So I've Heard

LAST FRIDAY WAS WALPURGIS EVE, when witches ride and ballerinas glide, a festivity that provides the only justification I can think of for producing Charles Gounod’s Faust. Bill di Donato’s Bel Canto Opera did its usual patch-‘n’-paste job, in the auditorium at Culver City High. (One thing about being a Bel Canto fan: You get to know all the school auditoriums on the Westside.) I like the company, even when they overreach, as they did with Aida at the John Anson Ford last summer; our more expensive company, after all, has become increasingly famous for its underreach.

The opera was given with the traditional cuts: Marguerite at the spinning wheel, her duet with Siebel — no loss. The agonizingly
insipid Walpurgis ballet, alas, was left in and given complete, with dancers bumping one another, dropping bits of costumes, acting out a choreography on the brink of drag parody. The chorus sang the final apotheosis from behind a heavy curtain, and could not be heard. Kay Otani, a company regular, led the undersize but eager orchestra, working in an improvised pit space where the lamps on the players’
music stands shone out into the hall and where Otani himself, not exactly a sylph, blocked the audience’s view from many of the best seats. There was a creditable Faust, Cuban tenor Gabriel Reoyo-Pazos, and a sweet-voiced, extremely pretty Marguerite, Kristin Hammar, both also Bel Canto veterans. There was a voiceless, last-minute-replacement Valentine, a squeaky Siebel, and a Mephisto who sang loud but out of tune. You don’t need to know their names.

The Bel Canto gives the impression of putting on opera for sheer pleasure, and its loyal following has become something of a family over the years. They turned out in pretty good numbers for the Faust, although those numbers did dwindle as the evening wore on. “Wore on,” come to think of it, is exactly the right description for Faust. Never mind; I stayed to the end, and was happy to share in the crowd’s good time.

DOMINICK ARGENTO’S POSTCARD FROM Morocco runs less than half the length of Faust, and delights at least twice as much, as it did at USC a couple of weekends ago. In 1972, when Postcard was first performed — by the Center Opera of Minnesota, which commissioned it — it occasioned huzzahs as an American work, bright, clean, clever and mysterious, full of musical and verbal puns and half-meanings, opera for the folks who do the New York Times Sunday crosswords.

Argento’s 90-minute one-act piece, to John Donahue’s quirky text, escorts a pileup of contrasting characters, assembled in what is described as a “train station in Morocco” but can be anywhere you want, through a layering of musical and verbal gibberish: tunes and quotations from here and there, a smattering of 12-tone, a quick quote from Wagner to test whether you’re still awake. The plot may or may not deal with everyone’s expressed need to see what’s inside everyone else’s luggage. I can’t think of another opera that must be as much fun to stage or perform.

That’s what came over, above all, in David Pfeiffer’s bustling, breathlessly inventive
staging in the modest confines of USC’s Bing Theater, as the opera workshop at USC’s Thornton School of Music untangled the knots quite delightfully. The stage was a glorious clutter to match the score; only a few misplaced slide projections seemed lost in the turmoil. A student cast sang well under Timothy Lindberg’s musical direction; what came across best of all, however, was the interplay, the way people were tuned in to one another as they sang Argento’s sometimes-beautiful, sometimes-nonsensical, always-clever music. After the Workshop’s Marriage of Figaro last season, I promised myself never to miss their work in the future, and the resolve still holds.

THREE OPERAS, THREE BRAVE BUT TOtally unalike attempts to define the beast; you cannot fault Tod Machover for trying. His first opera was an electronic fantasy based on the Philip K. Dick sci-fi classic Valis; his second, Brain Opera, enlisted interaction between the listener and computer gadgetry. Now comes Resurrection, a setting of Leo Tolstoy’s dense, speculative novel on the redemption of souls, calling for — and receiving with remarkable success — musical treatment along traditional Romantic operatic lines. Commissioned and produced by the Houston Grand Opera — its 24th world premiere in the 28 years of David Gockley’s enlightened leadership — the opera almost mitigated Houston’s junglelike climate when I looked in on it last week. “Almost,” I said.

Tolstoy is said to have detested opera as an encumbrance to his words; previous treatments of Resurrection, including a lurid misrepresentation by Franco Alfano that reduces Tolstoy’s moralizings to soap opera, justify his distaste. For the 45-year-old, New York­born Machover, librettists Laura Harrington and Braham Murray have provided a more honorable, literate treatment of Tolstoy’s basically
actionless probing of guilt and salvation. Machover, in turn, has given their words a richly intelligent setting, gritty at times but soaring and intensely lyrical at others, faltering only in some rather gooey final moments as Prince Dmitry Unpronounceable, “resurrected” from his profligate existence, sees Katerina, the woman he had once wronged, achieving her own “resurrection” in a Siberian prison, and walks off alone over Simon Higlett’s eye-dazzling snowscape into lighting designer Chris Parry’s boudoir-pink sunset.

Up to now, Machover’s fame has been fashioned from his electronic inventions as head of musical matters at MIT’s media laboratory — including the interactive “cyber-cello” he built for Yo-Yo Ma. Perhaps his creation of a full-scale opera on a Tolstoy novel — scored for traditional orchestra, with only a smidge of electronic touchup here and there, managing with sure musical insights the novel’s tense, dark emotions — may strike his
cutting-edge confreres as a backsliding. Whatever, it’s a work of genuine originality, remarkably skillful in the vocal writing, its
music imaginatively tinged with a light wash of Mussorgsky here and Prokofiev there. It adds to the paltry store of worthwhile new operas a work of great attractiveness and power.

Houston has again polished its laurels
as a dynamic force in the treacherous realm
of modern opera. Peopled largely with good young singers drawn from the company’s extensive apprenticeship program — including baritone Scott Hendricks and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as the “resurrected” pair, both splendid and promising young singers — under the strong baton of the company’s newly appointed music director Patrick Summers, Resurrection sounds the convincing note of belief that opera just might have a future.

Photo by Susesch BayatCHARLES LINDBERGH’S SOLO FLIGHT across the Atlantic in May 1927 sent the world into a tizzy of adoration. It spawned parades, popular songs, Lucky Lindy Hair Tonic and — not the least — a strange but endearing cantata by Kurt Weill, to a text by Bertolt Brecht. That work, burdened with its bifurcated title Der Lindberghflug-Ozeanflug, had its first-ever local performance two weeks ago, a one-shot production under Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department auspices at San Pedro’s gloriously goofy Art Deco Warner Grand Theater. The evening had its share of mismatches, but at least the music and the venue seemed made for each other.

Curious artwork, curious history. If aviation’s vast horizons seized the public’s imagination at the time, so did the even broader potential of the era’s other great invention, radio. By January 1929, Brecht had completed the text for a grandiose word salad around Lindbergh’s achievement, including words to be sung by Fog, by the City of New York saluting the Lone Eagle overhead, by the plane’s engine. (Such hifalutin fantasies were apparently embedded in the Germanic soul at the time — as witness the singing glacier in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf and the poetry-shrouded mountains in Leni Riefenstahl’s early films.) The work was planned for presentation over German radio, with music jointly composed by Weill and Paul Hindemith; Hermann Scherchen conducted a broadcast, some of which survives on a recording once available on Capriccio. After a so-so initial reception, Hindemith withdrew his
music; Weill completed the work himself, now announcing it as a “Cantata for Schools.” Otto Klemperer led the premiere of the revised score, and Leopold Stokowski gave it its first American hearing — also broadcast — in 1931, in an English translation by George Antheil. In 1950, disturbed by Lindbergh’s political activities in his later years, Brecht revised the text, deleting all mention of the pilot by name and adding an anti-Lindbergh spoken prologue, renaming the work Ozeanflug. In San Pedro the prologue was performed, but the name of Lindbergh still appeared on the projected titles and may, for that matter, have also been sung by the chorus; sharper ears than mine would have had to determine the latter point.

None of this would merit detailing except that a) Weill’s music is wonderful, full of the slash and tension of his Mahagonny score, well worth reviving, and b) the local presentation, which could have offered much, was badly botched. A French vocal ensemble called Soli-Tutti — based, or so the press release raved, close to the very airport where Lindbergh landed — which on its own before intermission had sung Poulenc and Ligeti songs admirably, turned Brecht’s German words into Middle High Urdu. Aside from a clumsy printed synopsis, there was no clue as to text or
action. Wandering spotlights plus a light leak from the brightly lit theater lobby added an overlay of visual confusion. Eventually, the stage was so crowded with wayward choristers that conductor Arthur B. Rubinstein, who led his Symphony of the Glen in what might have been a creditable performance, had no way to signal the music’s end.

I hear that the Cultural Affairs Department has grand plans for the Warner Grand, and that the acoustics are splendid for orchestral concerts. On the first point I am hopeful; on
the second I am so far unconvinced. Surely we need excellent new venues widely scattered, even as the Ambassador Auditorium remains dark. But nothing could kill the whole concept of cultural expansion faster than throwing the doors open to the kind of patched-together, grossly underrehearsed, vaguely defined presentation I endured at the Warner Grand a few days ago.

LEONARD STEIN HAD TURNED PAGES FOR Frances Mullen at one of the first “Evenings on the Roof” concerts, on Peter Yates’ roof, in 1939. Marni Nixon had performed songs of Charles Ives at a “Roof” concert in 1949. The “Roof” concerts became the Monday Evening Concerts; Leonard became — well, Leonard Stein; Marni recorded Webern and Stravinsky with Monday Evening Concert personnel, and was Audrey Hepburn’s voice in “The Rain in Spain.” It was fitting, and also glorious, to have them back at the County Museum doing Ives songs at the first of three concerts celebrating the 60th anniversary of a series that, under
either of its two names, has been one of the most distinguished and longest-lasting explorations into unfamiliar and rewarding music anywhere in the world.

Not everything on the two (of three) concerts I heard was up to that performance or musical level, but that’s always the chance you take when you explore. Two early works by eventual hell-raisers — Pierre Boulez’s 1946 Sonatine for Flute and Piano and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1959 Refrain — didn’t seem to have much to say these days. Schoenberg’s Violin Phantasy and the Bartók Contrasts were somewhat defused by an excess of care from violinist Maiko Kawabata. At the final concert, Gerhard Samuel’s dust-dry 1998 cantata Hyacinth From Apollo offered little nostalgic value and even less music. But at that concert David Sherr played two of Luciano Berio’s Sequenze and Samuel let loose the luminous flames of Anton Webern’s 1928 Symphony — save for the Ives, the oldest music on the three programs; suddenly you could realize that the cause for celebration was not merely a venerable concert series, but music itself.

OBITER DICTA: FOR ME THE GREAT MOment in Martha Argerich’s steaming trajectory through Chopin’s E-minor Piano Concerto was her first entry: the impatience, violently voiced, after the agonizingly long and crudely orchestrated preamble (its length unmitigated by Emmanuel Krivine’s woolly reading with the Philharmonic on the first night). Yes, the nocturnal slow movement passed by on moonbeams; yes, the finale danced enchantingly. But was it really worth the 18-year wait for this one-of-a-kind musician to impose upon us so mealy-mouthed an excuse for a concerto while the masterworks languish for her touch?

I had never paid much attention to Prokofiev’s Cinderella ballet score, regarding it as inferior to his Romeo and Juliet. (But then, what isn’t?) At the Ahmanson, performed by an undersize orchestra but crowned with the captivating originality of Matthew Bourne’s reworking of the old legend, it is magically transformed: music full of enchanting flicker, its great waltz an amazing study of dark shadows against daylight. Any number of ballets make an insignificant score tolerable through great dancing (e.g., Giselle); this new Cinderella makes an insignificant score significant, and that’s a lot harder.

Photo by Ken HowardLAST WEEK’S VISIT BY THE ENSEMBLE Intercontemporain delivered exhilaration and bafflement in equal measure; I don’t think I was the only member of the commendably large crowd at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall to leave the concert wondering what had hit me and where. The playing, by the Paris-based ensemble under the splendid leadership of Santa Monica’s own David Robertson, was extraordinary: every note shaped with lapidary precision, textures balanced and shaped like crystal gleaned from some outer galaxy. Even with an American conductor, and a program including music by an American and a Korean composer, it was all very — how you say — French.

Yes, bafflement. From the program notes I learned that Philippe Hurel’s Six Miniatures en Trompe-l’oeil contained “rhythmic units [with] precise functions, certain of them being sufficiently heterogeneous in and of themselves to be able to be distinguished and nevertheless sufficiently similar to be intermingled.” About Unsuk Chin’s Xi, the annotator informed the eager crowd that “there is a continuous metamorphosis of a certain number of generating cells . . . that remain, however, as unrecognizable as a single atom on the skin of a human being.” What I heard in these works was none of the above: in the Hurel, a clinkety-clank of successive sonorities, intricately shaded and including microtones; in the Unsuk Chin, more of the same but now spread through the hall via an elaborate surround-sound setup. Cast adrift by all that informational overload, could anyone in the audience claim to have experienced the music at all?

Fortunately (for a few of us, at any rate), Robertson and the EIC returned to UCLA the next morning for a two-hour seminar devoted to Hurel, demonstrating the composer’s use of computer technology to explore the harmonic implications of certain notes and their power to generate other notes, along with demonstrations of the heroism involved in playing hard new music. That afternoon, the group went up to CalArts and performed a similar anatomy lesson on another work on the program, the two parts of Pierre Boulez’s Dérive. Anyone lucky enough to attend the sessions certainly came away feeling a lot closer to these works, and to the creative processes behind the glacial, intricate note spinning that we think of as intrinsically French (but which also embraces Elliott Carter, whose recent Clarinet Concerto fit neatly into last week’s program).

But that only accounts for a few dozen enlightened souls, among the millions that the composers Hurel, Boulez, Chin and Carter surely hope will hear their music. The matter here is broader than just the activities of the 23-year-old EIC (which include performances so far of some 1,600 works); it touches on the whole interaction of music and audience, sense and sensitivity. I posed the problem to Robertson at one of the seminars, and his answer was intelligent if narrow: The EIC exists ideally to play its difficult repertory over and over, until people begin to catch an inkling of what the composers want to say — and can then accept or reject on the music’s own terms. (EIC’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of Boulez’s Répons, tingling, space-filling music that the Ensemble played here on a UCLA basketball court in 1986, is fresh at hand.)

Some music asks to be loved: the “Crucifixus” from Bach’s B-minor Mass, Don Giovanni, Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet, maybe a few thousand others. The music at the EIC concert made no such demand. It asked instead for admiration for the precision of wheels going around. Fine and dandy; I loved my Erector Set when I was a kid, and perhaps the exhilaration of last week’s concert reached the same nerve centers.

THE PROPOSITION OFTEN ADVANCED, THAT Mozart’s Don Giovanni is the greatest of all operas, will encounter no opposition from this corner. The further proposition, that the L.A. Opera has finally shaken itself awake in what has been a dismal season, with a performance fully worthy of the music at hand, seems almost too good to be true. But that, too, will encounter no opposition here, or from the large crowd that cheered this latest effort — surely as much with delight as relief — at the Music Center last Wednesday.

Karen Stone’s staging of Jonathan Miller’s production, premiered at the 1990 Florence May Festival and brought to Los Angeles a year later, digs deep into the roots that have made Mozart’s 1787 masterpiece a fertile field for psychological interpreters. From Giovanni’s first entrance, his clothes still askew after his thwarted rape of Donna Anna, to the love-crazed Elvira’s constant tinkering with fetishes and mementos, to the peasant Zerlina placating her miffed suitor Masetto with sweet singing while also loosening his belt, the production gives off a full awareness that babies don’t come from storks. The one flaw in the 1994 revival, the tendency to interrupt the music for long moments of pantomime, has been done away with this time around.

Mozart has always fared well at the L.A. Opera, the more so since the Italian conductor Evelino Pidò has come on the scene. (Then why is there no Mozart scheduled for next season?) Pidò’s Don Giovanni rings true from first notes (those startling D-minor chords ringed in hellfire) to last (the little flick of orchestral stardust after affairs have been set right). His cast proves an altogether superior aggregation: Dwayne Croft’s intense, insinuating Don; Richard Bernstein’s savvy, sardonic Leporello; and the phenomenally vital singing of Jane Eaglen and Sally Wolf as the two heroines undone — probably past their powers of realization — by Don Giovanni’s predations.

Robert Israel’s sets did not accord with everyone’s imagined Don Giovanni at the 1991 premiere: stark, massive, movable architectural units in pervading shades of gray. Duane Schuler’s new lighting, with its startling shifts of shadow for the supernatural moments, is a considerable improvement, especially as it allows the characters, in Israel’s nicely defined costume colors, to stand out against their background.

Above all, there was balance: the splendid equilibrium among the cast and between vocal ensemble and orchestra; the visual balance between what people looked like and what they were up to; the dramatic balance in this most challenging of all operas between searing personal torment and delicious period comedy. Balance, at the L.A. Opera, has been a rare commodity of late; without it, all the beautiful singing in the world won’t bring Mozart to life. It was there this time, and the amazement was something you could almost reach out and touch.

TWO PERFORMANCES OF THE “GREAT” C-MAJOR Symphony; in between, the no-less-great C-minor Sonata: We Schubertians, a noble if embattled breed, had reason to stand tall last week. Great performances of great works reveal new facets, no matter how familiar the works themselves may already seem; they then lead to new ways to think about those works, and about the creative spirits who brought them down to Earth. And even though the past week also afforded one other experience of enormous, unsettling power, it is Schubert who occupies my mind on the Saturday afternoon on which I write.

No other music, composed before or after the C-major Symphony, bears any resemblance to it. Within the broadest outlines of the forms that had served composers well for, let’s say, 75 years, Schubert invented a new music — new in melodic manner, new in its way of respecting (or disrespecting) the classic forms, new in its very sounds. All the program-note writers point to Schubert’s pioneering use of the trombone in this symphony, not to reinforce the downbeats at the big moments (as did Beethoven in his Fifth) but as a soft, mysterious, romantic voice from afar. In the sketches for a final symphony that Schubert worked at on his deathbed — which others have patched together as a putative 10th — there are passages even stranger, moments where four trombones are massed in a kind of funeral oration. What marvels these tantalizing score fragments do portend! But the C-major Symphony offers other innovations: the textures in the string writing, the sonorities of soft brass and strings in the Trio of the Scherzo, and, of course, the cataclysm, the apocalypse, as trombones confronting the full orchestra argue A-flat versus C in the final pages.

It’s not easy to account for any of these wonders flowing, at such lengths and with such exuberance, from the pen of a 28-year-old ailing composer, darling of Viennese hippie society but woefully lacking in friends in higher places. In 1822, at 25, Schubert had composed two movements of another symphony of similar innovative spirit, then laid it aside unfinished; those movements, at least, survive as one of our richest treasures. Schubert surely realized that, given his outsider status, music as daring as his B-minor Symphony, resonant with passions hitherto unknown in musical circles, was doomed to gather dust; of course he was right. We have to marvel, then, at the courage it took, three years later, for Schubert to start the upward climb once again, and this time make it to the top — “top,” that is, in the sense that he finished the work. It still gathered dust for years.

The history of this symphony and the sound of it — at the Music Center last Wednesday, with the Philharmonic and guest conductor Hans Vonk, and at Royce Hall two nights later, with Jeffrey Kahane and his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra finishing out their subscription season — are closely intertwined. You have to take the giddy momentum of that amazing last movement, leading into the flaming torrents of its final measures, as some reflection of Schubert’s own wild enterprise in attempting the work. Musicians in the London Philharmonic are said to have ridiculed this movement on first confrontation, 10 years after Schubert’s death. I giggle too, at its sheer bravado, the message, the massage. Neither Vonk nor Kahane took notice of Schubert’s request to repeat the exposition of this finale, thus adding another four minutes of unbridled hilarity. I accept their wisdom, allowing for the symphony’s 50 or so minutes without repeats, yet . . .

Between the two performances I would be hard-pressed to choose; both gave off accents of love, admiration and — a most necessary ingredient here — patience. Vonk, Netherlands-born and current head of the St. Louis Symphony, led a solid, respectable reading through a thick pall of whooping cough and the Black Death; Kahane’s audience, in the brighter and kinder acoustics of Royce Hall, gave off the impression that they were there to hear the music.

MURRAY PERAHIA’S ROYCE HALL CONCERT, QUITE likely the best piano recital I have ever heard or could ever want to, ended with the great (lower-case, this time) C-minor Sonata, one of the miraculous three from Schubert’s last year. Again, it is the madcap exuberance in the finale that makes the work’s first friends, the onrush, the quick jamming-on of brakes, the sudden excursions into the middle of next week. The quiet, pleading simplicity of the slow movement makes friends more slowly; the fist-shaking opening movement makes no friends at all, but bedazzles us with its defiance, the desperate clinging to life of a doomed spirit with mere weeks to live.

At 52, Perahia has staked out a particular territory on the pianistic landscape that nobody else of his generation can challenge. His repertory is unsullied by the socko warhorses that others ride to glory: the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff concertos, Pictures at an Exhibition, etc. His program here — Bach, Beethoven and Schubert — abounded in heavy thinking, all of it delivered with Perahia’s unique mix of humor and high drama, colored with a command of piano tone full of glints and soft, subtle colors. A finger injury in 1992 put him out of commission for five years; he has returned to performance fully recovered, a deeper, more humane musician. The morning after his recital I went to his master class at UCLA. Four students played; for each he had words first of commendation and then of concern. His concern wasn’t so much with fingers and wrists, but with the essentials of music itself — the harmonies, the momentum, the themes and their permutations — and their role in determining the direction of a piece. What he taught — to one-fingered me and to the budding young virtuosos in the hall — was a way of living in music, and of letting music live with you.

THE WEEK’S OTHER MIRACLE WAS, OF COURSE, Thomas Quasthoff’s half-program with the Chamber Orchestra: Bach’s “Ich habe genug” Cantata and four Mozart arias. The shock in the sight of Quasthoff onstage, his body the victim of Thalidomide, lasts perhaps half a minute; you marvel at his agility, his infectious huge smile, the utter absence of self-consciousness with which he has conducted his career. Then you listen, to that big voice so smooth, so flexible in the service of music’s moods, so utterly pure in its dark beauty. You think: This is the voice for Die Winterreise, and there’s already an RCA recording to prove you’re right. The fogies among us spent the intermission riffling through memories of Hans Hotter, Paul Schoeffler, George London, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, of course, and Hermann Prey. The circumstances around Quasthoff make comparisons difficult, but one impression stands out: In a world where outrageous premiums are placed on differentness — or have we already forgotten David Helfgott? Andrea Bocelli? — Quasthoff comes to us to make music, and he does it right now as well as anyone on the planet.

Photo by Dimo SafariDURING INTERMISSION AT LAST THURSDAY’S Philharmonic concert, the talk in my corner was about long-lost or neglected composers. The concert had begun with Arthur Honegger’s Symphonie Liturgique, which the orchestra had last played in 1949. It was followed this time by Franz Liszt’s First Piano Concerto, but all the poster-color and glitz (including soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s snazzy red socks) didn’t erase the memory of the Honegger — which, by the way, was accorded a decently respectful if indecently loud performance by the orchestra under guest-conductor Antonio Pappano.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but there seemed to be a lot more Honegger in the air a few years ago. Daniel Lewis and the Pasadena Symphony gave a splendid performance of his oratorio Joan of Arc at the Stake in the early 1980s, but the story at the time was that orchestra board members objected to all that modern stuff. Serge Koussevitzky and Charles Münch played his music in Boston; so did Pierre Monteux in San Francisco. These days not many people argue his cause. In Berkeley in my time there was actually a Honegger Society, although I remember that its meetings were more devoted to concocting imprecations against Beethoven than upgrading Honegger. There was a recording on imported 78s of his big choral number The Dance of the Dead, which knocked everybody’s socks off; it had Jean-Louis Barrault howling passages from Ezekiel and the chorus screaming the “Dies Irae” chant. I sold dozens of copies at my record store, and wish I had kept one. (There was a newer recording, on Erato, now discontinued, but it was pretty tame by comparison.)

The Liturgique, which dates from 1946, is an extraordinary work, but it’s easier to say what it isn’t than exactly what it is. Its orchestration leans to deep horns and ecstatic trumpets, but without the vulgarity of the César Franck disciples of the previous generation. Flights of angels pass close overhead, especially in the serene, sublime slow movement, but they don’t fly through the vapors stirred up in Messiaen’s liturgical ecstasies. Above all, you could never mistake this or anything else by Honegger as akin to the glib, easy charm of his fellow members of “Les Six.” He seems to have been the philosopher, the deep thinker of the group. He left a substantial musical legacy, some of it rather fun (like his Pacific 231, a tone-painting of a locomotive), some of it a gorgeous mix of profundity and theatricality (like the aforementioned choral pieces, a setting for a Jean Cocteau reworking of Antigone, and the Liturgique that inspired these thoughts). Along with a few other composers of our time badly in need of present-day champions — Luigi Dallapiccola, say, or Karl Amadeus Hartmann, or the early, pre-Mathis der Maler Hindemith — he certainly doesn’t deserve his current limbo. Overall, last week’s Philharmonic concert wasn’t great; Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony was made into hash. Honegger made the night important.

THE PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY CAME TO TOWN with its new conductor, Mariss Jansons, and with Mahler — the 70 minutes of coitus interruptus that constitutes the Fifth Symphony. The work is surprisingly well-liked; the listing in Schwann is longer than for any other of the Mahler symphonies, even the good ones. I can’t tell a good performance of this work from a bad, except for the separately famous Adagietto, recordings of which range from seven minutes (Bruno Walter and Willem Mengelberg, both educated at Mahler’s knee) to 14 (Georg Solti). I fought off sleep long enough to recognize Jansons’ performance as somewhere in the middle. The orchestra sounded impressively loud, but — as usual with touring orchestras in unfamiliar halls — the brass badly outshouted everybody else all night, even in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, also on the program.

The house was sold out, and the crowd yelled itself hoarse at the end. You have to hand it to Mahler; he knew how to orchestrate an audience better than any other 10 composers you could name. But the crowd had also yelled itself hoarse at the end of Helen Huang’s pallid, tinkly version of the concerto. Is the spectacle of a cute 16-year-old braving the tightrope across Big Bad Beethoven all it takes to bring an audience to its feet these days? And why does an orchestra, even the especially good one that the Pittsburgh now seems to be, travel with such uninspiring luggage? Are there no Pittsburgh composers worth highlighting? No specialties that define Jansons’ musical outlooks?

Oh, well.

THERE ARE NEARLY TWICE AS MANY LISTings in Schwann for Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons as for Mahler’s Fifth, which I take as proof of civilization’s chance for survival. (In 1940, when I started collecting, there were no recordings of either work.) Tafelmusik, the excellent Toronto-based ensemble that performs Vivaldi delectably (and also Haydn), played to a near-capacity house (Royce, this time) not long ago and was properly cheered. Music director Jeanne Lamon’s flexible, willful Vivaldi is not everyone’s. She does tend to stress the music’s astonishing panorama of mood and tempo changes; you can almost smell fresh paint on Vivaldi’s pastoral landscape. A couple of the violinists seemed to be having a bad bow night, only enough to prove their humanness; Vivaldi, too, survived.

Even without visiting ensembles, the local fund of early music seems to thrive; one could hear some kind of music-making almost every night without once descending to Mahler. I’ve missed most of Greg Maldonado’s programs with his Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra this season but promise to make up soon. I’ve gotten to our other local treasure, Michael Eagan’s Musica Angelica, more often, most recently in a vocal program at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church that included some amazing — there’s no other word for it — music by Barbara Strozzi, singer and composer of 17th-century Venice.

“I burn with silent fire,” sings the heroine of one of Strozzi’s long, passionate outcries. The music soars, dips; on “rivers of tears” the vocal line slithers down through chromatic harmonies that raise goose bumps; “tongues that cannot speak” speak in a monotone of repeated notes. One singer — the splendid Samela Aird Beasom — with a couple of plucked instruments to maintain the runway for these flights of fancy: The simplest of music creates the most profound, disturbing emotion. Opera was invented in Strozzi’s time; the power of music like this makes you feel present at the creation.

ASK ANY ORCHESTRAL MANAGER, ANYWHERE IN THE world, and you’ll get the same answer: There is no better way to pave a pathway to financial ruin than by playing new music. The real money flows in to the tunes of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky; substitute the abstruse patterns of Boulez and Carter, and the moneyed flow toward the exit doors.

Still, brave souls dot the landscape, and the true nobles in adventureland pull in fair-sized — if not always well-heeled — crowds. Our own California EAR Unit draws respectable aggregations to its County Museum concerts; the New York New Music Ensemble holds its torch aloft; in Frankfurt, the Ensemble Modern concerts are hot-ticket; so, in Paris, are the programs of extraordinary range by the courageous, much-traveled Ensemble Intercontemporain (henceforth to be noted as EIC), which pays its third visit to the UCLA campus with a concert at Schoenberg Hall on Sunday afternoon.

Out on the podium that afternoon won’t be the formidable Pierre Boulez, the ensemble’s president and chief image-maker, and the name most associated with EIC since its founding in 1976. There’ll be Boulez on the program — the pair of pieces collectively known as Dérive, along with music by Philippe Hurel, Elliott Carter and the Korea-born Unsuk Chin, who had a knockout piece at a “Green Umbrella” concert earlier this season — but the music director will be David Robertson, who has held that post since 1992. And if the name “David Robertson” strikes you as rather un-French for someone leading an ensemble from notoriously xenophobic Paris, that’s understandable; he was born — some 40 years ago — right here in Santa Monica. If your memory goes back to, say, the mid-1970s, you may remember Robertson as a 17-year-old wonderkid assistant conductor in the days when Santa Monica High School had first begun to attract worldwide attention for the excellence of its young orchestra.

Now, however, David Robertson has earned his own worldwide attention and gives phone interviews from his Paris apartment. He starts by explaining why, after his promising start in Santa Monica, he didn’t climb the usual American ladder toward stardom. “Sure, I started on the audition route, and I had a few good chances. But I also got the feeling early on that the American way of breeding top musicians had too much to do with marketing and too little to do with music. Some people take quite readily to all this image-building nonsense. I didn’t.”

Instead, soon after high school, Robertson enrolled at London’s Royal Academy of Music. By 21 he had already begun a substantial career, with a door-opening win at a modest but important Danish conducting competition. In 1984 he began a two-and-a-half-year stint as conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony. By 1987 he was well-established in a circuit of small opera houses, and concert halls just below top level. “The value of Europe for me,” he says, “was the way I could easily get to conduct a lot of different things — concerts, opera, new music, old. Some of this may have been in piddling small towns, but the value for me was far from piddling.”

Much of his early European renown came from his work in opera houses, with a particular leaning toward the grandiose virtuosity of the Italian bel canto — Bellini, Donizetti, early Verdi. “Yes, it’s a long way from Norma to Boulez,” he admits, “but to me the basis of all music is the vocal line, and the way all music moves along some kind of line. I don’t believe in trying to fit a performer’s musical tastes into compartments: early-music specialist, new-music specialist, that sort of thing. Every kind of music has to sing. Every piece of music creates its own language.

“I don’t think in terms of ‘gear-shifting’ in moving from one kind of music to another. I’m more aware of the spaces between the notes, and how each kind of music generates its own dynamic for filling in those spaces. If I conduct early Mozart, I don’t let myself get hung up on matters of ‘authentic’ instruments. It’s hopeless to try to re-create the way Mozart heard his own music, because an audience today can’t listen through Mozart’s ears. It’s much more important to concentrate on what is in the language of each piece, the incision of its rhythms, the roundness of its triplets — that sort of thing.”

Robertson’s career was granted the chance to shift gears almost by accident. “In 1990 I was asked by the French Radio to conduct an opera by Philippe Manoury, an important, upcoming French composer. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Manoury was a protégé of Pierre Boulez, and that Boulez was going to be in the studio audience that night. He was, and a few months later there was a call from Boulez’s secretary, inviting me to come in for a chat. Well, I figured, perhaps he wanted me to guest-conduct a program sometime. Instead, he asked me to become music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, replacing the departing Peter Eötvös, who had held the post since 1979.”

The EIC was created by Michel Guy, then France’s minister of culture, to fulfill Boulez’s vision of an ensemble devoted entirely to performing the music of our own time, the thornier the better. The idea from the start was to create a body of extraordinarily capable soloists who would commit two-thirds of their time to the ensemble without abandoning their solo careers for the other third. (The recent Deutsche Grammophon recording of Luciano Berio’s solo Sequenzas, played mostly by EIC members, spectacularly illustrates the group’s level of performance.)

Robertson has put his own one-third off-time to good use, including Janácek’s Makropoulos Affair for his Metropolitan Opera debut three seasons ago, the world premiere of Berio’s stunning new opera Outis at Milan’s La Scala in October 1996 and Rigoletto at the San Francisco Opera a year later. The present tour with EIC takes him to six college venues — UCLA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Seattle, Buffalo and MIT — with performances and student workshops at each stop. Robertson himself is due back at the Los Angeles Philharmonic next December, in a “hugely difficult” (his own words) program: Ives, Janácek, Lutoslawski and the contemporary Dutch composer Tristan Keuris. Further plans include Robertson’s abandonment of the EIC post in August 2000 to take over what amounts to the musical directorship of the entire city of Lyons — head of its National Orchestra and of the municipal arts center as well.

EIGHT YEARS WORKING IN THE SHADOW OF PIERRE Boulez, beyond doubt music’s most influential shaping figure in the second half of this century: Has that left David Robertson scarred, enriched — or both? “Not at all scarred,” he claims. “From the beginning, my relationship with Pierre took the form of a dialogue. I came to the EIC with my own set of ideas, my own set of styles, different from his and also different from those of Peter Eötvös.

“We have come out of a time when music had formed a more or less homogenous language within well-defined social conventions. Now we have to create new priorities. I like to think back to Jackson Pollock, who never got further into an explanation of his own painting than to say, ‘It works.’ In music, too, we have to experiment, to take chances . . . and to go with whatever works.”

THE ART FOR A RECENT ECM DISC SHOWS a solitary figure on a shadowy, fog-swept landscape, his worldly possessions, including a drum and a trumpet, beside him in loose bundles. The photograph — as is usual with this exceptionally arts-aware record label — is black-and-white, handsomely presented. In another photograph the performers — the Argentinean bandoneónist/composer Dino Saluzzi and Germany’s Rosamunde Quartett — play in what looks like the corner of a small, cramped room. The disc has become an important, much-repeated part of my life since its release a couple of months ago; those foggy blacks and grays of the artwork, and the sense of cramped space about to burst from the intensity of what it contains, seem exactly right for the music. It’s an extraordinary recording — the more so since its composer was just a blank space in my book until it arrived.

Saluzzi was born in 1935 in the province of Salta, came to Buenos Aires, studied his instrument — the 88-note, keyless button-accordion brought to Argentina by German immigrants — with the legendary bandoneónistas, inevitably absorbed the heat and passion of Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo, but moved beyond that to develop a style more beholden to Andean and Indio folk sources. In Europe he was heard by ECM’s Manfred Eicher, who then produced a solo disc, the first in the series Saluzzi calls Kultrum; this new disc is the second.

The confluence of this remarkably gifted musician rooted in Argentinean folk art and a sophisticated, adventurous young German string quartet — whose exploits I have praised before in this space — is one of those meetings of mind beyond explanation. The hour of music that fills this disc moves — hypnotically, slowly for the most part — past many familiar mileposts. Some turns of phrase, harmonized with a rich, late-Romantic urgency, bring to mind moments on the better side of Brahms; there are outcries — passionate, stretched-out flames of melody — that recall the way the Kronos plays Piazzolla. There is no need to keep score of the occasional and obvious borrowings in this music; what inflames my own imagination, after many hearings, is the rhapsodic, original sense of flow. Anyone who complains that new music denies us the emotional closeness to the composer afforded by, say, Mozart and Schubert can learn much from this disc.

IN 1958 LUCIANO BERIO COMPOSED A six-minute piece for solo flute; he called it a Sequenza, having to do with the interaction between the melodic nature of the instrument and the harmonic sequences implied in that nature. Over the next 37 years, Berio followed this first Sequenza with 12 more solos for almost all major instruments, including voice, accordion, harp and guitar — but not yet (dare one hope?) for cello or bass. (The formidable bassist Stefano Scodanibbio has, however, “kidnapped” one or two of the others for his own instrument.) Berio composed his Sequenza III in 1965 for his wife, the late, irreplaceable vocal stylist Cathy Berberian; her recording survives on a Wergo disc. In Sequenza X (composed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Thomas Stevens), a solo trumpet plays into the resonance of an otherwise silent piano with the pedal down. Now Deutsche Grammophon has gathered all 13 Sequenze into one three-disc, imperative album; its value is enhanced in the accompanying booklet by the composer’s moving reflections on his music, and by Edoardo Sanguineti’s elegant, short, poetic invocations to each of the works. The performances are by members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain (whose stint here at UCLA on April 11 you are hereby forbidden to miss) plus a few guests. Eliot Fisk is the guitarist; Teodoro Anzellotti, the accordionist; Luisa Castellani has come as close as mere mortal can to standing in for the absent Cathy.

“Elegant, short, poetic invocations”: My words for Sanguineti’s lovely verses could also apply to Berio’s extraordinary music. (Not all the works are that short, however; Sequenza XII, for bassoon, fills an adventure-packed 18 minutes and 31 seconds.) There is more here than merely a set of etudes; more than just a composer’s explorations into the range of possibility, technical or expressive, within each of the chosen 13 instruments; more than an “Old Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” Even as solos, the works embody a kind of counterpoint: the interplay among the various ways each instrument can be played, their intrinsic array of contrasting personalities. Each of the 13 works, in 13 different ways, seems to turn in on itself, to examine the full implications of “flute-ness” or “viola-ness.” In so doing, the music also seems to escort Berio himself onto center stage. He has always enjoyed that position, from his love song to the joys of the folk song in his A-Ronne to his richly theatrical paean to theatricality in the opera Un Re in Ascolto. He turns 75 next year; I can only hope the world won’t be too busy with the Bach year to give Berio his due.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE OLD EMI recording of Francis Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (André Cluytens conducting, with Denise Duval as the titillating Thérèse) no longer floods my brow with weeping; the new version on Philips is, in a word, merveilleuse. You couldn’t want a bubblier cast: Barbara Bonney as the errant wife who donates her — er — bosom to the feminist cause; Jean-Paul Fouchécourt as the husband who compensates by making his own babies; and — most remarkable, considering his prowess in serious German art songs — Wolfgang Holzmair as the philandering Gendarme. The work — if, by some imponderable twist of fate, you don’t already know — is pure, surrealist champagne. Even more wondrous is the notion that Seiji Ozawa’s conducting (of the Saito Kinen Orchestra) — against all the unhappy thoughts I’ve been harboring about his work in recent years — is bouncy, shapely, thoroughly responsive to the work’s sun-drenched colors. As makeweight the disc contains further delight: Poulenc’s song cycle Le Bal Masqué, again with Holzmair, again led by Ozawa, again delicious.

STRANGE, THESE CONFLUENCES. LAST week was the time of the double bass: Italy’s Stefano Scodanibbio, with Terry Riley, in an off-the-wall Monday Evening Concert at the County Museum; the multiphased Edgar Meyer in a new concerto of his own fashioning with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra a few days later. Add to this the hilarious, unexpected double-bass solo called for midway in the Haydn symphony the Philharmonic had performed the week before — a bull fiddle in a china shop if ever one was — and you have what might be called some remarkable hijinks in the lower depths.

Almost nobody had heard of Scodanibbio when he first turned up at the County Museum a decade or so ago, and so almost nobody came; a concert of nothing but new music for solo double bass does not automatically make for audience bait. Credit LACMA’s Dorrance Stalvey, then and ever since, for his bravado in concert planning in the face of near-zero budgets. Word got around; audiences grew. Scodanibbio was amazing then: an unbridled soul creating a huge range of possible music out of this most unwieldy instrument, and then wandering delightedly among those possibilities to create music fluent and astonishingly varied. I remember a solo concert I helped produce for him in 1993, in the big room at the Ace Gallery that reverberates like the space at Notre Dame; if you weren’t actually in the room you’d swear you were surrounded by half a dozen symphony orchestras in full array. Now that he is established as a major member of the innovative community, with recordings on the adventurous New Albion label, his spell is widely cast, and people come.

Scodanibbio is not, however, merely a fashioner of trick sounds. At last week’s concert he contributed a spellbinding partnership to Riley’s somewhat less awesome improvisation on synthesizer in a work called Orfeo; stopped the crowd’s breathing once again with Tritono, a passionate solo; and then, best of all, used the strings of his instrument as a sinuous, throbbing tabla to Riley’s hypnotic singing and droning tampura in a night raga that nobody wanted to stop. There were problems; it took the museum’s sound engineer most of the evening to master the subtle balances in this fragile, powerful music. The Orfeo had been worked out in an intricate tuning system, with the synthesizer matched to the complex of overtones from each of the bass’ strings; so far so good. What came off the stage, however, was less of that subtlety and more the impression of an unequal matchup between the heroic virtuosity of Scodanibbio’s live performance and the relative ease — and, therefore, seeming triviality — in the similar sounds out of Riley’s synthesizer. I kept thinking Music Minus One. With all these problems, it was still a one-of-a-kind concert, and it drew the right-size crowd.

YOU MIGHT THINK OF EDGAR MEYER AS A two-of-a-kind musician: involved with the small but sturdy “serious” repertory for his instrument as resident bassist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; looser-hanging free soul and crossover hero in such ventures as his Grammy-honored Appalachia Waltz collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor — which, I am driven to confess, I have mostly managed to avoid so far and plan to keep on trying. His 20-minute Double Concerto, in which he participated along with New York Philharmonic cellist Carter Brey and the Chamber Orchestra under Jeffrey Kahane, works up a certain amount of primitive fun, and drew a hearty welcome from a large crowd at Royce Hall. Most of the writing is an ongoing argle-bargle between soloists, sometimes rising to outbursts of ill temper, then subsiding to a more easygoing joshing. The style is a sort of hillbilly with matching socks; there are no tunes to take home, but a lot of gestures that sometimes portend moments of glory that never come. It’s not a critical term much in circulation, but it seemed to me that the piece was what you could call okay.

The composer shoots himself in the foot, however, by claiming kinship with one of music’s truly sublime works of wordless conversation, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola. Conductor Jeffrey Kahane shot him in the other foot as well, by scheduling that very work — with Margaret Batjer and Roland Kato the eloquent conversationalists — ahead of Meyer’s: no contest. Haydn’s Symphony No. 99, in a performance maybe just a shade too up-front, ended the program; what a splendid, happy revival this most worthy composer is enjoying in our midst!

OF THE FIVE-PIANIST CONSORTIUM THAT creates the admirable “Piano Spheres” concerts at Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church, Mark Robson is apparently the resident gadfly, known in the past for such matters as an entire concert of his own original works for left hand. Last week’s concert began well: Mauricio Kagel’s weirdly likable piano etude An Tasten, one of Olivier Messiaen’s wonderfully colored bird pieces and Frederic Rzewski’s extended discourse on the Civil War spiritual “Down by the Riverside” — all of it proof of Robson’s trustworthiness with other people’s music. Then, however, came something truly strange by Robson himself, Initiation, in its world premiere, a revival of that hoary musico-dramatic form known as the “melodrama,” which, in the strict meaning of the term, involves the dangerous combining of music and spoken text. Maybe Isadora Duncan never danced to melodrama, but I always think of her in that connection.

Robson’s hourlong expedition into futility involved a gathering of texts touching on the sad tale of Venus and Adonis, intoned (in English, Spanish, and classic Latin, Greek and Hebrew) alternately by Robson and Lynda Sue Marks-Guarnieri. Candles were lit, gongs and small percussion pieces were struck; at one point, darkness fell (but soon got up again). Around it all was Robson’s meandering, inoffensive but faceless music. The problem wasn’t so much atrociousness as blandness. Isadora would have known what to do.

TARRED WITH THE BRUSH OF “CONSERVAtive,” politicians turn into bogeyman figures suitable for frightening small children. Composers are not so drastically afflicted. Their world may not be mine, but I feel safe there on occasional visits. At Pasadena City College, a small chorus beguiled me most pleasantly with the lavender-and-cream of the bygone Randall Thompson and Ralph Vaughan Williams and their creditable contemporary descendant, the local composer Morten Lauridsen. At the Zipper Auditorium in the new Colburn School downtown, the “serious” doppelgänger of P.D.Q. Bach, who goes by the name of Peter Schickele, came to brimming life in an evening of safely harmonious chamber music. At the Music Center, the Philharmonic’s treasurable program included Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, in which old poetry and not-very-new music come together in a rapturous oneness.

Hail Randall Thompson, most ivied of Ivy League musical gentlemen! All college glee clubs have his Alleluia in their luggage: seven or eight minutes on nothing but the one word, its harmonies the billowing sequences of first-inversion triads (“faux-bourdon” in your appreciation textbook) invented in medieval England and seldom out of earshot since. At Pasadena’s Harbeson Hall, the 29 members of the Donald Brinegar Singers — students, teachers, lawyers, folks — performed the Alleluia out in the room, surrounding the too-small audience. They sang with remarkable purity of tone and pitch, and the effect was bracing and grandiose.

So was the whole program: a parcel of Thompson’s settings of Robert Frost — talk about music matching words! — the Mystical Songs of Vaughan Williams, with Scott Graff as solo baritone, and two sets of Lauridsen songs. Lauridsen teaches at USC; his Lux Aeterna, recorded on RCM by the Master Chorale, made it to a Grammy nomination last month: good, solid choral writing, old musical languages put to new and lively use. On the Brinegar program I liked best of all Lauridsen’s elegant, witty Chansons des Roses of 1993, settings of fragrant Rilke poetry about roses, including thorns.

YOU COULDN’T EASILY CONFUSE THE SERENE elegance of Peter Schickele’s chamber music — now and then rather French in manner, but just as often a kind of quiet, civilized prairie-folksiness — with the riotous but deadly accurate classical send-ups of his P.D.Q. Bach creations, but there are strong resemblances even so. From the chamber music — five quartets so far plus works for piano and solo strings — you recognize a wise, well-schooled creative spirit with an accurate grasp of musical structure, of exactly how long a piece is to run and how it can be made to stop. It is this overarching wisdom, good Juilliard training, plus further study with the likes of Darius Milhaud, that make the P.D.Q. satires succeed on a level above the mere belly laff. He is one of the distinguished few — Anna Russell is another — who can extract the ridiculousness embedded in classical music and still always tell the truth.

Locally the Schickele franchise resides with the Armadillo Quartet — Barry Socher, Steve Scharf, Raymond Tischer and Armen Ksajikian — who perform concerts of his music at least once a year and are the dedicatees of several of the works. Last week’s concert at Zipper drew a large crowd; Schickele officiated, a most welcoming host, and collaborated with Guy Hallman on a couple of piano duets. Most of the music resembled most of the rest of the music, which nobody seemed to mind. The new Fifth String Quartet was subtitled “A Year in the Country,” and that was exactly what it sounded like.

The oldest music at Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonic concert was also the least conservative: Haydn’s Symphony No. 8, the last of his “Morning, Noon and Evening” trilogy, astounding for the many ways the still-neophyte composer kicked apart the musical customs of his time. There were musical phrases of unequal length in asymmetric groupings, sudden rhythmic shifts and unexpected harmonic break-ins, a solo for double bass (!) midway in the minuet, lots of blooie-blooie for the horns. It’s easy to guess what in this marvelously tricky music attracts Salonen, both as composer and as conductor; he leads it well, with all repeats observed and the orchestra pared down to proper size.

A great program all told, in fact. Paul Groves — the superb Tom Rakewell in the 1996 Salonen/Peter Sellars The Rake’s Progress in Paris — sang the Britten with fine regard for words and word-colors; Jerry Folsom’s horn — including the stipulated “natural” second horn with its inevitable woodnotes wild for the opening and close — hit well below the allowable number of blobs on the first night, and came even closer to sublimity on the second. The mingling of words and music in this piece,
set into the star-studded halo of the string
orchestra, is sheer magic. Even if Britten
hadn’t also composed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this Serenade could stand in its place. I envy anyone hearing it for the first time.

At the end came the hourlong torso of Mozart’s unfinished C-minor Mass, wisely delivered without the misguided attempts some have made to fill in missing sections from other Mozart works. Conservative and liberal mingle; Mozart had not yet gone far in his studies of Bach’s contrapuntal mastery, and there are fugal passages in an old-fashioned baroque style that do tend to lumber. (They might not have done so with half the choral forces employed here, and with cleaner diction than the Master Chorale tends to muster.) Of the vocal soloists, Janice Chandler (replacing the ailing Barbara Bonney) sang her “Et incarnatus” as angels might; Suzanne Mentzer’s brutalized “Laudamus te” could have shattered windows in South Pasadena; Groves and Nathan Berg dispatched their brief duties commendably. There is greatness in the work, if sporadic: the grinding, clenching chromaticism of the “Qui tollis,” the warm sunshine of the “Benedictus” and the triumphant C-major trumpeting of the final “Osanna.” Salonen hasn’t given us much Mozart; this was a step forward, passionate and immensely expressive.

LAST WEEK’S “GREEN UMBRELLA” BEGAN and ended rambunctious, deliciously so: Silvestre Revueltas’ Ocho por Radio at the start, John Adams’ Chamber Symphony — inevitably a letdown after the previous week’s triumph but still a hoot — at the end. Midway came Asia-inspired works that illuminated the joys and the dangers of the musical multiplex: Bill Kraft’s garrulous but endearing Encounters XI: The Demise of Suriyodhaya for Carolyn Hove’s English horn and Raynor Carroll’s vast and gorgeous array of gongs and gadgetry; Gerald Levinson’s indescribably awful Time and the Bell . . . for Gloria Cheng-Cochran’s piano and the ensemble under Salonen. I looked up what I had written in January 1995 when Simon Rattle and the Philharmonic imposed Levinson’s Second Symphony upon us: “turgid, derivative, agonizingly overwritten, aimless.” I asked then, and I ask again: Why?

MY NORMAL REACTION TO THE VIOLIN Concerto of Johannes Brahms is one of resigned tolerance. People whose friendship I cherish pretend to like it, therefore I must. In the past year, however, I have had two epiphanies about the work, which have induced the hallucination that the Brahms Violin Concerto is some kind of masterpiece. One came on hearing the recording with Jascha Heifetz, Arturo Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic in the first set of restored broadcasts by that orchestra issued several months ago. The second happened last week at the Music Center when the 18-year-old violinist Hilary Hahn and a last-minute-substitute conductor, Leonid Grin, made common cause to the greater glory of the work and to my delighted ears as well.

There are reasons to develop allergies to the hordes of teen and preteen violinists that seem to be pouring out of the woods. Most arrive carrying their own safety net: the repertory of no-brainer concertos (Sibelius, Wieniawski, Lalo, you name it) that can survive in the realm of dimples and baby fat. But Hilary Hahn — Virginia-born, currently living in Baltimore, product of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, which she entered at the age of 10 — came on with stronger stuff; she stood up to the Brahms Concerto, conquered it, even turned it into music. She had a splendid partner in Leonid Grin, pressed into service when Franz Welser-Möst called in sick for the second year in a row. In one memorable moment (of many), Grin brought in the orchestra at a barely perceptible pianissimo after the first-movement cadenza, then gradually built to the final climax: a radiant, ecstatic effect. Hahn — slender, attractive rather than merely pretty — was wonderful to watch: the give-and-take as she played the eye game with conductor and orchestra, the triumphant thrust as she raised her bow skyward at the end of some particularly juicy phrases.

After enduring the Grammys the night before at the Shrine, observing the chaos surrounding the live production numbers, recoiling at the inanity of perfectly good songs (plus a few clunkers) brutally overarranged for the stay-at-home gee-whizzers, the relative sanity of a Philharmonic concert — even with Brahms — served as a welcome restorative. After 55 years of pounding the classical-music beat, I don’t find myself choking up all that easily, but I admit with no sense of shame that in raising the Brahms Violin Concerto as a mighty monument, Hilary Hahn also stole my heart.

Ukraine-born Leonid Grin currently leads the San Jose Symphony, to that city’s good fortune and, last weekend, to ours as well. Slight of stature, with a facial expression that belies his name, he is all business on the podium, generous of gesture but precise and, I would guess, easy to follow. His program here had been chosen by the absent Welser-Möst and also included the Brahms “Tragic” Overture and the last of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies. Not many conductors can take on the Shostakovich 15th on short notice, but the performance under Grin — even on the first night, with an orchestra he had never conducted before, in an unfamiliar hall — was solid, properly proportioned and beautifully balanced.

The symphony sent the usual number of offended parties toward the exits during its 40-plus minutes. To be sure, it is a hard nut. It dates from 1971; Shostakovich still had three productive years, but this symphony is inevitably regarded as a farewell. Its long, dark stretches of near silence, pierced from time to time by a single instrument, look ahead to passages in the 15th String Quartet of two years later, but they also recall the Sixth Symphony of 1939. Even the quotations from the “Lone Ranger” (i.e., William Tell Overture) theme, which always draw snickers, look back to the finale of the Sixth.

The 15th is by no means a comic work; the clattering small percussion that starts it in high spirits sounds like a death rattle when it returns at the end. Shostakovich apparently composed in waves; this final symphony seems a strange sequel to the violence in Nos. 10­13 and the melancholy of No. 14 — just as the short and jocular Ninth makes for an incongruous successor to Nos. 7 and 8. The 15th will never be popular; its mood swings defy simple explanation. Still, it was worth hearing this once, in what was surely a stronger performance than the erratic Welser-Möst would have offered.

TALK ABOUT MOOD SWINGS . . . THE ANNUal CalArts new-music bash, which filled a busy week at several downtown locations, came festooned with several subtitles: “Musical Explorations,” “Gradual Processes,” “Post Minimalist and Beyond,” “Pre-Post”; didactic elements freely mingled with the communicative process. At a free concert in MOCA’s small Ahmanson Theater, I wasn’t notably communicated to by extended works from electronic pioneers Christian Wolff and David Tudor; I heard the latter’s Neural Network Plus, created for a Merce Cunningham dance, in considerable pain. Both works seemed more like catalogs of possible electronic sounds, with some assembly still required. Kyle Gann’s Custer and Sitting Bull, with texts from the writings of the legendary antagonists and music tuned to what we know about Native American harmonic systems, revealed more convincing values in the electronic realm. And among all the gadgetry, one piece really did take flight: James Tenney’s For Ann (rising), an ascending spiral of synthesized sound, like a flock of eagles taking off into bright sunlight, hypnotic in the same way that Mozart and Beethoven (and, yes, even Brahms) sometimes are.

The lines of communication were fully open when the CalArts New Century Players took over last week’s “Green Umbrella” concert for an evening mostly about delightful ways of drawing new sounds out of traditional instruments. Former CalArts luminary Lois V Vierk sent along her 1991 Timberline, music that I hear mostly as a portrait of a composer’s pleasure in the making of evocative, richly colored sound. Ten players stationed around an open grand piano, playing on the strings with splendidly varied gadgetry, bathed Stephen Scott’s Vikings of the Sunrise in audible radiance. Shaun Naidoo’s skittish Bad Times Coming, which pianist Vicki Ray had performed with tape at a “Piano Spheres” concert last year, returned with Ray and a live ensemble to even greater effect. For a rare instance on the new-music panorama, it was possible to leave the Japan America Theater that night both reassured and entertained.