So I've Heard

THE L.A. OPERA’S CURRENT LA TRAVIATA — its second attempt to scale the expressive heights of Verdi’s irresistible tragedy — is its best production so far this season (five down, two to go), but that, alas, isn’t saying very much. The singing on opening night, barring an occasional wandering from pitch, was the work of intelligent singers giving a glorious score their best shot. On the podium, Gabriele Ferro shaped a well-paced musical realization of a much-loved opera that doesn’t exactly perform itself. Nobody fell down during the ballet. Giovanni Agostinucci’s visuals, co-sponsored by the L.A. and Washington operas and Belgium’s Opéra Royal de Wallonie, were oversize and stifling in the time-honored tradition, as they might have been for a Traviata a century ago. Marta Domingo, wife of L.A. Opera honcho-designate and supertenor Plácido, had promised in a program note that her staging would jerk tears in the old-fashioned way, and she made good on her promise. But . . .

The Violetta, American soprano Carol Vaness, poured out her heartbreak standing, lying supine and at various angles in between. Vaness’ Violetta, beautiful and moving to watch, still left questions she has raised here before, about her suitability for the long Italian vocal line. Barring a few off-pitch notes at the start, her singing was nicely calculated but sadly lacking in the abandon that makes a great Verdian melody into a transfiguration of
human speech. As her errant swain Alfredo, Greg Fedderly seemed somewhat mended vocally from the strain he’d been showing in recent performances. The voice is no longer pretty, as it once was, but he threw quite a resonant tantrum at the end
of the second act. As the elder Germont, Finland’s Jorma Hynninen could have taught both his colleagues how to turn Italian bel canto into audible flame, but apparently didn’t. The choral forces in the opening party scene were of a size to drink Paris dry; they then returned in the bordello scene (a doozy of a shocking-red job that drew some of the evening’s heartiest applause) ready for more.

It was all very familiar, and very dusty. Anyone hoping for a fresh and enlightened approach to Verdi’s fragile masterpiece, a conception blown free of the dust of 145 years of performing practice, was obviously in the wrong opera house. What was even dustier was the decision to honor the ancient practice of cutting the opera to ribbons, dropping major arias (including big numbers in the second act for both Alfredo and Papa Germont) and specified repeats, leaving jolting gaps in the musical fabric. Most houses nowadays open these cuts at least partway, offering one of the two stanzas of the arias here omitted, allowing Verdi more of his say on his own time scale (a model of terse dramatic construction even at full length). The company’s 1992 Traviata, though otherwise wretched, at least offered that one amenity.

No such luck this time, however, in this resolutely old-school Traviata, a probable foretaste of the state of local opera when Plácido Domingo — splendid but aging singer, moderately capable conductor, impresario of qualities yet to be confirmed — assumes his new office next year without giving up his day jobs at the Washington Opera and New York’s Domingo’s Restaurant, and with Marta Domingo prominent in the entourage. (She is slated to stage Puccini’s La Rondine here next season.) Strange, isn’t it, that at a time when so much of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music making manifests a growing enthusiasm for exploring far horizons (see below) — for reaching out toward new ideas, new manners of presentation, new audiences — the most potentially spectacular of our musical institutions backslides into a comfy mom-
and-pop operation. The future of local opera, some would have it, lies firmly in the past.

 

 

OUT OF SILENCE, A SOLO FLUTE BEGAN A sinuous, ecstatic slow melody over the quiet throb of harps and, if I heard right, a guitar. The melody soared, seemingly without end; in empathy with the player, my own breath faltered. Gradually, the Philharmonic — huge forces, including percussion by the dozens, a sampler, and “normal” instruments in vast array — took up the line, which never seemed to stop as it churned to a brutal crescendo. A few from the near-capacity audience made their way toward the exits with the dazed, what-hit-me look we know well from new-music events. Most of the crowd remained, to cheer — 45 or so minutes later — John Adams’ marvelous new work for orchestra, his longest so far and quite possibly his best.

In a pre-performance chat with Esa-Pekka Salonen, Adams admitted that the new piece “behaves like a symphony.” Instead, he has called it Naïve and Sentimental Music, cribbing its title from a Schiller essay on differentiating between instinctive (naive) and the calculating (sentimental) kinds of art. Okay; the pleasure I derived from first hearing did not include any particular effort to match what with what. All three movements work their way toward intense climaxes through powerful gatherings of resources; the slow movement is deeply dark and inward, and the outer movements rattle your bones with the splendor of immense performing forces wondrously deployed. Just the final note — resounding bright and clear from winds and brass that at this last moment have shaken loose from the percussion’s clatter — still rings in my ear as I gather these thoughts. Some of Naïve‘s great wrenching moments bear the imprint of music’s greatest hits; Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring shows up in the distance, a distinguished visitor in meritorious company.

Adams has moved great distances. Gloria Cheng-Cochran played his early piano piece Phrygian Gates here not long ago and has recorded it for Telarc: half an hour or more of a single pulsating surge and, thus, miles removed from the tensile strengths in the melodic lines out of which this new work is woven. To venture upon an orchestral score of that magnitude, when most orchestras pay their lip service to new music with 10-minute soundbites (for which Adams has composed several) smacks of the death wish. Yet this new work, which had its world premiere at the Music Center last weekend, is a four-orchestra co-commission: four orchestras (in Los Angeles, Sydney, Vancouver and Frankfurt) willing to gamble that Adams — not Glass, not Lloyd Webber or McCartney, not Yanni — might be the composer to lend luster to the cause of new music. O brave new world that takes such chances!

Vaness’ Violetta: Void of Verdian va-voom

It was a week of pianists: top-dollar virtuosos at the Music Center, an early-music specialist at a “historic site,” a new-music specialist at the County Museum, brains and brawn with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra at Glendale’s Alex. If the results didn’t fully define the state of piano performance at century’s end, they at least afforded a glimpse of its variety.

Radu Lupu and Evgeny Kissin gave solo recitals at the Music Center. Lupu, a frequent visitor, drew a near-capacity crowd; Kissin, after a five-year absence, sold out the house to the rafters. Their points of origin are far apart: Lupu, the only Van Cliburn Competition gold medalist — after 10 runnings of that quadrennial event — to have actually gone on to a world-class career; Kissin, whose phenomenology includes the even more remarkable fact that he is, and surely will now remain, a competitional virgin. Their recitals here were major events beyond question: Lupu, in a stylistic sweep from the serene elegance of Ravel’s immaculately gorgeous Sonatine to the murk and turbulence of Brahms’ early F-minor Sonata (with a Brahms intermezzo, the single encore, that said far more in three minutes than had the sonata in 45); Kissin in a narrower, safer orbit around his all-Chopin program, with encores that may still be going on.

There was much to enjoy on both nights, and some to deplore. Lupu, with his customary 99 percent finger accuracy, raged demonically through the Brahms, dabbed exquisite glints of color over the Ravel and a Debussy group, tried without complete success to endow the three Gershwin Preludes with similar French accents, and a week later joined Salonen and the Philharmonic in a ravishing disquisition on Beethoven’s C-minor Concerto. Kissin, with his customary 101 percent finger marksmanship, handsomely lit up the glistening surface of the Chopin Preludes, the “Funeral March” Sonata and a gathering of shorties, only occasionally suggesting that there might be more to this music than meets his fingertips. From both pianists I most happily remember the ghostly moments: Lupu in the magical passage with soft drumbeats after the cadenza in the first movement of the Beethoven, Kissin in the windswept final movement of the Chopin sonata.

Neither pianist, however, gave off any sign that they were enjoying my company as much as I was supposed to be enjoying theirs. The reason for preferring live concerts to recordings, after all, is the sense of communion. Radu Lupu pads onto the stage like a grizzly bear aroused too soon from hibernation, scowls at the audience, addresses the music, then scowls some more. Kissin wafts in like a stick figure, achieves a stiff bow with no facial expression, and acquits himself at the 88s with phenomenal technique that, from all appearances, gives him no particular pleasure. Is it too much to ask that a performer, given the prevailing cost of concert tickets, expend a little effort to make an audience feel welcome? My memories of great pianists — the scholarly Schnabel, the exuberant Serkin père, the lordly Rubinstein, the grand lady Myra Hess, even Alfred Brendel with his terminal fidgets — include more than just the notes they played; they include a couple of hours spent in the company of the human beings who produced those notes. Impressive as the notes were at last week’s star-quality recitals, I still had the sense from both performers of automatons acting out recordings. For Kissin, who was hailed not so many years ago as the dazzling young savior of the piano, it is especially distressing to suspect that growth in artistic stature hasn’t kept pace with his awesome fingers.

At the County Museum, the Houston-based pianist Sarah Rothenberg joined Amsterdam’s Schoenberg Quartet in Anton Webern’s cut-down version of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. Two nights later at one of those eye-and-ear-opening “Historic Sites” programs — in the handsome but frigid Blossom Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt — Harvard-based pianist Robert Levin joined the five string players of the New York Philomusica in the cut-down version of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto that Beethoven himself had helped fashion. In both cases the rewrites had been created to render the music portable for some specific occasion. All of Schoenberg’s white-hot scoring for winds and brass had been transferred to the piano; all of Beethoven’s subtle and gleaming wind scoring — the countermelodies for oboe in the first movement, to cite one wondrous instance — had been made gray when handed over to strings. The fact that these versions exist doesn’t strike me as justification for exhuming them as repertory pieces, especially since in both cases the piano parts so overwhelm the strings as to violate any real chamber-music quality. At the County Museum, Rothenberg and the Schoenbergs separately performed Debussy most radiantly: a group of the Piano Préludes and the Opus 10 Quartet. At the Roosevelt, the Philomusica also offered a charming and sadly neglected Mendelssohn string quintet, and the justifiably neglected Clarinet Trio of Brahms, music from the opposite end of the composer’s career from the aforementioned sonata, but no less dreary.

There was nothing at all dreary at the Chamber Orchestra’s concert, which I heard in the repeat performance at the Alex — certainly not the lively, mettlesome playing. Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion started it off, with Jeffrey Kahane and Jon Kimura Parker out front and with Wade Culbreath and Thomas Raney on hardware. At the end came Schumann’s Piano Concerto, a work I have no hesitation in regarding as perfect, with Parker as soloist and Kahane back on his podium. In between there was Zoltán Kodály’s Summer Evening, delectable and negligible. Schumann and Bartók made for an interesting comparison, especially at the end of a week of pianos: the one the apotheosis of the power of the instrument to woo the ear with soft serenading and skittish trickery; the other the clear and sweeping denial of that power, the celebration of piano-as-mechanism, complete with skyrockets.

Photo courtesy Allegro Films

By the same distance that the Elgar Cello Concerto is a better piece of music than the Rach 3, so is Hilary and Jackie a more honorable piece of movie making than Shine. As a teller of truths about music, or as a purveyor of plausible fictions, it far outshines such other cinematic horrors as Immortal Beloved, Amadeus or the consummate awfulness of Ken Russell’s Mahler (which, you might be thrilled to know, has just been reissued on DVD after years of blessed unavailability). It may be true that Emily Watson’s handling of the cello bow doesn’t match the passion of the music she is made out to be playing; what strikes me as more important is that, on her own, she creates a level of passion-driven strangeness of comparable intensity to that of Jacqueline du Pré herself. Her presence intimidates me almost to the same extent that du Pré’s did the one time we met; the two occasions in my life that I have been struck tongue-tied during an interview were with her and with Maria Callas. Furthermore, if you compare Watson’s perform ance technique to such classic ineptitudes as Paul Henreid’s cello in the Bette Davis weeper Deception (badly in need of reissue, by the way) or Robert Taylor’s baton in Song of Russia (in no such need), she comes off as a veritable Yo-Yo Ma of musical probity.

Elgar abides. New York had an Elgar bash a couple of weeks ago conducted by Sir Colin Davis (Elgar/Beethoven, actually, which couldn’t have done Beethoven much harm), and the reviews bordered on the ecstatic. The scraps of sketches for a Third Symphony, which Elgar puttered over in his last days and then left with deathbed orders that they were not to be tinkered with, have now been tinkered with and fabricated into a full-length work, raising questions of morality as well as musical quality. The gadfly Nigel Kennedy has made his second recording of the Violin Concerto, this time with Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Orchestra on EMI, unearthing hitherto unsuspected strengths in the work. And now there’s the movie, and with it reports that the Cello Concerto (which the Emily/Jackie character confronts as though it bore the full and only meaning of life) pushes its way onto the charts to join the curiously diverse company of Hildegard von Bingen and the Rach 3.

Even if the world needed another Elgar symphony, a matter which I will argue, the sow’s ear being passed off as a silk purse under the cop-out full title of The Sketches for Symphony No. 3 Elaborated by Anthony Payne merely inflicts Payne on Elgar’s already shaky reputation. By 1932, Elgar’s composing had been in decline; the Cello Concerto, his last truly rounded-off work, was already 13 years old. Still, the BBC asked for a new orchestral work, and the doddering Elgar set about the task, sketching new material, orchestrating brief bits here and there, taking over music composed for uncompleted projects during the preceding decade. By the time of his death in February 1934, he had assembled a bundle of vestigial starts and stops that, he was wise enough to realize, were beyond salvation. Yet the tinkering, which he had forbidden with just that word, began soon after.

I am no admirer of Elgar’s symphonies: The First starts off with the only music I know that I could qualify as “morose”; the Second is all last week’s Yorkshire pudding. Elgar seemed to need a soloist to light a path through the murk. Nigel Kennedy not only blazes his trail through the nearly hourlong Violin Concerto, he hangs colored lights and streamers along the way. I have always been amused by
the work’s self-indulgence; Kennedy/Rattle have me hearing it as music. The Cello Concerto is all music, the deepest, purest and saddest of his works – a requiem, you might say, for Elgar’s own expressive power, and for a kind of music that nobody could, or would, write again. If the movie at least succeeds in bringing this music into your life, that’s accomplishment enough. There are three du Pré perform ances currently available on CD, plus
another on the Christopher Nupen video documentary, where it is preceded by a wrenching scene with the real Jackie, her body already ravaged by the multiple sclerosis that killed her, coaching a young student in the workings of her own fingers, her own soul, in this music.

That’s why I am appalled by this utterly wrong-headed, if resonantly pub-
licized, attempt to patch a wretched
memento of Elgar’s senility onto a chron ology so nobly ended years before. Some of the music, and all of the gluing and whittling, is by Payne himself. The most interesting product of his endeavor, in fact, is not the NMC disc of Andrew Davis’ performance (with the BBC Symphony) but the companion disc in which Payne, with violin, piano and occasional orchestral excerpts, does an honest job of explaining the nature of the sketches and what he has done to them. The music itself is dreary, its progress through 56 minutes clumsy and unconvincing, but you come away, at least, with some insights into the whole process of silk-pursemanship. What you donlearn, however, is why he bothered.

Can’t wait? The work gets its local premiere on Halloween next, with Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony, at Orange County’s Performing Arts Center.

Those who can’t compose, I read somewhere, write. I refer you to a recent disc on Hyperion, offering no less than Sir Donald Tovey’s one and only venture into the lordly form of the Piano Concerto, a work in A major dating from 1903. If you’ve visited this space very often, you know of my adoration for the Scots Tovey as a writer about music; his Essays in Musical Analysis: Chamber Music (still in print, but abridged) were the catalyst for my abandoning medical studies – which, in truth, had also abandoned me – and entering upon my current nefarious practice. Had I known Sir Donald’s compositional predilections at the time, I might have flinched, but only for a moment. Think back to Sir Edward, and shed a tear that that doughty figure had denied the world a piano concerto; then recoil at the news of the existence of the Next Best Thing, its Elgarian accents depressingly recognizable. Sir Donald’s hilariously ponderous concerto has as its disc mate music by a fellow Scot, a Scottish Concerto in fact, by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, composed – or, more accurately, cobbled together – out of wayward folk-song fragments in 1897. Steven Osborne is the unquestioning pianist; Martin Brabbins leads the BBC Scottish Symphony. Forget the Yorkshire pudding; try a spoonful of last week’s oatmeal.

Photo by Diane AlancraigWithin a few days last week, a fearless listener could have taken in a wildly diverse and mostly wonderful panorama of new-music creativity and ended up the better for the effort. Just as a sample: At the County Museum’s Monday Evening Concert, the Parisii Quartet (from Paris, need I add) played music by the late Italian mystic and composer Giacinto Scelsi that centered entirely around the overtones generated by a single note. On Wednesday’s “Piano Spheres” concert at Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church, the treasurable Gloria Cheng-Cochran introduced a new work by Mark Applebaum that fairly seethed with notes notes notes, with accompanying program notes program notes program notes of comparable plenitude. At Tuesday’s “Green Umbrella” concert at the Japan America Theater, the extra ordinary percussionist Steven Schick played a work by Vinko Globokar that called for no instruments at all except the performer’s own body, banged upon, tapped and tickled in ways that, if described in detail, might resemble a page from the Kama Sutra. It was vastly different from the stageful of gadgetry that the nimble Evelyn Glennie had zoomed around to put over Roberto Sierra’s new percussion concerto, a far less interesting piece, at the Philharmonic the previous weekend. On Sunday, another visiting quartet, the Sine Nomine from Switzerland, made a name for itself at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall with Bartók’s Third Quartet, 71 years old and perennially new.

To hear the Parisii (whose previous appearance here I somehow missed), I had to forgo Peter Serkin’s Music Center piano recital, which also included some alluring new works. Such luxury (or agony) of choice speaks well for the level of musical activity in these parts, while also calling out for some kind of cultural traffic cop. How do I choose, this coming Friday, among the Philharmonic program (with Radu Lupu at the piano and new music by Stephen Hartke), the L.A. Chamber Orchestra (with Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion) and the Orlando Consort singing medieval music at one of the Da Camera Society’s “Historic Sites”?

The Parisii, who belong to that rarefied fellowship of take-no-prisoners new-music evangelists whose ranks also list the Kronos and Arditti, began with Alfred Schnittke’s Third Quartet, which locks its players into intricate argumentation about the past of music and its ongoing relevance. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge is the matter of dispute, along with a passage that could be the cadence formula from a Renaissance motet and something else in rollicking triplets possibly out of one of Mendelssohn’s lower drawers. The Beethoven hurls out its bitter challenge, which must have terrified listeners in the 1820s and still can today; in Schnittke’s hands the fragment from the Grosse Fuge twists and turns, and gradually oozes into the contemporary (1983) harmonic language that Beethoven probably foresaw all along; the result is both funny and wise. The recorded Kronos performance, rough-edged and somewhat boisterous, tells us about the humor of the piece, but I also liked the wisdom in the smoother, more elegant Parisii version.

Their program included the seven brief, atmosphere-laden movements of Henri Dutilleux’s 1976 Ainsi la Nuit, music full of glinty moments, like a rock spangled with gold bits, but also rendered gray at times by the composer’s academicism – updated d’Indy – that some have found ways to admire and I never have. It ended with Witold Lutoslawski’s 1964 String Quartet (so called, but actually the first of two), music from the time of its composer’s experimentation with chance techniques. True, the work leaves certain choices open to the performers. Still, a given audience at a given time is confronted with the performance of that time; questions of fidelity to the score, or stylistic matchups with the music, go thus a-begging. The performance, in any case, was lively, intense and eminently winning. The evening’s magic, however, came in the aforementioned Scelsi’s 1984 Quartet No. 5, his final work, drawing immense expressive power from a throbbing single note restated over six minutes and subjected to infinitesimal microtonal deviations that generate a kind of overtonal haze, an aura amazingly rich.

Under the “Green Umbrella,” UC San Diego’s percussion ensemble red fish blue fish dispensed more of its by-now-familiar delights, a program consisting for the most part of remarkably quiet and charming percussive pieces: Iannis Xenakis’ Okho for three African djembes, rich-toned small-to-medium drums; Erik Griswold’s Strings Attached for snare drums tethered to a central pole, whose connecting ropes formed patterns reminiscent of the old “cat’s cradle” games; and Michael Gordon’s solo piece XY, virtuoso stuff involving the kind of, say, six-against-five rhythmic patterns that you find in Conlon Nancarrow’s pieces for player piano, but here performed live. At the end came Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1964 Mikrophonie, with players wielding heavily microphoned kitchenware items on either side of a huge suspended gong that kept them visually isolated: real noise, sometimes horrendous, John Cage without the smile.

Splendid variety, the glorious Cheng-Cochran concert the next night. Mark Applebaum, now on the faculty at Mississippi State, worked for a time at UC San Diego with Brian Ferneyhough, panjandrum of academic rigidity, so his new work’s title, Disciplines, could have told us what to expect. Fortunately, it didn’t; the work, though garrulous perhaps to a fault, and bearing such internal titles as “Cosmo Drama” and “Outergalactic Discipline,” scampered delightfully. Known for her partiality to the music of Olivier Messiaen – with an excellent disc to back up her championing – Cheng-Cochran included nothing by that composer on her program. She did, however, begin with three works – tidbits by Dane Rudhyar and Peter Lieberson plus Scriabin’s “Black Mass” Sonata – that together seemed to constitute the parts of speech for Messiaen’s own musical language.

The concert’s high point came in Paul Hindemith’s 1922 Suite, music from an era when the composer’s icy, ironic, dry-point manner was given further thrust by his passing fascination with the newfangled American jazz then inundating European sensibilities. This whole edgy, athletic side of Hindemith – embodied also in his second and third quartets and in his Chamber Concerto – goes neglected while revivals of his dense, Brahms-infested
Mathis der Maler pretend to celebrate his
greatness. They don’t.

The Dutchman of legend must fly through tempestuous seas for seven years before he can seek redemption; for a while it has looked as if operatic ambitions hereabouts were similarly doomed. Salvation, however — or a pretty good likeness thereof — came last week, not on the Music Center’s burning deck, whence all hope hath seemingly fled, but from the forces in Costa Mesa’s Opera Pacific, which has ridden out a few storms of its own in recent times but came within a hairbreadth of fulfillment this time out. I am not ready to proclaim that this Flying Dutchman justified the $131 top that the company has now become emboldened to exact (up from last year’s $93), but if you match it penny for penny against the L.A. Opera’s recent $137 worth of Madama Butterfly, you could look on Opera Pacific’s latest offering as the giveaway of the year.

Something about this opera, shortest and most old-fashioned of Wagner’s mature scores, brings out the meddlesome in stage directors. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s much-booed San Francisco production of 1975, still occasionally revived, enclosed the action within a dream of the work’s least important character, the Steersman on sea Captain Daland’s ship. Julie Taymor’s 1995 version for Los Angeles included, among its off-the-wall amenities, a ballet sequence for dress dummies. Keith Warner both designed and staged Opera Pacific’s Dutchman, created originally for the Minnesota Opera. It’s another dream number, this time for the heroine, Daland’s daughter Senta, set apart from her dowdy girlfriends by virtue of a bright-red gown that Armani wouldn’t disown.

Like most ghost stories, Warner’s contrived dramatic overlay does burden the credulity at times. His Senta was already onstage as the overture began, writhing on the floor, reaching out hungrily to the far wall where hung the portrait of the Dutchman of her dreams; she lingered in this trance even though Wagner hadn’t given her a note to sing for another hour. Her dreamboat finally showed up an act and a half later — but soon disappeared. Warner’s stage set, a vast, open space transformable by lights and scrims from a spook-infested shipboard to a folksy seacoast dwelling, heightened the unreality. At one point the floor split apart, and the Dutchman’s ghostly, ghastly sailors rose up in a mighty swirl as if from beneath the ocean floor; you just had to gasp. Nothing of such goose-bump­producing impact has transpired on an opera stage around here for as long as I can remember. Nothing.

Over it all was the surging, spirited musical leadership of John DeMain, newly appointed as Opera Pacific’s artistic director, masterfully dredging up Wagner’s D-minor billows from the depths of an alert if undersize orchestra. The major singers, most of them new to the area, ranged from splendid to wonderful: the immensely dramatic, ebony-voiced Dutchman of Mark Delavan; the smaller-voiced but intelligent Captain Daland of Charles Austin; and the Senta of Jeanne-Michéle Charbonnet, a bit reedy at first but rising to a passionate outpouring during her Act 2 ballad. (Yes, there was an intermission, despite Wagner’s prescribed single-act format; Costa Mesa’s opera-going society isn’t yet ready for a two-and-a-half-hour sitdown. Neither was Los Angeles’ in 1995.) Everything worked: the interaction of the cast; the lusty, brawling choral ensemble; the harrowing expanse of Wagner’s conception.

Founded in 1987 by impresario David DiChiera as the Western outpost of his Detroit and Dayton companies, Opera Pacific has ridden its own rough billows in recent years, with its last director, Patrick Veitch, hardly long enough in office to unpack. After 18 years as music director at the Houston Grand Opera and several guest stints in Costa Mesa, DeMain — buttressed by Martin Hubbard as executive director and Mitchell Krieger as director of operations — implies a new stability for the company uncommon in local operatic circles in recent months. It couldn’t happen to a better conductor, or a more promising opera company.

On paper, last week’s Philharmonic program suggested innovation and adventure. In actuality, it began with a bang but ended in a fizzle. The incendiary mating of Igor Stravinsky, Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen, which trio’s Rake’s Progress had lit skies over Paris in 1996, flared only sporadically in a misguided and poorly realized L’Histoire du Soldat at the Music Center.

It was inevitable, of course, that Sellars would conjure some eccentric vision of this one-of-a-kind folk-theater gloss on the Faust legend dreamed up by Stravinsky and C.F. Ramuz in 1918; his penchant for not leaving well enough alone has produced a legacy dazzling and disturbing. Sellars’ notion has been to relocate the venue of the piece — which the original ——–
AUTHORs never specified anyhow — in the ethnic melting pot of East L.A.; a newly contrived text by Gloria Enedina Alvarez, which flops back and forth from Spanish to hip-Californian, padded with enough cutesy local references to outfit a year’s worth of talk-show monologues, underlines the mix. So, of course, does Stravinsky’s music, which flits nimbly from jazz to tango to baroque chorale to wherever, but the overextended text makes for deadly gaps between musical episodes. Imagine, if you can: Sellars plus Salonen plus Stravinsky adding up to boredom.

Perhaps it will all work when the Philharmonic loads the whole production onto flatbeds to tour the city; on the cluttered Music Center stage it didn’t. Huge painted panels by artist Gronk provided background color, carried off one by one by stagehands through a jungle of cables and other gadgetry to add to the overall sense of aimless busyness. Over on the side, Salonen and his ensemble, done up in garish, touristy shirts, played their music through overexuberant amplification. All three speakers — María Elena Gaitán, who read the much-padded verbiage of the Narrator, Alex Miramontes as the Soldier and Omar Gómez as the Devil of many disguises — tended to mouth their lines. Near the end, Tiana Álvarez did what she could to arouse the drifting-off audience with a sexy solo dance.

Roberto Sierra’s 20-minute percussion concerto, titled With Wood, Metal and Skin, began the program, a Philharmonic co-commission in its world premiere, with the amazing Evelyn Glennie dashing like a demented wraith from one set of big-bang machinery to another: great noise, resistible music. It, too, was done in by its setting; the orchestra, on the flat floor without the usual risers, had to play through the barrage of percussion across the stage front, and came over as audible mush. For the eyes, however, it was by some distance the better part of a mostly unenchanted evening.

Over the past few years I have occasionally been moved to deliver unhappy words about this or that production by our local opera company. Following these occasions, I have often been summoned to lunch by Peter Hemmings, the company’s general director, and invited to eat my words (along with more palatable fare). This season, however, I have yet to be summoned, which suggests that even Hemmings himself has begun to acknowledge that his company has fallen on bad times and, specifically, that the five of eight productions so far this season do scant credit to an organization that aspires to present world-class opera at world-class ticket prices — $137 for the current muddle of a Madama Butterfly revival.

I am not ready, however, to lay the company’s gloomy string of near failures and not-quite successes entirely on Hemmings’ leadership. An opera company, the most glamorous and expensive of any city’s cultural amenities, is run by its board of directors, chosen above all for their proximity to Money; they hire the artistic lead- ership and monitor its ability to keep Money happy. Traditionally, Money is happiest when confronted by stars and by familiar, easy listening. There’s a famous story, probably true, that one of the founding dowagers of the Metropolitan Opera demanded that the company move the Act 1 tenor aria in Aida to later in the opera, since she wasn’t in the habit of arriving on time. In that instance management told Mrs. Moneybags to go climb a tree; I wonder if they’d be so brave today.

Hemmings came to Los Angeles with distinguished credentials: brave operatic explorations — along with the inevitable confrontations with boards — in England, Scotland and Australia. His first seasons here continued in that vein; even the failures — the Berlioz Les Troyens, for one — were at least interesting. Now the company is beset; the Domingo appointment as Hemmings’ successor surprised nobody but still shocked everybody; the talk around town is that that blame lies not with Hemmings but with the descendants of Mrs. Moneybags on the board. Valuable and
capable staff members have come but quickly gone: most recently publicist Elizabeth Connell, marketing director Joan Cumming and, at season’s end, executive director Pat Mitchell. It takes little imagination to envision the current morale among company members — singers and staff alike — still clinging to hopes for the distinctive and adventurous opera company that Los Angeles deserves and, not so long ago, actually had.

The current Madama Butterfly — four times around for this production (as its tatters now clearly show), five times for the opera itself, counting the first year’s attempt — should be gladdening to the Moneybags crowd, if a happy box-office response has
any meaning. As the 15-year-old Butterfly, we have the clearly overripe diva (Yoko Watanabe) whose publicity unabashedly cites over 400 previous performances as Puccini’s hapless heroine; her dream-hero is the comparably well-worn utility tenor (Richard Leech) whose career has afforded him mastery of every shade of fortissimo singing but little else. They move (no, make that stumble) to a clumsy and seemingly directionless restaging by Christopher Harlan. These are the ingredients for the clipped-wing cadaver the company is currently passing off as $137 worth of grand opera.

Mitigating factors? They include the decently well-paced podium leadership of Marco Guidarini — better than that of any previous conductor of the work here — and the usual strong work in supporting roles by the company’s homegrown current or recent “associate artists”: mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán as the servant Suzuki; baritone John Atkins as the well-intentioned Consul Sharpless; and, despite a ludicrous and ill-fitting bald headpiece, Louis Lebherz in a terrific few moments as the implacable Bonze.

Five times, and they still haven’t gotten it right; whatever happened to shame?

There was far better Puccini, and greater pleasure all told, at UCLA this past weekend, as the school’s newly resurgent opera program produced two delicious short comedies: the Gianni Schicchi that rounds off Puccini’s triptych of beautifully crafted one-acters, and Francis Poulenc’s giddy farce Les Mamelles de Tirésias. The Puccini, as Johnny Schicchi, was translated into English and, at no serious loss, set among studio lowlifes and hangers-on in Hollywood circa 1935. The Poulenc, which adorns a surrealist text by Guillaume Apollinaire whose overlay of puns and other wordplay defies translation, was wisely left as is. An attempt was made to link the two works dramatically through some pantomime at the start and a few explanatory lines in the program book: harmless but needless gadgetry.

Bravo all around. This was the third production I’d seen — after The Rake’s Progress and Falstaff — since UCLA revived its opera program with some wise funding from the Maxwell H. Gluck Foundation. William Vendice is its artistic director, certainly the best of the “occasional regular” conductors on Peter Hemmings’ roster; his conducting of both works, in the cramped and acoustically tricky space of the school’s Schoenberg Hall, was both lively and considerate. Dorothy-Jean Lloyd directed the Poulenc as her doctoral project, and led an exceptional young cast through a remarkably close re-creation of the work’s multilevel delirium. Her mentor, Frans Boerlage, formerly at USC, directed the Puccini and created the updated text. The singing in both works — and, above all, the ensemble work — was nicely trained and obviously loving.

There have been times in Los Angeles history when the strongest and most interesting operatic activity took place at schools: Jan Popper at UCLA, Walter Ducloux at USC, later Natalie Limonick and Frans Boerlage. With the gloom ‘n’ doom I sense at the Music Center — and believe me, I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong in that regard — the current level of activity at both schools could be the final refuge for those who cling to the notion of opera as a serious artistic commodity.

Bravo, too, for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s concert last week at Royce Hall. Jeffrey Kahane came up with a couple of small-scale 1940s rarities very much worth attention: Samuel Barber’s prickly Capricorn Concerto — Stravinsky stirred into Bach — and Richard Strauss’ world-weary but pretty Duet-Concertino, one of his sunset works. A parade of orchestra members served as the exceptionally fluent soloists: oboist Allan Vogel, flutist David Shostac and trumpeter David Washburn in the Barber, clarinetist Gary Gray and bassoonist Kenneth Munday in the Strauss, reminders that LACO — as a whole or in its parts — is one of our most valued resources.

At the end there was Ivan Moravec as soloist in Mozart’s D-minor Piano Concerto, wonderfully in tune with the work’s astounding quotient of anger and dark passion, and locked as well into Kahane’s own enlightened view of the work. Over the years I have recoiled at the hype Moravec’s record company, the Connoisseur Society, poured over his career; yet, for the duration of that Mozart concerto last Friday, he very well could have been, as the ads once proclaimed, the world’s greatest pianist.

Between the solemn ritual of Kurt Masur’s Beethoven, with his visiting New York Philharmonic at Royce Hall, and the giddy flamboyance of Junichi Hirokami’s Rachmaninoff, with the local gang at the Music Center, the choice is easy as to which event honored the greater achievement of Western civilization. As to which one afforded me the greater enjoyment, however, that is another story.

Why would anyone dream up the cockeyed idea of reviving Rachmaninoff’s
Third Symphony? The Second is dreary enough, but it at least generated one or two workable tunes for the pop guys. (Eric Carmen, wasn’t it?) The Third is shorter (which is tantamount to reporting that Pismo Beach now has one fewer clam), has no tunes at all, but continually behaves as if it did. I’ve never understood why Rachmaninoff, who lived and died in Beverly Hills, didn’t make it as a movie composer until after his death. There’s a scenario implicit in this Third Symphony — composed in 1936, when Steiner, Korngold et al. were riding high in the studios — which could have become the worst and most profitable movie ever made.

None of this is meant to detract in any way, however, from the sensational triumph scored by Hirokami on the Music Center podium last week. If the work has any use, it can at least serve as a showcase for a virtuoso conductor, and the 40-year-old, approximately 5-foot-0 Hirokami is certainly that. He had knocked my socks off with symphonies of Dvorák and Tchaikovsky at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1996, and I might as well exhume some of my words at that time: “exciting music-making, poised, the energy streaming ferociously . . . superb balance between meticulous orchestral detail and momentum. The left arm sweeping across the orchestra like a gigantic scythe, a nicely choreographed leap now and then (but no more often than now and then) to drive home a salient point.” All that happened again here last week, and it made the matter of the music’s gross inferiority almost beside the point. One gesture I will remember always: the way Hirokami held up his left hand at the end of the slow movement, slowly closing his fist as the music oozed into silence. You can play all the discs in the world on your home stereo, but for moments like that you have to be there. (And why weren’t you? The crowd on Friday night was pathetically small.)

Toru Takemitsu’s Twill by Twilight began the program with its iridescent waves of legato, surging sound composed in memory of Morton Feldman, creator of non-legato plinks, plonks and silences: a Japanese seascape on a Monet canvas, gorgeous whatever the language. Concertmaster Alexander Treger was soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto — rhapsodic, rough, Russian, with orchestral details that I had never before noticed (the sound of strings over a bass drum) brought out in Hirokami’s collaboration.

Any orchestra sounds better in Royce Hall than at the Music Center; that goes some of the distance to explain the ecstasy that engulfed the capacity crowd at UCLA’s handsome auditorium as Kurt Masur led the New Yorkers through hoops and over hurdles. And if these assembled forces had been granted the time, as visiting orchestras never are, to try out the hall’s acoustic singularities — to make the proper adjustments, for example, of how loud loud can be without shattering eardrums out front — their one-night stand among us might have taken on a few musical attributes to enhance the evening’s display of muscle stretching. The musical high-water mark was, in fact, not the two fifth symphonies listed, but the final encore, a wingding version of the old ragtime standard “Good ‘n’ Plenty” by four of the brass players, with Masur beaming approval from the side.

The New York Philharmonic is the country’s most famous orchestra, and its most peculiar. It has never had its own personality, as have the orchestras in Boston or Philadelphia in their glory days. It has always been a kind of machine, superbly functional at various times in its leadership history, wheezy and leaky at others. Under Masur the machine roars and purrs at Mach 4; since it did not do this under his predecessor, the woebegone Zubin, the improvement has made Masur seem like a savior, and a finer interpretive musician than he actually is. I found his Beethoven Fifth merely correct, interesting for its taking a rarely observed repeat in the third movement — as did Pierre Boulez with the orchestra in a 1960s recording about which the less said the better — but nothing much otherwise. And the Shostakovich Fifth under Masur, which both he and his smooth-functioning press machine have proclaimed his superspecialty, lacked the cumulative power that I hear in, for a supreme example, my cherished tape of Kurt Sanderling’s performance with our own Philharmonic from a distant and happy time.

The “Song to the Moon” from Dvorák’s Rusalka was the third of five encores (O generous, benevolent soul!) that sent the enraptured crowd homeward at Renée Fleming’s Music Center recital the previous Wednesday. Last week I noted her singing of this aria as the most beautiful recorded sound of 1998; now we have had it as the most beautiful live sound, beyond possible challenge, of 1999. From any standpoint — beauty of voice, wisdom in its use, charm of stage presence, intelligence and imagination in program planning — Fleming’s first-ever local appearance proclaimed an event as close to perfection as never mind.

Fleming’s recent London disc, Grammy-nominated last week, is properly titled The Beautiful Voice, but “beautiful” doesn’t say it all. What I found most astounding about her recital here was the range of her insights, her uncanny ability to find the exact emotional shading for a key moment — the unhinging of Gretchen’s reason on the word Kuss as she spins out her memories in Schubert’s marvelous song, the slinky insinuations in Duke Ellington’s “Do Nuthin’ Till You Hear From Me,” the woodland mists around a bit of Verlaine’s poetic imagery as conjured in a Debussy song, the whipped-cream and bratwurst in a Richard Strauss banality.

Along with Schubert’s sublime reactions to Goethe’s poetry, Fleming let us smile forgivingly at the same texts set by lesser hands: Glinka’s “Gretchen” and Mendelssohn’s “Suleika.” Throughout the evening she insisted that her pianist, Helen Yorke, share the stage bows out front, rather than the usual mousy nod from the piano bench — an awareness, seldom encountered, of the partnership that the magical repertory of the art song truly entails.

Artwork by Peter Bennett

A year begins, a century ends. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s last 1998 concert included music by Olivier Messiaen, a significant creator and inspirational force of recent decades; it starts this year with music by Toru Takemitsu, another. Last month, the Los Angeles Opera premiered a new American score; later this month, UCLA will put on a concert of ages-old but very new music for drums, only drums. Ends of years – or of centuries or millenniums – are the listmakers’ glory days, the time for summing up in tabular form. And so, like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Lord High Executioner – exalted archetype of paid criticism – I too have got a little list.

I was 16 when music first attacked me. My friend Normy and I were in the 25-cent rush seats, upstairs in Symphony Hall, on a Friday afternoon in 1940; Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony had begun the concert with Gluck and Mozart, full of comforting tunes and harmonies in a familiar language. After intermission, however, I was hurled across a boundary onto a strange and scary landscape. Midway in the first movement of a brand-new symphony (the Fifth) by a composer with a barely pronounceable name (Shostakovich), the man on kettledrums started up a huge bim-bam-boom. A xylophone joined in, maximum hysteria. The piano, for God’s sake – whoever heard of a piano in a symphony? – banged away. All around us elderly matrons pushed their way quickly to the exit doors. (The Boston Herald‘s great satirical cartoonist Francis Dahl noted that one of Boston’s indigenous sounds was the rustle of Grandma Saltoncabot’s black bombazine in the Symphony Hall corridors, beating a hasty exodus from Dr. Koussevitzky’s Shostakovich.)

The first thing I learned about new music was that it survived on a battlefield. The critics – including the Herald‘s Rudolph Elie, who would later hire me as a stringer, my first writing job, at $3 a review – greeted the Shostakovich Fifth with howls of protest. The dissonances and the banging were bad enough, the sentiment ran; what was worse was that the music, to those apprehensive 1940 ears, contained clear evidence of Soviet conspiracies against the American government. Koussevitzky, ever the warrior, immediately rescheduled the Fifth Symphony for a repeat performance later that season. (There are now close to 50 recordings of the Fifth in the latest Schwann catalog. It is easily the best-known symphony composed in this century; people whistle its subversive tunes in the streets.)

That afternoon’s encounter with the music of my own time brought a sense of astonishment that I can still feel; I simply had no idea that people could take the orchestra of Beethoven and Brahms, throw in a few more instruments, and create sounds like this. A few months later came Walt Disney’s Fantasia with its Rite of Spring sequence (hacked to pieces, I learned only later, from Stravinsky’s original score, but thrilling even so): more exhilaration, up to the edge of terror. I’ve never been much for horror movies or roller-coaster rides; the passion for new music I acquired on those two afternoons, and have tried to nurture on the thousands since, satisfies whatever craving along those lines I might otherwise entertain.

Of all the arts, music inspires the greatest fear of the unknown. If a painting or a sculpture offends, you can walk away. Music attacks, grabs hold and imposes its own time frame; try to escape from a live performance of some act of blatant musical innovation, and you risk stepping on toes, both literally and figuratively. A piece of new music sounds new because it does battle with expectations we’ve amassed from listening to other music not as new; therein lies its power. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring aggressed upon its first audience – in Paris, 1913 – with its very first notes; a solo bassoon isn’t supposed to wail like that in its highest register. Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony got in wrong with its first audience right at the start – in Vienna, 1805 – because the C sharp in the eighth bar doesn’t belong in the key of E flat. In the early 1700s, Bach was constantly in hot water with his employers because of his wild and dissonant organ improvisations. In Florence around 1600, Claudio Monteverdi enraged a critic named G.M. Artusi with passionate harmonies that no composer had dared to use before. In all those cases, and thousands more, the passage of time has smoothed the feathers of those first enraged audiences; Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring also gets whistled in the streets.

These offenses all seem to have taken place in the early years of their centuries – by coincidence, or because the chronological upheaval at a century’s turn inspires a certain state of mind. Now we’re there again, and while the computer guys try to figure out how to cope with double-zero dating, the culture guys are having a fine old time with compiling lists: the best, the most favored, the greatest or just the most.

My list is different: 100 pieces of serious musical artwork, arranged in no order other than chronological, that seem to me to define where composers of serious music have tried to take their art in the century now slouching toward the history books; perhaps also to suggest whence and how these creative urges arose back around 1900, and to intimate where music might – repeat, might – be headed in the years 2000-plus. Many entries that strike me as defining I do not personally like. Some things not on the list I like quite a lot, but they belong on someone else’s list. I would rather listen to early Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald or the Stones any day than Elliott Carter (and to Elliott Carter rather than Scriabin). “Serious” music I define as written-down music designed to be heard by non-participating – I almost said “passive,” but that’s wrong – audiences, and with the substance to warrant serious rehearing.

The question arises: By “defining,” am I also implying a prophecy that the music on this list will still be played and respected into the next century and even beyond? I think I am. I must assume, of course, that the performing forces that occasioned this music will survive; in these days, when not only symphony orchestras but whole national economies can fall off the map, that may be a foolhardy assumption. You gotta believe.

Music that embodies the strength to define its own era must also have the strength to outlast that era. There were string quartets, orchestras and opera houses in 1799 and 1899, as there are in 1999; there’s a chance, therefore, that something similar to them will be around in 2099, playing the new music of the day but also music created one, two or three centuries before. There are other imponderables, of course, that sometimes create curious additions to any survivors’ list. If I were compiling this kind of list in 1799, I probably wouldn’t have included the name of Antonio Salieri, yet there he is on the charts today, for well-known reasons beyond his own making. In 1899 I wouldn’t have dreamed of including the symphonies of Joachim Raff, or the piano concertos of Anton Rubinstein, yet some current enthusiasts have exhumed these presumed-dead figures as well. I can’t guarantee that someone in the year 2050 won’t make a movie about, say, George Rochberg or Nikolai Lopatnikoff, and then I will be reviled as a lousy prophet for not including those less-than-defining figures on my list.

To make it look less listlike, I’ve broken the chronology into 25-year, 25-item segments. That works out to be not as arbitrary as it sounds; 1925’s Wozzeck and 1976’s Einstein on the Beach are major milestones, and 1950, plus or minus, works well as the nuptial year of music and technology. I’ve followed each segment with my own take on the music therein: not so much a history of music in the 20th century, but a memoir of my own evolving reactions in the century’s twilight years. I have, after all, been through a fair amount of it myself.

1901–1925

1. DEBUSSY: Pelléas et Mélisande (1902)

2. SATIE: Pieces in the Shape of a Pear (1903)

3. DEBUSSY: La Mer (1905)

4. IVES: Central Park in the Dark (1907)

5. SCRIABIN: Poem of Ecstasy (1908)

6. STRAUSS: Elektra (1908)

7. MAHLER: Symphony No. 9 (1910)

8. STRAVINSKY: Petrouchka (1911)

9. SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 4 (1911)

10. SCHOENBERG: Pierrot Lunaire (1912)

11. STRAVINSKY: The Rite of Spring (1913)

12. COWELL: Advertisement (for Piano) (1914)

13. IVES: Sonata No. 2 (“Concord”) (1915)

14. FALLA: El Sombréro de Tres Picos (1919)

15. VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Symphony No. 2 (“London”) (1920)

16. JANÁCEK: Katya Kabanova (1921)

17. VARÈSE: Amériques (1921)

18. PROKOFIEV: Piano Concerto No. 3 (1921)

19. HINDEMITH: Kammermusik No. 1 (1922)

20. MILHAUD: The Creation of the World (1923)

21. STRAVINSKY: Les Noces (1923)

22. SCHOENBERG: Suite for Piano (1923)

23. GERSHWIN: Rhapsody in Blue (1924)

24. COPLAND: Music for the Theater (1925)

25. BERG: Wozzeck (1925)

No time in recorded history could match the euphoria, the eager curiosity about the future, that gripped the Western world right around 1900. The previous two decades had given the world the telephone, the light bulb, the phonograph, the automobile and, in 1903, the airplane; these were not merely improvements on things already in existence (as the compact disc might seem an improvement on the 78-rpm shellac disc, or the Concorde on the DC-3); they added up to an explosive expansion beyond what had previously been assumed the limits of human possibility. All the arts seemed to draw new energy from the spirit of innovation in the land; in the decade and a half from 1900 to the outbreak of the First World War, the air crackled with the shock of the new.

Some of the newness may have been the logical consequence of the recent past; the whisperings and half-lights of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande clearly stemmed from the impulses that guided Claude Monet’s brush at his lily pond; Gustav Mahler’s last symphony and the first works of Arnold Schoenberg took the agonized harmonic frustrations of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde onto the concert stage. So did Richard Strauss in his blood-drenched Elektra, with more surface glitter and less inner substance. Igor Stravinsky’s first ballet scores were recognizably the work of Rimsky-Korsakov’s star pupil. Yet the spirit of the times seemed to drive the new creators hard and fast. The merely two-year gap between Stravinsky’s Petrouchka and his Rite of Spring yawns wider than the 20 between Beethoven’s “Eroica” and his Ninth. So do the two years between Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and the Pierrot Lunaire of his self-anointed apostle, Arnold Schoenberg.

Jump back a few decades – to 1880, say. The European bourgeoisie prospered; the great cities celebrated their grandiosity by building concert halls and opera houses. Virtuosos flourished – sopranos, pianists, conductors. The old masters held their place – Beethoven, Haydn, Bach in monstrously perverse reorchestrations; just the opening bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that supremely romantic gesture of bringing the music in gradually as if from a distant cloud, became the gambit for dozens of latter-day rip-offs, some successful. It was taken for granted, however, that by far the majority of the concert and operatic fare was to be music hot off the press. The audience eagerly awaited the latest Brahms symphony, the latest Verdi opera. Richard Wagner died in 1883, and the world awaited with bated breath the emergence of his successor, assuming beyond argument that there would be one.

Around 1900, however, the first signs of a schism appeared between “music” and “new music.” Wagner had implanted some of the attitude with his orotund pronouncements about “the music of the future.” By 1900, too, Europe’s great music-publishing houses had caught up with the past, with complete performing editions of practically every major composer, from Bach to Beethoven and on through Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz. Performers could, better than before, think in terms of a “repertory” of past masterpieces; audiences, too, developed a fondness for wallowing in the familiar. The world at large no longer awaited the next symphony by Mahler or the next string quartet by Debussy with the hunger for newness that had driven taste in, say, 1880. Newness had become newer, and therefore more fearsome, than in the good old days. The impact of Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring – and the dozens of similar assaults on the musical status quo – drove the wedge.

Music’s world expanded beyond its traditional French/ German/Italian/Slavic boundaries in these years. Finland’s Jean Sibelius brought his country its first fame, with music rooted in the mainstream past but with at least one splendid work, the bleak, ascetic Fourth Symphony, which does indeed mirror the shrouding fogs of its native soil. Spain’s Manuel de Falla wrote Spanish-tinged music that went past post card prettiness in a dark, edgy and wonderfully witty manner. England’s Ralph Vaughan Williams, though defiantly anchored in his country’s ancient musical styles, at least turned out a repertory of symphonies that did not sound fresh off the boat from Germany, as did those of his countryman Edward Elgar. And the United States, whose handful of respectable 19th-century musicians also composed with heavy German accents, produced its first generation of indigenous crackpot geniuses with the likes of good ol’ boy Charlie Ives, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and the émigré Edgard Varèse, who proclaimed his Americanness with a wildly dissonant piece called Amériques, which had the critics disputing whether it was more descriptive of a zoo or a boiler factory.

The War happened, and then jazz happened, and the timing was just right. Great wars always leave the creative world with the need for a fresh start. In the post-WWII decade, composers would flop around for a time in desperate search of fresh impetus, adopting and rejecting a variety of artistic possibilities; but in 1918 that impetus had come ready-made, or so it seemed: an immensely vibrant language laden with fascinating interconnections to other arts (Cubism, for one), its potential beyond reckoning. Like the music, its very name – jazz – was a hybrid of arguable origin. Almost everybody was hooked at first. Visiting New York, France’s Darius Milhaud raided the shelves of Harlem record shops and returned home to create his “ballet nègre,” The Creation of the World; Germany’s Paul Hindemith blended the kicky new rhythms into his Bach-inspired chamber concertos; Stravinsky tried his hand at a couple of ragtime pieces, both terrible. Paul Whiteman toured Europe with his big, symphonic jazz band and played George Gershwin’s synthetic Rhapsody in Blue to awestruck crowds – lively stuff, even if neither jazz nor symphony. In Paris, another young innovator, Aaron Copland, was urged by his teacher – the legendary Nadia Boulanger, godmother to a generation of American composers – to use music as a way to define himself and his world. He did so by including, in his delicious, lighthearted Music for the Theater, a generous admixture of the newfangled jazz.

Stravinsky’s revolutionary orchestration in The Rite of Spring gave off all kinds of messages about new ways to make musical sounds. Ten years after The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky created Les Noces, depicting a Russian folk wedding, with an orchestra consisting of four pianos and a large battery of percussion; the American George Antheil, in cahoots with the Cubist painter Fernand Léger, did some of the same in his Ballet Mécanique, whose scoring included an airplane propeller. Before either of these, a San Francisco teenager named Henry Cowell astonished audiences with his piano pieces that involved reaching inside the instrument to stroke the strings, or whomping down on the keys with a fist or forearm to produce what he called “tone clusters.” Later, Cowell would become mentor and role model to the most carefree and influential of the century’s innovative spirits, the Los Angeles–born John Cage.

If Arnold Schoenberg had little taste for percussion ensembles or airplane propellers, he had his own visions of musical sounds hitherto unheard. Six months before Stravinsky’s bombshell had gone off in Paris, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire had earned a comparably hostile – if less vociferous – reception in Berlin: music in which a solo voice keened, wailed and whispered poetry about a moonstruck madman, joined by a chamber-music ensemble enhancing the spooky atmosphere with music devoid of any clear sense of harmonic progression or key. Standing aloof from all the jazzy razzmatazz, Schoenberg sought to codify his wholesale revision of traditional musical values with his “method of composition employing all 12 tones,” which he perennially explained as the logical extension of principles reaching back to Bach. His 1923 Suite for Piano, his first “pure” piece employing all 12 tones in strict serial order, did indeed link hands with Bachian models. But it was Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg, in his harrowing, immensely powerful operatic setting of Georg Büchner’s Wozzeck, who proved the expressive potential of the Schoenbergian style, moving in and out of 12-tone writing, also in and out of the Mahlerian shadows, as the moods of the intensely moody story dictated. Just by themselves, The Rite of Spring and Wozzeck were enough to prove that the new century had not lost the ages-old power to produce masterpieces.

1926–1950

26. BARTÓK: Quartet No. 4 (1928)

27. WALTON: Viola Concerto (1929)

28. WEILL: Mahagonny (1929)

29. STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms (1930)

30. VILLA-LOBOS: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1 (1930)

31. CRAWFORD SEEGER: String Quartet (1931)

32. RAVEL: Piano Concerto (1931)

33. WEBERN: Concerto, Opus 24 (1934)

34. THOMSON: Four Saints in Three Acts (1934)

35. GERSHWIN: Porgy and Bess (1935)

36. BERG: Violin Concerto (1935)

37. SCHOENBERG: Quartet No. 4 (1936)

38. McPHEE: Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936)

39. ORFF: Carmina Burana (1936)

40. HARRIS: Symphony No. 3 (1937)

41. SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 5 (1937)

42. PROKOFIEV: Alexander Nevsky (1939)

43. CAGE: Second Construction (1940)

44. MESSIAEN: Quartet for the End of Time (1940)

45. BARTÓK: Concerto for Orchestra (1943)

46. BERNSTEIN: On the Town (1943)

47. BRITTEN: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943)

48. COPLAND: Appalachian Spring (1944)

49. SESSIONS: Symphony No. 2 (1946)

50. BARBER: Knoxville, Summer of 1915 (1947)

In attempting to force any aspect of artistic history into the listmakers’ Procrustean bed, you inevitably end up with a dualism, “then” versus “now.” The musical “then” is a vast, safe area of sure-fire masterpieces, beloved by audiences and by concert managements as well: two centuries, give or take, bounded at the far and near ends respectively by, say, Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos and Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. You wouldn’t mistake one for the other, yet there are aspects they share: They are both entertainments composed for performing forces that are required to exhibit a certain amount of solo virtuosity; their harmonies honor the assumption that listeners like the security of the music being in a specified key; their rhythms can, if you’re so inclined, set your toes to tapping in regular patterns of twos, threes or fours. (There had been music before Bach, of course, and one of the great events of recent decades has been its accession to popularity in something close to its original sounds.) Over the 200 or so years of music’s “then,” the works that best exemplify the ideals of those years were developed in a certain few countries of Central Europe – France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy – plus an occasional outsider from England, Spain or the Slavic lands who, most likely, had studied music within the inner circle.

The crumbling of that tradition which began right after the First World War – the invasion of that inner circle by aliens from (horror!) the United States, by alien styles (jazz, Asian gamelan, Appalachian folk song) and sounds (percussion ensembles, junkyard salvage, silence) – brought about a vast expansion of the means by which a composer might achieve uniqueness of musical language. This in turn meant that the differences among the works composed during music’s “now” tend to be far wider than in any previous century or even two centuries. Not all the aliens, of course, carried the seeds of revolt. Britain’s William Walton and Benjamin Britten, and America’s Samuel Barber, found plenty of new things to say within the old conservative language. One of the first Americans to respond sympathetically to Arnold Schoenberg’s principles, the still-underappreciated Ruth Crawford Seeger (stepmother of folk singer Pete), blended the atonal manner into her own powerful outlooks in her vibrant, intense String Quartet, music which has only now, 67 years later, been accorded worldwide masterpiece status. Stravinsky alone among music’s towering role models never handed down a legacy for others to follow.

With the expansion of sources and resources available to musicians practically from the start of this century, new music maintains its power to intimidate far longer than before. People still flee the concert hall during Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (of 1913!) and probably always will. Béla Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, 70 years old, still strikes me as a very “daring” work, with the needle-sharp pizzicatos of its scherzo and the shiver-inducing nocturnal sounds of its slow movement. So does much other music as it approaches respectable dotage: Crawford Seeger’s Quartet (1931) and Schoenberg’s Quartet No. 4 (1936), with their slow movements that seem suspended in outer space while holding us spellbound here on Earth. So does the searing beauty in the 1935 Violin Concerto of Alban Berg, his last completed work, which – as in his Wozzeck of a decade before – explores the “romantic” potential in the 12-note serial technique. And so, from 1943, does the interplay of deep mystery and sublime wit in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra – the most recent large-scale work on this list to achieve permanent repertory status – music by a composer desperately ill and impoverished, but driven by that indefinable force that makes music happen against all odds.

From my 1999 vantage point, the music of this second quarter is astounding above all for its mix. Jazz continued its inroads into the “classical” world, thus speeding the crumbling of the wall between “serious” and “popular” that the 19th-century bourgeoisie had erected and labored to maintain. Maurice Ravel’s fascination with blues harmonies shone forth in his elegant Piano Concerto. In Berlin, Kurt Weill and the poet Bertolt Brecht stirred their preachments into a pot already aboil with jazz, ragtime and atonality, and produced the sizzling agitprop opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Four years later, Virgil Thomson and the sibylline Gertrude Stein wove their Four Saints in Three Acts out of a much more polite jazz plus hits from a Baptist Sunday-school hymnal. In his 1935 Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin’s attempt to meld a vivid blues style into a grand-opera format was uneasily received at first, and grew to masterpiece stature only slowly. And eight years later, the arrogant, jazzy rhythms of Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town signaled a giant forward step in literary and musical quality for the Broadway show, a breaking down of the wall of snobbery between musical theater and opera.

In the early 1930s, the American Colin McPhee traveled to Bali, and came home to compose music inspired by the rhythmic patterns of the Indonesian gamelan. Brazil’s Heitor Villa-Lobos produced amusing amalgams of his native folk rhythms and the stringent outlines of Bach. Closer to home, Roy Harris proclaimed his symphonies as illustrative of the “hard fastness” of the prairie soul; Aaron Copland succeeded somewhat better with his own fashionings of authentic or contrived “American” tunes in his cowboy ballets Billy the Kid and Rodeo, and the eloquent Appalachian Spring.

All of this happened within the context of an even greater upheaval, one that probably helped shape some of these other changes: the great communications explosion and its impact on the availability of music. By 1930, radio listeners coast-to-coast could hear live broadcasts by the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera; by 1950, they could also watch them on television. In 1926, the process of recording was greatly advanced by the development of electronic technology to supplant the acoustic horn; in 1948, the long-playing record made it possible to survey the realm of masterful and not-so-masterful pieces in remarkable likenesses of the original performances. The spread of broadcasting also established music as an unparalleled political resource. In Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Carl Orff turned medieval German songs into musical poster art to help celebrate his nation’s past; Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union made good use of its composers – the great Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich among them – to spread the communist word, and came down hard on them when they strayed in the direction of originality.

In previous centuries, the construction of the first public concert halls and grand-opera houses, offering accessibility to an ever broadening social spectrum of consumers, had greatly influenced the development of grander, noisier and more flamboyant music. In our own century, the infinitely greater expansion of access through recordings and broadcasts seems to be having the same effect, infinitely magnified.

1951–1975

51. STRAVINSKY: The Rake’s Progress (1951)

52. CARTER: Quartet No. 1 (1951)

53. CAGE: 4’33” (1952)

54. BOULEZ: Le Marteau sans Maître (1954)

55. BRITTEN: The Turn of the Screw (1954)

56. STOCKHAUSEN: Gesang der Jünglinge (1956)

57. STRAVINSKY: Agon (1957)

58. COPLAND: Piano Fantasy (1957)

59. HENZE: Kammermusik (1958)

60. SHOSTAKOVICH: Quartet No. 8 (1960)

61. PENDERECKI: Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960)

62. RILEY: In C (1964)

63. BABBITT: Philomel (1964)

64. XENAKIS: Eonta (1964)

65. LIGETI: Requiem (1965)

66. PARTCH: Delusion of the Fury (1966)

67. REICH: Come Out (1966)

68. SCHNITTKE: Violin Concerto No. 2 (1966)

69. SUBOTNICK: Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)

70. NANCARROW: Studies for Player Piano (1968)

71. STOCKHAUSEN: Kurzwellen (1968)

72. BERIO: Sinfonia (1969)

73. CRUMB: Ancient Voices of Children (1970)

74. LUTOSLAWSKI: Symphony No. 3 (1973)

75. HARRISON: Suite for Violin and American Gamelan (1973)

To John Cage, composing music meant redefining music. One of his first teachers, Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA, tried to stanch his creative juices by telling him that he was more an inventor than a composer; Cage took it as a compliment. He invented the notion of creating music by pounding on resonant junkyard objects, by “preparing” a piano (i.e., imposing bits of hardware among the strings) to alter its tone quality, by allowing four minutes and 33 seconds’ worth of the ambient room noise around a silent performer seated at a piano to stand for the entirety of a titled piece. In 1951, Cage established the Project for Magnetic Tape in New York, encouraging composers to create music out of taped sounds collected the world over. Magnetic tape had been invented in Germany in the 1930s. By the 1950s, armed with electronic sound-producing and sound-processing equipment – and, not many years later, reinforced with the ancillary marvels of computer technology – a composer could state with justification that the previous two millennia of music represented only the base of the mountain of possibilities.

Actually, there had been some attempt to redefine the very sound of music long before Cage. As early as 1914, the Futurist poet/painter/composer Luigi Russolo had built massive room-filling machines to produce an array of harsh, mechanized cacophony that he and his Italian cohorts had proclaimed “the music of the future”; unfortunately, Russolo’s machines and most of his musical sketches were destroyed during World War II. After that war, several composers in France – Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer and, for a time, the young Pierre Boulez – had used the recently invented tape recorders to process natural sounds, overlaid upon themselves or otherwise transformed into the designs of what came to be called “musique concrète.” These experiments would soon be supplanted, however, by the broader potential in the range of sounds produced by electronic means and processed by computer.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of music’s most ardent redefiners, used the vast electronic mainframe facilities of West German Radio at Cologne to produce his Gesang der Jünglinge, a work of symphonic proportions constructed entirely out of synthesized sounds plus the processed voice of a boy soprano. The Hungarian expatriate György Ligeti worked at Cologne for a time, and then succeeded in duplicating some of tape music’s marvelously atmospheric sounds with live performers. Some of the ethereal swooshing in Ligeti’s spellbinding Requiem found its way into Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it underscored the spaceship’s journey to Jupiter through psychedelic space.

In California, young composers – among them Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley – worked at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, blending poetry, visual art and electronically produced sounds into a unique multimedia art. Their guru was the Michigan-born Robert Erickson, whose own music often included natural sounds (waves pounding the coast, a brooklet in the Sierra) blended with instruments.

A building-filling electronic installation set up in New York, funded by Columbia, Princeton and the Bell Laboratories, attracted hordes of composers young and old, including the venerable 12-tone evangelist Milton Babbitt, whose immensely appealing 1964 Philomel used synthesized sounds to describe the maiden of legend transformed into a nightingale. Not many years later, Subotnick used a synthesizer no larger than a dining-room tabletop, designed by Donald Buchla, to compose his Silver Apples of the Moon. Electronic gadgetry shrank in size (and in price) as its versatility expanded. Subotnick would soon move on to CalArts and develop one of the pioneer college-run electronic-music curricula.

Whether inspired by John Cage’s libertarian proclamations or off on their own, composers in these years seemed hell-bent on expanding music’s boundaries. Freedom rang; to LaMonte Young, a proper musical experience might consist of watching a violin burn in an East Village loft, or enduring a single tone sustained for two weeks. Stockhausen, not long after the implicit rigidity of his electronic pieces, turned 180 degrees to invoke principles of chance in his “happenings,” quasi-theatrical events to bear out the Cageian dictum that “Everything we do is music”; Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen had live musicians improvising on the spot to whatever happened to be emerging from a shortwave radio at the time of performance. In San Francisco, Terry Riley dreamed up a trance-inducing piece called In C in which any number of performers played a series of short fragments at any speed and at any length; a performance might last 20 minutes or three hours. Steve Reich concocted an extended piece in which a short spoken phrase, “come out to show them,” was repeated on multiple tape loops, with the tracks gradually oozing out of phase to create an enormous onslaught of sound. A new word, minimalism (borrowed, like so much of music’s vocabulary, from the visual arts), stood for their kind of music: maximum impact created out of a minimum of material, gradually changing.

Wherever you tuned in, there were new sounds. Greece’s Iannis Xenakis, renowned both as a composer and as a disciple of the great architect Le Corbusier, devised music that did, indeed, seem in its undulations to suggest physical structures – proving Goethe’s famous dictum that architecture is frozen music. Lou Harrison – like Cage a onetime Schoenberg student – flooded his music with the bright jangle of the Indonesian gamelan. Conlon Nancarrow, an American expatriate working in Mexico, composed music for player piano, punching out the paper rolls by hand and thus creating rhythmic complexities beyond the reach of any ordinary pianist. George Crumb’s haunting Ancient Voices of Children (based on García Lorca’s poetry) used small, tuned stones as part of its “orchestra.” Crumb’s Black Angels, written in 1970 as a Vietnam protest, subjected a string quartet to violent overamplification – grinding, gnashing, intensely disturbing – to send its outcry skyward. The self-taught hobo-turned-composer Harry Partch devised fantastic, colorful pieces that employed scales of 43 tones (instead of the “normal” 12), and built his own fantastic, colorful instruments to play them. Luciano Berio’s exhilarating Sinfonia included one movement in which a group of actors declaimed selections from various activist writings while the orchestra performed a collage compiled from familiar symphonic works of the past.

It was a time, too, of striking contradictions. Cage and his disciples proclaimed the notion of “anything goes.” The element of randomness motivated others as well, notably Poland’s Witold Lutoslawski, whose Second and Third symphonies contained episodes that freed the players in certain passages to improvise (within a stipulated time frame). In sharp contrast, the young Frenchman Pierre Boulez had re-examined the Schoenbergian principles of strict 12-note organization and discovered that Schoenberg’s disciple Anton Webern had taken the notion of strict serial organization into matters of tone color and rhythm. Boulez earned his early fame with Le Marteau sans Maître: poetry by René Char intoned by a soprano with a chamber ensemble (a conscious tribute to Schoenberg’s seminal Pierrot Lunaire), remarkable also for the way recurrences and structural details in both words and music are rigidly worked out as a kind of audible mathematics. Boulez would go on to found his famous Parisian Institute for Acoustic/ Musical Research and Coordination (IRCAM), a hotbed for experimentation in the ways the computer, the live musician and electronically generated sound might join in this whole redefinition process.

Some, however, continued to nurture the old ways. Benjamin Britten’s powerful if small-scale operas, including a harrowing setting of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, sustained faith in the supremacy of the lyric stage. Deeply distressed by his first view of war-ravaged Dresden, Shostakovich – for whom the death of Joseph Stalin was an act of liberation – produced in his Eighth String Quartet a transfixing personal statement. Its mood was echoed, surely not entirely by coincidence, in the glistening, convoluted writing for full string orchestra in Krzysztof Penderecki’s wrenching Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, composed in the same year. Igor Stravinsky, who for most of his life had stood as a kind of antithesis to Schoenberg’s atonality, began after Schoenberg’s death to incorporate some of that methodology into his own work, notably the ballet Agon, arguably his last masterpiece. Even Aaron Copland, his fame secured by his “cowboy” ballets, tried his hand at a more abstract style in his 1957 Piano Fantasy. His Connotations was composed in 1962 for the opening offerings at Philharmonic Hall, the first component of New York’s Lincoln Center. The music drew far more critical admiration than the building.

1976–2000

76. GLASS/WILSON: Einstein on the Beach (1976)

77. REICH: Music for 18 Musicians (1976)

78. GÓRECKI: Symphony No. 3 (1976)

79. ERICKSON: Night Music (1978)

80. SONDHEIM: Sweeney Todd (1979)

81. UNG: Khse Buon (solo cello) (1980)

82. GUBAIDULINA: Offertorium (1980)

83. KURTÁG: Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova (1980)

84. RILEY: Cadenza on the Night Plain (1981)

85. HARBISON: Mirabai Songs (1982)

86. MESSIAEN: Saint François d’Assise (1983)

87. CARTER: Triple Duo (1983)

88. PART: Frtres (1980, revised 1983)

89. TAKEMITSU: riverrun (1984)

90. FELDMAN: For Philip Guston (1984)

91. BIRTWISTLE: Secret Theater (1984)

92. LIGETI: Etudes (1985)

93. LINDBERG: Kraft (1985)

94. SCHNITTKE: Viola Concerto (1985)

95. ADAMS: Nixon in China (1987)

96. CAGE: Fourteen (1990)

97. KANCHELI: Midday Prayers (1991)

98. KNUSSEN: Horn Concerto (1994)

99. TAN: Ghost Opera (1994)

100. SALONEN: L.A. Variations (1997)

The most obvious thing to be said about music in the last 100 years is that there isn’t just one thing to be said. The sonata tradition continues, grown dense with newly devised structural complexity from the Americans Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, and Britain’s Harrison Birtwistle and Oliver Knussen (who of all this group at least holds on to a sense of humor). German opera pretty much died out after Richard Strauss, but Olivier Messiaen’s spacious (if ponderous) 1983 Saint Francis couldn’t have been written if Wagner’s Parsifal hadn’t paved its way. Comic opera has spawned Broadway theater, a populous and populist brood written purely for money, but also with an occasional stage piece – Stephen Sondheim’s works, culminating in his Sweeney Todd; Leonard Bernstein’s output from On the Town to West Side Story – that suggests that artistic quality and box-office success can sometimes coexist. The collaboration of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev, in their Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, might have presaged a future for the epic-nationalist style that Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov had spawned 80 years before, but this has not yet happened. When Hitler’s proscription drove Germany’s leading composers to seek refuge in other countries, some came west with hopes of creating a new kind of musical drama – modeled, perhaps, after Wagnerdream of a “total artwork” – hand-in-hand with the film industry. The composers who succeeded best, however, were the ones who could scale their ambition down to fit the straitjacket of the Hollywood soundtrack.

The traditions held fast, but the impact of Einstein on the Beach was in its complete disassociation from any kind of musical past. Philip Glass had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; more to the point, he had traveled extensively through the music of other worlds – India, North Africa, Central Asia – and absorbed the ways of making music out of stillness and repetition instead of sonata forms and 12-tone rows. With the poet/director/designer Robert Wilson, Glass evolved an allegory about the space age and the atomic threat, with the iconic figure of Albert Einstein (playing the violin but not speaking) as the generative force. Dance, chant (sometimes just strings of numbers repeated, repeated) and lighting effects blended into an uninterrupted five-hour musical trance. Unlike Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring of 63 years before, Einstein hasn’t exactly become a repertory item; its physical proportions are too daunting. Like the Rite, however, it was like nothing that had come before.

Minimalism didn’t last very long in its pure state (with Terry Riley’s In C as its paradigm). Steve Reich, who had once played in the Philip Glass Ensemble, created one other minimalist masterpiece, the hourlong Music for 18 Musicians. John Adams’ early Shaker Loops and his stunning piano piece Phrygian Gates also belong on that list. Glass found it profitable to remain anchored in his old methods, but both Reich and Adams moved on, Reich most recently to multimedia dramatic works incorporating music and video, and Adams via the astounding “newsreel” opera Nixon in China and in a large legacy of orchestral works as often-played as anyone’s new serious music these days.

The musical buffet is well-stocked at century’s end. Over here there is the curious mix of the so-called “holy minimalists,” Estonia’s Arvo Pärt and Poland’s Henryk Górecki, with music that looks far back into history and tries to reconcile the pre-tonal harmonies of the Middle Ages with a contemporary awareness, both the 11-minute Frtres of Pärt and the nearly hourlong Third Symphony of Górecki spinning their webs of enchantment by obsessive reiteration of austere, ancient-sounding harmonies. Over there is the growing influence of the Pacific Rim, with China’s Tan Dun and Chen Yi, Cambodia’s Chinary Ung and Japan’s Toru Takemitsu casting their shadows over their eager American admirers Lou Harrison and Terry Riley. Among us also, the smiling countenance of John Cage encourages all comers to continue to dare, to question; his old friend and disciple Morton Feldman hands off his four- and six-hour concoctions of few notes and many silences, and rewards our patience. An extraordinary generation of Russians – Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and the Georgian Giya Kancheli – bursting out of captivity after the end of Soviet artistic repression, writes symphonies, quartets and operas that pour into these venerable molds music of extraordinary vitality that, once again, sounds like nothing else in this wide musical world.

I was attracted to California, 20 years ago come September, by the new-music scene here: the electronic music at CalArts and Stanford; the mix of acoustic instrumental virtuosity and natural sounds at UC San Diego as taught by Robert Erickson (whose Night Music is one of only two works on my “100” list unavailable on disc); the Monday Evening Concerts at the County Museum, with their tradition reaching back to 1939; the Ojai Festival, with its unlikely mix of Pierre Boulez’s music in a rural setting; the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s ongoing service to new music, more ardent than the work of any other American orchestra I know, via the “Green Umbrella” concerts and similar projects. With the noble music patrons Betty Freeman and Judith Rosen, I helped produce in-home concerts of new music, which allowed me to shake hands with György Ligeti, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Morty Feldman . . . you name ’em.

That all actually happened during my second California incarnation. In the first, I studied music at UC Berkeley during the days of Roger Sessions and Ernest Bloch, and with Darius Milhaud a few miles away at Mills College. I helped start KPFA, the first-ever venture into public radio. We put Harry Partch’s music on the air, and when the rapturous phone calls came in after a live studio performance of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (music still terra incognita in 1949), we simply had the players repeat the performance on the spot.

A few other memories: Shaking hands with Bartók in Boston after the world premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra. My first hearing of Mahler’s Ninth, conducted by Bruno Walter in Carnegie Hall (and a revelatory later performance conducted in Los Angeles by Carlo Maria Giulini). Pushing my car with its dead fuel pump into an illegal parking space in order to get to the Metropolitan Opera House for the premiere of Einstein on the Beach (and finding it neither towed nor ticketed five hours later). Discovering for the first time the music of Schnittke and Gubaidulina, on tape in a Soviet information office in Boston. Sitting for four hours on a chair carved out of stone at the Ace Gallery, transfixed by Morty Feldman’s For Philip Guston. The ovation after Esa-Pekka Salonen’s L.A. Variations at the Music Center.

I’m not a composer – the world isn’t ready – but I’ve spent most of my life close to creative people, and I think some of their sweat has rubbed off. I know that if I go to a new-music concert in Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York, I’ll run into lots of old friends; when I went to a Kathleen Battle recital at UCLA a few weeks ago, I ran into nobody. Among living composers, I listen to György Ligeti’s music with the greatest pleasure. I found Salonen’s 1997 L.A. Variations – the other as-yet-unrecorded work on my list – enormously appealing and reassuring: complex, sometimes even gritty, music that has the same sense of confident propulsion that I hear in Ligeti.

All but five among this final 25 are still active, including the 90-year-old Elliott Carter. If there were room for No. 101 in this list, it would surely be some brand-new work by the immensely talented young Brit Thomas Adès, still in his 20s, whose opera Powder Her Face is currently making the rounds. Rather than defining the century now slouching to its end, his success so far stakes out the solid ground on which to plant our hopes for the future. Onward!

One hundred entries is actually a paltry list to represent the achievements of this or any other musical century. Even so, let’s boil it down even further to an indispensable 10-plus-10, which you will accept only with the promise to move further afield on your own.

List No. 1: The Absolutes

1. MAHLER: Symphony No. 9. Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Chicago Symphony (Deutsche Grammophon)

2. STRAVINSKY: The Rite of Spring. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra (Sony)

3. BERG: Violin Concerto. Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin, with James Levine conducting the Chicago Symphony (Deutsche Grammophon)

4. BARTÓK: Concerto for Orchestra. Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony (RCA)

5. COPLAND: Appalachian Spring, complete ballet. Aaron Copland conducting the Boston Symphony (RCA). Original version for chamber orchestra. Hugh Wolff conducting the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (Teldec)

6. SHOSTAKOVICH: String Quartet No. 8, Kronos Quartet (Elektra/Nonesuch). Version for string orchestra (“Chamber Symphony”). Mariss Jansons conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (EMI Classics)

7. LIGETI: Requiem. Michael Gielen conducting the Hessian Radio Symphony and Chorus (Teldec). N.B.: Salonen has also recorded this work for Sony; when it’s to be released is anyone’s guess.

8. BERIO: Sinfonia. Riccardo Chailly conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (London)

9. REICH: Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich and Musicians (Elektra/Nonesuch). An earlier version, also by Reich and Musicians, is available on ECM New Series, but the newer one is better.

10. GLASS/WILSON: Einstein on the Beach. Greg Fulkerson (violin) and the Philip Glass Ensemble (Elektra/Nonesuch; an earlier version by the Glass Ensemble, on Sony, is severely cut.)

List No. 2: The Almost-Absolutes

11. IVES: Piano Sonata No. 2 (“Concord”). Gilbert Kalish (Elektra/Nonesuch)

12. BERG: Wozzeck. Claudio Abbado conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, with Franz Grundheber and Hildegarde Behrens (Deutsche Grammophon; also available on video)

13. CRAWFORD SEEGER: String Quartet. Arditti Quartet (Grama vision)

14. SCHOENBERG: Quartet No. 4. Arditti Quartet (Disques Montaigne)

15. CARTER: Quartet No. 2. Juilliard Quartet (Sony)

16. CRUMB: Ancient Voices of Children. Arthur Weisberg conducting an ensemble, with Jan de Gaetani, soprano (Elektra/ Nonesuch)

17. SONDHEIM: Sweeney Todd. Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou (RCA, also available on video with Lansbury and George Hearn)

18. FELDMAN: For Philip Guston. California EAR Unit (Bridge)

19. SCHNITTKE: Viola Concerto. Kim Kashkashian, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony (ECM New Series)

20. CAGE: Fourteen. Stephen Drury, pianist, with the Calli thumpian Ensemble (Mode)

If I had to demonstrate the communicative power of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music with only one work, I would surely choose one of the church cantatas. These are the works, above all others in Bach’s voluminous legacy, that most vividly outline the unassailable niche he occupies in the realm of the arts: his skill at composition, his unwavering faith in Higher Powers, and the genius whereby he applies the one in the service of the other. The further astonishment in these works — the 200 or so that survive out of probably twice that number — is the extraordinary beauty, originality and complexity of the greatest of them measured against the circumstances of their creation, music ground out on order to serve the daily needs of a church at which Bach was a salaried minion. Yes, there are cantatas that come across merely as the competent products of a busily engaged craftsman, as there are dull moments in Shakespeare and occasional uninspired brushwork by Michelangelo; with all three towering figures, the flub percentage is wondrous small.

Right now I’m under the spell of the Cantata No. 8, thanks to a superb recording newly at hand on the Harmonia Mundi label. (The numbering of the cantatas, by the way, has nothing to do with the order of composition, but only with the sequence in which they were first published, more than a century after Bach’s death.) The text, which begins “Dearest God, when am I to die? My time is running out,” propounds one of the central tenets in the Lutheran canon: Earthly death not as a tragedy but a release to a more “blessed, joyful dawn.” As with most of the cantatas composed during his tenure at Leipzig’s St. Thomas-Church, Bach designed the work as a gloss on the chorale specified for that particular Sunday — Trinity XVI in this case. The text, fashioned by one or another of the merely adequate poets serving the church, is, similarly, a gloss on the words of the chorale, heavily laden with the dense interweave of metaphor and symbol that constituted churchly poetry in the Baroque (and may still).

The miracle is Bach’s ability to rise beyond the encumbrance of this workaday text, and the fact that he accomplished this at Leipzig week after week. Join me to sample what happens at the start of this particular magical work. Two oboi d’amore (deeper-pitched than an oboe, but not as honky as an English horn) wind their deep-bronze tones around one another to spin out a haunting, slow melody in triplets that seems to extend toward far horizons. Over their melodic line from time to time a piccolo goes “ding ding ding,” fast, repeated notes like a distant summoning bell. The melody stops, then starts again, still with the insistent “ding” from the piccolo; this time the chorus joins in with its opening text, sung to another flowing triplet melody in elegant, smooth counterpoint to the oboes’ tune. Listen with delight and awe, in just the opening phrase of this new melody, to the way Bach sets the word sterben (“to die”): a dissonance, a chromatic shudder, a harmonic progression that seems for one wink of the eye to look ahead toward romantic harmonies as yet undreamed.

Actually, this new melody is a flowing, elegant, somewhat garrulous variant of the simple, hymnlike chorale tune that, in its unadorned form, will round off the work some 20 minutes later. Be amazed at the way Bach has built this first movement by combining four separate lines into music rich and warming, full of its own range of fantasy: the tune for the oboes, the piccolo, the flowing melody for the chorus, with the notes of the chorale embedded into that line. Many of Bach’s cantatas are constructed in this “striptease” manner; they start off with a chorus or ensemble in which an actual chorale melody is wrapped in elaborate counterpoint, and arrive eventually at that melody in its bare essentials.

The world gave Bach a pretty good birthday party back in 1985, his 300th, but it will surely find time to celebrate again in 2000, the 250th anniversary of his death. He needs these frequent celebrations, for at least two reasons. One is to make up for the decades after his death when his music was virtually unknown until Felix Mendelssohn’s famous revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829. Another is to make up for the years after that, when his music circulated in lurid reharmonizations and re-orchestrations that sought to re-create Bach as an eager precursor of Romanticism.

But that history of mistreatment says something about the timelessness of Bach’s music, and its resilience. His music survives the tamperings of the Victorian monster choruses, the irresistible pandemonium of Leopold Stokowski’s transcriptions of organ works and choruses for Wagner-size orchestra, Wendy Carlos’ sci-fi synthesizer versions, Bach-as-scat by the Swingle Singers. It shines through the prissy rhythms in Wanda Landowska’s Goldberg Variations on an “authentic” harpsichord or the visionary intensity of Glenn Gould’s two performances on an “inauthentic” Steinway grand, either or both of which I hear as modern man’s self-defining statement on Bach. On the new Harmonia Mundi recording of three cantatas, Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe’s performance of the first movement of No. 8 runs six minutes, 41 seconds; Helmuth Rilling’s on Hänssler Classic runs four minutes, 34 seconds; both are the work of eloquent, dedicated specialists in this music.

When we listen to music — listen, I said, not merely bathe in — we are almost always made conscious of its place in time. We hear Haydn and Mozart as the fruition of Classicism’s sublime logic; we hear Beethoven as the fuse kindling Romanticism, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as modern music’s powder keg. I hear Bach’s music, however, beyond any chronological identity. Music like the cited opening of the Cantata No. 8, or the violent confrontations in the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, or the end of the “Crucifixus” from the B-minor Mass — where a harmonic sideslip at the sepulchral bottom of the voices’ range defines the exact meaning of grief for all time — exists apart from any sense of time frame. There have always been imitators, but never a successor. Bach endures, not in some kind of scholarly vacuum, but as music’s great self-renewing force.