So I've Heard

THIS BEING THE SEASON OF SMOG IN the Los Angeles basin, the haze of uncertainty that descended upon the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this past week seemed apt. Willem Wijnbergen, executive vice president and managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was departing after a mere 15 months in office.

Did he resign? Was he pushed? Neither? Both? From his native Amsterdam, where he is vacationing, Wijnbergen told the L.A. Times that his Los Angeles lawyer, Howard Rosen, had delivered to Barry Sanders, president of the Philharmonic Association, a letter pointing out problem areas in their relationship — areas that Wijnbergen has so far declined to identify. The letter, Wijnbergen claims, did not contain the word resignation as such, but noted the presence of difficulties that had the potential to activate a “termination with good reason” clause in his contract. The board, however, accepted the letter as a resignation — effective immediately.

“This is no dismissal,” Sanders stressed early last week. “We would very much like him to stay.” On KCRW’s Which Way L.A., Sanders assured the world that everything is in place and unchanged for a superb Hollywood Bowl season and further glories beyond. But his final words on that program may have told more than he intended: “We know how to execute.”

The wisdom in Philharmonic circles is that the controversial, visionary Wijnbergen, who arrived on the scene last year with a briefcase full of changes in the orchestra’s physiognomy — which involved many firings, many hirings, a flurry of job reshufflings, even at one point a plan (now deferred) to move the whole Philharmonic management out of its Music Center offices to a more distant vantage point — had come up against the resistance of a board famous for its fear of novelty on both the management and artistic side.

Discernible through the uncertainty was the sturdy figure of Ernest Fleischmann, Wijnbergen’s predecessor, whose 29-year tenure redefined the role — social as well as artistic — of symphony orchestras for all time. Insiders have for months advanced the theory that Fleischmann’s act would be hard — nay, impossible — to follow; now there’s proof: Wijnbergen has been done in by the impotence of not being Ernest. While it’s unlikely that Fleischmann, now pushing 75, might be lured back to his old job (currently in the hands of chief financial and administrative officer Gene Pasquarelli), he hasn’t exactly been invisible around the Philharmonic in the past year. (Interestingly, Fleischmann, Wijnbergen and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen were all out of the country last week.)

Wijnbergen, an adept musical amateur but basically more businessman than impresario (with a dossier that included time as brand manager for Procter Gamble’s Rotterdam office), arrived here convinced that business — dealing with deficits, devising new marketing gadgetry, streamlining operations in both artistic and money regions — ranked first on the agenda. He came to the Philharmonic from a comparable position at Amsterdam’s legendary Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which his managerial skills had pulled out of red ink in the early ’90s. He was virtually unknown in the U.S., although Salonen had conducted Wijnbergen’s orchestra and had endorsed his coming to Los Angeles. (Unnamed sources with the Philharmonic indicated last week that Salonen’s enthusiasm toward Wijnbergen had noticeably cooled in recent months.) In any case, Wijnbergen arrived on the job with a winning smile and an obsession for change that was bound to trample many toes at the Music Center. It may well be that he acted upon some of them with undue haste — the precipitous firing of the popular and able Hollywood Bowl manager Anne Parsons mere weeks after his arrival, for one.

The intelligence among Philharmonic staffers after Wijnbergen’s announcement combined shock with a minimum of surprise; it seems apparent that a collision between the new managerial blood and the fuddy-duddy intractability of the board was bound to happen. The miracle of the equally strong-minded and innovative Fleischmann’s 29-year survival looms ever less understandable. Crusty and wily, monstrously ungifted as platform speaker, not above coddling favorites, Fleischmann still demonstrated the classic gifts for charming his way toward his great goals — gifts the indisputably able Wijnbergen simply lacked.

Even so, Wijnbergen’s impact on the orchestra, and its community, was considerable. The overall image is much improved — partly through his quick and easy overtures to civic leaders in many fields, and also thanks to his role in motivating the L. A. Times’ long overdue decision to give classical music more lines of newsprint than it had previously enjoyed.

Wijnbergen is due back in Los Angeles on July 9. He seems to hold out hope — or at least he says he does — that the differences can be worked out. Most Philharmonic watchers, however, are betting he won’t put in another appearance at the Music Center. If that’s the case, he, too, will be a hard act to follow.

Art by Robert GrossmanAT 75, GIUSEPPE VERDI WAS CLIPPING rave reviews for his Otello and toying with an opera about Falstaff. At 75, Igor Stravinsky produced Agon, a major step forward in his compositional outlook. At 75 — as of yesterday, please omit flowers — I sit here in a pink cloud of self-congratulation, examining navel lint and figuring how to get into words my reasons for justifying the title of this small essay in terminal smugness. Critics, after all, don’t usually deserve the major-birthday tributes earned by operatic sopranos and middle-of-the-road composers. The only music critic I can think of whose name lives on is the late Alfred Frankenstein of San Francisco, and he was born lucky.

A knock on the door; the wispy, willowy interviewer arrives. “How did it start?” is the correct first question.

It almost didn’t. At 6 I could pick out on the piano the tune the cleaning lady sang — “A little rosewood casket” — well enough to convince my mother of my musical potential. A maiden-lady piano teacher was convinced otherwise, even though I had triumphantly delivered “The Cricket and the Bumblebee” at her annual student recital. We parted company soon after. At 9 I was sent to bed with rheumatic fever (no antibiotics yet), where for the next four years the only music that spoke to my soul was the Ray Noble recording of “Isle of Capri” on my bedside radio.

But how, then . . .?

In high school (Boston Latin, ’41) I got into dangerous company. My friend Eddie collected symphonies on discs you could get with newspaper coupons. He played them on a turntable you hooked up to the radio, using needles that were actually cactus thorns that you sharpened after every side. I blame Eddie for everything that has happened to me since. (He got in touch again a few years ago, after 50 years, but the friendship was doomed. All he wanted to talk about was Sibelius.)

Shortly after I discovered music, I discovered writing about music. It happened in the physics lab at Harvard (where I had gone to metamorphose into My Son the Doctor as filial duty ordained); the guy at the next desk had a copy of Donald Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis and was doubled up laughing over a description of a moment in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with “flashes of red light from the trumpets.” I borrowed the book, read it all night, and awoke in another world. A week later I sent off a zippy letter to Rudy Elie, the Boston Herald‘s music critic, fussing over a minor point he’d made about Mozart’s K. 364, couched in the pomposities that are the lingua franca of Harvard sophomores. He wrote back offering me a job — stringer at $3 per review. Bye-bye, My Son the Doctor. (After maybe 300 hearings of Beethoven’s Ninth, I still hear those trumpets as flashes of red light.)

Okay, speed it up, baby, we’ve only got this page.

The little bundle of Herald clippings got me into UC Berkeley as a grad student in music. Some profs were horrified that I planned to turn all their revered teaching into a career as a (shudder!) critic; some weren’t. I helped found KPFA, the first public radio station, where I got to hurl weekly thunderbolts at the San Francisco Symphony in its pathetic days under Enrique Jordà. Then back in New York — where KPFA had dispatched me, as Paul to the Corinthians, to bring its newly acquired WBAI into the fold. Print beckoned. By 1963 I was at the helm of the sinking ship known as the New York Herald Tribune; it had just given birth to a Sunday supplement called New York, which has long outlived its parent. There was no Lincoln Center then (nor Kennedy Center, nor Los Angeles Music Center), no National Endowment, no operas on videotape. Leonard Bernstein was riding high, but Beverly Sills was singing small roles at the New York City Opera and Pavarotti might have been delivering pizzas for all anyone knew.

In 1979 I moved back to Los Angeles, intending to stay a year to help New York misguidedly clone itself as New West. That year became two, then forever. Out here I’ve written for weeklies on slick paper, for monthlies on even slicker paper, and, since 1992, on the paper you now hold, suitable for wrapping chicken parts. I’ve done quickie radio commentaries and extended series; people claim to have found me on the Internet. But I did my first writing, 55 years ago, on newsprint, and that remains my medium of choice. Writing weekly, furthermore, remains my rhythm of choice.

Is it a life?

It’s a good life, and I say that in the present tense. For lousy but adequate pay I get to make my own choices in what to hear and what to avoid; most of the time, the concerts and operas I attend for my column are events I’d go to even as a civilian. (Most of the time, I said.) In my seven years here I haven’t once attended an event so uninteresting that I took away nothing worth writing about. At home I listen only on purpose: the slow movements of Mozart’s G-minor Quintet and Schubert’s in C-major for proof of God’s hand; the basses’ duet from Don Pasquale instead of Prozac; Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen in place of a cold shower. I know many people — perhaps you’re one of them — who use music as wallpaper. I think they’re nuts, and I also pity what they’re missing: that chill when Mozart takes his first violin up to a high D and we forget to breathe, and when Schubert pins us against the wall with the intense radiance of his closing measures.

And for posterity?

If I have any advice for hopeful critics, it’s simply to write as much as you can, and spend your study time learning about music as an art. I never took a writing course; if my job is to write about the things I know and feel, I don’t need anyone to tell me how to do it. The actual writing is the easy part, although it helps to have an editor to protect you from ravaging fact checkers.

So far, I think I’ve done all right. At least I’ve learned to stop lying about my age.

BETWEEN OJAI’S VERDANT VALLEY AND the dour woodlands of Finland, some distance intervenes. For a time last weekend, however — the occasion of the 53rd Ojai Music Festival — you could have sworn that miles had shrunk to inches. The Finns came, wonderful musicians bearing remarkable music; they charmed and they conquered.

Here in Los Angeles we live with testimony, in the presence of Esa-Pekka Salonen, of Finland’s emergence in the last couple of decades as a major musical power. Not only has Salonen’s conducting created an aura around the Los Angeles Philharmonic that currently crowns it the most irresistible of American orchestras, he has added to that glow the work of a composer of extraordinary gifts for whom no limits are easily discernible. At Ojai there was music by Salonen, and by two near contemporaries, all three onetime classmates at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy — all three, for what the information is worth, currently living outside Finland.

Sibelius’ music is, and will remain, the rock on which Finland’s eminence rests; his music, of necessity, maintains an obligatory presence at any celebration of that country’s music. The music that opens his First Symphony, the clarinet solo off in the chill grayness over muffled drums — which Salonen, the Philharmonic and the irreplaceable Michele Zukovsky performed at Ojai’s first concert on Friday — is some kind of magical mood-painting which nothing that ensues in this logy, overstuffed sofa of a symphony ever again matches. After Sibelius there was a generation, perhaps two, of composers apparently content to labor in his shadow, conservatives like Einojohani Rautawaara — the excellent Sakari Oramo performed a short work of his with the Philharmonic last month — and Aulis Sallinen, whose opera Kullervo had its world premiere here in 1992. Then came a vastly different generation, students at Helsinki around 1980: Salonen, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho, all by now familiar here through the efforts of Salonen and the Philharmonic, and represented at Ojai by works either brand-new or at least new to American ears.

A weekend of new music from Finland cannot answer all questions about the musical state of that land; the Finnish government is also remarkably supportive of new opera, and there was none of that at Ojai. What there was, however, if any generalities can be spun, was music strongly narrative, bristling with jagged, deeply coloristic masses that often seemed to jar against one another: Saariaho’s Amers, for one, with its prominent cello solo set against the gently rackety orchestra. The weekend’s most sensational work was Lindberg’s Kraft, composed and recorded (on Finlandia) in 1985 but never before performed in the U.S. Outbursts of brutal, crushing blows on gongs spread around the audience area, moments of ethereal calm as a gathering of twittering piccolos seemed to make common cause with Ojai’s resident avian population: This is a nihilistic masterpiece, wonderfully scored (including an assortment of auto parts and old railway-car springs to enhance the percussion). The piece seemed exactly fashioned for Ojai, where performers (including Lindberg himself) could easily hurtle from onstage noisemakers to more gadgetry among the trees that ring the audience area.

Salonen’s own new work bore another kind of beauty, profound and luminous. His Five Images After Sappho sets fragments of several Sapphic love poems (in translations by Paul Roche) to music of fluid, plangent grace. Some passages in the small orchestra take on the urgent purling of, say, the Daybreak music from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë; the richness and easy flow of the melodic line suggest a mastery of vocal writing that should make anyone impatient for the opera that will soon occupy Salonen’s full attention.

IF THE MUSIC WAS EXTRAORDINARY, THE performances — discounting one precipitous exception — were even more so. Salonen had composed his songs for Dawn Upshaw, who then had to cancel for emergency spinal surgery, and another American soprano, not yet as well-known, sang the music as if her own. Remember her name: Laura Claycomb; she’s the Juliet in the L.A. Opera’s The Capulets and the Montagues next October. By some distance, however, the weekend’s performance laurels were earned by Toimii, the seven-member utterly fearless new-music ensemble founded in Helsinki in 1981 by Salonen and Lindberg, and often led by Salonen on recordings. Individual members of the group were prominent on almost all the concerts: the supremely gifted cellist Anssi Karttunen (the way those Finns waste letters!) making his unerring way through a Lindberg concerto and the Saariaho; and the delightful clarinetist-sprite Kari Kriikku.

No less impressive was Toimii’s morning “family” program in which all members joined forces to eradicate the institution of opera once and for all through a boisterous and mettlesome spoof that even included a high note or two from the august Salonen himself. Our own L.A. Philharmonic New Music Group, founded the same year as Toimii, was also on hand, in a program that ended with a reminder of what a solid, beautifully planned work is John Adams’ Chamber Symphony. One more Finn, the pianist Olli Mustonen, who has brought his affected, self-indulgent pianistic and musical mannerisms here before (and been castigated on this page more than once), offered a program whose basic idea was not bad — alternating preludes and fugues by Bach and Shostakovich — but whose execution in an overshaded, falsely accentuated old-timey salon style (the worst Bach playing I can remember since Rosalyn Tureck) was by all counts the low point of this Ojai Festival and several previous.

Things are happening at Ojai. Ernest Fleischmann’s first year as artistic director brought changes, including an expansion via three short “Sundowner” concerts earlier in the week. There is to be a yearly young-composer competition, financed by a local foundation, with the first winner included in the 2000 season program. Next year’s conductor, by the way, is Sir Simon Rattle, and the solo list includes the incomparable Lorraine Hunt. It’s not too early to reserve.

POOR, SWEET, PUT-UPON LUCIA OF LAMMERMOOR. BOTH the opera and its heroine have been far more sinned against than sinning, burdened with evils of the spirit and flesh. The debatable notion prevails here and there in opera-buffdom that underneath Donizetti’s fragile, romantic weeper there bubble deep psychological currents that call for prodigies of a producer’s invention. Memories of the L.A. Opera’s 1993 version persist, with June Anderson climbing the outsides of buildings and Andrei Serban’s stage cluttered with dancing slabs of scenery. Earlier that season I had stumbled upon the Metropolitan Opera’s new production, the Francesca Zambello number with the coffins that was booed and lasted only one season. (I hear from New York that the Met’s latest Lucia also had the critics recycling the adjectives — “abominable,” for one — that had served them well seven years before.)

Jonathan Alver’s production currently at the Music Center, brought up from Opera New Zealand, imposes on neither patience nor credulity; it looks the way it sounds. That way is full of artifice and hokum, but I wasn’t disturbed until the Mad Scene, which had the chorus cavorting around the forlorn Lucia and eventually massed into a Hi-De-Ho formation like an MGM minstrel show, and the ending, which had the saintly Scottish Presbyterians assembled in a churchyard backed by a projected fiery-red cloudscape straight from hell.

Sumi Jo, pretty and graceful, has no business singing Lucia at this stage in her career, if her fuzzy, unfocused and painfully out-of-tune first-night performance means anything. Worse, you never had the feeling that she owned the stage, and without an inadequate Lucia there’s no Lucia. Her Edgardo, Frank Lopardo, yelled a lot, but at least did so in tune. Gino Quilico’s Enrico also had its shrill moments, but he is an exciting young singer new to the company, and his work endowed the opera. There was certainly no stability in the flabby conducting of Richard Bonynge: the sad spectacle of a onetime expert follower (of his now-retired ex-wife, Joan Sutherland) now with nobody to follow.

IT IS 13 SEASONS SINCE THE CURTAIN FIRST ROSE (SHAKILY, if you remember) on the newborn Los Angeles Opera. By managerial standards — the kind expressed in dollars and cents, red and black ink — the company is fabulously successful. It has won an enviable place in the community, serving young and minority audiences with valuable educational programs. Once a season, on the average, it comes up with an event that draws press and opera honchos from out of town to add to the local luster. Occasionally it justifies all that junketing with something operatically worthwhile: the ’97 season’s Return of Ulysses, for example. Sometimes it doesn’t; I can’t think of a more flagrant fiasco in all Operaland, in terms of pre-performance hype vs. abject final product, than last December’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. In this past season I would have proudly escorted a discriminating out-of-town visitor to only one of the eight productions, the revival of the Jonathan Miller/Robert Israel Don Giovanni. When that production was new, in October 1991, it shared a season with Berlioz’s Les Troyens, the world premiere of Sallinen’s Kullervo, and Britten’s Albert Herring, along with a couple of more standard crowd-pleasers. This year it shone its single light in the gray morass of the tried-and-true along with the never-should-have-been.

In the days when he used to meet regularly with the musical press — as he hasn’t now for over a year (nor would I in his tromped-on shoes) — Peter Hemmings was quite open about the reason for the company’s regression from the adventurous to the safe and familiar: his need to put the most well-heeled of his patrons at their ease. He tended to sidestep the fact that the company’s clear claim to success was already established in the years of Wozzeck, The Fiery Angel and Katya Kabanova. You can’t refute his motivation, even as the ranks of elderly, well-heeled devotees of Madama Butterfly grow ever thinner. The Philharmonic, by the way, under its former and its present management, refutes it very well. But operas cost more to produce than symphony concerts.

From the start, the company has projected a bifurcated, self-contradictory image. Operating in a 3,100-seat luxury venue, it was obliged to affect the air of a grand-opera company on a level with the Met, Chicago and San Francisco. Its roster was anchored on one supernova, Plácido Domingo (as he sounded in 1986), who went on to serve the company on a semiresident basis and soon — with prospects one may justifiably question — assumes leadership. Around Domingo at the start were a few other luminaries who welcomed the chance to practice new repertory in the boonies (just kidding, folks) before taking it to the real world: Maria Ewing, for one; Carol Vaness, with lesser success — and whatever happened to Carol Neblett? At the same time, the company came on as a mirror of the best qualities in the New York City Opera: a unit of young singers enlisted in on-the-job training, working their way up if they had the stuff, or out if they didn’t. If you heard Richard Bernstein’s Figaro at the Met, or Rodney Gilfry sing the opening exhortation in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth with the visiting Brits at Costa Mesa last week, you were in the presence of careers in full blossom whose roots reached back to their time at the Music Center. (Gilfry was the Herald in Otello on that fateful opening night in 1986.)

Somewhere along the line, the images blurred. The typical L.A. Opera night seems compounded of a sure-fire high-style opera inadequately cast, tentatively staged and, as often as not, indifferently conducted: this season’s Carmen, Falstaff and La Traviata as prime examples. Can we expect better from next season’s Rigoletto, Faust or La Rondine?

It’s not my place to answer that question — yet. Next season also offers our first-ever Billy Budd, an authentic masterpiece; a return of the delectable production of The Elixir of Love; The Capulets and the Montagues, Bellini’s curious gloss on the RJ script; Hansel and Gretel, which in the realm of kiddie opera looms over Mr. Fox like Tristan und Isolde — and, for starters, Samson et Dalila. That one is sure to bring down the house.

IT WAS A MONTH FOR SYMPHONIES: Mozart in full glory, two unfamiliar Dvorák delectables, one often-roasted chestnut from the Shostakovich legacy and another more rare — and, of course, the Nine. Beethoven’s inscrutable legacy drew sell
out crowds to Costa Mesa’s Performing Arts Center; from overheard lobby conversations I would judge that the contingent who came out of love for Beethoven-as-composer just about equaled the Bee-
thoven-as-P.C.-icon crowd. On opening night, John Eliot Gardiner and his “Revolutionary and Romantic” Orchestra got through the entire program without a single intrusive between-movements ovation; on the second, when you could expect that the profound mysteries of the “Eroica” and the Fourth symphonies might hold an audience spellbound, there were outbursts
of applause at every juncture. (The sad news is that between-movements applause, which in our reverence for Product we hear as intrusions, is actually the “authentic” practice. Respectful or stunned silence is a far more recent — and, I’m tempted to add, pretentious — behavior.)

Gardiner, at work in this part of the world for the first time, enjoys a following from recordings, many of which I revere as the best-of-all performances — Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the Berlioz Fantastique — for their wisdom, strength, a certain bravado, and his mostly superb and mostly young
orchestra. In the five concerts in Costa Mesa — sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society, whose programming this season and next suggests an infusion
of bravery other organizations might profitably heed — these qualities were in evidence now and then, except for the “superb young orchestra,” which filled the air each night with the bloopers and imbalances probably inevitable in period-instrument ensembles but resounding strangely in a hall where the Vienna Philharmonic once played.

Still, Costa Mesa’s Beethoven week had its values. For all the misfortunes in the wind and brass sections, there were the
seductive, velvet-and-bronze tones from a string section playing with gut strings and reduced vibrato, turning long melodic lines into a kind of superhuman breathing. For all the chill surrounding Gardiner’s conception of Symphonies 4, 6 and 9, there was the hair-raising energy in the “Eroica”‘s first-movement drama, and in all of the Seventh. At the Wednesday concert, Gardiner, the orchestra and his Monteverdi Choir put together a demonstration of music that Beethoven might have heard on his way up the mountain: arbitrary in the jiggering of facts now and then, oblivious to the fact that, in the time of triads and
neat dominant-to-tonic cadences, all music sounded somewhat alike.

A certain piety pervades the whole concept of historically informed performance on period instruments, of “reinventing what the composer could have heard,” stepping gingerly around the hard facts of changed audience perception, concert-hall architecture, and, in Beethoven’s case, nearly two centuries of skillfully orchestrated hype under which music turns into an amalgam of masterpiece and product. Did the crowd that whooped and hollered for a good 10 minutes after Saturday’s Ninth Symphony react to the wretched execution all evening by horns and winds? Or to Gardiner’s straitjacketing conception that sandpapered the fury and desperation of the first movement into bland note spinning and turned the miraculous slow movement into dry wood chips? Or to the perceived wisdom that the Beethoven Nine form a product that defines its own wrapping and, like Everest, merits our adulation Because It’s There?

DVORáK’S NINE LIVE ON A LOWER slope, ensconced among the world’s best feel-good music. The Fifth Symphony comes on — clarinets in a purring arpeggio — with a vision of fields and forests, oblivious to the tornado that lurks in the
finale half an hour later. The Sixth begins with a most ingratiating wet kiss, such as a child on tippy-toes might deliver to a benevolent uncle. Later in his career, as the naïve Dvorák learned of his own genius from the product packagers, a certain stiffness set in; his last two symphonies, for all their grand tunes, move more carefully compared to the ease, the fluency, the unselfconscious repetitions of pretty tunes just because they’re pretty, in these earlier works.

The L.A. Philharmonic had never performed the Fifth — nor, for that matter, have many other orchestras. The neglect is baffling, because the music — even the long finale, whose bluster demands some condescension — is gorgeous. Guest-conducted by David Zinman, the Dvorák crowned an evening that had also included Gil Shaham’s dazzling sprint through Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto — a neat folk-tinged pairing. The Sixth turned up to charm the daylights out of us at the
season’s final concert by the Santa Monica Symphony in the acoustical horror of
the Civic Auditorium. Sound aside, this orchestra and its free-to-all-comers concerts are a valuable local resource; its conductor, Allen Robert Gross, is particularly adept at leading a not entirely professional assemblage toward a fair facsimile of eloquence. That’s just my fancy way of saying that Dvorák’s most lovable symphony did its job lovably.

Shostakovich’s month with the Philharmonic mingled fabulous and flatulent. Someone at the Philharmonic seems to mistake Mark Wigglesworth’s brattiness for talent, since he turns up as guest conductor so often (two separate gigs this season). I do not, and from the sounds of the orchestra — unbalanced and often tentative in the Shostakovich 10th — there is little love lost between players and conductor. After many years I am finally learning to like this symphony — long, powerful, also given to bluster now and then — but the performance under Wigglesworth, simultaneously sharp-edged and fuzzy, was a setback.

For all the popularity and the hokey biographical detail concocted around the Shostakovich Fifth that turns symphony into product, I have little problem learning to like the work. I had less than usual, in fact, in Sakari Oramo’s beautifully thought-out performance with the Phiharmonic: the orchestra responsive and, in the wondrous slow movement, positively sleek; the finale, at a pace considerably brisker than in the legendary Kurt Sanderling performance here 15 or so years ago, an authentic bone-rattler. Oramo, the latest to emerge from Finland’s seemingly inexhaustible fund of star-quality musicians, nailed down his credentials with a performance of the Mozart 39th, its magical wind scoring lovingly sprinkled with stardust. I also have a warm spot for guest conductors so little ego-driven that they don’t bother to remove their eyeglasses before taking a bow; Oramo’s modesty in this regard seemed, in a word, spectacular.

Photo by William WegmanLISTENING TO VERY OLD MUSIC DEMANDS a confrontation on shaky ground between the imaginations of the long-dead composer and the listener presumed alive. However pious the press releases may read on the subject of “authentic performance practice as the composer might have heard it half a millennium ago,” the impression is inescapable that an interlock of artificialities is in operation. There is no way that today’s performance of, say, a Mass by Johannes Ockeghem can be made to resemble what the composer had in mind — let alone what he was able to extract from whatever amateur choral forces his church might have been able to afford. We wouldn’t like it if it did; over five centuries, ears and expectations change.

Instead, our senses are bathed in a thoroughly modern contrivance: the richness of medieval and Renaissance repertory newly repainted to fit today’s conception of past practices: not the Parthenon of Athens but a Parthenon-shaped pizzeria in Fresno. In the last couple of weeks we’ve been visited by excellent early-music specialists whose performances, besides being gorgeous to hear, bore some cachet as “authentic” or, that more satisfactory epithet, “historically informed,” time machines devised for escorting latter-day throngs back through olden times in mellow comfort. The British group called Magnificat made its local debut, performing 16th-century Spanish polyphony in a church — vaguely Spanish, vaguely Renaissance — built in 1923. A week later came four women of the hot-ticket New York ensemble Anonymous 4, along with the six men of the group known as Lionheart, performing a complete Mass service by Ockeghem in UCLA’s Royce Hall — a secular venue inspiring secular behavior. (Despite an appeal in the printed program, some in the audience succumbed to the need to break the continuity with applause every three or four minutes, thus widening the gap between listening to music circa 1999 and inventing music in the time of Columbus.)

Two major Renaissance figures, 130 or so years apart, formed the substance of these programs. Magnificat sang music of Spain’s Tomás Luis de Victoria (1549­1611) and his countrymen: dark, passionate, sideslipping into passages of the startling dissonance we tend to ascribe to Gesualdo. Anonymous 4 and Lionheart labored on behalf of Ockeghem (1410­1497). Together these two sublime composers form the bookends for the century that saw Man and God sharing the composer’s worktable and turning out music that told what the world needed to know about both.

Ockeghem is the “where has he been all my life” of recent years. Not a note of his music existed on records during my student days in Berkeley, therefore we were left unaware of his existence. Like Monteverdi, Beethoven and, arguably, Mahler, he bestrides a major musical upheaval, from the chaotic mannerisms of the early 15th century to the infusion of triadic harmonies and sweet, shapely melody as the century neared its close. At Royce there was the music of Ockeghem’s Missa Mi-Mi, with others of his works inserted as they would be in a church service. The flow of expressive devices — strings of first-inversion triads (“fauxbourdon”) that sound as if born long ago in a distant galaxy; wrenching shifts of harmony; cleverly spaced-out counterpoint games (a tune sung in one voice against its mirror image in another) — is astounding enough; the sheer beauty of the music is beyond description. Ockeghem’s music is somewhat recent for the usual tendencies of Anonymous 4 and their “brother” ensemble; it could be that this venture into new repertory — or the rude applause — brought on the occasional unsettled-sounding passage at Royce that afternoon. At the end there was the lament on Ockeghem’s death by his most illustrious pupil, Josquin Desprez (1440­1521), music that seemed to capture the breath of anyone within earshot, and the surrounding air as well.

CERTAIN CLICHéS EXIST UNCHALLENGED: the notion of the clean, snowy-white way of singing — vibratoless and often bloodless — imposed on early music by choral groups mostly British; the “authenticity” of using boys’ voices for the soprano and alto lines; the tuning obsession whereby singers do lip service to the past by honoring archaic systems of intonation so that a modern audience, familiar with Beethoven and the Beatles, hears everything slightly out of tune. (It’s just as easy, by the way, to sing with contemporary intonation practices and still sound out of tune, as witness the work of our Master Chorale or, even more painful, the strained, wobbly singing I heard last March at the Los Angeles Bach Festival.)

On the evidence of recordings I have heard recently with particular pleasure, I discern an overall trend away from the pale bloodless style and toward an elegant balance between historical correctness and beauty. Two recent discs on Virgin Classics’ Veritas label — vocal duets and ensemble pieces by Claudio Monteverdi (1567­1643) — hold me spellbound, both for the incredible imagination that fashioned these works and for the splendid compromise between history and contemporary awareness that sets the music free to chill our senses with its hot breath. Alan Curtis is the conductor, an American harpsichordist — onetime faculty member at Berkeley — now living in Venice (the other one), where he maintains an ensemble called Il Complesso Barocco. If you seek the ultimate proof of music’s power to hold us in its grip, hear Curtis’ group, on the second of the two discs, in the Lamento della Ninfa, a six-minute full-scale opera about abandonment, the pangs of love and the joys of eavesdropping, with the Complesso Barocco leaning with exquisite emphasis on the music’s amazing array of dissonance employed in the depiction of misery. I never argue with people who tell me that this heartbreaking small work is the world’s best music bar none.

On a rewarding Harmonia Mundi disc, Paul Hillier leads his Theatre of Voices through the thickets of Hoquetus, a trove of medieval vocal music: liturgical works; secular songs about love, war and matters in between; amazing exercises in complex counterpoint in which liturgical and secular combine simultaneously; wondrous bursts of sound from the device of “hoquetus” or “hocket” (“hiccup”) — a strange way of varying a sung note by breaking it up (i.e., “hiccuping”) among two or more voices. The music isn’t just tricks, however; in its austere, two-dimensional way (think Ravenna’s mosaics), it generates its own kind of fascination. So do Hillier and his group; over the years, from the early Hilliard Ensemble to the current group, his work in celebrating the interaction of man and music — any music, all music, Arvo Pärt and John Cage no less than Peter Abelard — has been a major force in keeping open the heavy gates between music then and ears now.

“Gusts of splendor, gods and demi-gods contending with vast swords, color and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory . . . it will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”

–E.M. Forster, Howards End

BEETHOVEN LOOMS LARGE, AS HE ALWAYS has. He is of all composers, a wise critic once wrote, “the one who most insistently tells us that we cannot do without him.” Fortunately, we never have to. Other composers rise and fall in the world’s affection: Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Mahler. Two bodies of work endure: Handel’s Messiah and all of Beethoven. A few weeks ago the Beaux Arts Trio surveyed Beethoven’s bequeathal for piano, violin and cello on three radiant evenings at UCLA. Next week John Eliot Gardiner, his Monteverdi Choir and his period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique transmute Orange County into pure gold with the eternal Nine spread over five evenings that portend fire and magic. To hear the first concert, however, you must forgo a Beethoven program by the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society that includes the astonishing C-sharp Minor String Quartet. All five piano concertos turn up on this summer’s Hollywood Bowl docket. Next season’s Philharmonic schedule lists four symphonies (one of them played by visitors from San Francisco), three concertos and a whole evening of violin sonatas.

His genius endures under many names. No single compositional trick in the entire musical realm casts a longer shadow than the opening of the Beethoven Ninth, that procession of veiled mutterings out of which the substance of the first movement takes shape only gradually. You can’t name a composer in the whole panorama of romanticism who didn’t find some use for Beethoven’s gambit: Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler. Last week the Philharmonic played a work far outside the Beethoven orbit (or so you’d think): the delectable Fifth Symphony of Antonin Dvorák; yet the very opening of the work — a sustained F-major splashing-around that goes nowhere and has a fine time doing so — is a page shamelessly filched from the start of the Beethoven “Pastoral.”

He endures as a press agent’s dream; the Beethoven-as-icon industry is almost as old as the music itself. The gadgetry exists in lavish supply: the Napoleon biz with the “Eroica,” the “fate knocking at the door” biz with the Fifth, the mysteries and ultimate triumph of the Ninth, the deafness, the “immortal beloved” biz, the movies good and rotten. (My favorite: Harry Baur in the organ loft, in Abel Gance’s Beethoven, thundering out the Funeral March from the Opus 26 Piano Sonata while his erstwhile sweetie gets married to someone else down below.) The ultimate PR triumph came around 1940, when the handouts proclaimed that the world’s two supreme cultural inevitabilities, Beethoven and Toscanini, had joined forces under the aegis of the National Broadcasting Co. The music-appreciation racket fed handsomely on clichés and half-truths. The exploitation of mass-produced Beethoven created, in the words of critic Theodor Adorno, “a tendency to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth as if it were a set of quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth.”

His music endures in many shapes. Before 1910, a collector of recorded Beethoven in pursuit of, say, the “Moonlight” Sonata found fulfillment only on a single-sided Victor disc played by Vessella’s Italian Band; now the range of choice fills a full column of teensy type in the latest Schwann. In 1913, Arthur Nikisch, by some distance the most renowned and revered conductor of his time, gathered as many Berlin Philharmonic musicians as could fit in front of an acoustic horn and recorded the first-ever complete Fifth Symphony. (That recording also endures, available on several reprint labels.) Granted, a Schwann column’s worth of “Moonlights,” or two of “Fifths,” smacks of conspicuous consumption; even so, you can spend fascinating hours wandering through the versions, charting the many things that Beethoven’s music has meant to many people over the many years.

TAKE, FOR EXAMPLE, THE OPENING OF the Fifth, just the first phrase up to the sustained G: surely the most famous opening of a symphony ever, with the four-note motif standing in for “fate knocking at the door” (in Beethoven’s words) to “V for Victory” (in Winston Churchill’s). I put the stopwatch to several versions from my own collection; in just this one passage — 20 seconds, out of a movement that lasts nearly eight minutes — the differences were astonishing. Here is John Eliot Gardiner, with his historically informed instrumentation that produces a comparatively light tone, setting the speed record of 16 seconds; yet George Szell, mustering the full symphonic potency of the Cleveland Orchestra, ties that mark. Roy Goodman’s Hanover Band, another “authentic” group, lumbers at a poky 19 seconds, matched by two “modern” ensembles: Bernard Haitink and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and the 1955 performance by Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna. (Karajan revved up somewhat in later performances; his 1990 video clocks in at 17.) Toscanini lopes along at 20. Carlo Maria Giulini’s wonderful Los Angeles performance from 1982 whips by at 18 seconds, while his 1993 La Scala Philharmonic recording slows the pace down to 25. Arthur Nikisch, with the indulgent slowdowns and speedups that define a whole ‘nother era of performance values, demands 27 seconds of our valuable time, but so, half a century later, does Bruno Walter’s much less affected reading.

These figures have to be balanced against other matters, of course: how long you sustain the held E-flat in measure 2, or the held D in measures 4 to 5. Yet the differences among the 86 years of performing the Beethoven Fifth, or even the 59 years since Toscanini’s recording, seem to me the exact counterpart of the infinite and continual variety embedded in this inexplicable music itself. The Beaux Arts series began with Beethoven’s Opus 1 No. 1, music he looked upon as his way of getting his foot in the doorway to Vienna’s musical society: jolly, titillating Biedermeier note spinning. The journey from there to the profound eloquence of the “Archduke” Trio — the final work in the series — or from the jaunty frivolity of the First Symphony to the defiant outcries in the first movement of the Ninth follows arduous roadways over vast expanses. Beethoven struggled to chart these roadways for himself — struggles we can observe in the page after page of frustration and victory in the published sketchbooks. We owe him some struggle of our own to understand where he is taking us, and to sense the glory that awaits us on arrival. “Oh no, not Beethoven again!” the clods among us will intone; yet anyone who arrives with ears properly washed — on five nights at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall next week, or on Thursday nights at the Hollywood Bowl this summer, or at the Music Center come fall — will encounter at least one major surprise per work, however you may think you already know it. That’s part of the magic.