work in the trilogy, slated for performance in 2001 as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, is set in an idealized movie theater, and again the line between performers and audience is dimly defined. The participants witness a live performance, actually a number of simultaneous performances taking place, but all of these elements are being filmed and fed onto a large movie screen, blended into other, prerecorded images to create a counterpoint of violent contrasts, of conflicting images that somehow relate to the same action.

The future? “When we talk about technology,” Rouse says, “most people think ‘computers’ or ‘the Internet.’ As with television, the medium takes precedence over the message. In rushing to claim the latest innovation, too often these days what you see is only the technology at work. If it’s a good painting, you shouldn’t notice the paint . . .

“There’s always some kind of breakthrough, to bring music back to life,” he continues. “Jazz did it; jazz proved that you could have serious musical aspirations and still attract an audience. Minimalism did it; so-called ‘serious’ music was strangling on its own complexity, and the minimalists returned music to simplicity and made it work. In both cases, the timing was just right. Now there’s technology, and I’ve come to regard my recording studio as a musical instrument by itself. Just recently I took a set of string quartets that I composed in 1985, and I sampled them on the computer and recast them as whole new pieces — investigating my own past, you might say.

“There’ll always be concert halls and opera houses, functioning as museums. For me, though, the only valid music is what I can do myself. I come from a background of playing my own music. Now, with my studio, I can go one step further and record my own music. My music is my world, and I live in the middle of it. If I can take it out on tour, as I’m doing now, that’s fine. But the other way, handing the music off to someone else to perform and relinquishing my own role as performer — I would find that pretty exasperating.”

“Isn’t that a kind of isolationism?” I wonder.

“Maybe it is for now,” says Mikel Rouse, “but I’m still young — for a composer, that is. There’s plenty of time.”

You could arrive at the Los Angeles Opera‘s latest offering with a personal list, rather long, of the works still undeservedly neglected by the company: Verdi’s Forza for starters, Wagner‘s Meistersinger, the two Manons, and on and on. You’d be pretty far down the list before you arrived at Vincenzo Bellini‘s The Capulets and the Montagues. (I’ll spare you the unpronounceable Italian.) Surprise and delight would then attend your arrival; the local guys have reached deep into the repertory of the forgotten, accorded Bellini‘s fluent, elegant score the treatment worthy of a masterpiece, and demonstrated that it deserves no less.

Getting to that realization does, of course, take a little work. You have to get Shakespeare off your back, and Prokofiev and Bernstein as well. Felice Romani’s workaday libretto harks back to the obscure Italian novel that Shakespeare probably also knew but greatly expanded; his lovers, somewhat longer in the tooth, have already bedded down at curtain‘s rise, and Romeo has asked Papa Capulet for Juliet’s hand. But Romeo is also the leader of the Montague family forces, which are trying to unseat the entrenched Capulets in Verona, and Juliet is caught between love and filial loyalty. The tragic ending, however, is the same. (Since the current production updates the action to around 1910, however, you have to wonder how the presumed-dead Juliet gets dumped into the family tomb without the benefit of embalming.) Oh yes, and Bellini, honoring the old bel canto custom, has written his Romeo for a mezzo-soprano. Any teenage moviegoer with throbbing heart will attest that the notion of an androgynous Romeo isn‘t all that novel these days.

By the time the first act (of two) floats blissfully to its close, however, your every pore should be tingling from the sheer spun-sugar incandescence of Bellini’s music for the lovers, and the way Laura Claycomb (the Juliet) and Susanne Mentzer (the Romeo), singly or in duets of rapturous togetherness, send this music skyward, a pairing fashioned in vocal heaven. Never mind director Thor Steingraber‘s off-the-wall update, with the Capulets done up in black tie rather than splendid Renaissance robes and the warring factions having at one another with swords, daggers and (!) handguns. Never mind that the lovers are also given alter egos, who dance out the torments of love during Bellini’s long orchestral intros. Never mind that Robert Israel‘s handsome, skeletal scenic pieces actually relate to no time and all time. Nobody goes to a bel canto opera for the dancing or scenery.

Actually, there’s more to the opera than the lovers‘ gorgeous music. Act 1 ends with an extended ensemble, the five major characters each confronting a separate dramatic problem, the music surging forward toward a tremendous climax. In 1835, five years after The Capulets, Gaetano Donizetti fashioned the same kind of knockout ensemble, for six singers, at the turning point of his Lucia di Lammermoor and did so no better than Bellini here. What Bellini was good at — the long melodic lines like human breathing transfigured above the orchestra’s gentle prodding that distills the harmony into the texture of idealized honey — no other composer of his time could equal.

The Capulets runs through October 31; it is one of the company‘s truly sublime offerings. The cast — all Americans, by the way — is uniformly good: a newcomer, Eric Halfvarson, as a powerful, resonant Papa Capulet, and Malcolm MacKenzie as the sympathetic Lorenzo (Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence, but here a doctor). Britain‘s Richard Hickox conducts, cleanly if with no prodigies of energy. (Hickox was also the admirable guest conductor of last weekend’s Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concert, a superlative event that I‘ll try to discuss next week.)

In the month since the Hollywood Bowl season, the Philharmonic gave two concerts in Mexico and three in local neighborhoods; sent a bus-and-truck production of Peter Sellars’ madcap, messy version of Stravinsky‘s A Soldier’s Tale to three local parks; delivered a delightful benefit concert of Shakespeare-plus-Mendelssohn‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the likes of Peter Hemmings, Gordon Davidson and Rosie Perez in speaking roles and the aforementioned Laura Claycomb enchantingly singing of ”spotted snakes“; and donated a Beethoven‘s Ninth to the World Festival of Sacred Music jamboree at the Bowl. By Thursday night’s all-Mahler ”opening concert“ at the Music Center, therefore, the orchestra had already attained midseason form, as witnessed by the concert‘s first note, a soft blooper from the first horn, followed soon after by a beeper somewhere in the hall. Oh, well.

The important news, and it’s good, is that the hall‘s new acoustical adjustments seem to work. The stage floor has been raised somewhat, and extended out 16 feet; the setup is easily removed and replaced to free the pit for opera. Obviously the players need time to get used to the changes; some balances last Thursday were only approximately good. But the string tone had a greater sense of thrust out in the hall, and there seemed to be more air on the stage itself. The long, ethereal opening of the Mahler First seemed to hang in midair, and pizzicatos from cellos and basses sounded more than usually resonant. The new arrangement does create some seats with a limited view of the stage, a few of them in the posh Founders Circle. (The Philharmonic has allowed subscribers in the afflicted areas to change locations.) In all, the changes have reduced the total number of seats to 3,086 (from 3,200), with 378 ”obstructed“ and another 80 ”slightly obstructed“ — a total of 2,628 unproblematic seats, some 400 more than are projected for Disney Hall.

The program began with the early Blumine, a little squeeze of syrup that Mahler had once wrapped into the First Symphony and later dropped. The five songs to Friedrich Ruckert texts came next, music from 18 years later, encapsulating the composer’s extraordinary growth in eloquence since early days, and made miraculous in the rich rhetoric of Jose van Dam‘s plangent, overwhelming delivery.

At the Bowl last summer I had found Salonen’s Mahler First both interesting and disturbing in the matter of excessive slowdowns and speedups — even though some of this is lightly suggested in the score. (The Salonen recording of the Fourth is, similarly, rather rubato-ridden.) Has he, in only a month‘s time, rethought the work — or have I? The momentum in Thursday’s performance was steady and staggering: a breathtaking, narrative sweep that stormed the heavens, a transfiguration of the young Mahler‘s wondrous, arrogant power, a prefiguration of the eloquence he would soon fully master. The hall sounded great, the Mahler sounded great. Wow!

Photo by Lisa KohlerDRIVING INTO TOWN TO MEET PHILharmonic honcho-designate Deborah Borda at her first L.A. press conference, I found solace and sadness on KPCC’s Talk of the City, host Linda Othenin-Girard’s valiant daily attempt to elicit intelligent phoned-in comment from concerned citizens. The morning’s topic was the exhibition by young British artists at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the outpouring of municipal hostility engendered by some of its contents. Incensed by one work in particular — a collage that surrounded a portrait of the Virgin Mary with tributary images legitimately honored by some faiths (e.g., a dollop of elephant dung, a ritual symbol in the artist’s native Africa) but deemed offensive by some of New York’s religious spokesfolk — Mayor Giuliani and his pals among the city’s traditionally uptight Catholic leadership have stomped down hard on the Museum, threatening both funding cutoffs and eviction from its handsome and newly renovated premises.

Echoes of traditional run-ins between governments and creative artists have been resounding far and near, all the way from the “Degenerate” art shows in Mr. Hitler’s palmy days to Harry Truman’s threat to punch out a Washington music critic for panning his daughter Margaret. They invariably produce bonanzas in the wrong places: a boost for Mayor Giuliani’s presumed senatorial ambitions; sellout crowds at the Brooklyn Museum (with a concomitant rise in the value of the artworks themselves, on which the auction house of Christie has dibs), fame far beyond merit for Washington critic Paul Hume.

Up to my arrival at the Music Center, the votes on KPCC were running well in favor of cutting the Brooklyn Museum adrift, along with its “obscene” and “revolting” artwork (none of which, of course, the callers had seen). To Linette, the situation called for “a whole ‘nother set of values.” Terry offered a capsule history of art, which “kept getting better and better until the 1800s, and then started to fall off again.” Linda, horrified at the thought of public support for the arts, called for the election of new officials to shut down all funding. Only Candice, bless ‘er, seemed willing to grant the young Brits some benefit of the doubt; the value of all art, she nobly proclaimed, lies in its power to mystify, to suggest “something more.”

I wish this were all as funny as it ought to be. The sad fact is that the arts have been in trouble ever since the invention of the democratic process. The absolute monarchs and aristocrats — the Medicis, Haydn’s boss Count Esterhazy, Wagner’s pal Ludwig of Bavaria — nurtured the arts as their private privilege, and hand-picked their audiences from among their own circles. Once there were public concert halls and museums open to ticket buyers, the elephant dung hit the fan. The mission of the arts to direct an observer’s mind toward the “something more” defined by one of KPCC’s callers gave way to the notion of the arts as the public’s pal, soothing and accessible. The yahoo politicos build impregnable fortresses by constantly trumpeting to their constituents that the insults perpetrated by degenerate painters and composers of tuneless cacophonies are supported by public taxes. On the few occasions when the arts have made some degree of inroads toward popular acceptance, they have done so on the basis of externals: fancy new buildings, expressive ideals watered down to easy-listening kitsch, the perversions heaped upon the very nature of the artist so that David Helfgott’s brainless murder of pop tidbits outdraws Alfred Brendel’s wise discourses on Beethoven or Schubert sonatas.

We have been given to believe, and were so again at last week’s Philharmonic press conference, that salvation for a large chunk of Los Angeles’ artistic life rests upon the building of the Disney Concert Hall. It could even be true; given the appropriate drenching in hype, any new public edifice can be counted upon for sellout business in its first few months. As a fledgling critic, I watched Lincoln Center go up, building by building, in New York in the 1960s; I listened to the predictions of acoustic splendor at Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall almost from the placing of the cornerstone; I shared my colleagues’ disappointment verging on contempt as, remake after remake, the sound of the hall remained flawed (as it still is). I remember that neither the New York Philharmonic — the hall’s main tenant — nor any of the regular visiting attractions showed any notable sign in their first-year offerings that the hall signified the outlay of new concepts in programming, in reaching new audiences, in stimulating new thinking among composers young and old. I also remember, of course, that Philharmonic Hall’s first year was New York’s hot ticket, that on most nights you couldn’t get near the place.

EVERYBODY KNEW THAT ERNEST Fleischmann would be a hard act to follow as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s artistic administrator; indeed, it had taken nearly two years for a Philharmonic search committee to find a successor willing to walk in his shoes. It took only a few weeks to lure Deborah Borda away from the New York Philharmonic to walk in Willem Wijnbergen’s shoes. Wisely, she made it clear at our first get-together that it was too early to reveal — or, probably, even to formulate — plans. Everybody in the room was on best behavior; nobody had the bad manners to ask about the well-publicized and long-enduring feud between Borda and New York’s peppery maestro Kurt Masur; the photographers snapped many hugs between her and the comparatively benign Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Masur or not, Borda did an important job in New York. Her change in concert formats, instituting series of shorter concerts at rush hour to lure commuters, was a good move nicely tuned to New York rhythms. Maybe it would work here, maybe not. A woman, an American: It could be an unbeatable parlay. Barring a Richter 9.1, she’ll get the new hall built.

Then, of course, she’ll have to face the softly voiced but widely held conviction that the Music Center concept is wrong and was from the start, that the whole complex sits in a barren, audience-hostile area, remote from anywhere else, its car access — bad enough on Dodger nights — about to be further threatened by the Staples Center sports arena a few blocks to the south. One day, in a nostalgic mood, she’ll remember the crowds strolling past Lincoln Center night and day, the array of nearby restaurants, the welcoming lighting in the Plaza, the great hangout area around the fountain, the allure of the artwork that gleams from the Metropolitan Opera House (second-rate Chagall though it be). Then she’ll stroll through the gloomy, ill-lit, unwelcoming space at the Music Center, dodge if she can the inane ventriloquist who howls into his dummy, search in vain for refreshment worthy to be thought of as food, and wonder about the many empty seats at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion night after night. That’s part of your new job, Deborah Borda. Won’t you miss Mayor Giuliani, even a little bit?

MOSES UND ARON IS ON MY CONSCIENCE. Arnold Schoenberg’s opera, imposing even in its unfinished state, accorded unquestioned masterpiece recognition on the strength of its composer’s own eminence, is still — after 65 years — so seldom performed that its
few revivals stand as major events. It made its belated first appearance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera last season, and was revived there (as the first of a scheduled supercautious mere three performances) last week. The audience was sparse, but all the right people attended, and the cheering at the end was long and loud. The crowd also included an unusually large contingent of teenagers, there — as several told me — on their grandparents’ subscription tickets. Schoenberg’s music may have lost its innovative edge over the years, but not its power to strike terror into the hearts of grandparents.

This was my third staged Moses, after the American premiere under Sarah Caldwell in 1966 (which I described in print as “live Cinerama”) and Achim Freyer’s stunning production (all in desert colors) at the New York City Opera in 1990. The work holds no terrors for me, and I have no problems with its stature, the power of Schoenberg’s conception and the intensity of its thinking, the impact of its raw theatricality. Try as I might, however, I cannot love it. I am not reached by the gruff speech-song of the Moses character (as I am, for example, by the same device in the 20-years-earlier Pierrot Lunaire). I hear no lyric strength in Aron’s rhapsodizing (as I do in the last two string quartets, roughly contemporaneous with the opera). Nothing in the protracted orgy music tells me about the profane passions of that scene, not even its sour waltz-parodies; Richard Strauss’ dance for Salome, lousier music but one-third the length, does the job with greater efficiency.

Against all that I value in Schoenberg — the integrity of his musical mind, the greatness of much of his music — I am troubled by my admire-but-don’t-like take on this one monumental score. The subject matter of Moses und Aron is not the biblical yarn so nicely projected in Cecil B. De Mille­style epics; it is a discourse on the nature of faith, of Jewishness in crisis — matters of great concern in the conscience of the Jewish-turned-Protestant Schoenberg in a Germany already wracked by the war cries of Hitler’s thugs. Could it be that musical considerations, in this work, seemed of less consequence to Schoenberg than text? Could it even be that his failure to compose the music for the third act, while allowing publication of his complete text, reflected his own priorities?

No opera company undertakes a Moses und Aron without some strong ideas on production; it is to the Met’s credit that, having decided to risk inevitable empty seats, it has given the work a staging of comparable brilliance and innovation. On a stage slashed with broad color bands, Graham Vick has created huge living modules of singers (principals and chorus) in taut clusters, dressed in contemporary Hassidic Orthodoxy: grungy black suits and hats, decrepit footwear, proclaiming the timelessness of suffering and bondage. John Tomlinson intoned the blunt, brutal lines of Moses; Philip Langridge, the sly, sinuous music of Aron. A large cast was involved, including six singers in modern black tie on chairs downstage, as the Voice of God. And through it all rang the resonance of the Met’s orchestra under James Levine, pleading the cause of Schoenberg’s troubled opera with stunning eloquence.

ACROSS LINCOLN CENTER’S PLAZA, THE New York City Opera proved to me on two occasions the exceptional current good health of the company. Paul Kellogg, who is also head of the Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York, has parlayed the work of both companies onto an artistic level greater than its parts. On one happy night at the City Opera, I saw the company’s first-ever Il Viaggio a Reims, Rossini’s curious occasion-piece with its almost-nonexistent plot and its glorious music that includes ensembles that tickle every rib within earshot. Rossini had composed the work for a star-studded Parisian company; the City Opera ensemble wasn’t quite that, but the precision of its quicksilver vocal work, under George Manahan’s leadership, still made for a delightful evening. In the excellent cast I spotted our own Paula Rasmussen, of many L.A. Opera triumphs, singing enchantingly as a man-eating Polish countess.

The City Opera continues its good services toward new opera; a triple bill of short operas by three composers, all of them set in Central Park, got critical raves at Glimmerglass this summer and is already sold out at the New York State Theater for later this season. Surprisingly, the company has also emerged as a force for Handel operas: two seasons ago with Stephen Wadsworth’s production of Xerxes that showed in Los Angeles, last season with Partenope, and last week with Ariodante.

The City Opera Handel is not quite the purist versions enshrined on the Harmonia Mundi discs, but it also doesn’t stray so far as the 1966 Giulio Cesare that made stars out of Beverly Sills and Norman Treigle at drastic cost to historical integrity. For the Ariodante, Jane Glover led an ensemble of contemporary strings, winds and brass with harpsichord in an elegantly phrased, impeccably balanced performance. There were a few cuts, mostly repeats and da capos. The cast, splendidly integrated, sang with intelligent awareness of the style, but with enough latter-day vibrance to make dramatic sense out of the deceptions, reconciliations and lovemaking of the drama. Britain’s Sarah Connolly sang the title role marvelously, but the day’s star, as the villainous Polinesso, was the same countertenor, Bejun Mehta, who triumphed so magnificently in another Handel in Santa Barbara this summer. Mehta’s program bio listed him as the Tolomeo in a Los Angeles Opera Giulio Cesare at some unspecified future date. Pray it’s not a typo.

Some ink has been spilled over the new electronic equipment recently installed in the State Theater to correct certain long-standing acoustic problems. Management has taken great care to describe the installation not as “amplification” (a four-letter word in critical circles, more appropriate to the brutally cranked-up sound in Broadway theaters) but as “enhancement.” So far the response has ranged from “okay” to “can’t hear the difference.” Having no memories of State Theater acoustics for the past few years, I can only report that the sounds I heard in Handel and Rossini were bright, clear and nicely balanced between stage and pit. One chorus in the Handel was sung offstage and piped into the hall; it sounded canned, as indeed it was. Everything else in the performance sounded alive and fresh, as indeed it was.

Photo by Diane AlancraigTHE INDOOR CONCERT SEASON DIDN’T begin with the customary orchestral spectacular at the Music Center or Royce, but with charm and intelligent small-scale music making in a friendly and informal setting: Gloria Cheng-Cochran’s recital at Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church to begin the sixth run of the valuable series known as “Piano Spheres.” The program promised much and gave even more: a spread of 23 short pieces composed between 1902 and 1999, each of them some kind of dance, grouped not chronologically but in such a way that each piece cast a light on its neighbor — not as a random smorgasbord, in other words, but as one of those carefully arranged “tasting menus” in a great and unaffordable restaurant.

Cheng-Cochran, I don’t think I need to reiterate, is one of our local treasures; so, for that matter, is the concert series of mostly new and very new music that she and four other pianists put together each year (next: Susan Svrcek on November 23). Inevitably, her program had its share of clunks — an inane, paint-by-numbers waltz by Philip Glass, an Igor Stravinsky tango from 1940 that surely ranks as an embarrassment to his legacy — but they were far outweighed by the charmers and the discoveries. Among them was the “Shimmy” from Paul Hindemith’s Suite 1922 (which Cheng-Cochran had played complete last year): music with an amazing power of observation, a document of a Europe in the first throes of its discovery of jazz. Henry Cowell’s Lilt of the Reel, also from the 1920s, was fascinating to hear — bristling, nose-thumbing music from a legacy that cries out to be rediscovered. Among the brand-new works, I especially admired Joan Huang’s Red Ribbon Dance, a mingling of ethnicities beautifully blended. Altogether, an all-too-short sweep through intriguing music, full of fine thinking, wonderfully played, enhanced by the resonance of one of the Faziolis from the benevolent David Abell’s piano showroom, which he sends over for each of these valuable events.

THE MYSTIQUE OF THE PIANO AND ITS virtuosos past and present does not always engage my undivided attention; piano nuts lag only slightly behind dramatic-soprano nuts in my catalog of the irrational. But the panorama is broad, with room at one end for David Helfgott — who seems, however, to have disappeared again, thus proving the existence of God — and, somewhere else along the path, for those enlightened souls with the powers of imagination to
regard the piano as a thinking instrument. There is some remarkable brain and finger power at work on a new two-disc set, out next week on ECM, that excellent, high-adventure label. Two of the clearest thinkers among today’s pianists, Peter Serkin and András Schiff, are deeply involved in two-piano works by Mozart, Reger and Busoni, including the latter composer’s spellbinding Fantasia Contrappuntistica, one of music’s authentically unscalable peaks.

Talk about brain music! Busoni’s
half-hour horizon-expanding masterpiece arose from his obsession with J.S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue, specifically with the final fugue, left unfinished at Bach’s death,
with its foreshadowings of an even grander complexity than anything in the work up to the breaking-off. Busoni’s intent was not merely to “finish” Bach’s final fugue, but to use it as a launching point into his own vast speculations on Bach’s musical world in 1750 and on his own world 170 years later — and, thus, to extend Bach’s own speculations on the expressive horizons of the art of counterpoint. Gnarled, crabbed, yet explosive, the work is no less murderous to hear than to perform. I once had the privilege of turning pages for the late Egon Petri, a onetime Busoni pupil, who braved the solo version in the studio at KPFA (in a happier time), but the full realization of the music’s amazing strength reaches me first with this sublime performance by Serkin and Schiff.

The set also includes Mozart’s Two-Piano Sonata, to which I composed a love letter in these pages about a year ago. This is the work that’s gotten a lot of publicity from a psychologist’s findings about its power to raise hearers’ IQ. Well and good, and if I give you a long list of other works that have the same effect, they’ll probably all be by Mozart. But there is, indeed, something special about this sonata, and the wise, loving performance by Serkin and Schiff brings it out. Mozart, in putting together the slow movement, follows a “normal” classical pattern: opening theme, change of key, second theme, development, etc. There is a concept mathematicians call an “elegant solution,” a way of solving a problem not only accurately but with an extra dollop of imagination. What I hear, time and again, in this slow movement is that kind of elegance: the way Mozart, in his orderly progression from A to B, takes a quick detour to sample a particularly beautiful flower in bloom over at C. A really splendid performance of this music, the one that’ll take your IQ right up to the Einstein level (for a couple of minutes, anyhow), has to be infused with the majesty of A and B, but also the fragrance of C. These guys get it right.

Despite sentiments expressed a few lines above, I am not entirely unreachable by the “purer” kind of piano virtuosity, and Sony’s forthcoming release of Russia’s 26-year-old whiz-bang Arcadi Volodos’ 1998 Carnegie Hall recital would knock the socks off a marble statue. The music itself — showoff pieces by Liszt and Rachmaninoff, Scriabin’s 10th Sonata and assorted tidbits, a set of Schumann miniatures — won’t do much to raise your IQ, but it’ll definitely drop your jaw. There is an exhilaration here, a torrent of virtuosity of the kind that you associate with certain no-brain Russians of bygone times. Nothing here, or on other Volodos recordings I’ve heard, tells me anything about his
ability to assume the burden of thought; he comes to the Philharmonic next February with the Tchaikovsky, which won’t tell us much more. But I wouldn’t miss it for worlds.

LAST SATURDAY’S PAPERS — THE New York and Los Angeles Times, respectively — ran statements from heads of classical-music radio stations worth considering as the millennium hurtles toward us. Says Bill Campbell of Boston’s WCRB, which has discontinued the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts: “The popular operas are fine, like La Traviata and La Bohème. People recognize them and are happy to hear them every year. Then comes along a five-hour Wagner feature, and I’ve got to tell you, that is an acquired taste.” Says KKGO’s Saul Levine, answering Mark Swed’s call for livelier, up-to-date programming: “We present a balanced selection . . . that fits our mainstream approach. We do not air the works of John Cage or similar-sounding [sic] composers.”

Is this what they mean by “static”?

This was the week of Los Angeles’ annual identity crisis. On Tuesday and Thursday, in shorts and T-shirt, I loaded the picnic basket and made it to the Hollywood Bowl. On Wednesday I fished out my matching socks and headed downtown to the Music Center, where the Los Angeles Opera began its season with the usual opening-night gala. The intermingling takes getting used to, all the more so since the musical level of Camille Saint-Saens‘ Samson et Dalila, which kicked off the opera season, is a lot closer to the typical Bowl fare than is Ravel’s subtle Sheherazade, which Dawn Upshaw had sung enchantingly at the Bowl the night before.

Samson marked the start of the L.A. Opera‘s 14th season, the last for outgoing founder and general director Peter Hemmings; it served as well to trumpet the presence, however brief, of incoming artistic director Placido Domingo (with the rest of the new administrative team as yet unannounced). In a sense, the Samson also celebrated the sweep of history within the company. Lawrence Foster, who conducted the inaugural Otello (with Domingo) in October 1986, was again on the podium, as he has often been in the intervening years. Domingo was the Samson; he has sung opening-night leads in nine of 14 seasons, and conducted two others. Two singers in lesser roles, Richard Bernstein as the Abimelech and Louis Lebherz as the Old Hebrew, are alumni of the company’s training program and well along in world-class careers.

Tattered baggage though it be, Samson et Dalila maintains its place in the repertory on the strength of its glittering surface. Sure, it has only one tune worth remembering. Its ballet is the ancestor of all operatic hootchy-kootch. Given a fair serving of charismatic lung power in its two name roles, however, and a stage setting evocative of the Loew‘s Babylon lobby of everybody’s imagining — all of which it got at the Music Center on Wednesday — it can still dupe an undemanding audience into believing itself some kind of masterpiece.

Credit composer Saint-Saens as the opera‘s adept string-puller; his hand here, as in all his voluminous legacy, is more shrewd than inspired. Samson is a role fashioned in tenor heaven, from his first lurching onstage with his mighty battle cry to his heart-rending laments in Philistine captivity. Does it matter that neither of these musical commodities nor most of what Samson gets to sing in between these two big numbers remains in the memory? No; what remains is the sound, if not the shape, of Placido Domingo’s white-hot outbursts: opera at its most elemental. (After this weekend, however, Domingo hands off his lion skin and curls to replacement tenor Gary Lakes, and heads east to serenade the sequins and tiaras on opening night at the Metropolitan Opera.)

Dalila is fashioned out of friendlier stuff. She has the opera‘s one Tune, in the Act 2 lovehate duet, but it’s a long time in coming. Denyce Graves, apparently put on Earth to take over and inflame all of opera‘s bad-girl mezzo-soprano roles (of which there are many), with flashing eyes that could seduce any tenor within miles to abandon home, hearth and hairdo, was sensational, lavishly endowed in voice and in everything else as well. (She even tried a few dance steps during the Bacchanale, a welcome contrast to choreographer Daniel Pelzig’s Muscle Beach stuff.) Gregory Yurisich sang the High Priest‘s music without vocal color or dramatic sense: his third major role with the company, his third fizzle.

Douglas Schmidt’s production from the San Francisco Opera 1981 neatly matched the music‘s garish ponderosity: a heavy impasto of burnished color, as from watching 10 Gustave Moreau paintings at once, and for the final temple scene a jumble of pseudo-Oriental statuary lacking only a popcorn stand. Nicolas Joel’s staging, tidy and unremarkable, at least nicely accomplished the final catastrophe that everyone eagerly awaits; it brought down the house.

Donizetti‘s L’Elisir d‘Amore, three nights later, proved a lot easier to love, in a lively and flexible reading under newcomer John Keenan’s baton. Ramon Vargas was again the smooth, immensely likable Nemorino that he was when Stephen Lawless‘ production first came here in April 1996; Thomas Allen, now a “Sir,” repeated his Dulcamara: loud and somewhat bluff, without much of the endearing vocal biz others have brought to the role. (Anyone else remember Salvatore Baccaloni?) As the philandering Belcore, Rodney Gilfry brought his own neat comic gestures, with voice to match. The final 15 or so minutes — Nemorino’s “Una furtiva lagrima” and Adina‘s answering aria that evoked my own furtive tears — were as beautiful as anything you could want to hear in an opera. The Adina, Ruth Ann Swenson in her first role with the company, sang the music out full, with none of the chirping that lesser singers have imposed on bel canto comedy, her voice radiant, pure and immensely winning. Lawless’ staging, as before, suffered from an excess of fidgets: too many doors opening and closing, too much busywork among furniture movers and grain-bag schleppers. Again, however, what remains in the memory is the staging of that final scene, in a vacant field lit by a full moon and by those two wonderful voices.

A final Bowl echo for the season: My negative note on the intrusive video projections of the concerts onto a screen overhead — simulcast in reverse, you might say — has brought on the accusation of spoilsport, which perish forfend. A second try last week worked somewhat better; there were no roving camerafolk onstage, and the solo shots were better coordinated to actual performances. It was ravishing to watch Dawn Upshaw close-up, her face lit as much by the radiance of her music as by the spotlights. But the big screen still imposes itself on the attention; I would prefer smaller screens to the sides, affording the choice of whether to watch a concert live or canned. I would also hope for even better coordination: picking up on a solo player not a couple of beats into the solo but in the few seconds before it starts, as the link between conductor and performer is forged, and the beauty of the live performance takes shape.

“I still don’t know much about early music, Monteverdi, or even Bach,” said Esa-Pekka Salonen in May 1996, in an interview in these pages. Apparently he‘s a fast learner; his all-Bach program at the Hollywood Bowl last week was a fascinating essay in the variety of approaches to the music, and in the sociology of these approaches as well. No composer’s legacy has undergone so vast an assortment of performance styles, from the mellifluous padding of the Victorian orchestrators to the enchanting scat of the Swingle Singers and the “switched-on” electronic escapades of WendyWalter Carlos in later times. No composer‘s legacy has better demonstrated such sublime and indomitable powers of survival under crushing odds.

As it happened, Salonen’s program included none of the aforementioned ventures in Bachian perversion. We got others instead: two of Leopold Stokowski‘s garish reworkings of famous organ works, and a footloose venture by Gustav Mahler drawn from two of Bach’s orchestral suites with a heavy wash of Mahlerian counterpoint stirred in to subvert the texture into last week‘s kartoffel-kugel. Earlier there had come a couple of brave attempts on Salonen’s part to deliver the First “Brandenburg” and the two-violin concertos in something like pristine proportions. I have to confess that the transcriptions were a lot more fun than the “straight” performances, in which the overriding impact of this glorious music — most of all the tense, hair-raising dissonances in the slow movement of the First “Brandenburg” — were concealed under an overlay of excessive carefulness. But that was no fault of Bach‘s.

Such considerations lead us inevitably to that pervasive and familiar bugaboo, the business of “authentic” performance, of the right sounds produced by the right number of players in the right venue and at the right tempos, dynamic shadings and the like. Common sense would seem to dictate that Bach’s well-worn D-minor Toccata and Fugue, our old pal from Disney‘s Fantasia, fits better into the spaces of Cahuenga Pass in Stokowski’s mammoth orchestral setting than in the paler resonances of an 18th-century organ loft. Yet there have been Bach-size Bach performances at the Bowl that have fit the surroundings far better than Salonen‘s the other night; I can’t easily forget a St. Matthew Passion under Christopher Hogwood in 1985, done with forces of “authentic” size and thrillingly audible — at least until a car alarm broke in exactly at the moment of Jesus‘ crucifixion.

Stokowski was himself an organist, and there’s no reason to doubt his word that his dozens of Bach orchestrations were sincerely motivated by a desire to expand the public for this music — or even his theory that Bach, if alive, would surely be composing for similar orchestral forces. His D-minor Toccata is, indeed, a keen psychoanalysis-through-sound of Bach‘s design, the sheer bravado in the capricious mood shifts in the Toccata and the clear separation of lines of counterpoint in the Fugue achieved by handing them off to contrasting groups of instruments. Salonen’s performance went further than Stokowski‘s own recordings in a broad panorama of tempo changes, but this, too, seemed right for the music. Some of that same flexibility, in fact, would have helped the two concertos earlier in the program.

The Mahler “Suite” was by some distance the greater perversion of Bach’s design: a gathering of movements from the second and third orchestral suites, the scoring considerably thickened with added instruments and an organ, Bach‘s clean counterpoints tangled up with new lines, the ethereal “Air on the G-String” turned into audible molasses. The work dates from 1910. Much of the public notion of Bach at that time was based on the Romantic rescorings of the orchestral works — by, among others, the proper Brit Joseph Barnby, who also enriched the world’s musical treasury with the lullaby “Sweet and Low” — and the Mahler transcription was hardly the greatest sin of the time. Beside the falsities in this work, however, Stokowski‘s version was the soul of purity.

The dealers’ shelves groan under the weight of recorded keyboard Bach, on 9-foot concert grand piano, laptop clavichord, tabletop synthesizer and harpsichords of all sizes. Tucked into Philips‘ mountainous “Great Pianists of the 20th Century” series there is, inevitably, Rosalyn Tureck’s “Goldberg” Variations, recorded in 1957 and thus the earliest (and least insufferable) of her three recorded performances. Tureck has been, by her own proclamation (and that of a few others as well), the high priestess of Bach on piano, and it is just that affectation of priestliness — the mock solemnity right at the start that turns the basic theme from the Sarabande to a funereal threnody, the childlike clatter in some of the faster variations — that I find offensive in her playing and always have. Bach on the piano does not offend me, nor do I require the iconoclasm of a Glenn Gould, however convincing, to make the music work on this “anachronistic” instrument. (Andras Schiff‘s London recordings are all superb, and I suspect — after hearing his recital at UCLA last spring — that Murray Perahia is the world’s next great Bach pianist.)

Annoyed by what I was hearing (and not hearing) in the recently acquired Tureck recording, I sought solace in print, and found it in a passage by Henry David Thoreau. Hang it on your wall:

“The living fact commemorates itself. Why look in the dark for light? Critical acumen is exerted in vain to recover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present and future; and it is the province of the historian to find out not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.”

Sellars, Kevin Higa; Grimaud, J. Henry FairFINALLY, THERE WERE SIGNS OF LIFE AT the Hollywood Bowl — onstage, and in the audience as well. Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to his rightful podium to kick off his three weeks in the Tuesday/Thursday “classical” series that brings the season to a close. His first program was a daredevil affair, made the more so by the visual concept on the big overhead screen concocted by Peter Sellars, who came onstage in his red pajamas before every number to Explain It All in vast sprays of high-flown verbiage just to make sure all 8,000 of us got the point. The music was lively, and so were the performances. The crowd was livelier still; at the end of György Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds, there came a chorus of boos from a gathering of naysayers. That, in turn, energized an answering section of cheering yeasayers. You should have been there; it was like The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913 all over again — and in the proletarian surroundings of the Bowl, where, according to the more cynical among us, nobody listens.

There is a fine art to the elegantly voiced boo, and to the judgment of its appropriate place. Professional critics are assumed to be above the practice, since they can boo to heart’s content on the printed page. In 20 years at the Bowl I have been moved to boo only once — at a Lukas Foss atrocity that subjected some excellent Bach to a garish rewrite — but I didn’t have a writing job of my own at the time. Booing belongs as the proper reaction to presumption, as response to a creative act that oversteps artistic common sense and insults a hearer’s intelligence. If I had been in a booing mood that night last week, I would have responded to Sellars’ inappropriate take on Scriabin’s Prometheus, onto whose color-besotted measures he had spatchcocked his strange choice of visuals: a 1914 black-and-white Edward Curtis documentary of Vancouver Indian rituals. Scriabin himself had specified visuals for this work, projections from a “color organ” he himself designed, with hues wedded to the “spiritual” content of specific notes and harmonies. If this music must be performed at all, a premise I might challenge with a vehemence just short of the full-throated boo, I would far prefer humoring the composer’s own view rather than the willful caprice of the madcap (and often, if not this time, startlingly right-on) Peter Sellars.

The booing at the Bowl came not after the Scriabin but after the Ligeti, which had been offered with no visual meddling at all, music I had been longing to hear again since Salonen’s first performance here in 1993. (It was slated for release as part of Sony’s complete Ligeti series, and even assigned a number — SK 62317. But that project now appears to be scuttled while Sony busies itself with its Leonard Bernstein repackagings.) The music had first taken shape, writes Paul Griffiths in his excellent Ligeti biography, as the score for a projected comic-strip opera about Oedipus. What strange, magical fantasy is here! Flutes and clarinets in groups of five chortle around a women’s chorus with their clouds of made-up syllables; lower instruments act as clockwork. Some sounds are familiar: the buzzing from the other Ligeti works appropriated by Kubrick for 2001. Whether the music belonged in Bowl programming, where mind-stretching experiences are not exactly standard procedure, the joining of music and the balmy evening air of Cahuenga Pass was without seam.

At the end of this dazzling, one-of-a-kind event, there was the Déserts of Edgard Varèse, not quite “the ugliest piece of music ever written” of Sellars’ introduction, as if echoes of Scriabin’s atrocity were not still lingering, but a curio from the late days of one of music’s fearless innovators. Here the visuals — Bill Viola’s desertscapes and mindscapes — surrounded and exalted the music, smoothed the tentative transitions from orchestral to primitive electronic sounds, turned the whole complex into something far more gratifying than the music itself. At the end there were cheers.

TWO NIGHTS LATER IT WAS MANAGEment that perpetrated the boo-boo, the harebrained notion to turn video cameras loose on the music — Salonen conducting the Mahler First Symphony and, with Hélène Grimaud, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto — and project the performance on the big screen still in place from the previous event. It was a ghastly mistake: cameramen roaming the stage, seldom if ever focusing on the right players in solo passages, repeating over and again certain stock shots, and — worst of all — creating a distracting, larger-than-life image on the screen whereby the actual live performance down below became accompaniment to a TV show. Granted, the music at Bowl concerts is amplified and fed into loudspeakers; that still doesn’t justify turning a concert into a studio production.

One irony: The notion of projecting concerts onto a TV screen had been advanced by the now-deposed Willem Wijnbergen early in his time here, and then dropped as impractical. Philharmonic people told me after this week’s concert that there had been “problems” with the cameras’ not being able to reach the right spots, and that the decision to shoot had been made only three days before. A defective commodity, in other words, was knowingly handed off to a live audience, at a $75 top ticket. There are plans under consideration to rethink the process for next summer’s concerts, with screens better placed so as not to distract from the live performance. Wouldn’t free binoculars be an even better solution?

It was also, by lousy luck, one of the worst evenings this summer for airborne interference. On the screen you could see Grimaud looking up as helicopters hovered again and again to disrupt her concentration. The performance that had begun spacious and profound cannot, in all fairness, be reviewed. Salonen’s Mahler managed to outshout the competition at times; it was, I think, a tremendous performance.

Salonen’s Mahler has become a very personal conception. He observes quite literally the music’s frequent changes of pace and invitations to rubato; it takes getting used to, but it creates a fascinating, stretchy melodic line. Driving home after the concert I heard, via KKGO, Salonen’s Mahler Fourth, one of his first Los Angeles recordings. That, too, is remarkable most of all for its flexibility. With no interference aside from a few semis on 101 — mere whisperers after the massed might of LAPD’s helicopter squadrons — it sounded almost like a performance.