So I've Heard

I cannot believe — or, let’s say, I don’t want to believe — that in the managerial echelons of the Los Angeles Opera there was nobody to look in on the early rehearsals of Fantastic Mr. Fox, recognize the proceedings as a mess beyond redemption, and simply call a halt. Instead, like the legendary unstoppable Juggernaut, the disaster grew to enormous proportions until the bursting of the bomb — for such it is — on the Music Center stage last week. Peter Hemmings had lunched the New York press and dispatched the tidings worldwide that his opera company was finally primed to produce an American world premiere. The company’s educational department set up an admirable program to lure both children and their teachers; the press department circulated word that no, it wasn’t just a kiddie opera, but a “family opera” for the young-at-heart of all ages. At the pre-performance talk before the dress rehearsal, Christopher Hailey promised the crowd that the music would be like “nothing you’ve ever heard.” Wrong: The music is like everything you’ve ever heard, only not as good.

Tobias Picker, the one acknowledged hand among the many whose music goes wriggling through Mr. Fox‘s empty spaces, is himself a media masterpiece. “I look out at my trees,” he told an interviewer last week, “and I ask them to tell me where my melodies are. I walk through the forest and I hear my melodies.” At 44, he has gained a firm toehold for a tidy output of correct and trustworthy compositions, full of everybody’s best melodic gadgetry from times gone by, all aimed at assuring the timid that new music means us no harm. His 1996 opera Emmeline, an Oedipus spinoff set in New England, with all the melodramatic gestures that you hear as drama until five minutes later, has been televised and is making the rounds; like André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire of this year’s vintage, it draws sustenance from somebody’s notion that a Great American Opera should be some kind of cultural inevitability in this not-all-that-opera-minded nation. Picker is currently at work on not one but three opera commissions, including one for the Met.

The problems start with Donald Sturrock’s talky-talk libretto, which inundates Roald Dahl’s wise little children’s fable — wily fox bests stupid farmers and feasts on their fowl — with uncute jabberwock of no appeal to any age. (In fairness, there is one line, not in Dahl, but worthy of note: Animals, says Mr. Fox, “have a natural gift for forest life that humans had years ago.”) Dahl’s woodland critters, their numbers now swelled by the man-hungry spinster Miss Hedgehog and her amorous swain Mr. Porcupine, are obliged to sing for their supper; Dahl’s Rat becomes Rita the Rat, a gabbling, Spinoza-quoting yenta. There is also — I’m not making this up! — a tractor that sings and puffs steam and a singing earth-digger right out of Jurassic Park. As designed by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe’s magic pen, on a revolving set that bears some resemblance to Breughel’s Tower of Babel, they’re all fun to look at, but that’s as far as it goes.

Tobias Picker’s trees have led him astray. He has transformed Sturrock’s logorrhea into its musical equivalent, a featureless up-and-down singsong in rhythms that often clash with the sound and the sense of the words. His dense, busy orchestration further obliterates these vocal lines, often rendering them virtually inaudible. Adults with mature neck muscles can pick out the missing words from the supertitle screen high overhead; children shouldn’t have to. On opening night I detected no attempt from conductor Peter Ash to create any kind of balance between stage and pit.

There is something overall depressing about this latest in our local company’s long list of operatic miscalculations. It goes beyond the fact that Tobias Picker, widely hailed as American opera’s great new hope, has turned out this inept baggage — not at all funny beyond its cutesy staging, manifesting not even the minimum competence for combining words and music into a whole greater than its parts — and now basks in the momentary glory that the Hemmings machine has afforded him. A good cast has given the work better than it deserves. Some of its singers — Suzanna Guzmán, Louis Lebherz, Jamie Offenbach, Charles Castronovo — are “resident artists,” starting with the company in small roles and moving up. Gerald Finley, the titular Mr. Fox, has had a deserved sky-high career since his debut here in 1994. Grant Peter Hemmings high marks in the matter of attentiveness to emerging talent.

As the company has developed since its 1986 inaugural, there is reason to suspect a split personality. In its middle age, it has lost much of its early, appealing edginess: the Janácek, the Berg, the Alden brothers’ inventive stagings. Last season’s Fedora, Florencia en el Amazonas and Countess Maritza were novelties in name but creaky antiques in actuality. Next season’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet opera) hardly counts as a brave step into the unknown. Nobody was taken in by Mr. Fox; everyone knew all along that management was trying to pass off a kiddie opera as grown-up fare. Even Hansel and Gretel has more substance.

Basically, the L.A. Opera is now the model of a company in a middle-sized city, doling out its standard-repertory fare, venturing afield only on the safest paths. This excess of programming caution might be justified if the company booked more of the generation that now lights up stages in San Francisco, Chicago and the Met: The names Renée Fleming, Deborah Voigt, Ben Heppner, Rene Pape come first to mind. Jennifer Larmore has been here in roles wrong for her; Carol Vaness is a world-class Mozart singer, but her upcoming Violetta doesn’t inspire confidence. Okay, Jane Eaglen’s Donna Anna does. Greg Fedderly sings La Traviata‘s Alfredo, but his recent vocal decline results from too many roles too soon — the consequence, I’m willing to bet, of an overdose of bad advice.

Can anyone believe that Plácido Domingo’s accession to the top job will provide the turn toward imagination and adventure that the company now lacks? His star appeal cannot be denied. Yet nobody has accused Peter Hemmings — who runs only one opera company, doesn’t sing tenor leads or in three-tenor circuses, shows no inclination to conduct, and isn’t married to an aspiring stage director — of being underemployed. As the West Coast pole of a bicoastal opera cartel, the company risks losing some of its Los Angeles identity, a crucial part of the support structure. That’s what’s been keeping me awake nights lately — along with the recent news stories of Zubin Mehta’s ardent declaration of rekindled love for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and his resolve to heighten his local presence. Welcome to Pleasantville.

Hildegard von Bingen abides. Her 900th birthday occurred sometime this year and has been lavishly celebrated. An eight-disc box on BMG Classics honors the event with a comprehensive anthology of her music, gently and respectfully updated by the performers most active in maintaining her sacred flame, the Cologne-based medieval-music ensemble known as Sequentia, founded in 1977 by American expatriates Benjamin Bagby and the late Barbara Thornton. Two weeks ago, high in the Brentwood hills in the handsome small Mary Chapel on the Mount St. Mary’s College campus – one of the Da Camera Society’s “Historic Sites” – 14 members of Sequentia performed Hildegard’s Ordo Virtutum, an allegorical disputation in which forces of good and evil battle to possess one faltering soul. (Guess who wins.)

It was an ennobling experience. Ninety minutes of meandering medieval song, unharmonized except for a few instances when a single string instrument might hold a long single note under a melodic gambit, didn’t seem a minute too long under the spell of the group’s elegant, pure singing. Afterward, the stars in the night sky and the distant city lights formed yet a further benediction. You can say what you want – and there’s a lot to be said – about the dangers of taking this ancient repertory too seriously, of imputing to the blessed Hildegard a degree of musical individuality to match her historic stature as a visionary and spiritual leader. (Oliver Sacks’ famous essay on Hildegard’s visions ascribes their inspiration to migraines.) The rediscovery of this woman composer – not even the first, according to some recent researches – two decades ago fell into the collective lap of the emergent feminist/musicologist crowd like a gift from heaven. One disc – catchily titled A Feather on the Breath of God (one of Hildegard’s more modest descriptions of herself), with music overarranged and sweetly sung by a pre-Sequentia group called Gothic Voices – and she became an instant media bonanza.

I used to be more upset about all this hoopla, about the process of tarting up ancient music of uncertain provenance in the quest for sexy press releases. Very little of the music we know and love, even from recent times, after all, reaches our ears the way its composers intended; Mozart gets played with modern clarinets, Verdi with the wrong-size trombones. What mattered most up at Mount St. Mary’s the other night was the chance to hear some wonderful singers, nicely costumed in a very beautiful space, performing exceptionally attractive music worthy of that setting and of our love.

Short takes on a full and rewarding week:

What the people of Sequentia bring to their chosen repertory of the very old, the dedicated souls of our own California EAR Unit lavish on the very new; both groups make common cause in the battle to save the world from Muzak. Actually, last week’s EAR Unit concert at the County Museum ranged somewhat more broadly than usual, reaching back in time some seven decades for a quick but affectionate sweep through American musical origins: three of Ruth Crawford’s piano preludes from 1928, an orchestration (why?) of Virgil Thomson’s Second Piano Sonata from 1930, Henry Cowell’s Toccanta from 1938 and Lou Harrison’s First Concerto for flute and percussion from a year later – delightful, small-scale but consequential music. Crawford’s remarkably strong, rugged, even abrasive legacy looms ever larger these days; her String Quartet is an acknowledged masterpiece, and these short piano pieces – nicely played by Lorna Eder – are not far behind. The kicky rhythms and folkish harmonies of Cowell’s bright chamber piece underscore our need for a major revival of his works. So, too, for Harrison; I loved most of all the starry, slowly unfolding melody midway in this early concerto, sent skyward by Dorothy Stone’s magic flute. After intermission came the extended nuisance of some of Michael Torke’s minimalist hootchy-kootch that I won’t bother to name, and Frame(s), Rand Steiger’s exhilarating new work for the EAR Unit’s percussion goddess Amy Knoles, knockout music including long improv passages for the players to feast upon royally, as, indeed, they did.

My memories of previous perform ances of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony – Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall in 1945, Carlo Maria Giulini at the Music Center three-plus decades later – weren’t challenged by Zubin Mehta’s performance last week, especially since the Philharmonic seemed to be having a bad horn night on Thursday. But if any kind of music is Meh ta’s meat (a matter still to be argued), this sublime work surely is, and the performance – massive, spacious and eminently sensible – did him credit. Mehta had, quite rightly, reseated the orchestra as Mahler himself did, with the second violins downstage and the basses far back. The range of emotions had been carefully mapped: the heaven-storming climax of the first movement, the diabolical cachinnations midway, the long recession into silence at the end, when the music seems to resound from deep inside the hearer’s bloodstream. Those final moments at Thursday’s perform ance, alas, seemed timed to an outbreak of whooping cough in
the hall.

On Friday there was Bach at Royce Hall, the first three (of six) cantatas of the Christmas Oratorio shepherded by the much-loved Helmuth Rilling, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the USC Chamber Singers and an exceptional quar tet of soloists: music of joy and exaltation that sent me home to plan a whole ‘nother article about Bach sometime soon. In the spectrum of current Bach performance practice, Rilling stands just about midway. He doesn’t mind a judicious vibrato in either vocal or instrumental tone, he knows the expressive value of a slow tempo now and then – as in the “Pastorale” that opens the second cantata, luscious and radiant – and his management of contrapuntal textures is marvelously strong and bright. Best of all – as anyone knows who has seen him in action every summer at the Oregon Bach Festival – he projects the sense of knowing how to make people want to perform. Among the soloists, the tenor Alan Bennett, who has also been here with Paul Hillier’s Theater of Voices, sang the Evangelist’s music with extraordinary clarity and beauty of phrase.

Full schedules keep me away from too many tempting-looking school perform ances, but nothing keeps me away from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. I looked in on Saturday night’s performance by the USC Opera Workshop, figuring on leaving at intermission if matters got hairy. Instead I stayed to the end, riveted and beguiled. On a make-do but adequate set, David Pfeiffer’s staging was full of the right kind of comedic touches; Timothy Lindberg drew from his student orchestra sounds both silken and silvery; somebody had imparted to the young cast a high regard for the beauty of Italian vowels and consonants. The singers, at least in the 562-seat Bing Theater, were mostly wonderful. I shouldn’t name names at this stage of their careers, but if a young singer named Sarah Hagstrom, whose Cherubino nearly stole the show, doesn’t turn up sometime soon in the operatic firmament, I’ll donate my crystal ball to the next garage sale.

Artwork by Akg London

Nobody composed better art songs than Franz Schubert. Many tried, and Hugo Wolf came close. In his 43 years – a life cut short by syphilis and insanity – he produced some 300 songs, feverishly devouring texts by virtually every Romantic German poet and filling their every pore with music sublime, sometimes witty, more often agonized. Like Schubert, he failed at composing opera (although his comedy Der Corregidor merits revival); like Schubert, he knew how to compose music with opera’s power to represent intense actions or thoughts in stunning detail, but within the span of two or three minutes with a solo singer and a pianist.

Wolf’s song legacy has been amply recorded. Great singers of today or the recent past – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elly Ameling, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – show up among the Schwann Catalog’s listings. There is one Hugo Wolf recording project, however, that stands apart and above all other efforts; it has just been reissued in midprice on EMI Classics, and must never again be allowed to vanish: five discs representing the labors of the Hugo Wolf
Society, nearly half the total song legacy, recorded between 1931 and ’38, enlisting the services of an awe-inspiring list of the time’s finest singers of the German language, both opera stars and concert artists. They all belong to a glorious past; the last to go was the soprano Tiana Lemnitz, who died in 1994.

Confronted with the two columns of fine print that constitute the “Wolf” entry in the latest Schwann, it’s difficult to imagine a time when the recorded repertory contained no such treasures, no complete Beethoven piano sonatas or Mozart operas. To make such recordings possible, the smart marketers at EMI organized subscription societies: If so many prospective buyers kick in so much money in advance, we’ll go ahead and record Wolf, or Mozart at Glyndebourne, or Artur Schnabel’s Beethoven. The Wolf project was the first; the great British publication The Gramophone got down on its journalistic knees month after month during 1931 to plead for subscribers. The plan worked; we can sample its fruits even today. The Mozart Opera Society’s Don Giovanni, recorded at Glyndebourne in 1936 under Fritz Busch and currently listed on the Pearl label, is still the best version you’ll ever hear; Schnabel’s set of Beethoven’s “32,” on EMI Classics, is a mountain of probity few will dare to scale.

And now we have the Wolf once again: starting off with nearly an hour of tense, dramatic singing by the astonishing mezzo Elena Gerhardt at the height of her
career; the purity of Tiana Lemnitz in
some of the simpler, pastoral songs; “Prometheus” delivered as if from a mountaintop by Friedrich Schorr, the foremost Wotan of his time; the suave, delicious humor in Gerhard Hüsch’s “Epiphanias,” Goethe’s folkish retelling of the Three Kings on their way to the manger; Helge Roswaenge’s hair-raising “Fire-Rider” (for which, the legend goes, the usually placid singer’s orange juice had been spiked); John McCormack’s ecstatic delivery of “Ganymede”; and on and on. Gerald Moore is at the piano for most of the performances, collaborating with incomparable skill. More than a historical document, this set, its ancient sound astonishingly well restored, captures the dedication that created it, back in the days when a love of music and of the best way to serve it were the prime motivating forces that kept the record industry alive.

After Wolf, who died in 1903, there were the late songs of Mahler, some early tonal songs by Schoenberg and Berg, and some minor efforts by Pfitzner, but there were no new poets to stimulate the continuance of the German art song. The one great exception, however, was Hanns Eisler, who for a time was part of the refugee contingent here in Los Angeles, and who, working mostly with Bertolt Brecht, produced a remarkable set of songs they called The Hollywood Songbook. The poems aren’t all about Hollywood – frequent recipient of contempt from both poet and composer – but they are almost all bitter, cynical, aching with homesickness. Given Eisler’s proletarian leanings, you shouldn’t expect the subtle sophistication of Wolf’s songs; the 46 songs of The Hollywood Songbook are, for the most part, simple, folkish and not very artful. Brecht far preferred Eisler’s kind of song to that of his other collaborator, Kurt Weill, whose music could easily seduce the attention away from the text. Yet there is beauty in these artless, endearing songs, and power.

The new London recording, part of its “Entartete Musik” series that has admirably surveyed the broad repertory by composers considered “degenerate” under the Nazis (and often murdered by them as well),
is sung by the splendid young baritone Matthias Goerne, who performed the songs in a marvelous if underattended concert here several months ago; Eric Schneider is the pianist. To my knowledge Goerne has not yet recorded any songs of Hugo Wolf, but he surely will; his voice is exactly right, with that rare power to seek out the drama in a song text and make it work on a concert stage.

During my student year in Vienna (rather a while ago, if you must know), my friends told me that two large-scale musical works would be my best guide to understanding the Viennese musical soul. One was Hans Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina, which was in repertory at the State Opera. The other was Franz Schmidt’s oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln, taken from the Book of the Revelation, the description by St. John the Divine of the Book With Seven Seals wherein lay the pertinent facts about the destiny of mankind. I attended both, over two long evenings that revealed to me, above all, the extent of pain that extreme boredom can produce. The Viennese audience, in both cases, greeted this thoroughly dreadful music with the ultimate ovation: complete silence interlaced with adoration. Pfitzner’s opera, which was produced at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival a couple of years ago and was greeted with a differently motivated kind of silence, has been around on disc for some time. Now comes the Schmidt, in its full uncoiling, running just under two hours, grinding and groaning under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst, wonderfully performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Stig Andersen and René Pape as, respectively, St. John and the Voice of God, and vividly recorded as if the Almighty himself were at the console. There are already three older versions of the work, would you believe, all recorded live under less than ideal conditions. Here it is now: last week’s schnitzel, congealed and stale, but elegantly served.

Between a 1610 violin sonata by Giovanni Paulo Cima and the 1995 Fifth String Quartet by Elliott Carter there stretches a chronological and stylistic gap of nearly four centuries. Still, the music in both cases – the one played last week by the British group that calls itself Romanesca at one of the Da Camera Society’s “Historic Sites” concerts, the other by Britain’s Arditti Quartet at Caltech on Sunday – assaulted the same nerve centers in my receptive apparatus. So – ka-pow! — did Saturday’s violin recital at Royce Hall, the first local appearance by the singular Brit with the single name of Kennedy, having forsworn the “Nigel” of his birth. (Show biz is full of name-droppers.)

Cima and his countrymen Dario Castello and Biagio Marini – who shared the Romanesca program that bore the subtitle “Phantasticus” in an elegant salon at Pasadena’s Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel – flourished in the early years of Baroque. Opera had just been invented, and with it a new manner of vocal writing, passionate and virtuosic, supported by some wildly adventurous turns of harmony that can still astound our ears today. The violin had begun to take the place of the earlier viol, also allowing greater feats of virtuosity and a vibrant tone of almost human earnestness. The concert was well-named; the players – violinist Andrew Manze, harpsichordist John Toll, and Nigel North, who played both the lute and its larger, giraffe-necked relative called the theorbo – lunged delightedly into music full of amazing shifts of mood, unruly outcries, grinding dissonances, “phantastic” in every sense.

Romanesca records for Harmonia Mundi; their latest disc, also called Phantasticus, contains some of the music from last week’s concert, but with a wonderful small organ alongside the harpsichord. Manze has also conducted a superb set of Handel’s Opus 6 Concerti Grossi on H.M., in the same kind of vivid, taut, deliciously impolite performances he delivered here. If his mission is to take Baroque music out of its wallpaper status, he has my vote.

In a getup that suggested a recent rummage through a nearby dumpster, the aforementioned Kennedy – self-styled punk kid, age 42 – ambled onto the Royce Hall stage half an hour late, engaged in some clumsy chitchat, got some laffs with the information that Béla Bartók had died of leukemia in an unheated Manhattan apartment (not true) and that he doesn’t like having his hair washed (obviously true). He also performed, phenomenally: Bartók’s Sonata and two movements from Bach’s C-major Sonata, both for unaccompanied violin, and seven movements from a “Concerto in Suite Form,” concocted by Kennedy from music by Jimi (listed in the program as “J.M.”) Hendrix, backed by an acoustic combo of guitars, cellos, winds and bass. Some of the Hendrix pieces were spatchcocked between movements of the Bartók, a lamentable procedure partly redeemed because the segues themselves were nicely imagined and the music itself somewhat stupendous.

There is, however, something of a Kennedy problem. He is obviously one of the great musicians of his generation, technically omnipotent and brainy as well. His in-your-face recorded performances of wide-ranging repertory, from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to the Elgar concerto, prove that he, too, is anxious to do battle with the wallpaper syndrome. But he seems to be squandering a small fortune on unnecessary image building, which, on Saturday night, I found intrusive, offensive, and unworthy of his obvious brilliance and of his age.

The Arditti Quartet, which performs in suits and matching socks, had played Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge and Elliott Carter’s Fifth Quartet at Irvine in March; it did no harm to revisit them, even in the dreary acoustical and visual setting of Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium to open the 95th (!) annual Coleman Concerts. In the Beethoven, that extraordinary exercise in manic counterpoint, I discover more marvels on each hearing; in the Carter I discover fewer. The Arditti, which otherwise plays nothing but very new music, often with the ink still wet, apparently regards the Beethoven as a gateway, an understandable attitude. Their program also included Carter’s recent Piano Quintet, composed for the superb, adventurous pianist Ursula Oppens, its garrulous, cavorting piano part considerably leavening the usual Cartesian textures. On her own, Oppens also played a late Beethoven sonata, Opus 110. The day was Beethoven’s, by a considerable margin.

Yet another Brit, composer George Benjamin, led the Philharmonic’s New Music Group in some of his own energetic music – including his Three Inventions, commissioned by local patron Betty Freeman, and an immensely appealing early piece called At First Light – at last week’s “Green Umbrella” concert at the Japan America. Born in 1960, Benjamin studied with Olivier Messiaen, whose own genius for manipulating huge, multicolored blocks of sound his pupil has ob viously absorbed. Benjamin’s music is full of paint and shards of stained glass, and wonderful moments in which distant, somber pronouncements from the brass make themselves heard through clouds of sparks and smoke. Susan Narucki sang Unsuk Chin’s Acrostic-Wordplay, enchanting, quiz- zical music by a young Korean composer new to American audiences, and Benjamin, at the piano, played one of Messiaen’s ravishing bird pieces: an exceptionally strong, balanced program, too sparsely attended.

Watching Yuri Bashmet perform Alfred Schnittke’s Viola Concerto last week, with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic, you almost thought that the late Schnittke himself had returned. Schnittke was considerably less tall, but the two men’s features – gaunt, glaring, hollow-cheeked, the look of a latter-day Raskolnikov – seemed almost uncannily similar. And they seem to merge as well in this extraordinary concerto that Schnittke composed for Bashmet in 1985.

The work, which Bashmet has recorded for RCA, is music of outcry: 35 minutes of passionate discourse, sometimes wrenching, sometimes soft and conciliatory. The orchestra is large, but there are no violins; the solo viola sings out above the low strings, and its voice is almost constantly present. The orchestra also includes piano, harpsichord and celesta, all of them placed down front to engage in occasional intimate duets with the soloist. The work begins with a slow, rhapsodic melodic unfolding for the soloist; it returns to that kind of music at the end. The long, faster central movement veers wildly and wonderfully, as if obsessed with having too much to say in too little time. I cannot think of another concerto of this century in which the soloist seems to take on an almost human personality, singing (and sometimes shrieking) lines in which actual words lurk just below the surface. For this you would have to go back to the last piano concertos of Mozart, which this moving, tortured work of Schnittke in no way resembles – except in its impact.

Photo by Zoe DominicAlban Berg’s Chamber Concerto and Donald Martino’s Notturno, composed 50 years apart (1923 and 1973, give or take a few months), were performed two days apart here last week: the Berg by the Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen with pianist Mitsuko Uchida and violinist Mark Stein berg as soloists, the Martino in a Monday Evening Concert at the County Museum by the New York New Music Ensemble. The two works relate interestingly. Both follow principles laid down by Arnold Schoenberg in his “method of composing with 12 different notes related entirely to one another” – composing, in other words, in a manner that denies the traditional practice of tonality in which some one of those 12 notes becomes more important than the 11 others, and is entirely derived instead from an arrangement (or “row”) of all 12. Both works, however, constantly and fluently contradict the harmonic anarchy implicit in the 12-note method at its purest; both succeed in being beautiful in ways that even the most fear-stricken of contemporary audiences can recognize.

Of the triumvirate that constituted the “Second Viennese School” – Anton Webern was the third member – Berg abandoned the old Romantic ways the most reluctantly. His Wozzeck, which dates from around the same time as the Chamber Concerto, draws its overpowering impact from the variety of its music: the 12-note depiction of the grotesque forces that prey upon the hapless nonhero, the more “Romantic” music for Wozzeck and Marie, the almost Mahlerian orchestral summing-up of the tragedy near the end. The Chamber Concerto, written as a birthday tribute to Schoenberg and built on a row that includes the note-equivalents of the letters of Schoenberg’s name, is an equally engaging amalgam of old and new. The term “delight” doesn’t always come first to mind when writing about these Second-Wieners, but there is no better way to describe the long episodes of smoky, slithery waltz music in the first movement – or the palpable exhilaration in Mitsuko Uchida’s interaction with Salonen and his players in the performance here last week.

The Chamber Concerto isn’t often heard; the Philharmonic performed it at Ojai in 1970, but seldom if ever at the Music Center. Its scoring – a 13-member ensemble of winds and brass – puts it in a gray area between chamber music and orchestra. It needs two brave and exuberant soloists; violinist Mark Steinberg, though known as an excellent chamber performer (as leader of the Brentano Quartet), was somewhat behind Uchida in succumbing to the intense power of this marvelous music.

Berg’s work compellingly defines its time; so does Martino’s. By the 1970s, Schoenberg’s principles had been kicked to death by a generation of academics and hangers-on who assumed that the rigid “rules” of 12-note composition meant that all you had to do to make masterpieces was to connect the dots. As a junior critic at The New York Times, I remember being assigned to concert after concert – usually on Saturday afternoons, when hall rental was cheap – of this murky, terribly correct, terribly predictable note spinning, a kind of 12-note Vivaldi. Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic played the nice, easy new music of Copland and Bernstein himself, but did nothing to encourage a generation of American innovators to compete with the vitality of the emergent Europeans (Boulez, Stockhausen, Maderna, Dallapiccola . . . that crowd). Pierre Boulez’s accession to the Philharmonic in 1971 changed the atmosphere somewhat; so did the appearance of superb, dedicated smaller groups: Speculum Musicae, the Group for Contemporary Music, Dan Shulman’s Light Fantastic Players. The splendid New York New Music Ensemble, which performed Martino’s Notturno at LACMA last week, is of that lineage.

Very brave, that Martino work; very brave also the Pulitzer jury that in 1974 abandoned its customary dedication to easy listening and gave its prize to this tense, marvelously atmospheric but gritty music. Like the Berg half a century before, Martino’s 18-minute sextet, involving flute, clarinet, strings and percussion, had found a balance between doctrinaire atonality and deep, communicative expression. Many composers seemed anxious to write “night music” pieces at the time; there is much music of nocturnal inspiration worth hearing by George Crumb and Robert Erickson, among others. Martino’s nocturnal landscape is visited by storms as well as moonlight. Led by the haunting, dusky tones of Jean Kopperud’s clarinet, the New York visitors reminded us of what we miss by not hearing this music every week. (There are, however, excellent recordings, on Nonesuch and Koch.)

There was also Beethoven on last week’s Philharmonic agenda: Uchida in the “Emperor” Concerto, replacing the Berg on Saturday and Sunday; the Fifth Symphony at all four concerts. You want to talk about innovation and the modern touch? Beethoven belongs on that list. Recently I’ve read copious complaints by the New York critics about the inundation of concert life by Beethoven’s music; the folks at the Orange County Philharmonic Society have another Beethoven bash planned for later this season. I’m sad for the critics, delighted for Ludwig; we’ll never stop learning and discovering as long as his music is around.

Look, for starters, at the astounding, magical passages in both works at the juncture just before the start of the final movement. Look first at the breath-stopping, quiet drop in the concerto from B major (the key of the slow movement) to the distant key of E flat to start the finale. Then look at the similar, sudden key change in the symphony, again in an unearthly quiet, that ushers in the mysterious crescendo over drumbeats and links the third movement to the finale. They weren’t supposed to write that way in Beethoven’s time, but he did anyhow. (A glitch in the hall’s ventilating system on Sunday afternoon, alas, drowned out both these sublime moments with a sustained whoosh that also filled Beethoven’s dramatic pauses with audible goo.)

The marvel of Uchida’s performance of the “Emperor” was the sense she gave off that every turn in this wondrous score was, for her, a discovery that she couldn’t wait to share. Discoveries still await Salonen in the Fifth Symphony; the dark A-flat lyricism of the slow movement is, for him, still ever-so-slightly out of reach. He’ll get there, though.

In 1928, Arnold Schoenberg began sketches for his Moses und Aron and completed his orchestration of Bach’s “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue: the one an opera completely atonal in style, the other a transcription of music that celebrates the full glory of God, at overpowering length, in the golden resonance of the key of E-flat major. The opera has made its way slowly; I wouldn’t want to hang by my thumbs awaiting its appearance at our local company. The Bach transcription has also reached us only now, in its first performance ever by the Philharmonic, last weekend under Sylvain Cambreling.

Pasteurized and purified as we have become in the hands of the authenticity worshippers, such vile misdeeds as Schoenberg’s inflation of Bach’s organ masterpiece are no longer to be tolerated, or so the story runs. Still, I suffer no conscience pangs from my delight at the glorious noise that filled the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last Sunday afternoon. If the miscreant Schoenberg made his presence blatantly apparent, so, through Schoenberg’s machinations, did Bach. When Schoenberg hands over the consequent phrase of the opening proclamatory tune to six – count ’em, six – clarinets, the sound that emerges is the mellow bellow of a dreamed-of instrument with which some future organ-designing genius may, with extreme luck, bless us all. Not one but two contrabassoons are enlisted by Schoenberg throughout the piece to simulate those 32-foot fundamentals that might, in some provincial organ loft, demolish the sturdiest stained glass. The sound is glorious. No, make that stupendous.

Sure, the desecrations that Schoenberg imposed upon Bach – not to mention his enterprising aggrandizement of the Brahms G-minor Piano Quartet that Anne Manson conducts on this week’s Philharmonic program – were duplicated in the manicured hands of Leopold Stokow-ski with his reams of Bach orchestrations that still survive on disc. The philosophies were different, however. Stokowski covered his sins with the proclamation, many times professed, that if Bach were alive today he’d undoubtedly be composing for Wagner-size orchestral forces. Schoenberg reversed the process: In this “St. Anne” transcription, and in the two Bach chorale-preludes he had orchestrated some years earlier, he seems intent on proving that Wagner-size or even larger orchestras could, in proper scoring, re-create the sounds of the bygone pipe organ at its most sublime. Rather than the fussy, trickery-infested Stokowski escapades that sound snazzy enough but continually falsify their source, Schoenberg has given us the chance to glimpse the meeting of minds over two centuries, the outlook of a genius of our own century on the towering stature of his immortal predecessor.

I am also still aglow from last week’s concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall by the wonder-working Jordi Savall and his ensembles: the instrumental group Hesperion ” and the vocal sextet La Capella Reial de Catalunya, joyously giving off songs, dances and sacred pieces from 16th-century Spain, the “Golden Century” under Philip II. Savall and his viola da gamba made it to the charts with his music in Tous les Matins du Monde, and then, in an astounding turnaround, delighted us all by leading a period-instrument orchestra in a fabulous Beethoven “Eroica” (on Audivis, get it). In this Royce concert, too, there was a meeting across centuries – music fashioned to the taste of a bygone society, composed in a bygone artistic language, interacting with the wisdom of modern interpreters who have studied its nature and devised their own synthesis of “could” and “might” to create an acceptable facsimile of “authentic” or “historically informed” performance.

That, I think, needs remembering whenever old music – 4 years or 4 centuries old – comes to mind. We can restore or reconstruct period noisemakers; Hesperion’s collection of cornetto, chirimia (an oboe ancestor), sacabuche (= sackbut = trombone), bajon (= bassoon), plus string instruments bowed and plucked, forms a handsome assembly. We can figure out the notes these instruments once played, or come fairly close. To re-create this music fully, however, we would also need to re-create the impulse that moved performers 400 years ago from one note to the next, and the interrelation between those notes and the people who heard them, were moved by them to dance or sing along and to share the ecstasy of their invention.

These are elements that composers of any era, including our own, cannot write down or type into a computer. The music at the Hesperion concert seemed to exhilarate the performers, who in turn were wonderfully adept at passing that feeling on to the happy and large crowd at Royce with a trove of highly spiced, delirious musical treasures from four centuries and half a planet away. Performers at Philip’s court were well-supported, even as their monarch frittered away the Netherlands half of his empire and saw his Armada turned back by the upstart Brits. But they didn’t get to perform their songs and dances on a proscenium stage before an audience of 800. What is “authentic” about concerts such as this – or about the upcoming appearances by the Tallis Scholars or Anonymous 4 at Royce, by the string group Romanesca at the Ritz Carlton Huntington Hotel or Sequentia in, for once, a proper-size chapel at Mount St. Mary’s – is not so much the interaction between the sights and sounds of bygone music making and a contemporary audience however attuned. Beyond any of this, it’s the fact that the beauty in music is a generic phenomenon that exists beyond matters of time.

This past week, I was reached by the dark, mysterious beauty and the delicious rhythmic quirks in just about every note of Jordi Savall’s concert; by the hypnotic spookiness of New York’s Bang on a Can All-Stars playing Brian Eno’s ambient music at El Rey; by Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at the Philharmonic (a work that I tend to think of as perfect) in Martin Chalifour’s unfussy, elegant reading. Others found happiness, but I did not, in the secondhand Stravinsky in Henri Dutilleux’s Metaboles, which ended the Philharmonic concert. Music eludes; that may be the greatest of its beauties.

Between Joseph Haydn’s Opus 1 and George Crumb’s Black Angels – two centuries, give or take a decade – lies the realm of the string quartet, subtlest and most secretive of all kinds of music, demanding the listener’s most concentrated patience and rewarding it the most lavishly. Within a week, as it happened, we were blessed by both the first of Haydn’s quartets, at the County Museum, performed by the Angeles Quartet, and Crumb’s stupendous outcry played by the Kronos at Irvine’s Barclay Theater. Wow.

Those mileposts are not fixed, of course; there were string quartets before Opus 1 from 1760 and string quartets after Black Angels of 1970. Composers with serious matters on their minds seem to find benign companionship in two violins, a viola and a cello, and probably always will. The deep melancholy in the slow movement of Beethoven’s first quartet (Opus 18 No. 1) is phrased in terms far more mysterious than the language in his first two symphonies of about the same time. There is nothing in his late orchestral music, not even the Ninth, to match the crushing dissonances in his Grosse Fuge, the world’s first X-rated music. I cannot claim that every one of Haydn’s 80-odd quartets holds me by the throat, but most of them do, and all of them form the laboratory of one of music’s supreme innovators. The operative word for this music is fearless, and that applies as well to our excellent local Angeles Quartet, which is performing them all at the County Museum over several years, and recording the whole caboodle for Philips. The first release is due out this year.

Already in Opus 1 No. 1 there is amazement. Haydn hadn’t yet mastered the art of freeing each of the instruments as an individual voice, as he soon would; the violins play their gorgeous tunes to a steady accompaniment from the lower strings. But in one of the minuets there is a fine trick, the two violins quickly alternating bowed and pizzicato passages, and you know that this isn’t more of that bland KUSC music you can just doze off to. The Angeles program also included Opus 33 No. 1, from 1783. Haydn by then was twice blessed: a steady job with an employer who encouraged innovation, and a group of players willing and able to tackle all challenges. This work is supposed to be in the key of B minor, and the unwritten laws of the so-called classical style ordain that you make your key clearly recognizable right at the start. Not Haydn this time; he begins somewhere else, and only slides into the “right” key after leaving his listeners baffled for several bars. Beethoven used that device at the start of the Ninth Symphony, and gets all the credit; here is Haydn doing it 42 years before. When Haydn’s Opus 33 quartets were performed in Vienna, the recently arrived Mozart was in the room, and he later credited Haydn for showing him the inner secrets of string-quartet creation.

Two quartets from Haydn’s Opus 50 rounded out the Angeles program: No. 1, with its heart-rending, throbbing slow movement, and No. 4, with its final, gnashing fugue that again carries portents of the Beethoven to come. The Angeles, its new second violinist, Sara Parkins, joining Kathleen Lenski, Brian Dembow and Stephen Erdody (bearer of the illustrious name of the countess who was Beethoven’s “lady confessor”), played with marvelous flexibility, the sense of adventure that permeates this music and raises it above the cliches and customs of its time. In tracing the growth of Haydn’s quartet mastery in this series of concerts at the Museum, the Angeles itself has also grown.

Black Angels lies at the foundation of the Kronos Quartet; hearing it on the radio 25 years ago, says the group’s founder and first violinist, David Harrington, instilled an obsession to create an ensemble that could play it. The work is about Vietnam; its language of shrieks and groans, with the strings purposely overamplified and interlaced with feedback mixed in with spoken, agonized gibberish from the players, may claim descent from Beethoven’s grinding masterpiece, but its concerns are of its own time, and they are expressed in an extraordinary richness of language. It belongs alongside Luciano Berio’s only slightly less frantic Sinfonia in its way of hurtling out from the stage with music that hovers on the edge of urgent speech about the world in horrific crisis.

Crumb hadn’t been very productive in the 1980s, but Quest, a big recent piece for the guitarist David Starobin and a chamber ensemble, released on Starobin’s Bridge label, sounds to me like a welcome return to center stage. He is an important creative figure, especially for his ability to orchestrate the implications of his times into hugely compelling music. Larry Neff, the Kronos’ lighting wizard, and Jack Carpenter have worked out a staging for Black Angels, mostly a matter of flickering lights and shadowy shapes on a darkened stage, around a kind of ceremonial altar under a rising and falling canopy. The effect is stunning, but tells me nothing that the music by itself doesn’t make achingly clear.

The Kronos’ Irvine program also included other bitter, lacerating music in the body of Alfred Schnittke’s harrowing Second Quartet, and Terry Riley’s two brief Requiem Quartets, in memory of recent deaths within the Kronos family, music of ethereal poignance that seemed to hang in the air. (I wish I could say as much for Riley’s UCLA concert of piano improv two nights before, which for once in my long admiration of his music I found meandering and pallid.)

At Royce Hall the night before Irvine, the Kronos kicked off with Ben Johnston’s gleeful and gritty version of Harry Partch’s U.S. Highball, with the hobo texts declaimed by David Barron; so far so good. At the end, however, the quartet was joined by Margaret Kampmeier in a pointless if not downright goofy arrangement for piano and strings by John Geist of, if you’re ready, Stravinsky’s sublime orchestral tour de force The Rite of Spring. Why, for God’s sake? Even Stravinsky’s own two-piano reduction, created to make the work portable for audition purposes, makes some sense; it at least preserves some of the percussive effects. This version locates a place for the music on a dusty shelf as some insipid piece of French chamber music, a d’Indy reject perhaps, plus a few kicky rhythms. The opening, that unearthly bassoon incantation that can still raise goose bumps 85 years later, turns pale and featureless translated to a solo cello. To paraphrase whoever it was who said what about whom: The Kronos doesn’t make many mistakes, but when it makes one it’s a beaut.

A silent-movie paean to life at its most forlorn, the grit ‘n’ gloom of a live soundtrack cobbled from works of the grittiest and gloomiest of composers – who, even among the most sanguine, could have mistaken these as ingredients for a radiant, stirring opening to our Philharmonic’s 79th subscription concert season? The cheers at the Music Center last Thursday night, therefore, must have been compounded as much out of surprise as admiration.

There had been other grounds for pessimism. Once before, in the summer of 1990, Peter Sellars had attempted a melding of live music and classic film, a misguided splicing – of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with John Adams’ Harmonielehre – that the writer of the Sellars bio in last week’s Philharmonic program book wisely overlooked. But Victor Seastrom’s The Wind cries out for Sibelius; you can sense that even from the video, with its score by the usually reliable Carl Davis that washes the horror-stricken drama in parlor sentimentality. When the film comes to its misbegotten tacked-on happy denouement commanded by the MGM executives, no music could better suit the moment than the featherbrained brassy rhetoric in the final bars of Sibelius’ justly neglected Night Ride and Sunrise.

And so Sellars this time out, with considerable brainstorming from Esa-Pekka Salonen – who, however, confesses that some of the selections were unfamiliar even to him – has concocted a Sibelius potpourri for The Wind in which both music and film sounded and looked better together than either element by itself. Some of the joinings of music and action were remarkably coordinated; a few blasts of taped wind noise interspersed between musical selections helped with the timing. There were production problems inherent in the hall; the screen, as large as it could be in its allotted space, was still too small; the lights on the musicians’ stands diminished the stark black-and-white contrasts of the film’s magnificent photography. There is a problem there for the Disney Hall designers to countenance, because last week’s goings-on suggest that the love feast between film and the Philharmonic, with or without the project’s cutesy title, is here to stay.

As the program’s brief opener there was Salonen’s new nine-minute Gambit, not of the stature of his LA Variations, but proficient on its own: the work of a man who knows what an orchestra is good at doing, and remembers what it has done.

Sixty years ago come next April, brave music lovers and musicians first confronted fearsome new music in Peter Yates’ rooftop studio in Silver Lake. “Evenings on the Roof,” which turned into “Monday Evening Concerts” and moved to the County Museum, is now the longest-running new-music series anywhere; last week’s concert, by Montreal’s Nouvel Ensemble Moderne under the leadership of Lorraine Vaillancourt, ushered in an uncommonly substantial and promising anniversary season.

Elliott Carter’s 20-minute Clarinet Concerto began the evening, music 2 years old from a composer who turns 90 this December; the 27-minute Secret Theater by Britain’s 64-year-old Harrison Birtwistle ended it. Both share a gritty harmonic style right at the edge of tonality. Carter’s work is, as usual, basically about itself and its power to generate abstract patterns. I try desperately to discern the “direct poetic beauty” that respected colleagues find in Carter’s music and will keep on trying; I fear, however, that we live on different planets. The Birtwistle generates dreamlike shapes, dances and processions seen and heard through shifting fog planes. In a musical vocabulary not much different from Carter’s, this work unfolds as a fantasy richly woven and involving.

Both works call for some stage biz. In the Carter, soloist Simon Aldrich moved around the stage to blend his playing into various groups within the ensemble; the Birtwistle encourages most of the players to alternate in performance between standing and sitting. The drab acoustics of the museum’s Bing Theater, however, tended to equalize the sound wherever its origin.

Australian Mary Finsterer’s glistening sound study Pascal’s Sphere and the Alap Gat by Spanish-born Canadian Jose Evangelista – an attempt, not entirely happy, to translate classical music of India for Western instruments – rounded out the program: lively, provocative, performed with the evangelical intensity that is the prime ingredient of all new-music ensembles. On such occasions, even a museum comes to life.

At Royce Hall, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra began its season with a gala benefit. You only needed the exquisitely balanced, high-spirited Marriage of Figaro Overture to recognize the level that this precious small orchestra has reached under Jeffrey Kahane’s leadership. I was, however, less taken by Kahane’s rather hard-boiled run through Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, conducted from the keyboard; I didn’t sense as much loving as this sovereign work requires. I was not at all taken by soprano Maria Jette’s pallid singing of a big Mozart aria and Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with James Agee’s beautiful words turned to mush. There was sheer delight, however, in Ginastera’s popular and elegantly fashioned Variaciones concertantes, a work designed (or so you might think) specifically to show off the skill of a superb small orchestra before a doting audience of patrons.

The Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra is not quite superb, but I have taken greater pleasure in some of its previous concerts than I found at its season’s opener at the Wilshire-Ebell last Saturday. The program was substantial to a fault: the most dramatic of Mozart’s Piano Concertos – the C minor, K. 491 – and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Both works, alas, lay beyond the reach of the performers. Local former boy wonder Alan Gampel, now in his mid-30s, whose program-book bio lists impressive worldwide attainments, skittered along the surface of Mozart’s wondrous profundities; his hard-as-nails pounding in the last movement suggested an antipathy toward the work bordering on hatred. A memory lapse toward the end, clumsily managed, did not help. Conductor (or “maestra,” as the program demands) Lucinda Carver, whose career is also in orbit these days, seemed to have mistaken the momentum in the Beethoven for haste; by ignoring most of the specified repeats, she also undercut the music’s marvelous logic. The orchestra did, however, keep up with her, and first French-hornist Jon Titmus hit some incendiary high E’s that might have wakened the deaf, Beethoven himself included.

At the season’s final classical concert at the Hollywood Bowl last month, Yo-Yo Ma was the marvelous soloist in John Tavener’s 48-minute The Protecting Veil, with Jeffrey Kahane and his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; at the end, the crowd of just under 10,000 held its silence for a full minute as the last quiet sounds mingled with the cool evening air – an atmosphere describable as hypnotic. The next night, at home, I allowed myself to be hypnotized again at even greater length by the new ECM recording of Arvo Part’s Kanon Pokajanen. The two works sang the same language: Tavener’s, with a solo cello weaving its incantatory, sinuous, nonstop melody in and out of the string orchestra’s enveloping haze; Part’s, with its unaccompanied chorus spinning immensely long vocal lines of penitence and exaltation, expanding from time to time into harmonies of almost palpable lushness, then falling back into an ages-old-sounding single strand like a small light in a huge, dark room.

This is what the phrase-spinners have dubbed “holy minimalism,” and the tag is not far off the mark. It has nothing to do with the archetypal minimalism of Steve Reich or Philip Glass, their throbbing, repetitive patterns oozing almost imperceptibly from one shape to the next. I hear this music as “minimal” only in the sense that so much emotional power can grow out of such modest resources. The breakthrough work, in terms of surging public acclaim, was Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony; it rode to the charts a few years ago via the proselytizing efforts of crossover DJs here and abroad. (The recording that put it there – David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony on Nonesuch, with Dawn Upshaw’s angelic singing – differed markedly from two previous versions, and also from the performance Gorecki himself conducted last year at USC.)

The Protecting Veil, its title derived from a millennium-old Eastern Orthodox legend about the Mother of God casting her veil to protect the Greeks from invading Saracens, is too eloquent on its own to be thought of as a ripoff of the Gorecki. Let’s just say that it rises effortlessly from the older work. Tavener’s hand – here, and in much of his considerable output – is guided by his religious involvement. I resisted the Veil on first hearings, but no longer; despite its prevailingly thin textures it demands full attention. (It seems to be getting it; Yo-Yo Ma’s new Sony Classical recording, again with Zinman/Baltimore, is already the third.) Whoever in the Bowl management decided to accompany the performance with shifting colored lights in the shell surrounding the performance – climaxing in a barfworthy hot magenta at the music’s ecstatic climax – should be brought up on charges of heresy.

Kanon Pokajanen, Part’s 83-minute ecstasy, is a setting of a Greek/Russian Orthodox morning service, for unaccompanied choir; its text, teeming with accents of repentance and atonement, even at times of abject groveling, might play well these days at the White House. If you know the great works in the Part legacy – the earlier Fratres, whose harmonic pulsations come at you like the summoning of distant bells; Passio, recounting the mysteries of the Passion through a pall of darkness; the glorious, brief, sun-drenched Magnificat – you should have mastered by now the task of relaxing in the face of his music’s daunting demands. Kanon Pokajanen’s time-scale is daunting, but its sounds are gorgeous. The ongoing chanted melodic line is the unifying force; that line, at times unadorned and austere, is then bathed at other times in the blinding light of rich, lush harmonies of indescribable beauty. Now and then the basses in the chorus hold a single low note at what seems like excruciating length, an effect familiar in some of the Russian liturgical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, or in my distant memories of the singing of the old Don Cossack Choir.

Some of the profound impact of the work, as heard on this new two-disc set, comes from the performance itself and the way it has been recorded. The singers are Tonu Kaljuste’s Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, who sang at the Irvine Barclay Theater last year in a concert I will not soon forget. The recording was made at the Niguliste Church in Tallinn, which looks from photographs to be a fairly small, unadorned structure; the singing is enveloped in an aura of resonance that, once again, suggests distant bells. (The work was actually composed to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the huge cathedral at Cologne, where it would probably sound even more resonant but not nearly as well-defined.) I cannot, in honesty, propose this music as the latest adjunct to the easy-listening shelf. For the believers, however – in whose ranks I gladly include myself – both the music and its realization on these discs make for an extraordinary experience.

The indoor concert season began not in one of our major masonry edifices, but in the intimate, welcoming space of Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church, where Vicki Ray inaugurated the fifth season of Piano Spheres with music-making no less hypnotic than any of the above. The house was full, as it deserved to be; this series – five yearly concerts by five pianists, a consortium devoted to innovation and adventure in music mostly but not entirely new – has become a resource valuable and enchanting.

The program consisted of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus, 90 minutes nonstop of vintage, exquisite music oozing – slowly, and on the edge of silence – around the periphery of some nameless vastness. For this performance the video artist Clay Chaplin devised a real-time visual counterpoint, projected images and abstractions of Ray’s hands in action, moving in and out of focus, with words of John Cage from his 1959 Lecture on Something, woven through the screen images. Once again, as with the Tavener piece at the Bowl, the participatory silence around the performance became a part of it; I’ve seldom known 90 minutes to go by so quickly.

The venerable Leonard Stein, whose brainchild this series was, performs at the next Piano Spheres concert on November 24, followed by Gloria Cheng-Cochran, Mark Robson and Susan Svrcek, who ends her program (on May 18, 1999) with Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata – that work, too, being music as deserving of the epithets “innovative” and “adventurous” as anything you’ll hear all season.

Willem Wijnbergen can’t wait to get back into music. His job description, after all – as executive vice president and managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic – demands at least as much attention to musical matters as to fund-raising, community relations, labor relations, the well-being of two full-scale orchestras and the planning of new concert halls. Since moving into his Music Center office last March, he has, by his own estimate, been able to deal with musical matters – planning programs alongside music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, checking out promising new soloists, fighting the good fight for new music – for only about 5 percent of his time.

On a Sunday night last month, Wijnbergen, his wife, Noelle, 8-year-old Hector and the 7-year-old twins, Eva and Merel, are coping with some newly arrived chaos, the large boxes from Amsterdam laden with all the family’s household goods. “I am no longer a resident of Amsterdam,” boasts the just-turned-40 Papa Wijnbergen. “I am a firm believer in burning bridges.” Barefoot, in shorts and a shirt with the Polo logo, he takes time out for coffee and a good Dutch cigar, and to look down the road for distant shadows. I try to visualize the imperial Ernest Fleischmann, 29 years in the job Wijnbergen has now inherited, doing an interview barefoot and in shorts. I cannot.

“I’m not ready yet for any major statements about my plans for the Philharmonic,” says Wijn(VINE)bergen, in that elegantly modulated English that Northern Europeans master so beautifully and Americans never will. “I still have to learn how people work here, and about audiences here. Just think of the Hollywood Bowl, those thousands of people listening to Beethoven and Mahler and Gershwin. I tried that once, but Dutch audiences are much too snobbish to accept that kind of informal atmosphere – even if it didn’t rain so much in the summer, which it does.”

A year ago, the Philharmonic’s search committee was operating in secrecy and in some desperation, trying to find someone reckless enough to take on Fleischmann’s well-worn mantle, with its built-in hazard of Fleischmann’s magnanimous offer to stay on as “consultant.” Suddenly there was Wijnbergen, reportedly at the ardent recommendation of Esa-Pekka Salonen, and he seemed almost too good to be true.

In six years as managing director of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, he had pulled that renowned ensemble out of financial doldrums – brought on by drastic cutbacks in government funding and a somewhat stodgy public image – and had wiped out the orchestra’s deficit two years ahead of his own target date. Not only that: His credentials include a respectable career as conductor and pianist, studies in business and arts management at Southern Methodist, and a two-year stint as brand manager at Procter Gamble’s Rotterdam office. Soap and symphony, the market and the muse: You couldn’t patent a better design for someone to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic into a new millennium and a new concert hall.

Crossing those thresholds are, of course, his major concern. Deep down, Wijnbergen shares the widely held (but surreptitiously voiced) belief that the downtown location of the Music Center is all wrong, in ways that adding the new Disney Hall will not correct. Whatever the Chandler family’s hopes were in 1964 – for the creation of a magnetic cultural enclave comparable to New York’s Lincoln Center or London’s South Bank, surrounded by restaurants, book and music stores, small and delightful gathering places – they have not materialized; the barren Music Center is surrounded by more barrenness. It’s not very likely, however, that its buildings will anytime soon be loaded onto trucks and moved somewhere else. “What we have to concentrate on instead,” says Wijnbergen, “is to develop many kinds of venues all over the city, where we can attract diverse audiences with diverse programs. I don’t mean only concert halls, although I’d love to find some use for Ambassador Auditorium, which just sits there sad and empty. I mean churches, small theaters, outdoor settings, a network of places with the Music Center as the nucleus.

“The biggest job, as I see it, is to become important to the broadest segment of the audience. We have to take a long and hard look at programming. I don’t mean that we have to turn everything upside down; there’s nothing basically wrong with playing Brahms symphonies, and audiences will be moved by this music into the 21st century and even beyond. But there are ways of making programs that are more imaginative than just doing a Brahms and following that by a Tchaikovsky. For example, we could do a series of programs built around Russian music, or baroque music, or Hispanic, and then schedule other events that would expand on those concerts, make them a more meaningful part of the audience’s experience – chamber music by the same composers on the main program, or a lecture, or a free outdoor event. If we can suggest to an audience that we take seriously the music we present week to week, perhaps we can convince the audience to take it seriously as well.”

Symphony orchestras do most of their programming two or three years in advance, to fit in with the schedules of touring soloists and visiting conductors; thus, most of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 1998-99 season, which begins this weekend, was already set in place during the last two years of Fleischmann’s leadership. There are exceptions, of course, due to inevitable dropouts of one kind or another. This weekend’s program, for example, was to have included the second of the “Film-Harmonic” projects: short new films with scores played by the orchestra, commissioned for inclusion on the orchestra’s regular concerts. But Renny Harlin, the scheduled director, took on another assignment and had to postpone his Philharmonic stint; it was Wijnbergen, then, who had to marshal his local forces to come up with a substitute. The result: a film not new but old – Victor Seastrom’s silent classic The Wind – with music also old, chosen by Salonen from some of Jean Sibelius’ windswept tone poems, with additional brainstorming by director Peter Sellars. Thus, this weekend’s concerts, which inaugurate Wijnbergen’s first season as the Philharmonic’s managing director, inaugurate his prowess as a musical planner as well.

Already there are reports of other innovations on Wijnbergen’s drawing board. Upon arrival last March, he immediately waded into musical matters at the Bowl, reorganizing the management of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, installing himself at the head, tearing up plans for a scheduled complete performance of Puccini’s Turandot as being outside that orchestra’s rightful territory, tromping on a few toes in the process, which have since healed. Now the reports point to a considerable expansion of Bowl fare starting next summer, with increased attention to jazz and the addition of world music to the summer fare. “I had the feeling,” Wijnbergen explains, “that the Bowl needed my attention at first even more than the Philharmonic. For one thing, the Bowl programs are usually planned only a year in advance, not three. What little time I’ve had for musical programming up to now, therefore, has gone into the immediate problem of next summer at the Bowl. We need to book more conductors and more soloists, and, frankly, we haven’t always made the best choices along those lines.”

Leaving Amsterdam’s orchestra, recognized as one of the world’s half-dozen greatest, to take on America’s Wild West: Does that suggest a bravery verging on the foolhardy? “What attracts me the most about coming here,” says Wijnbergen, “is the scope of the possibilities. I know this can sound like public-relations bullshit, but I mean it seriously. My biggest problem? It’s the same as nearly every orchestra manager’s biggest problem right now. It’s to renew our relevance – to the musical world, and to our own community. Three orchestras in the world can exist beyond concerns about relevance: the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, and the orchestra I left in Amsterdam; they are the fac
t of life in their cities,
like every stone monument. The rest of us face the daily need to lead the musical life of our cities, and to prove to more audiences every day why that life is important.”

Willem Wijnbergen pours another cup of coffee, and looks straight ahead into the next century. “It can be done,” he says.