So I've Heard

Andre Previn’s score is bland and derivative; Philip Littell’s libretto reduces the play to a skeleton; Colin Graham’s staging is busy and hectic. Still, a fair portion of the blame for the failure of the San Francisco Opera’s A Streetcar Named Desire, whose premiere on September 19 was ushered in with hoopla of Richter-scale proportions – and cheered lustily by a gala audience obviously needing to justify having shelled out $1,500 for the top ticket – lies not with the above, but with the company’s general director, Lotfi Mansouri, who has proclaimed, as a litany published worldwide in press interviews, that an operatic Streetcar has been his dream for nearly 20 years. That’s a long time to be as deluded as Mansouri has been on this particular matter.

What anyone hears when under the spell of this extraordinary play is music itself, not virtual but real. Not only is Tennessee Williams’ 1947 tragedy an intense, lyrical unfolding, with full-scale verbal arias and ensembles for characters both major and minor (the “flores para los muertos” woman, for example, with her brief walk-through like a Wagnerian annunciation), but Williams’ published text specifies an almost nonstop undercurrent of offstage music, later expanded upon but not desecrated by Alex North’s score for the 1951 movie version. To impose upon this rich, overpowering design a layer of overt operatic transmogrification – even if the Previn/Littell creation were any good, which it isn’t – becomes at the very least an exercise in redundancy. According to Mansouri, he had previously dangled the Streetcar project before Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, who turned him down; no fools they.

Hobbled by the Williams estate’s insistence that he add no words of his own to the original text, Littell’s contribution is mostly an act of jettisoning large chunks of that text, drastically reducing the play without the chance to add any kind of “operatic” enhancement – an ensemble for Stanley’s pals, perhaps, or an extended love/hate duet for Stanley and Stella to explore their steamy relationship. Blanche’s several extended speeches, which in the play hover at the edge of music, make the easy transition into full-scale arias. These moments, too, form the least-worst of Previn’s ambitious – and ultimately overreaching – musical setting: from a jagged, frazzled recitation as Blanche recounts the deaths of the folks back at Belle Reve and the loss of the property itself, to a serene folk song as she envisions, her mind unhinged but now at peace, her last days on her imaginary lover’s phantom yacht.

As Los Angeles concertgoers remember all too well, Previn has built an up-and-down reputation dealing with other people’s music on orchestral podiums, and it shows here; his score veers widely among current and recent musical styles, from an attempt at blues to honor the play’s New Orleans setting (in the sanitized pseudo-jazz style familiar from some of his recent recordings) to the surge of Benjamin Britten’s ocean via a bit of Mahler at his most purple. What is most fatally lacking, however, is a musical point of view to shine any kind of light on the greatness of Williams’ play – and, thus, to justify this misguided effort to drag it into the alien atmosphere of overstuffed, overpriced grand opera. Previn himself conducted the first four performances; on opening night he and the orchestra were not yet eye-to-eye. Same old Andre.

On Michael Yeargan’s generic New Orleans set, Colin Graham, a practiced hand at putting over problematic new operas, creates a generic operatic busyness to match the generic undefinedness of Previn’s score. Thomas J. Munn’s projections serve as pictorial supertitles. Blanche sings of Stanley as a throwback to the age of the apes, and, by golly, the stage is engulfed in jungle foliage.

As Blanche I heard the fast-rising Renee Fleming, who by current estimate can do no wrong; the strain that came across in her performance, however, was not that of a bygone belle coping with decay, but of a greatly admired soprano coping with tragic accents the music would not let her feel. Rodney Gilfry was similarly cast adrift by the facelessness of his music; in a role eternally overshadowed by the image of its first interpreter, his Stanley did, at least, make a praiseworthy stab at not being Brando. Anthony Dean Griffey’s lumbering Mitch and Elizabeth Futral’s rather chirpy Stella were as okay as the music demands. The opera runs through October 11, with several cast changes.

Streetcar has already been booked into the San Diego Opera in 2000; Opera Pacific is reportedly nibbling. Operatic honchos from several other companies, including Los Angeles and Chicago, looked in at San Francisco last week, along with a 140-member corps of the international musical press. The world hungers for the Great American Opera; the mistake was in trying to extract it from the Great American Play.

Across Grove Street, the torrid love affair between Michael Tilson Thomas and his adopted city continues apace, with the much-made-over Davies Symphony Hall serving as nuptial bed. At last week’s concert you could, in fact, have made an interesting case for the striking resemblance between the hall and MTT himself: the one festooned with acoustical chachkas (a virtual forest of suspended clear-plastic panels that go up and down, more reflecting panels on the sides and on the stage itself), the other in a reading of Mahler’s First Symphony similarly encumbered (interpretive quirks, minor moments overemphasized, subtle contrasts brutalized). The sound in the hall is impressively loud and in-your-face, and those, too, are the words for the San Francisco Symphony’s much adored conductor, widely if not universally acclaimed as the right guy in the right place.

Credit where due: Tilson Thomas has led his orchestra on some interesting and important excursions into areas where few others care to venture. His program two weeks ago also included three American works. One was a rightly admired classic, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, with James Agee’s words beautifully sung by Heidi Grant Murphy as a last-minute substitute for Sylvia McNair. The others were novelties very much worthwhile: Charles Ives’ amazing From the Steeples and the Mountains, a venture into dissonance and clangor scored for nothing but brass and bells, and Henry Cowell’s Music 1957, an extended work for huge orchestra (including anvils and tom-toms), an extraordinary if at times exasperating interweaving of great tangles of complex rhythms with folksy tunes of almost embarrassing innocence.

Cowell grew up in the Bay Area, antagonized his first audiences there while still in his teens, served time in San Quentin on a trumped-up perversion charge that today would probably get him elected mayor, and – even when later living in New York – composed music as innately Californian as any resident or visitor before his time or since. Since taking on the San Francisco post, Tilson Thomas has labored nobly to restore the Cowell legacy, which is copious and uneven; among his many other good deeds, this alone would be enough to assure his ticket to heaven.

Two French operas back to back: mon dieu! Does this spell the end of the Puccini hegemony at the L.A. Opera? Not quite, I fear; despite a substantial sop to kick off the company’s 13th season – and the ominous rumblings of a threatened Samson et Dalila not far down the road – there is some ground to cover before the considerable and precious French repertory can assume a rightful place against the murky torrent of Butterflys and Toscas at the Music Center.

One forward step would be to deal with the best-known work in that repertory in a manner mindful of its stature. Last week’s Carmen was the company’s second stab, but no step forward. The 1992 production, staged by Nuria Espert – with the promising (and, since then, acclaimed) Denyce Graves in the title role – was all high-concept revisionism, starting off with a death dance for Carmen during the overture. The new staging, by Ann-Margret Pettersson, is a Carmen by the book, but the book itself shows its tatters. Both productions dropped the spoken dialogue of Bizet’s superior original score in favor of the sung recitatives by Ernest Guiraud inserted after Bizet’s death that slow and muddy the pace and undermine the drama at the opera’s climactic moments. Customary and wise practice these days is to revert to Bizet’s pristine plan, which has been newly edited and published. The Los Angeles Opera apparently sees Carmen as a museum piece and last week performed it as such.

Jennifer Larmore’s Carmen has been eagerly anticipated, and I still have hopes. Lovely of voice and of stage bearing, she is currently by just those attributes a failed Carmen, gorgeously engraved in the wrong colors. She lets you know, in the most exquisite, ladylike terms, that she would no more let loose with a dusky chest tone or a seductive portamento than sing the role in chain mail. This was her first stage Carmen, after last year’s concert performance at the Hollywood Bowl; she may grow into the role. Considering the marvels in her Handel/Rossini bel canto performances, I almost wish she wouldn’t, but Carmen, of course, is where the money lies.

Placido Domingo was the Don Jose in 1992, and sang it again last week, only slightly the worse for wear. He sings the role not as Jose but as Domingo, which, I guess, is what some people want for their $135 top ticket. Never mind, then, Domingo’s unequal struggle with Bizet’s prescribed pianissimo ending to the “Flower Song” in Act 2. Never mind, also, that the spectacle of the, let’s say, portly Domingo coping with a ladder on Lennart Mork’s two-level set – on his way to murder his sweetie in what is supposed to look like a jealous rage – is not one of opera’s more endearing sights. Some day the company may unearth a Don Jose possessed of a pianissimo B flat and the looks to suggest a nice mama’s boy love-smitten and driven to murder; meanwhile, there’s Domingo. Local boy Richard Bernstein’s rafter-rattling Escamillo was just fine; Carla Maria Izzo’s wan, edgy-voiced Micaela, in something surely not French, somewhat less so. (She was well-along pregnant, which is a legitimate excuse for her vocal problems, but not for a company asking $135 for this level of work.)

There was nothing wrong (or radiantly right) with Bertrand de Billy’s well-routined conducting, except for his acquiescence to using the wrong score. Pettersson’s staging consisted of people, people, people, clutter, clutter, clutter. The cigarette girls in the Act 1 chorus looked as if holding their cigs for the first time ever. The Act 2 set, a name-the-picture rip-off of Sargent’s El Jaleo, stole the show.

The next night there was Werther, the company’s long-overdue first dip into the mauve-and-lavender Massenet legacy and, in its modest way, a thoroughly respectable piece of work. In an attempt to drive copyeditors off their rockers, the performance enlists the services of the conductor Emmanuel Joel and the director Nicolas Joel; they are half brothers, but only Nicolas spells his name with the dieresis. Both they and the production itself are from the opera house at Toulouse, which, from this evidence, must be a fine place to visit. The simple, generic sets by Hubert Monloup look as if they could serve a company’s entire repertory; anything more elaborate, however, would probably clash with this opera’s modest proportions.

Nothing much happens in Werther, and it does so very prettily. Massenet’s melancholy vapors form a fragrant fog around Johann Goethe’s 1774 archetypal romantic weeper, which in its time lured generations of adolescents into suicidal frames of mind. The tenor in the title role learns in Act 1 that his beloved Charlotte is otherwise betrothed and wails, wails a little more in the next two acts, and, to nobody’s surprise, shoots himself at the end and expires in Charlotte’s arms as she, also unsurprisingly, confesses that she has loved him all along. Even the couple of hit arias along the way are patchwork affairs compared, say, to Carmen’s outpourings or, for that matter, the tunes in Massenet’s better-known Manon. The characters here are not bullfighters or philanderers but well-off provincials; in today’s world they would own lava lamps and dine at Benihana. Massenet’s bourgeois music captures their essence.

Excellent as it is in most respects, this first-ever venture by local forces into the dolorous languors of Massenet makes friends slowly; the opening-night crowd thinned noticeably after intermission. Compared to the one-two punches delivered by Carmen the night before, Werther moves at a placid pace. Even so, the beauties in the score are deep and genuine; at the Music Center they are nicely probed. The L.A. Opera has peopled its stage with a mostly young cast welded into a fine-tuned musical and dramatic ensemble: maybe not $135 worth of all-star talent or spectacular scenery, but at least that much worth of lyric intelligence. The Charlotte, Paula Rasmussen, is one of the company’s homegrown stars, an intelligent and handsome young singer who began in small roles and now has an international career. The Werther, Mexican tenor Ramon Vargas, has exactly the light-textured, sleek vocal manner to mirror the monotone sadness of his music – and to steer the attention away from his somewhat clunky stage presence. Reminiscences of Italy’s Tito Schipa would not be out of place.

The Joel/Joel contingent does itself proud. Director Nicolas moves his cast with no false moves. Conductor Emmanuel draws from the local orchestral forces the properly gossamer, wispy sounds, Chanel No. 5 made audible. It’s all very, very French and, as they say over there, splendide.

America was still savoring the triumph of the first moon landing, that summer of 1969, when the terrible thing happened at Chappaquiddick and the air darkened perceptibly. Soon after, the garish glory of Woodstock confirmed the fall of the curtain, the death of national innocence that made Vietnam and Watergate seem, if not inevitable, at least horribly explicable.

Nearly a quarter-century later, Joyce Carol Oates produced her violent and harrowing short novel called Black Water, recounting the hours from the meeting of Senator

Edward Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne to her drowning death in the Chappaquiddick Inlet in Kennedy’s car, its characters renamed – she is now “Kelly Kelleher” – but not otherwise disguised, its locale moved northward from Martha’s Vineyard to an island off the Maine coast. Out of the tragedy Oates fashioned a kind of ballad, much of it as the doomed heroine’s imagined last thoughts, trapped helpless in the submerged, overturned car, with its litany – “the black water filled her lungs, and she died” – repeated with agonizing insistence like a steady, maddening drumbeat.

Now Oates and the composer John Duffy have turned Black Water into a chamber opera for relatively modest resources – 10 solo singers, piano, violin, cello – first produced a year ago at Philadelphia’s American Music Theater Festival, repeated with the same principals a few weeks ago at the Skirball Cultural Center, taped at that time by L.A. Theater Works for broadcast on KCRW-FM this Sunday, September 6, from 6 to 8 p.m., not to be missed. (Yes, I know it conflicts with Jane Eaglen’s concert at the Hollywood Bowl, but there are such things as tape recorders. It runs just under two hours.)

For her libretto Oates has uncoiled her convoluted original text to form an ongoing narrative, fleshing out characters only lightly touched upon in the novel, artfully creating the milieu – chitchat at a Fourth of July party with its tangle of mouthed political and social gobbledygook, the central pairing gradually looming as if from a great distance. Duffy, a distinguished and prolific elder musical statesman whose good deeds include heading the support organization Meet the Composer, has caught the resonance of Oates’ storyline – the vicious sarcasm as “The Senator” enchants the crowd with honeyed double talk, the not-quite-pure innocence of “Kelly”‘s “American girl-ness,” the cliche-studded idealism of her tossed-aside boyfriend. This is brilliant musical theater, in a tense, angular style Stephen Sondheim might not disown, remarkable for its resourceful identification of character even in the cleverly intertwined ensembles. That latter quality in particular makes it work as a radio opera (which I heard again last week on tape) almost as well as it did with the live cast at Skirball, unstaged but mobile. That cast – Karen Burlingame as “Kelly,” Patrick Mason as “The Senator,” David Lee Brewer as the boyfriend, with Alan Johnson’s musical direction from the piano – labored as if in the service of a small but authentic masterpiece, an opinion I will not dispute.

Acis and Galatea became, therefore, the second opera produced unstaged in Sepulveda Pass this summer. Michael Eagan’s Musica Angelica ensemble, which had presented the first of the Getty Center’s “Ancient Echoes” concert series tied to the museum’s antiquities exhibition, returned to close out the series with Handel’s giddy and wondrously charming pastoral piece, delightful in all respects, ecstatically greeted by a capacity crowd. The series has been uncommonly interesting and, aside from miscalculations inevitable in this kind of project the first time out, successful. The worst miscalculation was the inclusion of a dance program, in a space where the flat audience area and the too-low stage made the dancers invisible from the waist down to all but the front couple of rows.

Acis is famous and often staged for several wrong reasons; smalltime music societies have a ball with the silliness of lovers serenading one another with roulades of “happy, happy” and the like. Eagan’s splendid group, sparked by Jennifer Ellis’ wise and delectable Galatea, brought out strengths in the work that had escaped me in lesser performances: above all the rich, solemn beauty in the choruses, and the recent-immigrant Handel’s remarkable skill in setting the English language. It’s hard to believe that so profoundly good a production as this was put together for this one weekend at the Getty; it should be mounted on wheels and sent out to raise the level of civilization the world over.

Questions I raised last week concerning the quality of the music making at the Hollywood Bowl do not, of course, apply in the matter of visiting orchestras; one can assume that they arrive with their programs already extensively rehearsed. I liked the sense of assurance around the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s performances – five programs over six days – last week. The orchestra has only existed full time since 1992, but this was already its second stint at the Bowl. Its membership, too, looks predominantly young. Its co-founder and conductor, Ivan Fischer – whose older brother, Adam, made a so-so Philharmonic debut at the Music Center last January – has appeared here off and on since 1983.

The Budapest week began impressively, with a concert of Beethoven Threes: Third Leonora Overture, Third Piano Concerto, “Eroica” Symphony. That overture is always a knock-’em-dead item at the Bowl, with its offstage trumpeter sounding the message of salvation from high atop one of the lighting towers. Fischer and his players dispatched the entire work, in fact, with a fine mix of impulse and detail. This is music popular but not easy; midway there come page after page of steady eighth-note chug-along that in lesser hands can be made to sound like routine Philip Glass. This time there was drama, a steady buildup of tension that the trumpet calls really did resolve, and then a glorious swoosh onto the bone-jarring final dissonance. At times like this, music you think you know backward and forward comes on like a welcome stranger. The “Eroica” performance – spacious but never laggardly, filling nearly an hour even without the repeats, splendidly detailed especially in the way the wind playing came somewhat forward – produced some of the same feeling. Something about the sound of the performance, the depth and dark luster of the orchestral tone, took on an Old World eloquence different from the gleaming, tense clarity of our local orchestra, and no less cherishable.

Veteran pianist Peter Frankl accomplished something similar in the Third Concerto, in a reading broad and rhetorical, beautifully controlled, especially responsive to the slow movement’s sublime meditations. This music, Beethoven’s first truly “serious” concerto, is often beset by tinkly performances from young fingers; a run-through of the same work by Seung-Un Ha earlier this summer (at one of the Bowl’s fireworks nights) was a case in point. I can only hope that among last week’s nearly 6,000 Bowl attendees there were a few young pianists (or pianists of any age) receptive to the evening’s message.

Against the taunts of the nonbelievers, I cling to the premise that a night at the Hollywood Bowl, even for the Tuesday/Thursday “serious” programs, can be a joyous, even uplifting, event. Some nights this summer, however, I’ve had to cling more tightly than usual, although the last two weeks’ concerts, with Esa-Pekka Salonen back on his rightful podium, outweighed some of the sadder memories.

Attendance for the classical events has been down this summer. Any impresario would, of course, be happy if four or five thousand people showed up for a regular-season concert; yet scattered through the nearly 18,000 seats at the Bowl, a crowd that size looks like the population of an Inuit outpost. I find it harder than usual, this time, to castigate the stay-aways. The Bowl’s classical offerings are studded with masterpieces: Beethoven symphonies, Romantic symphonies and showoff concertos, not a note of Haydn or Schubert but lots of Brahms, a welcome year off for Tchaikovsky symphonies but a fair helping of Shostakovich, a big- or medium-name soloist every night. But each of these programs gets a single day’s rehearsal, under conductors sometimes previously unknown to the orchestra. Top-ranking conductors – Simon Rattle last summer, Roger Norrington last month – are allotted (and deserve) extra rehearsal time, and the results show. And they show, as well, when Salonen takes the podium and hasn’t had to waste half a rehearsal just getting acquainted.

On any night, the idea of putting together a picnic supper and washing it down with live professional performances of symphonies and concertos is mighty appealing; the Bowl deserves its worldwide fame. (The new managing director, Willem Wijnbergen, has already confessed to an amorous passion for the Bowl, even for the august Philharmonic playing backgrounds for Bugs Bunny cartoons, as happened one night. You could never make this work in stodgy Holland, he assures me.) The sound in the boxes, where the pampered press is seated, is acceptably clean for outdoor amplification, although the mix of live and wired tends to fade in and out. In the first rows behind the boxes, where I sat a few nights ago, the sound was pure electronic, and even better. But the commodity being amplified – underrehearsed performances, led by conductors whose occasionally inadequate readings can be laid as much to circumstances as to failed musicianship – has struck me on many occasions as the Bowl’s major continuing problem. Anyone troubled – as I was – by Jeffrey Tate’s laggardly reading of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, by Stefan Sanderling’s slog through Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony or by Lawrence Foster’s merely dutiful Beethoven, redeemed only by the fireworks, might have difficulty in fixing the blame.

There’s no easy solution. It’s not a matter of hiring better conductors; I’ve heard superior performances from the three named above, properly rehearsed. Maybe it’s a matter of hiring fewer conductors for longer stints: two weeks to get acquainted with the orchestra, rather than one. (Aside from Salonen, it’s the soloists rather than the conductors who usually sell tickets at the Bowl.) Cutting back on the classical series is, of course, an unconscionable option, although this year’s small turnouts must be causing concern in some quarters. Again, if a conductor were here for two weeks instead of one, there might be more opportunity to promote his or her appearance – granted, of course, an increase in enlightenment in the local media. But what can I, humble handservant of the arts that I am, know of such matters?

Salonen’s four Bowl programs were dress rehearsals for the Philharmonic’s European jaunt now under way. (Lucky Europe is, however, being spared the Sibelius Violin Concerto, mushed through by Joshua Bell and Salonen on the third program.) Two extraordinary vocal performances, by singers a generation apart, lit up the skies. On the first program, Gundula Janowitz, a week past her 61st birthday, sang five slow Richard Strauss songs (with the piano parts acceptably orchestrated) with the same youthful urgency and sweetness of both tone and phrase that had enslaved us all with her Sieglinde at the Met (and on discs) in 1967. Lorraine Hunt’s transfiguration of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer on the last program hung in the summer sky like an apparition from some benevolent planet. What an amazing, wondrously wise, seductive artist she has become in the few years of her incandescent career!

And so Salonen and his Philharmonic take to Europe some of its own music: Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner – the Fourth Symphony, which he conducts cleanly and sturdily, but which still seems to get longer every year – and his rough-and-ready sprint through the Beethoven Fifth. Better yet, they take some of our own music: the glorious romp of John Adams’ Slonimsky’s Earbox, with its writhing, steaming tangle of the many scale-forms that the great, late Nicolas explored and codified, and Aaron Copland’s archetypal world-music exploration, El Salon Mexico – whose execution the other night, alas, lacked some of the down-and-dirty that the much-missed Lenny had so gleefully supplied.

Best of all, Salonen is taking his own latter-day triumph, his 20-minute LA Variations, a work that, many hearings after its memorable premiere, continues to assure me that serious, deeply considered and imaginatively crafted music for large symphony orchestra can still be written and can still exhilarate. It may, in fact, be the most challenging music ever performed outdoors anywhere: a stupendous workout for both players and listeners as a complex, tortuous theme spirals through the orchestra, tries on a wondrous variety of disguises, weathers storms along the way and ends enchantingly as a shaft of audible white light (a single high note on the piccolo). Perhaps the reception at the Bowl fell short of the memorable ovation at the premiere at the Music Center a year ago last January, but not by much; a small but happy, responsive crowd proved itself equal to the challenge. So, even, did the demons of air traffic. It was one of the Bowl’s great events.

Somebody had the good idea to initiate a series of Sunday-morning chamber concerts at the idyllic John Anson Ford Amphitheater. It’s the right time of the day, and of the week, to let our ears be wooed by the subtle and loving tones of this kind of music. Management provides an overhead canopy – two huge parachutes, actually – to mitigate the sun’s rays. There’s a buffet brunch, a little pricey if truth be known and a little hard to manage in the absence of trays, but I’ve known worse. Somebody also had the far-less-good idea, however, to amplify the music; the two opening works at last week’s concert – trios by Haydn and Dvorak played by pianist Christopher O’Riley, violinist Andrew Dawes and cellist Paul Katz – were sent thundering through the ravine with all the power of the Rolling Stones, with the cello drowning out everything else. Fortunately, the air at intermission was full of complaint, and it reached the proper authorities. Schubert’s E-flat Trio, the final work, was wafted crowdward at something closer to its proper volume. Chalk up a rare but resounding victory for audience activism. One concert remains, on September 6.

That Schubert trio – one of his few large-scale works that became known and admired during his lifetime – rolls on for nearly an hour. It can’t be hurried; the players last Sunday got that right. Given the heat of the day, they were wise to forgo the repeats in the first and last movements; otherwise we might still be there (but happily so). No music I care to discuss makes greater demands on its listeners’ patience, or rewards it so handsomely. The other works on Sunday morning’s program – the famous Haydn trio that includes the “Gypsy” Rondo and Dvorak’s less-known F-minor Trio with its gorgeous slow movement – were models of concision next to the Schubert, but it was the latter score that seemed to flow out of the sylvan surroundings that make the Ford such a precious place for music.

Schubert composed his two big piano trios almost simultaneously – in late 1827, less than a year before his death – and yet the two are remarkably dissimilar: the B-flat with its honeyed endearments, the E-flat with its astonishing shifts from giggles

to grandeur. Only the Beethoven “Archduke,” among works in this medium, looms taller; Schubert must have learned from that work how great a range of emotion, how many dramatic shifts and surprises, could be wrung from just three instruments. Its range of trickery – above all, its way of affecting an air of utmost innocence as it flops arrogantly from one clearly established key to some distant harmonic region half a planet away – remains astonishing after 170 years. Schubert’s last months, as we are often told, produced a legacy of large works – three piano sonatas, the C-major String Quintet, the Mass in E flat, the F-minor Fantasy and the tantalizing outlines of a symphony that seems to peer far into music’s future (expertly filled in by Brian Newbould and recorded as “Symphony No. 10”) – whose greatness and variety constantly baffle and delight. Every one of these works, furthermore, is totally different from its contemporaries; it would be impossible to predict the style and shape of, say, any one of those piano sonatas from any other in the set.

The E-flat Trio, for example, is the only one of these works that experiments with the notion of unifying a work of several finite movements by quoting material from one movement in the next. Composers after Schubert did this all the time, proclaiming that the Romantic ideal in music favored unity over variety. Robert Schumann, who anointed himself the avatar of Romanticism, used this Schubert trio as a template for one of his own large-scale works, the E-flat Piano Quintet.

These are good times for Schubert. The 1998-99 brochure for MaryAnn Bonino’s “Historic Sites” series of chamber concerts is at hand, promising both this E-flat Trio and another vast, late Schubert work full of amazing inventions – the G-major String Quartet – in a setting, the Doheny Mansion rotunda, that could have been designed with that kind of music in mind. Meanwhile, some recent discs encourage hopes that we may once again be in a golden age of lieder singing.

Hyperion’s Schubert Edition, a complete sweep through the songs – including works for vocal ensemble, part songs, and also including alternative versions and some repertory duplications justified in context – has attained its 30th volume. The discs come with fat booklets full of analytical information about the songs themselves and general essays on aspects of Schubert’s life and style, all the labor (of love, obviously) of Graham Johnson, who is also the pianist throughout. It’s a project, in other words, based on the premise that there are still people out there willing to allot full attention to great music, and who can be made interested in what they’re hearing beyond the notes themselves. That, I fear, may be a dangerous premise these days, but it’s also the one that keeps me going.

Disc No. 25, released earlier this year, contains Ian Bostridge’s heartbreaking singing of the cycle Die schone Mullerin: music and musician, you’d swear, fashioned from the same bolt of lightning. Bostridge’s career only took wing four years ago; his voice is, above all, flexible – the sound of an oboe, the soul of a clarinet. It wraps itself around a melody and disappears into it, and we are left with an essence, of an artistry overpowering yet invisible. As the ultimate seal of heavenly approval, the disc also includes Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, about whose singing 40 years ago I might have written some of those words. Now he appears as speaker, reading some of the Wilhelm Muller poems that Schubert did not include in his cycle.

On disc No. 30, Matthias Goerne sings Schubert’s other cycle, Die Winterreise, with the soul of a clarinet in the roar of a volcano. Goerne was here last season, in an evening of chilling Hanns Eisler songs (which he has now recorded for London). His Schubert is also chilling, in a manner different from that of Bostridge. As the latter draws the tragedy of the young miller tight around him, Goerne’s forsaken lover engulfs us in the larger-than-life enormity of his tragedy. I would not abandon my Aksel Schiotz Schone Mullerin or my Hans Hotter Winterreise or my 5-foot shelf of Fischer-Dieskau’s Schubert; yet both these new discs, and the singers who made them, seem to me essential.

The ethics of full disclosure oblige me to reveal up front that I wrote the program notes for one of the concerts reviewed in this space. The fee I received, every penny, went for a root canal. If that doesn’t count as expiation, I’d like to know what does.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum, an exhibit called Beyond Beauty: Antiquities as Evidence presents some of the museum’s sculptural holdings in a nicely arranged gallery liberally festooned with informational placards. What the “evidence” is supposed to substantiate I’m not quite sure; the language of museumese can make even the most high-flying writing about music read like the Yellow Pages. But the artworks are beautiful enough, whatever beauty may lie beyond.

As an adjunct to the exhibit, the Getty has put together a series of musical events with its own highfalutin title: Ancient Echoes: Music and Dance Evoking Greco-Roman Antiquity, six programs on Saturday and Sunday nights in the Museum Courtyard – three down so far and three to go. The Pasadena Symphony’s Jorge Mester is the series’ artistic director; his programming becomes, indeed, an enterprising exploration into the ways musicians – from Renaissance times to our own – have fancied themselves driven by the highest ideals of ancient classicism. “The only way to become great,” wrote Johann Winckelmann in his book on classical art, a 1765 best-seller, “. . . is to imitate the Greeks.”

There’s a historical thread that runs through music as far back as you care to trace it, a constant desire for composers to reconfirm their tickets to Heaven by identifying with ancestral personages from other arts, specifically with the designers of the Parthenon and their world. Music attains a certain level of high sophistication and complexity; then a crowd of composer-activists comes along to deplore all this high artistry. “Music has lost its human values,” they proclaim. “Let’s dump all this counterpoint and return to the pure ideals of the Greek masters.” Thus ranted the dilettantes of the Florentine Camerata around 1600, distancing themselves from the intricacies of Palestrina’s polyphony and inventing opera. Thus, 150 years later, spoke Christoph Gluck, proclaiming that opera had now become too encrusted with complexity, offering his Greek-inspired Alceste and Orfeo ed Euridice as correctives. In our own century, Igor Stravinsky, having turned the musical world upside down with his Rite of Spring, then reinvented classicism (or invented Neo-Classicism, either way) with his Apollon Musagete. Later on the nut-genius Harry Partch proclaimed that all music had been following the wrong path since Pericles’ time, and devised scales and instruments to enable a whole fresh start.

It may be worth noting – or worth nothing – that the one substance that might have facilitated these invocations of the Periclean ideal virtually doesn’t exist. There are volumes of ancient theoretical writings about Greek music, and a great deal of ethical writing as well. Both Plato and Aristotle defined the place of music in society, and even specified the kinds of harmony that bred bravery in the hearer and the kinds that bred cowardice. Friezes, statues and decorated vases provide a lavish visual display of instruments. Practically speaking, however, there is no music: perhaps 50 fragments surviving from an eight-century span (500 B.C.-300 A.D.), some not more than a measure or two, that may or may not denote a specific melodic or rhythmic pattern. At last week’s Getty concert, third in the series, Philip and Gayle Stuwe Neuman, a young Oregon couple who call themselves Ensemble De Organographia, performed their own creditable reconstructions of some of these fragments, on “authentic” instruments they themselves built from old designs. The results, though pretty in a singsong sort of way that occasionally reminded me of some of the dumb-dumb tunes in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, is hardly the stuff of the great art forms that might have served as role models for composers centuries later.

In the Getty courtyard – a setting of some bleakness, more like an oil company’s corporate campus than a concert venue, under cool breezes that seek to sweep some of the sound out into Sepulveda Pass – Apollo and Dionysus wage their interesting battles; Winckelmann’s notion of “imitating the Greeks” can take many forms. The first program put forward a generous gathering of vocal works of Florence and Venice from around 1600, music stunning in its emotional intensity, directly influenced by the proclamations of the Camerata that had called for a new manner of composition in which melody and harmony were to join to underscore the passions of the text. Under Michael Eagan’s splendid direction, with vintage-instrument performers from his Musica Angelica ensemble (none the worse after their madcap Purcell with the Long Beach Opera a few weeks ago), a splendid vocal quartet delivered a survey of early Baroque heartbreak, songs short and long resounding with “lamento,” “soffrire,” “misero” relieved by an occasional palliative “dolcissimi.” It’s a wonderful repertory; the geniuses of the age – Claudio Monteverdi above all, but also his colleagues Francesco Cavalli and, you’ll be happy to hear, Barbara Strozzi – were marvelously adept at the sudden key change, the stinging dissonance, the jagged leap in the vocal line, all in the ardent quest for putting over the deepest sentiments with the most economical means. The singers – the well-known Judith Nelson along with Jennifer Lane, Daniel Plaster and the prodigiously resonant bass Curtis Streetman – had obviously been urged by Eagan to avoid the prissy delivery that lesser souls associate with early music, and to sing out. The results were astonishing.

The second program also offered music of self-proclaimed Greek identity but of more recent vintage: Debussy’s elegant, chaste Sacred and Profane Dances, Satie’s Socrate and Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagete – music of considerably cooler temperament – and Britten’s remarkable cantata Phaedra, which does seem to take up where Monteverdi’s passions left off. The Satie was the evening’s curio, a half-hour setting of extended passages from Plato’s writings about Socrates, bland vocal lines over an instrumental backing prevailingly gray. In his pre-concert chat Robert Winter advanced the suggestion that the work could be recast for the Three Tenors. That might, indeed, have helped, as the earnest work by Jacqueline Bobak, Lisa Popeil, Virginia Sublett and Kimball Wheeler did not. Jorge Mester led a small ensemble from his Pasadena Symphony throughout the evening; JoAnne Turovsky was the fine harpist in the Debussy, and Wheeler returned in the Britten work to endow the evening with its finest moments.

The Getty is admirably dedicated to musical presentations, both indoors and out. Shed a tear, however, for the setting in the elegant Inner Peristyle Garden of the once and (let us pray) future Getty out Malibu way. There you could feel the mingling of the arts. Now the music mingles with stone walls and the roar of I-405; it isn’t quite the same.

In a world overpopulated by fiddling moppets – dimpled teen and subteen virtuosos who wow the crowds with Bruch and Wieniawski concertos for a couple of years and then disappear into the woodwork – 51-year-old Gidon Kremer stands as honored patriarch. More to the point, he stands as one of the supreme musicians of our time, a performer not only awesomely talented but also extraordinarily cognizant of the responsibilities that befall a world-class artist. For every hundred musicians you can name who use the resources of the repertory to further their fame, there may be one or two at best who use their fame to further the resources of the repertory. Kremer is of that number. Huge chunks of contemporary music, works by the likes of Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and Arvo Part – not to mention John Adams – owe their current wide circulation to Kremer’s ardent championing.

He came to town last week along with KREMERata BALTICA, the 26-member ensemble of smart-looking young string players from his native Latvia and the neighboring Lithuania and Estonia, which he founded in 1996. The group touched down at the Hollywood Bowl for its U.S. debut, initiating a trajectory that also included performances in San Francisco and at Manhattan’s Mostly Mozart festival. The program, while not at all Mozartian, did touch on points of Kremer’s own involvement: Estonian composer Part’s ethereal Fratres, and the legacy of tangos by Argentina’s Astor Piazzolla, which blend the throb of that smoky dance into subtle and emotional original creations (and which Kremer has lately recorded extensively on Nonesuch). Music by two contrasting Italians – Vivaldi’s evergreen The Four Seasons and the Concerto for Strings by film composer Nino Rota – filled out the rewarding evening.

It’s possible that another small ensemble pleading the Vivaldian cause isn’t what the world most needs right now, but Kremer’s musicians won over their first American audience – 4,150 strong and obviously eager to applaud practically at every page turn – with playing full of imagination and snap. Even through the Bowl’s notoriously iffy amplification, the sound was sleek and nicely balanced. It’s hard to imagine a time when the record-collecting world had no Four Seasons (or much else by Vivaldi), but there was such a time; I helped produce the first American record release in 1947, an Italian re-orchestration by Bernardino Molinari, slurpy and sloppy, on the Cetra label. Now we are oversupplied – a column and a half of fine print in the latest Schwann Catalog – and this wonderful, fragile music suffers from absurd “personalizing” attempts: jazz ver-sions, piano transcriptions, in-your-face onslaughts from the likes of Nigel Kennedy and worse. Kremer and his lively band found an admirable middle ground: a performance flexible in tempo, responsive to the music’s delirious escapades – the soulful birdsongs and a thunderstorm that was actually scary – yet respectful of the 273-year stylistic gap.

Rota’s zippy little String Concerto came off as a charmer, full of the slithery harmonies of his scores for Fellini’s greatest films, and worthy to stand on its own on a concert stage. A suite of Piazzolla tangos, arranged for strings by Leonid Desyatnikov and thus lacking the down-‘n’-dirty sound of the composer’s own indigenous tango orchestra, pleased the crowd even so. So did the encore, one more small Piazzolla masterpiece called “The Shark,” toothsome, pearly white and biting.

My words about Jon Nakamatsu at his local debut (at El Camino College) last October, that his only so-so recital suggested that he bore the same curse as all previous Van Cliburn International Piano Competition winners, brought the expected quadrennial yawp of protest from the Cliburn management (published on our Letters page, as was the one four years before). I have nothing new to add, however. At the Bowl last week, Nakamatsu performed Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto, music miles superior to the Rach 3 but still not a piece that plays itself. The technique was excellent, the articulation so clean that you could have taken the piece down by dictation. But that’s as far as it went: all of the notes, with less of the force that binds one to the next. I happen to like this concerto; of all the romantic junk repertory it’s the one that can still give me shivers. I have the feeling, in fact, that I like the work more than Nakamatsu does.

Marin Alsop, music director of the Colorado Symphony, conducted, another in that exalted roster (along with Kremer) of serious battlers in the cause of new music. She managed to keep alongside Nakamatsu in the Rachmaninoff, but had a lot more to say on her own in the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony that ended the evening. Like the aforementioned Vivaldi, this overplayed work has been allowed to slide onto the warhorse heap in the hands of lesser conductors unencumbered with much respect for its content. There’s plenty in the work of the good ol’ bring-down-the-house stuff: the great noisy climax in the first movement, the nose-thumbing in the scherzo, the brassy bing-bang-boom in the finale. When the noble Kurt Sanderling was a frequent Philharmonic guest conductor in the 1980s, he gave a performance of the Fifth so deep and stirring that it really seemed to turn the work around. Alsop’s reading had some of that, and it made for an eloquent, memorable performance, full of dark and subtle shadows and, in the slow movement, particularly successful in underscoring the young Shostakovich’s acknowledged debt to Mahler. She’s a conductor worth watching, and she made the overworked Shostakovich Fifth a symphony once again worth hearing.

A curious evening indeed, last Friday at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex of Cal State L.A. The program listed a “Taiwanese Music and Art Festival.” The music was by one Maurice Weddington, an African-American composer now living in Berlin, some of it inspired by ancient scrolls from mainland China. The performers included two Taiwanese dancers, but the music was played by the Ensemble Oriol, also from Berlin, whose entire American tour consisted of this one per-formance plus one other, a straightforward pops program at Cal State Northridge. The Taiwanese identity was nailed down to some extent, however, by letters of greeting in the program, one from the mayor of Taipei and the other from that old Taiwan apologist and one-time Chiang Kai-shek dinner companion, former Congressman Edward Roybal.

Weddington’s music included two extended works with their related scrolls (photographed in black and white) unrolling on a screen above the players, and four shorter works with, alas, less to offer in the way of needed distraction. Much of the music seemed to draw its strength from solo wind instruments deliberately overblown, one of life’s least ingratiating sounds. One piece called Nebulae did approach pleasantness at times: a solo not for screeching flute or squawking clarinet, but for musette, a toy oboe. As so often in life, less was decidedly more.

Here’s a new name for you: Emil Frantisek Burian, Czech composer (1904-59), imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp but survived, journalist, socialist activist and experimental stage director. A recording on ECM of Burian’s Fourth Quartet, composed in 1947, marks his first appearance in the Schwann catalog: a work of exceptional beauty in a powerful performance by the Munich-based Rosamunde Quartett. The disc also includes the Eighth Quartet of Shostakovich and Anton Webern’s early Langsamer Satz, making it virtually a steambath of intense emotion. I don’t advise hearing it all at once, but I do advise hearing it.

The facts of Burian’s life – detailed in a single column in The New Grove Dictionary – rouse great curiosity about his other music. In Prague in the 1920s, he worked in a Dada theater, co-organized new-music concerts (with his mother!), led a jazz band and founded his own political cabaret. One of his operas is called The Quack. His musical influences included Janacek and Stravinsky, especially the latter’s Les Noces. There is quite a lot of Janacek in this Fourth Quartet: lush, densely concentrated melodic lines, sudden dramatic shifts that suggest a violent if undefined emotional concern. This is all nicely underlined in the Rosamunde’s larger-than-life performance, a style that also fits the deep, tragic draughts and the sardonic grotesquery in the Shostakovich Quartet, one of this century’s genuinely harrowing masterpieces.

Like Shostakovich (and, for that matter, like Beethoven in the distant past), Alfred Schnittke seems to have used the string-quartet medium as confidant for his most intimate thoughts. On a two-disc Nonesuch release, the Kronos Quartet plays all four of Schnittke’s quartets, covering nearly a quarter-century of his creative span (1966-89) and, by implication, a quarter-century in the emergence of today’s

Schnittke as an original and forthright

expressive artist, from a former artistically shackled existence under communism. It’s not a straightforward path; it looks in on interesting byways – from the bits of Bartok that color much of the First Quartet (at 16 minutes, shortest of the four) to the cheeky eclecticism of No. 3, with its sideswipes at certain earlier milestone works – Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge most prominently.

The Fourth Quartet dates from 1989; Schnittke by then had been canonized both in the Soviet Union and worldwide. He was desperately ill after a series of strokes, and desperately productive as well. This quartet, at 34 minutes the longest of the four, is a tense, irritating masterpiece. The program note by the famously untrustworthy Solomon Volkov (——–
AUTHOR of Testimony, the Shostakovich “memoir,” most likely fabricated) does make a valid point in comparing this music to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, their momentum grindingly yet hypnotically slow, their emotional impact unshakable.

The Kronos set also includes two short works by Schnittke: his 1971 Canon in Memory of I. Stravinsky and an arrangement of a heart-rending piece (originally for chorus and orchestra) with the accurate title of Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled With Grief, which was first released in a 1997 collection – fascinating and thus essential – called, simply, Early Music.

I am no closer to success in my struggle to scale the wall between Elliott Carter’s music and my own soul, but I haven’t stopped trying. Britain’s Arditti String Quartet, spectacularly gifted in their ability to pass off as music the most abstruse patterns, played Carter’s Fifth String Quartet (of 1994-95) twice in Southern California this past season, and I was there both times. The Fifth Quartet runs 20 minutes; it breaks down, I learn from the program notes but not from my ears, into 12 connected sections, alternating between concisely structured movements and freeform “interludes.” The piece gives off an aura of tremendous skill and meticulous craftsmanship; am I wrong, then, in believing that there needs to be more in music than just those elements?

The Arditti performance – awesome, I need not add – comes on an Auvidis/ Montaigne Carter disc filled out with two earlier and already-known works – the 1948 Cello Sonata and the 1974 Duo for Violin and Piano with excellent support from pianist Ursula Oppens – and a four-minute “Fragment” that, surprisingly enough, the Kronos had first played, in 1994. Even more surprisingly, I find the work rather attractive in an ethereal sort of way.

Nobody who heard Gloria Cheng-Cochran’s performance of John Adams’ Phrygian Gates at one of last season’s “Piano Spheres” concerts can put it out of memory; now her mastery of the work is enshrined on a Telarc release that also includes the companion China Gates and a garland of short piano conceits by Terry Riley. The two Adams works dating from 1977-78 could, he says, be considered his “Opus One.” The 26-minute Phrygian, in particular, stands as a major step in rendering the essence of the newfangled “minimalism” into a huge and gripping time structure. Nothing moves in the music, yet everything moves; over its surging, billowing surface your mind imagines its own melodic shapes, and by its astounding final cadence you may find you’ve forgotten to breathe. The Riley works, which include the Beatles-inspired The Walrus in Memorium and the disarming Fandango on the Heavenly Ladder, enhance the value of this utterly treasurable disc.

And, would you believe . . . There are treasures as well in a new disc on Denon, music by John Cage performed by the German accordionist Stefan Hussong. Cage, it seems, became enamored of the Japanese court instrument sho, which produces sounds from flexible reeds and is thus an ancestor of both the accordion and the mouth organ. From this implied license Hussong has transcribed other Cage works – several of the “harmonies” from the bicentennial piece Apartment House 1776, and the 1948 Dream and In a Landscape – for accordion, and also performs Cage’s Two” No. 5, composed for sho and struck water-filled conch shells. If this all sounds somewhat insubstantial, it is; it is also exceptionally beautiful. Honest!

It’s entirely possible that Gustav Mahler did not compose his Second Symphony with the Hollywood Bowl in mind; yet the two artifacts, the grandiose hullabaloo of a symphony from 1894 and the performance space imposed upon some impressive Cahuenga Pass real estate some 30 years later, strike me as having been created out of a single impulse. It also occurred to me at last week’s “official” opening concert – as Sir Roger Norrington and his assembled forces (the Philharmonic, the Master Chorale, vocal soloists, offstage brass bands and maybe vacuum cleaners, a passing helicopter or two) set the heavens afire with wave upon wave of Mahlerian onslaught – that Mahler himself looms ever more clearly as the dominant musical figure of this century.

The millenniologists and other list makers can argue for their Igor, Maria, Ringo and Lennie. You can also argue that the Mahler Second, which set off these thoughts, was actually composed in 1894. Never mind; this was the work (alongside, depending how you count, its eight, nine or nine and a half companions) that cast an inescapable shadow across the music making and the musical thinking of this century. The struggles of Mahler the composer (as distinguished from the unchallengeable triumphs of Mahler the conductor), from hostile rejection to grudging acceptance to triumphant hysteria, are a central saga of our time, the shaping force that altered for all time the nature of music.

Mahler came to New York in 1908 at the invitation of the Metropolitan Opera’s Heinrich Conried; for two seasons he and Arturo Toscanini functioned as the company’s principal conductors, after which Mahler left to take on the New York Philharmonic. Nothing much has been documented about how the two volcanic geniuses got along, or whether they were even aware of each other’s presence; given Mahler’s long history of fight picking at the Vienna Court Opera, however, someone (Ken Russell, perhaps?) could concoct a pretty good scenario for a Gus ‘n’ Artie epic or sitcom. I find the juncture of the two significant for other reasons, however. Think of Toscanini, his fierce obsessions with re-creating the cumulative power of a musical structure, whether a Verdian ensemble or a Beethoven symphony. Think of Mahler, his own music an equally fierce denial of structural unity, obsessed instead with creating vast, amorphous, emotion-crammed landscapes, more anecdotal than cumulative. In his entire career, by the way, Toscanini never conducted a note of Mahler.

A famous medallion struck by some Mahler fan club bore the inscription “My Time Will Yet Come.” When it did come – through the efforts of true believers, among whom Leonard Bernstein was only one of many – Toscanini was already a memento. More important than the gratifying increase in performances and recordings of his own works from 1960 on, Mahler’s shadow also fell upon the worktables of generations of composers. Name someone – bet you can’t – whose music hasn’t been touched in some way by Mahler’s kind of anecdotal structuring, by his mastery of a buildup of intensity until a single thread of sound (a solo flute, perhaps, or a lamenting bassoon) stops our breath at extraordinary length. Think of Shostakovich, Copland, Schnittke (absolutely!), Ligeti (those wonderful burlesque pieces!), Bernstein himself, Tippett . . . the list grows.

The struggle, while it raged, was fierce and bloody. Any critic mindful of responsibilities has to wince at the words of The New York Times’ Olin Downes, his ears under assult from a 1948 performance of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony (by Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic). “There is little that this writer cares to say on the subject of Mahler’s symphony,” wrote America’s most influential tastemaker. “He does not like it at all . . . It is to our mind bad art, bad esthetic, bad, presumptuous and blatantly vulgar music . . . After three-quarters of an hour of the worst and most pretentious of the Mahler symphonies we found we could not take it and left the hall.” (You should know that the frequently employed “we” with this critic always implied a partnership between Downes and the Almighty, with no clear definition of which was which.) From Los Angeles, Arnold Schoenberg, infuriated at Downes’ out-of-hand dismissal of the work – as he had been with Downes’ equally vitriolic putdown of his own Five Pieces – responded with a letter of protest full of Mahlerian resonance; Downes replied, allowing that the music he liked was to him a religion and, thus, entitled him to be intolerant of other religions. The correspondence, rather pathetic reading at this late date (it’s in Schoenberg’s collected letters), filled quite a lot of newsprint in a November and December of 50 years ago.

Meanwhile, back at the Bowl . . . Norrington brought his passion for authenticity into the Mahlerian world in a performance admirably no-frills, even zippy, a touch always welcome in Mahler. He seated the strings onstage as in Mahler’s time, with the first and second violins down front to underscore the give-and-take between these sections; even through the Bowl’s always problematic amplification, the difference was notable. Better yet, he encouraged the strings to employ just a tad of portamento, a sexy sliding between notes instead of the clean attack favored nowadays; in the whipped-cream elegance of the slow movement in particular the effect was . . . well, delicious.

On successive nights last week I attended two Mozart operas: a bounty at any time and especially during what are supposed to be summer doldrums. At the Torrance Cultural Arts Center, the newly anointed South Bay Opera sprang to brimming life with a more-than-merely-commendable Cosi fan Tutte; at the John Anson Ford Theater, Lucinda Carver’s Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra did all right by The Abduction From the Seraglio in an unstaged version, which, considering the problems of that space, was probably the better part of wisdom. Both operas were sung in their original languages: the Cosi with supertitles (which conked out for a while in Act 1), the Abduction with Rich Capparela’s maybe-one-joke-too-many English narration.

One must not overpraise on the strength of good intentions; the South Bay singers showed more promise than current ability. The Fiordiligi (Lori A. Stinson) managed her two killer arias with better luck with the top notes than elsewhere; the Guglielmo (Zeffin Quinn Hollis) displayed a promising baritone that will probably clean up well. The perennial Frank Fetta held the ensemble together with fair success, but conducted with little elegance of line or phrase. I cannot but wish the company well, and also cannot but wish they were promising more adventurous repertory than their upcoming Hansel and Gretel or Madama Butterfly. Lucinda Carver led her splendid small orchestra in a bouncy, vital reading of the Abduction, but her cast was once again a matter of good intentions over results. The Osmin of Michael Li-Paz stole the show; Greg Fedderly sang his Belmonte through an announced and obvious case of sinusitis; the gals – Camille King and Diana Tash – were just okay. But the moon was full, the setting sublime, the music by Mozart; who could ask for anything more?

Among the piano soloists listed for this summer’s concerts at the Hollywood Bowl are Garrick Ohlsson, who in 1970 won the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw; Jon Nakamatsu, who won last year’s Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth; Natalia Troull, silver medalist at the 1986 Tchaikovsky in Moscow, gold at the 1993 Monte Carlo Piano Masters; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, gold at Young Concert Artists in New York in 1981 (after several silvers). The lineup of violinists includes Gidon Kremer (gold at Tchaikovsky/Moscow, 1970) and Cho-Liang Lin (gold at Queen Sofia in Madrid, 1977).

This just skims the surface of the roster. It is hardly news anymore that admission to the inner circle of world-class concert soloists these days is best buyable with a solid piece of gold or the equivalent 30 pieces of silver. The exceptions are few: The late Sviatoslav Richter was one; the current phenomenon Yevgeni Kissin is another. Sometimes, of course, a good, solid scandale will serve almost as well as – perhaps even better than – a contest win. Witness, for example, the much-touted Ivo Pogorelich incident. At the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1980, the flamboyant Pogorelich was the favorite of the crowd – and of at least one outspoken juror, Martha Argerich – by several miles; when the jury refused to advance Pogorelich, Argerich resigned in a well-publicized protest. (Moral: Pogorelich moved on to instant celebrity and a big recording contract, but can anyone name the winner of that year’s competition? Try Dang Thai Son of Vietnam, whom you can hear, along with 14 other pianists, in a five-disc Chopin miscellany on the cheapo LaserLight label and, so far as I know, nowhere else.)

Last month I succumbed to the closet hedonist in me and accepted an invitation to look in at the aforementioned Piano Masters Competition in Monte Carlo, the seventh since the event was founded in 1989 by the charming and wily Jean-Marie Fournier, who also heads the venerable Salle Gaveau in Paris. This year’s running was somewhat beset by the strike at Air France; only eight of the scheduled 12 contestants were able to get to Monaco. I also consented, with some reluctance, to serve as a judge, but that ended up as no problem, since the final choice was unanimous. Dang Thai Son, by the way, was one of the jurors.

One distinction at Monte Carlo was that all contestants had to have been winners previously somewhere else, hence the “Masters.” Another was the admirable decision to up the maximum age from the customary 30 to the more sensible 40. Some of the eight pianists I heard – all in their early or middle 30s – had obviously spent a fair amount of time on the competition circuit. One semifinalist, the German-Russian Igor Kamenz, 33, had since 1982 carried off seven firsts and four seconds in competitions all over Europe; a finalist, Japan’s 30-year-old Yasuko Toba, had placed high in seven. Aside from the enlightened attitude toward age, the requirements at Monte Carlo were pretty much the normal competitionese: a first-round repertory culled from Haydn or Mozart (“without repeats,” the rules rudely stipulated), Chopin and Liszt; more Liszt, Rachmaninov and a big Romantic sonata in the second round; more of same plus Beethoven and Debussy in the semifinals; a concerto (the “Emperor,” Brahms, Rach 2 but not – hurrah! – 3, Tchaikovsky) with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic for the final. Since competition programs are not planned with any consideration of kindness toward the judges, we ended up heavily immersed in the Liszt Piano Sonata and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. A powerhouse 32-year-old Georgian woman named Mzia Simonishvili, truly handsome (rather than, for a welcome change, merely cute), was everybody’s obvious choice to win the honors and the $30,000 cash prize.

To what end? I spent some time renewing an old friendship with Paul Badura-Skoda, who served as jury president; now 70, he has mellowed from everybody’s favorite Viennese dimpled darling in the early days of the LP – those Westminsters with their echoey, bloated but sexy sound. Dimples and all, he’s had a good life as a thinking pianist, an authority on classical-era pianos and Mozart performance – and with a secret yen nevertheless, he confessed with a twinkle, to take on Mussorgsky’s finger-bustin’ Pictures at an Exhibition. “I never won a competition,” he recalled, “because I never had to. I didn’t; Alfred Brendel didn’t; Jorg Demus – yes, he did, once. What I did in my early 20s, instead, was to play in small halls, private homes, chamber music, anyplace where I could make my name recognized by patrons and concert managers. It was easy then; the American record companies were all over Vienna, and we were giving them repertory that nobody had ever heard before: Schubert’s four-hand music, for example.

“You can’t do that now. Patrons will pay $2 million for a van Gogh, but not to support an unknown young musician. And so we have competitions. Yes, there are too many of them. And that means, of course, that the winner of a competition this summer will have to act fast, before the winner of next summer’s competition comes along. The best are the small competitions that are more regional. If you win the Geza Anda in Zurich, for example, you have a pretty good chance of getting engagements in Switzerland; if you win the Busoni in Bolzano, you might get to play in Italy. I am more worried about the international competitions, like the Cliburn; there is something wrong with their method of judgments, compared with the realities of music today.

“One advantage with competitions,” Badura-Skoda continued, “is that we can guarantee these young contestants the fairest judgment they may ever get in their entire careers. The pianists we’ve heard this week – they’ve had their memory lapses, their fingering problems. My way of listening is to try to find a conception, a projection of an attitude toward the music; the technique can always be dealt with. Take Horowitz. At the end he was playing terribly. But he sat there at the piano, and you knew that there was some relationship going on between him and the music. That’s what I want to find in a new musician, to learn whether that musician is meant to remain.”

And this week’s Monte Carlo master, Mzia Simonishvili, whose account of the Tchaikovsky Concerto I found dazzling and even somewhat joyous? “Yes,” said Badura-Skoda, “I think she will remain.”