So I've Heard

Harth-Bedoya photo by Christian SteinerSERGEI PROKOFIEV’S FIFTH SYMPHONY dates from 1944, but it is the latest large-scale orchestral work to achieve permanence in the standard repertory. Some two dozen recordings are listed in the latest Schwann; at least that many more have come and gone. Until the performance at the Hollywood Bowl a couple of weeks ago, with the visiting Russian National Orchestra under its associate conductor, Andrey Boreyko, I don’t think I’d ever heard the work set forth with its emotional proportions as well balanced, its range of color so handsomely preserved.

It’s a big, tricky work, running 40 minutes more or less. Its two fast movements have the ring of the familiar Prokofiev: the sassy sudden jumps from one key to somewhere in the middle of next week, the glistening orchestration with its insolent brassy blats, and, in the middle of the scherzo, the wailing tune — inane but delicious — that suggests a visit from Boris Godunov‘s Fool. The slow movements — the first and third — play the most tricks; they start off with long, sweeping tunes which then turn bitter. Boreyko’s reading with the Russians underlined the truly mean-tempered, sardonic qualities in the first movement that I had somehow failed to notice in perhaps half-a-hundred previous hearings. And he delivered the third movement, which others have made sentimental and trivial, in a dry-eyed manner that restored this splendid music to its rightful place as the emotional crown of the entire work.

As the hordes of Russian orchestras come a-calling to garner a few dollars, it becomes harder to tell them apart. Despite its name, the Russian National is privately, not governmentally, supported; it was founded in 1990 by the much-admired pianist and conductor Mikhail Pletnev. He, however, suffered a foot injury while hiking just before his Bowl engagement, and therefore turned over the Bowl concerts to his two assistants. I missed the first, Dmitri Liss; Boreyko’s program had the more substantial music. Even from what I could tell from the Bowl’s sound system — which has been unusually iffy all summer — this is a remarkably sleek ensemble, deep and resonant in the way we always think of as “Russian.” They employ the classic seating, with first and second violins downstage; even through microphones, it makes the difference of a brighter string tone. The difference was even more audible in Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and Third Piano Concerto, although the latter was marred by the solo performance — most kindly described as doddering — by Vitaly Margulis, who is actually a local resident and on the UCLA piano faculty but who has never, for reasons not beyond deciphering, previously performed at the Bowl. (Has Russia suddenly run out of pianists?) Better yet, conductor and players went through an elaborate tune-up procedure before the concert, section by section — standard operating procedure with this orchestra, I am told. That, too, made a highly audible difference.

BACK IN PLACE AFTER A WEEK OFF, THE Philharmonic also placed itself in the hands of its assistant conductors last week, and I placed my ears in the hands of Andrew Robinson for an evening of Italian stuff with singers, and Miguel Harth-Bedoya for Latin diversions far more diverting. Harth-Bedoya, by the way, has just been upgraded to associate conductor and, from last week’s evidence, deserves the promotion.

The peculiar appeal of Alessandra Marc continues to elude me. Among a certain clique of opera fanatics she is the reigning Sacred Monster, and the grotesqueness of her appearance onstage (think docking supertanker) adds to her brownie points in that regard. But in achieving her current — er — stature, she has wasted, it seems to me, a precious resource. The incompatibility of stunning vocal equipment and utter carelessness in its use — notes bumped, breath out of control, passage work blurred and edgy — has to rank as a major tragedy. That evening at the Bowl, she sailed with mighty sound-blasts through the notes of Cilea, Puccini and Verdi, but never the music. In a Tosca duet, the excellent Mexican tenor Fernando de la Mora seemed anxious (and well-qualified) to help her shape her volcano of sound into something identifiable as melody, but to little avail. Nor did Andrew Robinson’s conducting — oddly enough, both flaccid and unyielding — help much, in the vocal selections or, on his own, in the lurid poster art of Respighi’s The Pines of Rome. He also needs some training in podium manners; no matter how rotten your soloist may be, you have to hug, shake hands or otherwise acknowledge her presence after the performance.

The program at Friday’s “Latin Spectac-ular” was lighter in weight, but not by much. Astor Piazzolla’s Bandonéon Concerto is a subtle, complex work full of deep undercurrents, wonderfully laid out for the plangent, throbbing solo instrument and nicely set against the small orchestra. Argentina’s Horacio Romo delivered the captivating, insinuating music with his own brand of mastery.

Fernando de la Mora was back for a varied collection of Latino ballads, not all of them the castañas of the repertory. I like his voice, clear and ringing; more than one other singer in the land could profitably study his clean, unforced delivery, and the lack of the affectations — the sobs, the gargles — that some find necessary to put over simple, ingratiating melodic material. Young (31) Harth-Bedoya, Peruvian-born and also recently appointed conductor of the Eugene Symphony, led the proceedings with zip and, one might assume, pride; he also chatted up the audience between numbers, just possibly to excess. Oh, how I wish that musical hosts given to verbal program notes could retire the “journey” metaphor for a year, or two. Or 10.

IN THE ASTOUNDING LEGACY OF HANDEL operas that now, at long last, assumes its rightful place on world stages, Rodelinda stands apart. It deals not with gods, magicians and philandering Roman generals but with humans subject to human-size emotions. Its characters fall in and out of love, even as you and I, and they sing to one another in love music more poignant, more unbearably beautiful, than you or I could ever fashion. Some of their behavior seems irrational at times: Why would the deposed King Bertarido leave his wife and child in the hands of his enemies while roaming around incognito plotting his return to power? But behavior irrational by 1999 standards may not have been so in its own time; try to straighten out the scenario of, say, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and you’ll see what I mean.

Rodelinda dates from 1725, the glory days of Handel’s reign over London opera; the soprano Cuzzoni and the castrato Senesino sang the principal roles — the Callas and Pavarotti of their time. A performance at Smith College in 1931 is generally credited with awakening American awareness of Handel’s operas in anything close to authentic versions; the production that capped the Music Academy of the West’s summer festival two weekends ago seems to have had the same effect on Santa Barbarians. In the small and comfortable Lobero Theater, surprise and delight were everywhere apparent.

Founded in 1947 by legendary soprano Lotte Lehmann, Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West has since then produced a summer workshop and festival, ever growing and ever more cherishable. And while Lehmann herself is said to have had little use for operas composed before the time of her beloved Mozart, her place has now been taken by Marilyn Horne, that walking volcano on whose broad shoulders Handel’s operas have ridden to their present high estate.

For Santa Barbara’s first-ever Handelian excursion, director Christopher Mattaliano created a setting elegant but simple, marked especially by an easy managing of exits and entrances to offset the episodic nature of most baroque opera. His villains smoked cigarettes; heroes and villains brandished up-to-date handguns. James Scott’s all-purpose costumes — military getup and plain gowns — bespoke no particular time or place. And despite Randall Behr’s expectedly poky pacing in the pit, his expert small orchestral ensemble, backed by a properly placed harpsichord, gave out a fair approximation of the sounds of a Handelian orchestra.

Casts for Santa Barbara’s one-per-summer operas are drawn from young professionals, assembled to absorb wisdom from the Academy’s voice-program director Horne and her illustrious faculty. Nevertheless, this summer’s group included an authentic star, and a sensational one. Attention focused on Bejun Mehta — cast in two of the three performances as long-lost husband Bertarido — who as recently as 1997, at 30 and with a happy career as a boy soprano far behind him, decided to transform himself into a countertenor and has done so with spectacular success.

Related to conductor Zubin only through distant cousins, Mehta pealed forth his tonsil-twisting melodic lines with an ease and honeyed smoothness over an enormous range that belied the brevity of his career so far. Baroque opera’s musical insinuations can easily be taken as an invitation to clutch-‘n’-lurch, yet Mehta onstage created a character as overpowering visually as vocally. In a cast with no one less than highly skilled, with Karen Wierzba’s Rodelinda handily outlasting a couple of inevitable one-note disasters in a killer role, Mehta’s work came across as pure show-stealing. He may next hone his arts of grand thievery on September 26, in the New York City Opera’s first-ever production of Handel’s Ariodante. The world suffers famine in the realms of adequate romantic tenors and Wagnerian sopranos; in the countertenor department — with Mehta alongside Americans Brian Asawa and David Daniels — the ranks are brimming and golden.

A VISION CAME TO ME LAST SATURDAY night at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater during the mostly superb performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. I saw a splendid small theater for Mozart operas and other works of similar proportion, here in Los Angeles, with no more than 800 seats, a proper orchestra pit and simple, adequate stage machinery — something like Glyndebourne, or even like Santa Barbara’s clunky old Lobero (which seats 680). The cast at the Ford, nicely backed by Lucinda Carver and her L.A. Mozart Orchestra, was almost all local freelance singers, not all of them young but most of them terrific. For this one-time-only performance, they had merged into a smooth and elegant ensemble, backed by the small chorus that goes by the interesting name of Zephyr: Voices Unbound. My vision included holding on to these fine people as the nucleus for an adventurous repertory company, the kind of project that is clearly not in the cards for the heavy spenders at the Music Center.

The performance space at the Ford has been tested in past years and proved unworkable for stage productions; the Flute was given in concert form, with the singers in black tie apparently encouraged to gesticulate and make faces. The fireworks from the nearby Hollywood Bowl went off exactly during the “trial by fire and water” scene. The singing was in German, the spoken dialogue (nicely pared down) was in English, an intelligent touch. More puzzling were the other cuts: a duet, a trio and the Priests’ March from Act 2. The singers were heavily miked, almost but not quite drowning out the mellow wind playing in Carver’s small orchestra. In my ideal, as-yet-unbuilt opera theater, the marvelously resonant Sarastro of Ron Li-Paz and the almost-right-on high F’s of Rebecca Sherburn’s Queen of the Night would need no help from the sound guys; the venerable but still valuable Jonathan Mack could tend to the last threads of his once-mellow tenor without going all red in the face. Lucinda Carver would be on the podium; this was, by some distance, the best work I have heard from her.

THANKS TO MR. TURNER’S GOOD OFFICES, Deception dropped into my satellite dish a few weeks ago, reminding me once again of the current glum treatment visited by moviemakers upon the noble art I so valiantly struggle to serve. You can have your Australian nut cases driven mad by the Rach 3; you can have your romantic egomaniacs performing simultaneously on nubile wenches and a discolored violin. Just leave me Bette Davis, taking deadly aim at the World’s Greatest Composer on the staircase of his jillion-dollar Manhattan apartment while, a few blocks away, the true love of her life fills worldwide ears with that composer’s new cello concerto — which he had contrived only to blackmail her into fessing up to the cellist that she and the composer . . . oh, never mind.

Delicious nonsense, this; without half trying — and without the almighty carry-on (I steal Pauline Kael’s immortal phrase) of such latter-day fabrications as Amadeus, Shine and, lately, The Red Violin — director Irving Rapper’s 1946 class-act soap opera digs deep into the unreality that besets classical music and makes life worth living for its innumerable slaves. I love the opening sequence: Cellist Paul Henreid, managing his bow as if trying to swat flies, saws his way through the finale of Haydn’s D-major Concerto, then meets his admirers backstage. The local critic (from The Daily Bugle, yet!), complete with horn-rims and pipe, filled to flood stage with his own knowledge, blasts through the crowd to make his presence known. “From now on, Mr. Novak,” he declares, in tones normally reserved for the Sermon on the Mount, “you’re my cellist.” Can’t you just hear me (or Mark Swed, for that matter) backstage at the Music Center? “From now on, Esa-Pekka, you’re my conductor.”

Claude Rains plays the composer in question: Alexander Hollenius, “who combines the melody of the past with the rhythm of today” and whose fees have vouchsafed him an abode for which a Rockefeller mansion might serve as guest cottage — plus another venue nearly as grand, where paramour Bette can practice on a piano as large as some counties (and explain to suspicious true love Paul that she bought it with Green Stamps or some such). With Erich Korngold guiding the pen, he turns out three or so minutes of a competent enough cello concerto, full of the swoops and sweeps that apparently passed as Hollywood’s notion of new music in 1946 — and, alas, still does. (Korngold’s concerto was completed and recorded, if you care: no worse a hackwork than the “Spellbound” or “Warsaw” concertos of similar provenance.)

Old movies about music and musicians come clothed in a pretension unashamed and joyous. Claude Rains’ Hollenius is an ogre beyond conceivable proportion. So is the Beethoven of Abel Gance’s colossal 1936 prevarication, beside whom the twit of Immortal Beloved is a zoo animal not worth feeding. The acclaim compiled by the dreadful Amadeus seems to have become license to pass off the old-fashioned lies about music as immortal truths. The Red Violin‘s acrobatic fornications are no more fun (and no less) than the threesomes in Farinelli. The lie-telling in both films strikes me as insulting both to music and to an intelligent moviegoer — or is that, these days, a contradiction in terms?

There is a musical quotient in Violin that is being passed off by the PR folk as worth serious attention: Joshua Bell’s solos over Esa-Pekka’s leadership of a John Corigliano score. Did I miss something? I hear a Main Theme ripped off from the old standard “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” laid onto a bland orchestral throbbing, with the solos nicely intoned — but so what? In E. Annie Proulx’s wonderful new novel, Accordion Crimes, a green accordion gets handed across generations and around the world, in a story shapely and elegantly told; The Red Violin traces a similar journey with nothing mistakable for shape or elegance. Besides, a local instrument maker tells me that the violin’s “secret” reddening ingredient would have turned black within days.

BETTER PLAYING OF THE VIOLIN — STUpendous, in fact — took place at the Hollywood Bowl last week: Vadim Repin’s account of the first of Shostakovich’s two violin concertos, with the Philharmonic handily managed by Eri Klas. Composed in 1948 for David Oistrakh, and kept under wraps until 1955 with Stalin safely out of earshot, this is powerful, intense music from a composer whose stature looms ever taller. The humor bites viciously; quiet passages disturb rather than calm. The work is, by some distance, the most farseeing music yet heard at the Bowl this summer; only the Salonen concert upcoming on August 24 offers any significant challenge. Repin, who has delivered dazzling performances here of repertory concertos (Brahms and Tchaikovsky) — and a fair number of discs, mostly on Erato, including some remarkably convincing excursions into the junk repertory — soared even higher to the challenging crags of this extraordinary work.

Conductors are expected to possess particular insights into the music of their native lands, but that is often easily disproved. Adam Fischer’s Kodály at the Bowl’s opening classical concert disproved the thesis quite adequately. So did Klas’ dreary slog through the Second Symphony by his almost-countryman Sibelius — Estonia being a mere stone’s throw across the water from Finland. I have to admit: I’ve never understood the peculiar power this horrendously overstuffed music has on minds both young and old. I hear it as disconnected wisps of drab melodic shapes pushing through a dense, ponderously gray orchestral buzz-buzz; of lurching to sudden stops as the inspiration simply sputters (a device possibly cribbed from Bruckner); of an oratorical tune in the finale that wears thin on repetitions. Even so, I have been reached by the brute force of some performances; I did, after all, grow up in Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston. The performance under Klas was, I am told, more respectful of the composer’s markings, an element that Koussie was famous for ignoring. As with all those movies, respect for truth doesn’t always make for the best entertainment.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN HAS FARED poorly on local hillsides this summer. At the Hollywood Bowl, in the Cahuenga Pass, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was her usual bratty self, turning the Violin Concerto into personal showoff. At the Getty Center, high above Sepulveda Pass, sour notes masquerading as authentic performance practice turned a couple of well-known orchestral masterpieces into something close to torture.

Mendelssohn takes a bad rap now and then. His music ambles along elegant pathways; its utter lack of rough edges is seen by some as a fatal flaw, an affliction also shared by music of far lesser stature. (Patience; we’ll get to Saint-Saëns in a minute.) Pomposities abound; the peroration tacked onto the “Scottish” Symphony is one of music’s most endearing absurdities. (In his assemblage of Mendelssohniana as the soundtrack for the great old Max Reinhardt movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — the one with Mickey Rooney as Puck — Erich Korngold turned that passage into a big choral number.) But the Violin Concerto, like its close companion Schumann’s Piano Concerto, is a perfect work. Its soloist speaks in long, lithe, appealing lines of melody far beyond any need for words. At one moment the violin, virtually on its knees, begs for our credence and love; at another, it summons our giggling delight at its airy tracery high atop the orchestra’s pretty tune spinning. It is exactly the right length for what it has to say, and it says exactly the right thing at the right time. It goes straight to an audience’s heart and elicits everybody’s finest impulses — so much so that all 6,930 people at this concert knew not to applaud at the magical link between the first and second movements. Above all, it doesn’t need the look-ma-I’m-sexy kind of swoops and slowdowns accorded it at the Bowl by Salerno-Sonnenberg, a violinist of undeniable technical accomplishment and a deplorable set of musical instincts. The Philharmonic, under the excellent Jahja Ling, supported her nobly; Ling — a product of the Bowl’s Summer Institute of fond memory — achieved a fine balance despite the ongoing amplification problems that have plagued this summer’s concerts.

At the Getty, this summer’s series ties in with several of the current exhibits. Robert Winter, musicology’s Lord High Everything Else, is in charge, so you can expect lots of programming imagination and lots, lots, lots of prefatory words. The last program I attended honored the show of old photographs from Scotland, so that Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture and the “Scottish” Symphony became audible post cards — if rather tattered. Greg Maldonado’s Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, augmented with a large contingent of outsiders to manage the long-beyond-Baroque scoring, handled the unfamiliar repertory bravely but not wisely; conductor and orchestra were in far over their collective heads, with little benefit either to Mendelssohn’s rhapsodic scoring or to the music’s deep, dark beauties. Despite the composer’s prescription that the four movements be played without break, there were continuity-disturbing pauses for tuning up and chats from the podium throughout — that from an orchestra ostensibly devoted to “authenticity.”

Before all this, a clutch of Haydn and Beethoven settings of Scots poetry, potboilers created for an Edinburgh publisher, got tryout performances by soprano Kris Gould and tenor Daniel Plaster in what sounded like sight-readings. (Betcha didn’t know that the words and tune of “Auld Lang Syne” turn up, almost intact, in one of Beethoven’s songs.) I had hoped that the Getty folk might have learned from the acoustical disasters in last year’s series, but no; on the same stage improvised on the chilled and windswept courtyard, backed by a nonresonant stone wall, the sounds came over diffuse and lifeless. Happier memories of summer events at the old Getty remain undispelled.

For hours after Jean-Philippe Collard had left Camille Saint-Saëns’ Fifth Piano Concerto a pile of shards on the Hollywood Bowl stage, I racked my brain trying — without success, as it happened — to think of a worse piece of music by a composer of renown. There are, I admit, many kinds of bad music, and some of it can be fun. (I own up to a passion for late-Romantic showpiece concertos, with the E-major of Moszkowski heading the list.) But this “Egyptian” Concerto, so-called because a gooey tune midway through the slow movement was tagged by the composer as of Nubian origin, brings up a shaky rear. Not an idea lingers in the memory — not even the opening, which comes across as a gross travesty of the sturdy tune that ended the previous concerto. The craftsmanship is clumsy, the overall shape grotesque. Writers about Saint-Saëns in his own time — Romain Rolland, for one, whose Jean-Christophe your grandmother surely read — exulted over his “happy grace . . . an elegance that cannot be put into words . . . [sharing with Mendelssohn] a common purity of taste.” Baloney!

There is bad music that I like (the aforementioned Moszkowski) and good music that I don’t; life is funny that way. My life, in fact, is a constant round of trying to make peace with the enemy, and sometimes I succeed. I did a couple of nights later, in fact, when the excellent Emmanuel Krivine (who had also participated in the Saint-Saëns two nights before, but never mind) drew from the Philharmonic a strong, immensely emphatic performance of the Brahms Second Symphony, conveying from its first deep, ruddy growlings the message that this, for once, might be a Brahms worth staying awake for — as, indeed, it was.

Both Ling and Krivine, in fact, have delivered admirable accounts of themselves at the Bowl this summer, lending further evidence to the notion that all this weeping over conductor shortages may be premature. Under Ling the orchestra had delivered a nicely paced, warm-hearted reading of the Dvorák Eighth, a work which — unlike the fabulous Seventh — needs a firm hand in patching a few holes and retying a couple of frayed knots. This hand the young Ling handsomely provided. Krivine, who had also led the Philharmonic indoors last April, shaped a beautiful reading of the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique: not only impressively loud in the proper loud spots, but also wonderfully airborne in the pastoral episode. Neither conductor’s stage manner was what you’d call a fireball in full blaze. Both struck me as strong, deeply satisfying musicians who could be with us for the long haul — if the long haul, indeed, is music’s destiny.

YOU WILL FIND MORE USEFUL TRUTHS about music in the dozen or so comic operas of the Sirs W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan than in all 20 volumes of Grove’s Dictionary. The irresistible beauty of their tunes and counterpoints compound the miracle; their deadly accuracy in holding up for ridicule the absurdities that underlie some of music’s most sacred principles serves the art as stern and unforgiving conscience. Their wisdom is both utilitarian and eternal.

What, then, accounts for the current scarce representation of these cherishable artworks in our landscape? Fear of being confronted too overtly with evidence of our own foibles? A growing disregard for the wondrous power of language, brought on by excessive reliance on computers with built-in grammar-correcting programs? The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, immutable guardians of the Savoyard flame in the creators’ own time and for decades thereafter, recedes into memory. We suffer from Gilbert-and-Sullivan deprivation on live stages; most surviving companies play for cutes rather than content. Fortunately, some solace resides in the treasures still at hand on disc, and a few bright patches on the video shelves as well — including a 1939 movie The Mikado with Kenny Baker (onetime tenor on the Jack Benny radio show) as Nanki-Poo but also with the D’Oyly Carte standard-bearers Martyn Green and Sydney Granville in other top roles.

The latest arrival is from Telarc: five of the operas conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, with the splendid chorus and orchestra of the Welsh National Opera and a mostly superb cast, recorded between 1992 and ’95, formerly available separately and now gathered in a five-disc midprice box. The discs will not tempt ardent Savoyards to discard their older recordings of these works, but they are worthy, fine-sounding companions. The early electrical recordings by the D’Oyly Cartes, first issued on RCA Victor 78s, later reprocessed on Arabesque CDs, preserved a few vintage voices from Sullivan’s own ensemble — among them, Sir Henry Lytton’s memorable rasp, beyond question the single most hilarious sound ever recorded. The London LP series from the 1950s offered a later D’Oyly Carte company with voices younger but with the company’s earmark style — its impeccable clarity of diction and elegance of ensemble — already in decline. (Some sets also included the spoken dialogue, delivered in a lifted-pinky style that distracted rather than enhanced.) Only one or two performances from Sir Malcolm Sargent’s series on Angel-EMI, with wonderful singers including Richard Lewis and Geraint Evans — recorded with Glyndebourne Opera personnel after the D’Oyly Carte franchise had expired — are currently available, if I can believe the latest Schwann. Any society that denies itself the lyric splendor of Lewis’ “Is Life a Boon?” endangers its right to be considered civilized.

The Telarc series boasts a few known singers. The veteran Donald Adams is a properly bellowing Mikado and Pirate King; Thomas Allen is the Pinafore‘s captain, and also takes on one of Lytton’s great roles, Dick Deadeye in H.M.S. Pinafore. Alwyn Mellor is an endearing Elsie in The Yeomen of the Guard; Richard Suart, her Jack Point, doesn’t quite erase memories of Geraint Evans in that role, but nobody could. There are cuts, mostly unimportant; the overtures to The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado are only someone else’s cobbled-together pastiches, and omitting them gets the works onto single discs. Less admirable: One verse of Ko-Ko’s “little list” is missing, presumably to solve Gilbert’s “nigger serenader” problem by tossing out both baby and bath water.

The major advantage in these new recordings is Mackerras, who supplies the ensemble sense that ennobles his Mozart, and the remarkable feeling for orchestral balance that makes his Janácek so vivid. His strong organizing force obviously underlines a high regard for these splendiferous works — as wise, probing comic creations, as documents of a bygone way of life worth remembering, and, above all, as superlative creations by an awesomely talented words-and-music team that succeeded, as only one other comparable pairing ever has, in bringing out each other’s high genius. I can only hope that the remaining works in the GS canon — above all, The Gondoliers, Iolanthe and Patience — are on the Mackerras agenda.

WE ARE BETTER SUPPLIED WITH THE artifacts from the genius of that other words-and-music team, but discoveries still await. Così Fan Tutte was the last of Mozart’s miraculous collaborations with Lorenzo da Ponte. Its dubious moral tone, even though reportedly based on an actual incident, bothered audiences for decades; its cynical views toward womanly virtue raise hackles even now. Its first Metropolitan Opera performance wasn’t until 1952, 162 years late.

That performance was recorded and has just been reissued on a two-disc Sony set. Fritz Stiedry conducts, stiff and prissy, deleting about 40 minutes of music. Against Eleanor Steber’s knowing and intense Fiordiligi there is Blanche Thebom’s pale Dorabella and Roberta Peters’ chirpy Despina. Worst of all, there is Richard Tucker’s Ferrando, an absurd attempt to throttle down his full-blown Italianisms to Mozartian proportions. The singing is in English, or tries to be; Ruth and Thomas Martin’s cutesy text is a clear holdover from the way people used to regard Mozart.

Measure that dim effort against the latest recorded Così, a hot-blooded performance led by René Jacobs on Harmonia Mundi — uncut and in the proper Italian, I needn’t add — which amounts to a whole new rethinking of this one-of-a-kind, subtle score. On first hearing I found it startling, the slashing accents, the passions brought to the surface in Jacobs’ flexible tempos, the service of the small orchestra — Concerto Köln — as a fluent, deeply engaged commentator on the action. Surely these are the passions both Mozart and da Ponte imagined in the work, and when Véronique Gens, the Fiordiligi, and Werner Güra, the Ferrando, start their amazing Act 2 duet (“Fra gli amplessi”) at arm’s length and gradually, desperately fall in love, only the hardest of heart could fail to succumb along with them.

The three-disc set also comes with an extra CD-ROM that enables you (on Mac or PC) to plunge into the score and the lives of its creators, examine the opera historically, analytically and anecdotally, and get some of Jacobs’ own answers to his distinctive approach to Mozart. In a truly enlightened society, every recording above the “Bach for Babies” level would come with this kind of documentation, to the world’s incomparable betterment.

CLASSICAL SNOBS, WHOSE COMPANY I seldom cherish, tend to look down upon the Friday/Saturday concerts at the Hollywood Bowl as some form of lowlife entertainment to be swept under the nearest rug. What can you expect, they sneer,
from a pickup orchestra whose personnel changes from week to week, with soloists booked from the ranks of show biz rather than high-culture management, with programs made up of tidbits rather than nicely padded hourlong symphonies?

Maybe so, but maybe no. Sure, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, an assemblage of studio freelancers with shifts of personnel from week to week — and even shifts of names, whereby string players Patricia and Timothy on the July 9 list turn up as Pat and Tim a week later — cannot be defined
on the same basis as the set-in-stone Los Angeles Philharmonic. Sure, the HBO seldom if ever gets a hearing without intervening microphones and outdoor sound systems of varying and dubious quality.
(A rare “indoor” hearing, presumably unmiked, is slated for the Music Center next October.) Such a situation in, say, Cleveland would certainly spell disaster. It doesn’t in Los Angeles, thanks to its large roster of studio musicians extraordinarily adept at
landing on both feet in any kind of musical terrain. It was a pickup ensemble that (as the Columbia Symphony) once recorded Beethoven and Mahler under Bruno Walter; it’s a pickup ensemble that marches, in time and in tune, to John Mauceri’s probing baton weekend after weekend at the Bowl.

I write these benevolent words in a glow after last Friday’s concert. It had ended with a knockout performance — as
near as I could tell, filtered through bombs bursting in midair — of Ravel’s Boléro. Ravel had perceived the work, Mauceri told the crowd in his well-honed, charm-drenched manner, as a musical distillation of a factory in full operation. Sure enough, when the music’s obsessive design swung into its final chaos (the collective brass blaring out their blooie-blooie in several tonalities at once), the fireworks of Gene Evans’ PyroSpectaculars took on the glisten of those gasworks down near Carson with their gusts of insidious orange flame and the blankets of white-hot stars sent sky-high. I am always suckered by the Bowl’s fireworks, but I can’t remember a time when sight and sound so convincingly merged. My sympathies that moment went out to the aforementioned absent snobs, who will never know what they missed.

That was reason enough to preserve fond memories of last Friday’s concert, but there was more. There was the orchestra’s lustrous, soft performance of Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess, small music and not quite a masterpiece, but an aura that seemed to float free in the caressing breezes of Cahuenga Pass. Some of Mauceri’s admirable reconstruction work on film music turned up, the seductive waltz from Miklós Rózsa’s score for Madame Bovary. There was another cherishable presence, the venerable mime Marcel Marceau, on hand
because the program boasted a “Vive la France!” theme as a two-days-late celebration of Bastille Day. Never before at the Bowl, and never before performing with a full symphony orchestra, this greatest of all great impersonators — as wise and as limber as we all should hope to be at 76 — brought along his familiar, wondrous one-man troupe: the cowardly lion tamer, the human octopus, the man of many ages. Video cameras caught the small image center-stage and sent it to the big screen overhead. You could forget the vast reaches of the Bowl, with its 18,000 seats (more than half of them filled); the art of Marcel Marceau made it all seem small and enchanted.

THE DOUBLE TALK CONTINUES; THE questions remain unanswered. Neither the interviews in Saturday’s Times nor an hour of Which Way L.A. on KCRW did more than express the faith that the Tooth Fairy would somehow pull the Philharmonic out of its management crisis. Only Mark Swed, on the broadcast, expressed any awareness that a serious situation existed, and might turn deadly.

The other crisis, which besets the orchestral scene worldwide, is even further from resolution: Where and how do we find, or invent, the talent to take over the growing number of vacant podiums here and abroad? Most of what I read doesn’t even address the problem correctly; it’s not a matter of “Where can Boston find another Seiji Ozawa?” but “Where can Boston (and New York, and Philadelphia, and Houston, and wherever) find leadership of talent, integrity, imagination and, if the gods so ordain, personal magnetism, to bring about the needed redefinition of orchestras that can stanch the leakage of ticket buyers and still maintain a proper balance of past, present and future?”

There are no more Ozawas; he — along with his unsteady clone Zubin Mehta — was already a throwback to an obsolete breed that preserved podium pizzazz and to hell with musical honesty. The few firebrand types that survive — Simon Rattle, Valery Gergiev, Yuri Temirkhanov and, yes, Esa-Pekka Salonen — look great on podiums but don’t need to hide the fact that they are also musically wise. The other extreme, the musically solid citizen (New York’s Kurt Masur, Philadelphia’s Wolfgang Sawallisch), bred in the German classics and shakier on the fields of adventure, is also on the
way out; the new Germanics (Christian Thielmann, Ivan Fischer, St. Louis’ Hans Vonk, perhaps Cleveland’s Franz Welser-Möst someday) seem a livelier bunch.

I don’t think we’re running out of conductors. Donald Runnicles’ Ring in San Francisco had me plotting ways to kidnap him for a stint down here. Among visitors here in the past couple of years I’ve been impressed by Fischer (at the Bowl last season, with his own orchestra), and at the Philharmonic by Vonk and Gergiev, by the extraordinary tiny Japanese demon Junichi Hirokami, and by yet another splendid Finn, Sakari Oramo. Among local heroes I number Pasadena’s Jorge Mester, and wonder why so inventive and widely capable a figure doesn’t have a full-time orchestra somewhere. In a relatively short time, Jeffrey Kahane (on the podium, at
the piano or both) has greatly enhanced the excitement around the L.A. Chamber Orchestra’s activities. I also admire Kahane’s continued loyalty to his excellent minor-league orchestra in Santa Rosa (as I admire Kent Nagano’s loyalty to his Berkeley Symphony despite the rising of his star all over Europe).

Meanwhile, back at the Music Center . . . It’s ironic, sort of — lots of solid, respectable performing talent around, but nobody to run things, sign the checks, keep the stage swept, the stuff of management’s job. Labor negotiations loom on the near horizon; we also scan that horizon for signs of concrete being poured atop Mrs. Disney’s parking garage. Esa-Pekka’s contract runs into the next millennium; what there’ll be for him to conduct, and where — an orchestra, a program, a stage — adds up to one helluva big question. The public — ticket-buying, taxpaying,
music-loving, tone-row-deploring, some or all of the above — deserves a better answer than the present cloud of double talk. The time is up for the Tooth Fairy.

Photo by Greg GormanOPENING NIGHT OF THE CLASSICAL-music series at the Hollywood Bowl —
not to be confused with the “Beatles Music Spectacular Opening Night Gala” of two weeks before, or the “Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular” that filled three nights in between — offered the members of the press the customary pre-concert spread; it may have been harder to digest than usual, but that had nothing to do with the food. The air of mystery — generated by the unanswered questions around the Philharmonic’s current management crisis brought on by the departure of managing director Willem Wijnbergen under still-
undefined circumstances — was lit up by
flashes of rumor: reports, for example, of Willem sightings around town. Barry Sanders, president of the board and every inch the archetypal slick, unflappable CEO, went from table to table with The Speech. All that really matters about the Philharmonic, he proclaimed in so many words, is the music, which, as we would soon hear, is in great shape.

If that’s the case, our orchestra is in deeper doo-doo than we’ve guessed, because the concert — as much of it as I cared to endure — was truly awful. The conductor was Hungary’s Adam Fischer — younger brother of Ivan, who had triumphed at the Bowl last summer. Adam had had a stint with the Philharmonic indoors in January 1998 in a program that included his countryman Zoltán Kodály’s Háry János Suite that I remember as at least okay. No such luck with the same work this time around, however; the sound was flaccid and colorless, the microphone balances so distorted that the incidental cimbalom obbligatos drowned out everything else, the audience reaction (from a not-bad attendance of just under 10,000) so tepid that it didn’t even allow time for Teresa Diamond, the cimbalist or whatever it’s called, to take a solo bow. (One audience member familiar from recent years, however, summoned up the proper reaction: our old friend the Cahuenga Pass Skunk, a most noticeable presence. Critics nowadays come in all sizes, shapes and
flavors.) The much-touted Sarah Chang noodled her way through the dusty measures of the Bruch Violin Concerto as though the music meant nothing to her (an understandable reaction). At intermission the prospect of an Also Sprach Zarathustra from these performing forces evoked instincts of self-preservation. I got to my car just as KKGO had started a tape from abroad: Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida, Bernard Haitink and the Vienna Philharmonic. By the time I reached home, my faith in music had been restored.

Matters improved two nights later, as Fischer and the local forces found considerably more happiness in an all-Mozart program: the two G-minor symphonies — one early, one late, both masterworks beyond fathoming — and the divinely beautiful G-major Violin Concerto (this time with a soloist, Julian Rachlin, to whom the music seemed to mean quite a lot), and again with a not-bad crowd (of 7,200). For reasons I don’t completely understand, Mozart always sounds better at the Bowl than any of the more often played big-band stuff. The miking was still not right, however; the horns tended to out-shout the rest of the orchestra — which, however, in these particular symphonies with their stark, intense drama, wasn’t all bad. The strings, and most of all the give and take between strings and winds in the slow movements of both works, blended exquisitely into the unusually heavy night air. Alas, there isn’t much Mozart on the
agenda for the rest of the Bowl season, only one very short symphony.

THE TIMES RAN A LETTER, SAD AND DIScouraging, on last week’s Counterpunch page, wherein a chap from Long Beach deplored the tendency of the Philharmonic to enrage its subscribers by serenading them with music they’ve never heard before and — according to the writer, one Brent L. Trafton — shouldn’t have to hear now either. He is up in arms at having to shell out $55 to endure such “atonal experiments” (his words) as Debussy’s The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Apparently he has been doing some market research, since he states that this kind of programming has “been building resentment with subscribers.” He finds Esa-Pekka Salonen a “lousy conductor” of, among others, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, obviously having been otherwise engaged this past season during the wondrous weeks of the Mozart C-minor Mass and the “Pathétique.” His advice to the Philharmonic board is to “put aside the selfish ‘interests and needs’ of its music director” and install a more comforting old-timey program. What is most depressing in the letter is that Mr. Trafton identifies himself, at 38, as one of the orchestra’s youngest subscribers. Oh dear, and I thought all Esa-Pekka had to do was to wait out the demise of all the old fogies on the subscriber list and get down to full-time atonal experimentation.

You could (and should) laugh off letters, except that this one, coming during a time of rumor and uncertainty, could stir up a lot of nut-case support for the wrong reasons. Classical-music organizations survive, if they do at all, despite a proverbially complex tangle of relationships at the top echelons brought on by the nature of the commodity and the high tensions of its practitioners. Even so, it’s not easy to surmise the reasons behind so drastic a move as Wijnbergen’s departure. His marketing innovations have been expensive, including some very fancy brochures for the Bowl and the 1999-2000 Philharmonic season and his many personnel changes, yet only weeks ago the board voted its confidence in all the new spending. If not money, then, what? The most credible guesswork
has some kind of head-on between the visionary Salonen and the market-minded Wijnbergen.

Salonen’s visions have to do with updating the balance between the wallowing in the tried and true so cherished by Mr. Trafton and an honorable and friendly attempt to broaden an audience’s horizons. He has ventured interestingly into new territory, not only with “atonal experiments” but also with admirable gestures toward film music and the Latino repertory. His enterprise has already elevated the Los Angeles Philharmonic to a place of envy among American orchestras. Yes, ticket sales are somewhat down, as they are worldwide. At a San Francisco Symphony concert last month, I heard an inferior orchestra led by a conductor with a shallow musical grasp; despite this,
however, Michael Tilson Thomas’ slick, in-your-face manner apparently sells tickets. I’d hate to think that this kind of music making, however sexy, is the only salvation for a symphony orchestra. Salvation here in Los Angeles will surely be helped along once Disney Hall is built, even if the results come only halfway up to the prognostications. Then we can start to do battle with the letter writers.

THE TIMING WAS PERFECT: “EPISODE I” of the Bay Area’s own George Lucas’ Star Wars packing the movie palaces worldwide; Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung as the San Francisco Opera’s hot-ticket item for most of last month at the War Memorial Opera House. Can such occurrences be mere coincidence?

The overlap of plot gadgetry should surprise nobody. It’s not that Lucas has shamelessly cribbed from Wagner’s own shamelessly cribbed rip-off of a tangle of mythic archetypes. What Wagner accomplished within the vast reaches of his stupendous panorama comes down to us, in all its throat-clutching sublimity and almighty bluster, as Romanticism writ large, the epitome of an era when giants roamed and mortals aspired toward immortality. The Lucas version — the aspiration to own the world’s greatest toy shop and other toy shops as yet unbuilt — may be different, but its hordes of operatives are strikingly similar. That Siegfried (“very young, very handsome, very stupid,” in the words of that other Wagnerian immortal, Anna Russell) serves as exact avatar to Luke Skywalker needs no proof from this corner. Nor do the ultimate confrontation between Siegfried/Luke and Wotan/Darth, the business with hero and heroine as twins (all-purpose gimmick in many mythologies), the hero/heroine’s eternal sleep on the rock (Han Solo actually becomes a rock) — and, in the latest episode, the evil emperor turning up as a phantom (as does Alberich in Götterdämmerung) with his army of clattering Nibelungs/Droids. Both cycles, from a list that also embraces the Homeric epics, Finland’s Kalevala, Beowulf, and on and on, plumb the resonances on which the world has always turned and always will.

It is in the matter of titillation, however, that Wagner and Lucas are most easily told apart. John Williams’ Star Wars music is a model of efficiency, admirable on its own nitwit level. There are tunes happy, sad, triumphant and heroic, and they come back often enough, unchanged in size and shape, so that even if you’ve ducked out for popcorn you won’t lose your place in the story. Wagner is different; even the Valkyries’ famous “Ride,” in which the two composers might be thought shaking hands, is a marvel of orchestral subtlety beyond anything in the Williams vocabulary. Hearing the Ring in San Francisco — the four parts in a mere six days — brought on the awareness, stronger than in any of my previous dozen or so immersions, of the music’s cumulative power, unlike anything else in the operatic world, more like the tensile strengths within a Beethoven symphony. Plunge in anywhere, follow any line of dramatic unfolding, from the murky depths in Das Rheingold to the blazing catastrophe 15 hours later; the screw turns until you could pardonably want to scream. I had thought it might be a good idea, after a confrontation with all that splendid urgency, to do a little ear cleaning on the homeward drive; I brought along the tapes of Mozart’s Figaro for the purpose. Instead, I could not clear my head, at any time during seven hours on the 101, of the overpowering dissonance as the leitmotif of Wotan’s Valhalla — so lean and triumphant as the great castle is first built, so heartbreaking as Sieglinde tells of the unknown guest at her wedding, so weedy and dust-covered as the sad, aged Wotan wanders the world asking questions — crashes into the incandescence of Brünnhilde’s funeral pyre and leaves a spellbound audience to choke on magnificence beyond words.

EVEN WITH THE WELL-KNOWN CURRENT paucity of singers comparable to the luminaries of the past — Flagstad and Melchior once, Nilsson and Vickers later — the Ring has never been more popular. In the 1970s the Seattle Opera joined hands with an airline and a swath of local merchants to surround a wretchedly staged and poorly performed production with a sense that the city had turned into both Bayreuth and Valhalla; Wagner T-shirts, scores and albums were everywhere on view. Poor as it was — it was later replaced by superior goods — Seattle’s Ring turned the work into news, and into an inevitable repertory item even where forbearance might have been a wiser course.

Despite its few genuine peaks, the San Francisco revival of its Ring, first given complete in 1985 and revived in 1990, falls under that latter rubric. The cycle was given four times, with two casts and conductors. The first cycle had the magic fire of Jane Eaglen’s Brünnhilde and the overwhelming, vulnerable eloquence of James Morris’ Wotan (as in 1985), with the company’s supremely able music director, Donald Runnicles, to stir the company’s so-so orchestra into a semblance of majesty. Deborah Voigt was the eloquent, moving Sieglinde in both casts, but the second ensemble bore the affliction of the gruff, nearly unlistenable Siegfried of George Gray, Frances Ginzer’s intelligent but small-scale Brünnhilde and, worst of all, Michael Boder’s featureless conducting under which the orchestra sounded as if playing in its sleep, snores and all. Andrei Serban, madcap man-of-many-stages, had come on to update director Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s original plan, which I remember as adequate but unremarkable. There were no atrocities this time around, either; I liked (but many didn’t) the idea of ending the cycle with the surviving Alberich posed like some enormous pink rat atop the ruined Valhalla, thereby suggesting the possibility of another 15-hour go-around. Are you there, George Lucas?

IN BETWEEN CAME THE FINAL EVENT IN the San Francisco Symphony’s Stravinsky Festival, a program mostly of sacred works (plus the Symphonies of Wind Instruments) given in the echo-infested Grace Cathedral, whose booming, reflecting surfaces dulled the iridescent orchestration in the Canticum Sacrum and the vast, elegant spaciousness in the Symphony of Psalms (the evening’s one masterpiece). San Francisco’s idyll with its beloved MTT goes on unabated; I can’t think of a better instance of the right conductor for the right town. He wooed the crowd (capacity, need I add) with saccharine “Stravinsky-‘n’-Me” verbal pomposities; with his approximately 10-foot-long fingers he made you think he was conducting, personally and individually, every member of chorus, orchestra and audience. The music came out hard, clean and — if such can be imagined for Stravinsky at his most dry-point — sexy. I knew it was all wrong, and I tried hard to hate it, but I couldn’t.

AS THE HEAVY-SPENDING LOS ANGELES Opera veers ever more sadly toward innocuous irrelevance, the threadbare neighbor down the road looks better all the time. Not that every venture by the Long Beach Opera — the area’s senior company, after all, 21 years to the local guys’ 13 — can count as opera-making par excellence. But interesting failures usually come about from interesting attempts, and what I have always found gratifying in the efforts of founder and general director Michael Milenski and his shoestring operation is a discernible richness in quality of mind. I defy anyone to identify that quality in, say, the Los Angeles Opera’s recent Lucia di Lammermoor — or much else during the company’s recent years.

Adventurous, exasperating, illuminating and just plain off-the-wall: The saga of the Long Beach Opera has been all of these and more. Some memories stick in the craw: a Boris Godunov done in street clothes with only a bureaucratic desk as scenery; a lurid rewrite of Carmen. Others persist in glory: a Death in Venice with TV monitors as scenery; Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea set amid a motorcycle gang. Milenski’s bravery has earned the company a cult following in the Los Angeles area, eager to deplore and cherish, forgive and forget.

This year’s two offerings, produced in mid-June for two performances each in the 1,100-seat Carpenter Performing Arts Center on the Long Beach campus of California State University, called for a lot of the above. One — the Molière comedy-ballet The Imaginary Invalid, with the play done complete, including the danced interludes to music composed by Marc Antoine Charpentier for the 1673 premiere — wasn’t an opera at all; the other was a small (but very large) operatic masterpiece, Béla Bartók’s one-act Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

Long Beach and the baroque repertory have long been a fruitful marriage; the company
can boast acclaimed stagings of all three of Monteverdi’s surviving operas; last year, Purcell’s The Indian Queen was blown up into an incongruous but irresistible Mexican fiesta. Purists who complained may have been placated by the treatment accorded this season to the Molière/Charpentier parlay: both play and music done straight and, alas, uncut, cantilevering far, far into the night. Matthew Maguire’s staging, on the clean designs of Craig Hodgetts’ futuristic set, leaned heavily on laff content; his large cast, led by Victor Talmadge’s Invalid, got out the words of Donald Frame’s translation, but without the tripping-on-the-tongue that can make easy work of ancient artifice. Susan Mosakowski’s choreography, lightly honoring the manner of 17th-century French court dance and backed by the delectable playing of the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra, provided the only fresh air during a long and otherwise stifling evening.

No such problems afflicted Bartók’s intense, gorgeously orchestrated 50-minute setting of Béla Balász’s symbol-laden gloss on the ancient legend of the amorous but uxoricidal Bluebeard, sung in Long Beach in Chester Kallman’s elegant translation. If a discernible “Long Beach Method” has been fashioned over the years, this was a prime example: a staging (by company stalwart Roy Rallo) that probed deep into the work’s inner voices while
projecting them into a modern milieu (as with Monteverdi in leather, Britten on TV). Marsha Ginsberg’s stage setting — tattered wallpaper as if in an abandoned apartment building the day before the wrecking ball, a few spotlights cleverly deployed, an incongruous onstage movie projector sending forth psychological designs — exactly complemented the Bluebeard (Pavlo Hunka) in a modern business suit and his Judith (Kathleen Broderick) in plain black sheath.

Hunka, a tremendous young bass in his American debut, may have more resembled Henry Kissinger than the Bluebeard of legend, but his singing, throbbing from the intensity of both poem and music, became a part of Bartók’s dark psychodrama. Broderick’s Judith captured the other worldliness of the lovelorn woman who deserts her marital bed for a life (and death) as Bluebeard’s love-slave; her diction, however, showed a few patches of incomprehensibility. A further hero of both performances was conductor Andreas Mitisek, who presided at the harpsichord in the Molière, and drew the full-color spectrum from an undersized but alert freelance orchestra in
the Bartók. More than any of the excellent participants, it was Mitisek’s inspired leadership that, once again, put the Long Beach Opera on a sound basis.

AT THE GETTY ON JUNE 18 THERE WAS more baroque opera: Handel’s Orlando of 1733, arguably his masterpiece in the genre, its splendor nicely boiled down to fit a concert ensemble of two singers — countertenor Jeffrey Gall as the love-crazed Orlando, soprano Sharon Baker as his loved-and-lost Angelica — and an instrumental quintet. The work was given to buttress the Getty’s “Scholar Year,” dedicated to the representation of the Passions in the arts; Orlando, with its extensive playbill of deceptions, rejections, delusions, illusions — plus a full-fledged mad scene for the hero — was an elegant choice. Elegant goes as well for the production, with the splendid Elizabeth Blumenstock (of Philharmonia Baroque and Musica Angelica fame) as first violinist and the solid support of Mary Springfels’ viola da gamba (she of Chicago’s Newberry Consort), heroines of the best early-music performance anywhere these days. Arias for the other principals, including a magician named Zoroaster, were neatly made over into instrumental solos — at some loss, of course. Still, enough remained of Handel’s ravishing designs to honor the work’s grandeur, and to whet the appetite for more of the same.

And if full-scale performances of Handel operas aren’t easily come by, think of the even sadder fate of La Púrpura de la Rosa, the historic entertainment that recently lured me to Indiana for what was billed as its North American premiere: the first opera composed and performed in the New World, created in 1659, then lost, then re-created in 1701 in Lima to celebrate the birthday of the 17-year-old Spanish monarch Felipe V. The history of the work is muddled; the 1659 music to Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play has been lost, and the 1701 music is the work of Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, chapelmaster of the Lima cathedral. This music, nicely staged by baroque-theater scholar James Middleton as the crown of this year’s Bloomington Early Music Festival (known locally as BLEMF), was worth the trip. Calderón’s story interprets the legend of Venus and Adonis, with later additions to wrench the plot toward a simpering obeisance to Spain’s Felipe (who is symbolized in the plot as Mars, a belligerent ladykiller). The music, light-textured Spanish songs of the utmost charm, is lovely, well worth someone’s further attention; the Bloomington production — with gorgeous and authentically cut costumes on a cute but provincial stage — bore out what everybody hears about Indiana University as a place for superb musicmaking. As with all of southern Indiana in springtime, I found the work irresistible.

In 1979, I laughed out loud at a job offer from Los Angeles. I was at the time music critic at New York magazine, a job that offered both comfort and prominence in the only city in America worth the attention of anyone involved in serious music – or so a few million people believed, myself included. Leave that behind for the gilded beguilements of some outpost in a cultural desert? Ha ha.

A year later I was gainfully employed in Los Angeles, writing about music. In the intervening year I had made a couple of trips west, and learned a thing or two about the state of matters musical here in Southern California. I heard some remarkable musical inventiveness in stopping places along Interstate 5, from CalArts in the north to UC San Diego in the south – electronic stuff opening onto a world new to me, music (by Lou Harrison and many others) that leaned out across the other ocean to shake hands with Indonesia, India and Japan. I heard the rebirth of reverence for the symphonic classics, at Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts under Carlo Maria Giulini. I talked about musical ideals and ambitions with students and young musicians determined to make a name for themselves right here in Los Angeles. I had come out for one year, to help the fledgling New West, a clone of New York – ill-considered, as it transpired – gain a voice on the musical scene; I was to find a qualified writer, turn over the keys to the kingdom, and return to my power base in New York. Something beyond naming led me to a different destiny. Even an accident on Figueroa at the end of my first year here, during which I was pulled unconscious from a burning car, didn’t strike me as a message worth heeding. New West is no longer here, but I am. ç

Twenty years later, I know why. Giulini’s time with the Philharmonic ended too soon, but the memories remained. There was one memorable week in the spring of 1982 when management allowed me to sit in on his rehearsals of Beethoven’s Fifth – the world’s best-known symphony, but one he hadn’t touched in 16 years. At lunch we studied the score together as if its ink was still wet; I discovered what it means to invite music into your soul, a wisdom I still cherish.

Giulini’s magic gave way to André Previn’s humdrum; the orchestra fell apart. Honcho Ernest Fleischmann pulled it back from the brink, with the help of two exceptional young men he had happened upon in Europe, and another very old. Nobody as youthful in appearance as the curly-topped Simon Rattle or the apple-cheeked, dimpled Esa-Pekka Salonen had any business attempting to galvanize a demoralized, half-asleep orchestra into a reborn ensemble, but those kids did. To cast a further golden thread of wisdom around the reawakened Philharmonic, Fleischmann also brought over the venerable Kurt Sanderling, who conducted Shostakovich with the authority of a one-time friend (which he was) and the Beethoven symphonies with the poetic insights of a direct descendant (which he wasn’t, but no matter). Sanderling no longer visits, but Rattle does, and Salonen is ours. Fleischmann brought them all, and the Philharmonic’s current relevance rests most of all on his broad but weighed-down shoulders – on which the orchestra rode for years. That Fleischmann’s managerial skills have been a hard act to follow registers clearly in the recent news that his successor, Willem
Wijnbergen, who raised a new set of high hopes with his innovative gadgetry in both programming and marketing, has now bowed out after a mere 15 months of trying to walk in the Fleischmann brogans.

There have been losses. In Pasadena, the Ambassador Auditorium was lost to a fiasco of mismanagement within the controlling powers; luridly decked out as it was, it still had the best sound of any local auditorium and, at 1,200-plus seats, the best size. The lustrous sound of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in that hall on one night, and Cecilia Bartoli on another, remain. A smaller loss, no less sad, was the “Chamber Music L.A.” series that just snuck away from its home in Little Tokyo and vanished. There was to be a small chamber-music hall in the new Disney Symphony Hall, but it seems to have dropped off the drawing board. Neither Zipper Hall in the new Colburn School downtown, nor the vast and bland spaces of the Japan America Theater and the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium, possess that quality of welcoming that can endow the experience of chamber music with the proper glow. New performing-arts centers have sprung up like mushrooms after a storm – in Woodland Hills, Cerritos, Costa Mesa – and the acoustics in these halls give “mush-room” new meaning. Readers of omens predict acoustical excellence in Disney Hall even before the cornerstone is laid.

And there have been gains – huge and turbulent, small and cherishable. Opera in Los Angeles in 1979 consisted of a run in the Music Center by the New York City Opera in something less than pristine condition, the squeezed-together three-week timing inconvenient for both the opera company and the dispossessed Philharmonic. Down the coast, a struggling Long Beach Opera made do with below-standard stars in standard repertory. Seven years later, the city had its own L.A. Opera; Long Beach had cast aside its Triviatas and begun to stick its nose into splendid rarities old and new. Why consider living in New York when a shoestring opera company right here can come up with all three of the surviving operas of Claudio Monteverdi, from whose flaming essence the very art of opera was first forged?

Okay, New York has its operas and symphonies; so do Boston, Seattle and, most likely, Podunk. Part of what holds me in Los Angeles’ grip – 20 years after I could just as easily have returned to the real world of Zubin Mehta and Luciano Pavarotti and recommenced paying $20 to park at Lincoln Center – is the serendipity, the way our musical treasures, in many sizes, are scattered all around the jillion square miles that make up this place. The ongoing symphony orchestras in Long Beach, Pasadena, Glendale and Costa Mesa bear witness to the huge population of freelance musicians who earn their big bucks in the studios by day and their ticket to heaven playing symphonies at night. MaryAnn Bonino’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series is a serendipitous masterpiece; I defy any other city on the planet to come up with anything like her wise, resourceful list of stupendous musical entertainments sublimely matched to their surroundings and delivered with the subtext that hope exists for the world after all. On a smaller scale, the five best pianists who reside in this area have formed the consortium called Piano Spheres and play a series of high-adventure concerts (mostly new music, some world premieres) in an intimate, elegant Pasadena church. At least two excellent instrumental ensembles deserve our valuable time with concerts of baroque and early-classical music in church settings: Greg Maldonado’s L.A. Baroque Orchestra and Michael Eagan’s Musica Angelica.

“So what do you find to do out there in the desert?” one or two of my unreconstructed East Coast friends still ask when I pass their way. Funny they should ask. I wish I had enough free time to construct a proper answer, but I don’t.