So I've Heard

They’ve done it again, Michael Milenski and his weird and wonderful Long Beach Opera. What looked on paper like a couple of time-wasting, doom-destined ventures in operatic futility have turned out – in the time-honored Long Beach tradition – fascinating, irritating, provocative and more than somewhat worthwhile. And even though the two works offered over recent weekends in the Carpenter Center at Cal State Long Beach seem to have journeyed toward that friendly space from different planets – Henry Purcell’s not-quite-dramatic setting of John Dryden’s The Indian Queen and Manfred Gurlitt’s not-quite-successful setting of Georg Buchner’s Wozzeck – they both told welcome tales of horizons beyond the familiar limits honored by other grander but more cautious local purveyors of operatic entertainment.

I saw the second (and last) performances of both works. Of the two, the Purcell/Dryden concoction was by some distance the more curious and rewarding, stirring up by far the greater range of joy and anger in the gratifyingly large audience. Dryden’s play was written in 1664; Purcell’s score, left unfinished at his death and probably rounded off by his brother Daniel, was created for a 1695 London revival, not as an opera but as a set of incidental songs, ensembles, instrumental interludes and dances inserted during the course of the play. Public taste in Dryden’s world was held spellbound in an age of exploration and discovery. Painters and writers filled the empty stages of the recently discovered Americas with richly colored civilizations that never existed; the craze continued for decades and gave rise to such later exotica as Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes and the novels of Chateaubriand, with their glorification of the “noble savage.”

Dryden’s play applied a light, exotic gloss to the time-honored conflicts of love, loyalty, honor and deceit that had nourished playwrights since Euripides; his rival queens and their lovers and villains are only casually located in a never-never Mexico of the writer’s imagining. Purcell’s music sounds like – well, like Purcell’s music: a wonderfully rich jewel of the English baroque, astonishing in its flights of dissonant adventure. Neither play nor music is any more Mexican, however, than A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Greek.

At the entrance a warning was prominently posted: “The performance will include nudity, simulated sex, gunshots and feathers”; a further warning against highfalutin carry-on might well have been added. The Long Beach perpetrators – David Schweizer, who directed; Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Elaine Katzenberger, who fashioned a drastically updated script into which tiny dribs and drabs of Dryden’s play were occasionally woven – moved the dramatic accents some distance from the original text, thereby widening even further the gap between the original sense and contemporary stage biz. Staggering indeed was the informational overload; the text, much of it delivered as rap, nipped at artifacts Latino from I Love Lucy to West Side Story; a video screen overhead showed quick images of Mexico’s struggles over the centuries: Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa, Pete Wilson as, alas, Pete Wilson.

An Inca chieftain, in shades and with an uncontrollable left arm, rode around in a Dr. Strangelove wheelchair. A couple of swingin’ American tourists scarfed a few margaritas and mixed into the action. You get the picture?

Purcell’s iridescent music, however, was left largely intact. A young Austrian conductor, Andreas Mitisek in his American debut, shaped a performance both lively and lovely with the splendid Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra; in the title role, soprano Sharon Barr sang her one well-known tune, “I Attempt From Love’s Sickness To Fly,” prettily indeed. Scholarly instincts should, of course, lead me to rise up in horror at all the visual vandalism. But ponder the alternative; consider, that is, any possible contemporary value in a scrupulous, scholarly rendition of Dryden’s high-flown imagery in its prissy Restoration prose, broken off now and then by a few shafts of Purcellian light, and then slogging back through the web of Drydenesque metaphor. For all its anachronistic absurdity and monstrous self-indulgence, I had a fine time at the Long Beach Indian Queen.

There is a La Boheme by Leoncavallo, the I Pagliacci guy; a Falstaff by the notorious Salieri; a Don Giovanni by a certain Giuseppe Gazzaniga. All three works display a certain modest proficiency, and also serve to measure the stature of the superior versions of these essential dramas by Puccini, Verdi and Mozart. At Long Beach, Manfred Gurlitt’s Wozzeck served somewhat the same purpose, but to less fortunate effect. Alban Berg’s opera, completed in 1925, mere months before the Gurlitt version, is not yet standard repertory among major opera companies, and there is some justification in regretting the effort expended on a patently inferior commodity while the “real” Wozzeck, an acknowledged masterpiece, gathers dust for years between performances.

The power in Berg’s work lies, to a great extent, in its mastery of musical characterization through his meticulously controlled variety of styles. By the short evening’s end, the suffering Marie and Wozzeck, their doomed small child, the monstrous Doctor and Captain have all entered our bloodstream, whence they will not be easily dislodged. Gurlitt’s music – post-Mahler, pre-atonal – clothes Buchner’s fire-etched words in a reasonably skillful but monotonous gray blanket of sound. Both settings derive their impact from the sense of immense speed, the breathless progression from short scene to short scene. Late in the Gurlitt work, however, there is an inexplicable hiatus in the action, an overextended scene with children – as if the audience needed some kind of sherbet break – and the work never quite regains its momentum.

The Long Beach forces endowed the opera with better than it deserved: a resourceful staging by Julian Webber joined with Neal Stulberg’s splendid pacing; Anthony MacIlwaine’s set, superb in just the outlay of imaginative simplicity so lacking in the Dryden/Purcell the night before, wondrously lit by Adam Silverman. Stephen Owen, a local bass-baritone with most of his credits in European houses so far, was a sonorous, immensely sympathetic Wozzeck; the always-reliable John Duykers and John Atkins contributed handsomely as Wozzeck’s evil spirits; Helen Todd’s Marie was, to these ears, somewhat on the shrill side. Garron Howe acted the role of Wozzeck and Marie’s child, rather strapping for the product of a three-year relationship, if truth be known.

Nothing in opera chills the blood as do the final moments of the Berg Wozzeck, as the unwitting child trots off to view the bodies of his dead parents. Gurlitt’s ending, a reiteration for chorus of the leitmotif of terror and helplessness that underlines the whole of Buchner’s harrowing drama, is by comparison standard operatic melancholy. It sends its audience homeward saddened but not, as in the Berg, aghast. The difference is between competence and genius.

You have to admire the thinness of the line that sometimes separates the very old from the very new. Here at hand, for example, are recent discs that demonstrate some interesting across-the-centuries coincidences. On a Nonesuch collection called, simply, Early Music, the Kronos Quartet creates believable soul mates (or, at least, disc mates) out of the very ancient Hildegard von Bingen and the very contemporary Arvo Part. On one Harmonia Mundi release, the remarkable baritone Paul Hillier and his vocal ensemble, Theatre of Voices, re-create a repertory, amazingly inventive and passionate, of some 12th-century monastic songs by Peter Abelard; on another, they whoop it up in some of the hang-loose vocal creations of John Cage. Across eight centuries, the two collections attain common cause: a loving celebration of the beauty of words and the way music enhances that beauty. On yet another Harmonia Mundi disc, Marcel Peres and his Ensemble Organum perform even earlier music, chants for an Easter Vesper Service from a sixth-century Roman liturgy that predates the better-known Gregorian Chant, full of grinding dissonances that, once again, seem to extend the hand of kinship toward the harmonic adventures in our own time.

Hillier’s great artistry, and the marvelously smooth interaction among members of his vocal group – four soloists and chorus in the Abelard songs with a few instruments discreetly used, six singers in the Cage with appropriate electronic monkey business – define, as well as any single force can, both the 800-year void and the enthralling similarities between music of vastly different cultures, between a Peter Abelard love-smitten elegy and a John Cage vocal tone poem about “whales” with its text made up of nothing but the letters of that word. They’re not all that different, Hillier told me a few months ago, even though separated by many centuries. In between those two historical extremes we have this whole fertile field of the music most of us know best, from Bach and Handel to Mahler and Debussy, all more or less tied to a common harmonic practice, a common expressive ideal – “the age of vibrato,” Hillier calls it. “Before that time,” he says, “and also after that time, you’re on your own. You’re not supported by common-practice harmony with its tonic triads and carefully systematized dissonances, so that exact intonation becomes really crucial.”

It’s that matter of clear, immaculate intonation with a minimum of vibrato – which nearly all interpreters of early music agree on, excepting only the luridly juicy Gregorian discs by those Spanish monks of Santo Domingo de Silos that made it to the Billboard 200 in 1994 in the early weeks of chantmania (and excepting also, of course, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) – that immediately transports our ears out of that comfy region of the Bach-through-Debussy era Hillier cites. After emigrating to the U.S., he formed his Theatre of Voices as a sequel to his former London-based group, the Hilliard Ensemble (which still produces wonderful performances of music old and new on the ECM label); the use of “theatre,” he claims, invokes the notion of the dramatic clashes of harmony that can arise when music is purged of the sweetness of common-practice period harmonies.

“The idea,” says Hillier, “is to explore the full range of what can be accomplished simply by voices, alone or in combination. Voices alone do create a kind of theater; listen to drama on radio, or to recordings, if you need proof.” His singers were purposely chosen from many musical backgrounds. “Maybe there are English choirs that make a smoother sound,” he says, “but there’s also the danger that in time they all might sound alike. I wanted an ensemble with built-in rough edges, singers from a variety of musical backgrounds, to create a constant interaction among the voices, a bit of friction perhaps. That’s also part of the notion of ‘theatre.'”

Theatrical, too, is the marvelous, sputtering wordplay in the Cage pieces – the gnarled imagery in the 36 Mesostics Re and Not Re Marcel Duchamp and, better yet, the piece called, simply, Aria, created for the madcap and much-missed Cathy Berberian and here intoned to an electronic background by six singers in turn. The text – think of it as a free-associative talking brain cut loose from corporeal restraints – is sheer delight, a word that doesn’t come automatically to mind on mention of John Cage. Take this 10-minute romp, therefore, as an excellent gateway to his variegated musical world.

The Paris-based Ensemble Organum has been here once, performing in a local church on one of the Da Camera Society’s “Historic Sites” events. The sound of the group is like none other you’ll ever hear: a stern growl, firmly buttressed by the group’s low voices; among their memorable previous discs is one of Corsican chant, ultimate proof that early music is as much a creation of blood and guts as anything from more recent times. The new disc of Roman liturgy is, in a word, astonishing. The melodies themselves demand great virtuosic tricks – coloratura, trills, leaps from low notes to high, somewhat reminiscent of the cantillation of Byzantine and Hebrew chant; in the ecstatic alleluias one voice will often sustain a low, slow-moving bass line while other voices move rapidly above it. The confrontation sets up clashes: not exactly “counterpoint” as we usually define it, but a thrilling effect by whatever name.

You can find some of that clashing effect also on the Kronos disc. There’s a piece by a nun named Kassia, who served at Constantinople in the ninth century, in which once again a melody in the upper voices does battle with an obsessive bass line. Three excerpts from the 14th-century “Notre Dame Mass” of Guillaume de Machaut are aboil with colliding inner voices; so, in this remarkable collection of musical styles at once complementary and contradictory, are small pieces from our own time by Arvo Part and Alfred Schnittke, John Cage and the great street musician known as Moondog, as well as anonymous folk tunes from Sweden and Tuva.

Everything here, as on the other discs mentioned in this disquisition, is colored by the educated guesswork of latter-day scholars and arrangers. Nobody knows what liturgical chant sounded like in sixth-century Rome; it’s a safe guess that Guillaume de Machaut never heard a string quartet; Cage’s Aria was conceived for one singer, not six. There’s a magnificent impurity at work here, and the results are glorious.

Any entertainment that consists of two or more consecutive events under the same management qualifies as “festival” – from Bayreuth to Ojai – and the crowds come running. I’m not sure whether last week’s “Resistance fluctuations,” which was identified as “a new unpredictable music festival,” actually qualified as “entertainment”; I’m not even sure that the offerings over the six days – concerts of challenging new music involving solo and ensemble live performances, electronic presentations and multimedia interactions – were all that unpredictable. The crowds did come running, however, a mostly young, exceptionally well-informed audience that seemed unsurprised and generally delighted at the proceedings.

The programs were co-curated by Daniel Rothman, a local composer and for the past several years a presenter (through his organization known as Wires) of valuable new-music events, and Christian Scheib, a CalArts faculty member and consultant to the Austrian Ministry of Culture. The Austrian new-music ensemble Klangforum Wien made its American debut, bringing in its luggage a repertory of new works by compatriot composers mostly hitherto unknown here; the programs were aimed at establishing both differences and similarities between the impulses of today’s energetic composers in the homeland of Mozart and Bruckner and products of various American creative hotbeds. A 60-page program book, distributed free at the concerts, teemed with statements and restatements of purpose, bristling with words like iconoclasm, disorder, communication, entropy and noise. John Cage, this century’s peerless re-definer of all the arts, was the sung if unplayed hero, invoked in the program notes (perhaps once or twice too often) as the enabling force that lets composers get away with murder. The events on Saturday, the penultimate day of the festival, were titled – with devastating accuracy – “No Noise Reduction” and “If it wasn’t noisy enough before . . . “

I furloughed my eardrums from the Saturday concerts; they had paid their dues on Wednesday during the 60-minute duration of Carl Stone’s Dong Baek, an electronic work created live by Stone at a small computer activating a large selection of samples. The pleasure in this kind of music is in the association; in a long and genuinely beautiful passage midway in the work Stone seemed to locate both me and his music in the bell tower of a medieval cathedral – Notre Dame, perhaps, hanging out with Quasimodo – with the bells pealing ecstatically, an organist trying out luscious harmonies far below, and a gorgeous vista unfolding, down a river and across some meadows. Then, however, came intense, ear-gnawing pain, horrendous masses of sound piled upon sound, made the more agonizing in the confinement of a small room at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, one of the festival’s principal venues). I cannot, of course, claim that my 73-year-old ears are the receptors Carl Stone and his younger colleagues have in mind when laying out their statements on contemporary communicativeness; yet I had heard beauty somewhere in this piece, and feel justified in wishing for more.

I heard more beauty, for reasons I understand even less, in Marina Rosenfeld’s Fragment Opera 3 on opening night. Rosenfeld, this publication’s assistant arts editor, has a madcap sonic imagination; others of her works enlist the services, for example, of guitarists performing “anti-virtuosically” with nail-polish bottles. Her piece last week involved four DJs seated at LP turntables, playing and swapping vinyl discs of synthesized music, thus creating somewhat the same textures as Stone would with his electronic sampling the next night. Perhaps it was the sight of live participants running their machinery, shuffling their several discs, and thus creating a performance atmosphere – with a pleasant flickering image projected on a screen overhead, that made this work attractive. (Was it structure or coincidence that one of the festival’s final works, Mark Trayle’s Automatic Descriptions, also used a turntable – this time an old wind-up Victrola with horn – as a control device? Plus ca change.)

You had to wonder at times, however, whether the ability to attract and divert ranks very high among contemporary priorities. Take, for example, Bernhard Lang’s Schrift 2 in which a solo cellist, the remarkable Michael Moser, sent both hands up and down the strings, plucking out a bristling, refreshing if pitchless texture. It was all fun until you read the program note. “The point of writing,” the composer insists we know, “originates in the interplay between the remembrance of predetermined scriptures and the aural anticipation of future significations . . . therewith being uncovered by a kind of ‘autogenerative’ grammar.” Take, for another example, Randall Woolf and Arthur Jarvinen’s misguided homage to the spirit of Cage, in the form of a set of changes – 840 in all – on Erik Satie’s infamous, 24-hour Vexations, the work Cage revered above all for its unswerving changelessness. And take, for yet a third example, the squawks and feedbacks of 3-E Guitars, three grown men running wind-up toys across their strings, using their instruments as body-massage tools, all in the name of furthering musical horizons.

I must, of course, be careful. Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective is my constant bedside reading, a compendium of writings that failed to recognize masterpiece stature when certain great works were new. Perhaps this kind of intense gathering together of new ideas and outlooks, with the music serving as richly illustrative examples, isn’t the ideal incubator for masterpieces. Yet there was beauty – the aforementioned moments in Carl Stone’s piece remain in the memory. On the last day, a gorgeous few moments in David Rosenboom’s Predictions, Confirmations and Disconfirmations (those titles!) with Rosenboom’s violin activating a torrent of radiant complimentary sound from the concomitant computers, and the whole thing resounding in audible Technicolor through the cavernous resonance of the big room at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, should have convinced anyone that some power to exhilarate still lingers on the musical scene.

Also lingering, however, was a slight sense of having been there before. I heard my first “tape-and” music in, I think, 1961; last week’s music for piano and tape (by Johannes Kalitzke) and cello and tape (by Winfried Ritsch), however agreeable, seemed mired in a bygone era. No matter. The fact of this event’s existence, and the message it sends out that somewhere in this world there are people willing to play and to listen to new music – and that the creators of this festival are already talking about the next, and the next – is the best of all possible news.

The crescent moon emerged in the sky over Ojai. The woodpeckers, at home in the huge sycamore to the right of the bandstand at Libbey Bowl, had finished feeding their newborn brats and chattered for a while about the day’s delights; soon their song would be taken over by the attendant crickets on their night watch.

On the stage, Mitsuko Uchida played Schubert’s serene, nocturnal G-flat Impromptu as an unlisted encore to her piano recital that opened last week’s 52nd annual Ojai Festival, and there was no way to detect the seam between her music, the songs of the bugs and the birds, and the stream of silver moonlight threaded across the black crystalline expanse of sky.

As previously confessed (more than once) in this space, I am hooked on Ojai: not only the one weekend of its annual music festival, but on the place itself. For its modest proportions, Ojai’s festival breeds strong emotions, and always has. So loving is the atmosphere in the town itself, with its perfect air framing perfect mountain vistas, and the perfect wisps of fragrance from the orange groves that ring the downtown area, that the festival regulars argue past and present accomplishments, not to mention future hopes, with parental possessiveness comparable to the brash, argumentative tones of the woodpecker family nearby.

By the standards of the festival’s history – which embraces the times of such earlier destiny shapers as Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Lawrence Morton and Pierre Boulez – the last few runnings appear to have backtracked from the former cutting edge. Last year’s and this year’s festivals have been built around wonderful pianists not particularly known as heroes of the avant-garde: Emanuel Ax last year and Mitsuko Uchida this year. Both have borne the title of “music director,” which may be mostly honorary, since much of the actual programming is done years in advance. (It will surely not be honorary next year, when Esa-Pekka Salonen takes on the title and leads Toimii, the Finnish new-music ensemble he founded, in what’s bound to be a killer weekend.)

Two years ago, as guest soloist, Uchida charmed the socks off everyone with her Schubert and Ravel; mere common sense must have preordained her return in whatever capacity. This year she played Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and tiny wisps of Schoenberg and Webern, and every event was an illumination comparable to Ojai’s moonlight. Only one event was something of a dud, for its conception if not execution: a program of Schubert’s piano duets with Uchida and Ignat Solzhenitsyn that ended with an agonizingly, obsessively complete rendition of the Divertissement a l’hongroise, 10 minutes of music plus 45 minutes of repeat signs. I am usually an adamant advocate of respect for a composer’s specified repeats, but Schubert’s endlessly charming entertainments were more designed for parlor music making, not meant for audiences sitting still on hard wooden benches. (One of his more substantial duet pieces – the fabulous F-minor Fantasy or the A-flat Variations – might have strengthened the respective spines of both program and audience.) To atone, however, there was Uchida’s splendid opening-night recital, which ended in a collaboration with members of the Brentano Quartet in Mozart’s G-minor Piano Quartet, and her exhilarating aggression upon Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto (with David Zinman guest-conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic) that brought the weekend to a fire-ringed close. No, there wasn’t very much of novelty in Uchida’s contributions to the festival, but a lot of brainpower was in evidence in the planning even so: the resemblance across the decades on that opening concert – for one of many examples – between Beethoven’s terse, crabbed C-minor Variations and the intense, epigrammatic set by Anton Webern.

No, it wasn’t one of Ojai’s more ardent excursions into novelty. A curmudgeon might well question the inclusion of an entire program of Leonard Bernstein’s show tunes, however well sung – I am told – by Joyce Castle and Kurt Ollmann. But it would have taken an onslaught of terminal grumpiness to miss the pleasure in Zinman’s program with the Philharmonic New Music Group, with the jocular naughtiness of George Antheil’s pseudo-jazz and Charles Ives’ pseudo-ragtime pieces framing Elissa Johnston’s marvelous delivery of John Harbison’s haunting Mirabai Songs and Leon Kirchner’s eloquent Music for Twelve. Zinman, still too little known on the West Coast, was a splendid addition to the roster. He might have spared the crowd his chatty if somewhat meandering spoken introductions to each piece, since Timothy Mangan’s written program notes, which covered the same ground, made their points more graciously.

From the conversations of staunch Ojai-goers, I overheard the usual panoply of attitudes. Why, I heard it asked, the “Emperor” Concerto, of all tried-and-true repertory chestnuts, intruding upon ground sanctified by the likes of Boulez and Stravinsky? Why, there resounded in other corners, all that Webern (maybe eight minutes’ worth, spread over two programs), so lacking in tunefulness? In truth, this year’s programs might have taken place in any major city you could name, spread through a particularly rewarding week of urban concert giving. I submit that it is Ojai itself – the air; the mountains; the kooky restaurants, amateur-run, turned panicky by this once-a-year invasion of hungry music-nuts; the great honor-system secondhand bookstore; the lingering ghosts of Krishnamurti, Stravinsky, Beatrice Wood and Lawrence Morton (and all this a 90-minute drive from downtown L.A.) – that surrounds the music in a rustic and not-all-that-comfortable setting amid the amateur outdoor painters and the professional woodpeckers and crickets, and turns it into a festival.

There was a questionnaire handed out at the concerts asking some rather scary questions about possible future pathways for the Ojai Festival: more concerts spread over more weekends? more or different venues? more modern music? less modern music? more commercialization? less? All these questions drove home the realization of the fragility of the whole premise of Ojai, which by some miracle has managed to survive these 52 years. Any visiting New York hotshot – and I’ve talked to several in my 18 years’ attendance – will tell you what’s wrong with Ojai: It needs a performing-arts center, a national press bureau, headline attractions on three-sheets hung from Lompoc to Lomita, Big Macs and Starbucks on every corner. By those standards, those 52 years of Ojai add up to one of music’s profound failures. Other standards, however, sound a different note. Cherish it.

Symphony orchestras, like fine wines, travel badly; yet travel they must. It’s not enough, for both commodities, to garner fame and fortune in their own back yards. The Philadelphia Orchestra must also conquer audiences in Costa Mesa, as a superb Burgundy must lubricate the plastic at a four-star Manhattan eatery. Hearing the Philadelphia at Segerstrom Hall in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, or the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at Royce Hall, or the City of Birmingham Symphony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion – to cite three recent forays by visiting orchestras into our midst – is, however, a little like sipping fine Burgundy from a plastic cup.

An orchestra plays upon the acoustical and visual properties of its home concert hall as subtly as its members play upon their violins and oboes. On tour, with the weariness in the bones brought on by an excess of air and bus travel, experiencing a new complex of sight and sound every couple of days – and, usually, with no more than an hour’s worth of sound-check and rehearsal time – a touring orchestra can offer its public only a facsimile of its hometown quality.

Having its orchestra on tour, hailed with lavish outpourings of exclamation points by critics in the boonies, is an ego massage to the boards of directors back home; the promise of tour dates is an effective carrot-on-stick for keeping conductors in their posts as well. Our Philharmonic’s own Esa-Pekka owes his current New York acclaim almost entirely to his yearly visits there with his orchestra.

There was a time when the “Philadelphia sound” – lush, seductive, wrong for the classical repertory but what the hell – was reason enough for enduring the mediocrity of Eugene Ormandy’s musical insights. You could hear it even in the orchestra’s home base, the hooty and echoey Academy of Music, and Ormandy was able to re-create that sound in every whistle stop on the orchestra’s tours. In the acoustic aridity of Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall, the Philadelphia under Ormandy’s successor-once-removed, Wolfgang Sawallisch, played Dvorak and Tchaikovsky – with a little Samuel Barber tossed in for a semblance of adventurous programming – without style, without tone, without anything that could identify it as one of America’s most renowned orchestras and not just some band from the boonies. Sure, the Philadelphia Orchestra is famous for being famous, a triumph of the record-company blurbmastery as much as musicianship; both programs played to turn-away crowds.

So, of course, did the Met Orchestra at Royce and the Birmingham at the Music Center. There are interesting similarities. Both are historic entities – the Met since 1883, the Birmingham since 1920 – whose current born-again eminence is entirely the work of spellbinding conductors fiercely dedicated to abolishing their orchestras’ status quo and imposing upon them an entirely new personality and purpose. Against the “ho-hum, another tour date, another Tchaikovsky Fifth” pall over the Philadelphia concerts, there was something undeniably fresh in these orchestras’ performances; it came from the fact that neither orchestra, and neither conductor, has yet had the time for the sense of routine to set in. It showed.

The Met Orchestra has given concerts throughout its century-plus existence, but only under James Levine has it become great on its own. The new Royce acoustics are kind – bright and somewhat in-your-face, certainly the livest sound of any local large hall – and turned Vadim Repin’s dash through the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto into audible flame; I don’t remember ever coming so close to being moved by the work. Better yet was the amazing detail, the glinting winds and the bright blare from the brass, in Levine’s performances of Rossini’s Semiramide Overture at the start and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger Overture as the encore. In between there was some more of Tan Dun’s arty and ludicrously extended pretentiousness.

When I first interviewed Simon Rattle – for Newsweek in 1985 – he confessed that he had just begun learning the Beethoven symphonies. A dozen years later he gave us his extraordinary reading of the Ninth with the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl last summer and, last week, the “Eroica” with his own orchestra – both conducted from memory. There were indications of edges still to be polished; the overenthusiastic timpani in the “Eroica” may have been an acoustic miscalculation, not repeated in the Mahler Seventh the next night. The energy on both nights was something you had to feel: not just the foot-stomping, hip-wriggling athletics of a Bernstein, but the work of an exceptional young talent as obsessed with defining each musical detail in turn as with pushing forward. Sure, the young orchestra was hard-pressed at times; the teensy flaws in the ensemble were about as important (i.e., not much) as the equally infinitesimal gray areas that still await exploration in Rattle’s growing mastery. Both programs – which also included a marvelous and little-played Haydn Symphony (No. 86) and Oliver Knussen’s intense, vital Third Symphony – were exactly what the musical world needs right now: assurance that within the hoary institution of symphony concerts the spark still burns bright.

There was a Haydn symphony the next night, too: Leonard Slatkin leading off the final concert of the Philharmonic season with the rich fantasy of No. 93, as preface to the glorious clatter, bang and unbridled hell-raising of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Piano Concerto to end the orchestra’s extended homage to that cherishable composer. The soloist was Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who bears the standard for Ligeti’s piano music and does so with awesome skill and imagination, and who earlier in the week had dispatched all 16 of the Etudes in a jaw-dropping evening at the Gindi Auditorium.

Slatkin’s program also included a lively run-through of Samuel Barber’s First Symphony, which Sawallisch and the Philadelphia had also pecked at in Costa Mesa the week before. I was delighted to read Paul Griffiths’ program note for the Philharmonic performance, in which he pretty much ticks off the work as imitation movie music. Hurrah for free thinking!

Meanwhile, back at Royce, there was Verdi’s Falstaff, produced by the UCLA Department of Music, sung by an almost entirely student cast (save for John Del Carlo’s Falstaff), conducted by the L.A. Opera’s William Vendice with the school orchestra, directed by the University of Indiana’s Vincent Liotta, and funded by the Maxwell H. Gluck and Gladys M. Turk foundations to test the possibility of an ongoing opera program at the school. Some distance must still be covered; at the moment UCLA has only two full-time vocal coaches and about 30 voice majors. All the more remarkable, then: Galvanized by Del Carlo’s “Immenso Falstaff,” and created with wonderful wit and energy by both Vendice and Liotta, this turned out to be the brainiest, most stimulating and beautifully produced operatic performance of the entire season. Yes, the entire season.

Interesting paradox: At a time of continued lamentation in certain unenlightened circles over the overdose of hardcore atrocities being foisted upon helpless local audiences, the past few weeks have seen more kindness extended to new music than to the warhorses. At the Philharmonic we’ve recently had Esa-Pekka’s first foray – except as concerto accompanist – into Tchaikovsky (a near fiasco), and a night of Beethoven, Schumann and Mendelssohn (not much better) under guest conductor Jahja Ling; at the Opera, Il Trovatore badly treated; on the recital stage, a Beethoven program (well-performed, I’m told) by the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, known for her services to contemporary music.

I chose the California EAR Unit, concluding its Wednesday-night residency series at the County Museum, over the Mutter, and was not sorry. In this past fortnight I was also able to commute from the Philharmonic’s Ligeti programs to Vicki Ray’s marvelous “Piano Spheres” recital in Pasadena, to Mathias Goerne’s extraordinary recital of Hanns Eisler songs at Hollywood’s Temple Israel, to a program of “Pacific Rim” composers at Cal State L.A. – organized by CalArts’ adventurous and enterprising pianist Lisa Sylvester – to more new music played by the modest but ambitious Symphony of the Canyons in Valencia. Two of these concerts contained brand-new works composed for and performed by that local monument of cellistic probity, the EAR Unit’s Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick. In the weeks ahead the choices include more Ligeti at the Philharmonic (May 22–24); the marvelous annual festival at Ojai (May 29–31); a fantastic array of contemporary works, including several multimedia ventures, in “Resistance Fluctuations,” a “new and unpredictable” festival organized by Dan Rothman’s “Wires,” with performances at LACE and the County Museum; and a visit from Austria’s Klangforum Wien (June 2–7). Whatever happened to post-season doldrums?

Concerts of hardcore contemporary demand prodigies of courage and loyalty to the cause – from the performers onstage and from the usually undersize audience as well. Nobody expects much ear candy from the EAR Unit; the exhilaration stems rather from the group’s awesome fearlessness in the presence of challenging, abrasive, sometimes (but not always) rewarding new music, and the sense they provide that they’re all in it together for the challenges and for the fun.

Fun? Try this on your cello: a long, rhapsodic solo with the performer also singing a sinuous, captivating microtonal vocalise that seems to twine around the cello line like gift-wrap glitter liberally sprinkled, and with the harmonic deviations between voice and instrument creating a strange and novel intensity. That’s Joan La Barbara’s A Trail of Incandescent Light, written for and majestically delivered by Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick. Or consider Zilver, the weird and witty pastiche by Netherlander Louis Andriessen, in which an unidentified but definitely pop-sounding tune plays off against its own image at different speeds, faster and faster until you forget to breathe. Milder onslaughts on the sensibilities found embodiment in Paul Dresher’s Double Ikat — a mellow and richly patterned interweave, by Dresher’s admission his “most blatantly lyrical work to date” – and James Sellars’ accurately titled Go, an ice-cold cascade of prickly, changing but hugely propulsive rhythms.

Founded at CalArts in the early 1980s, in residence at the County Museum since 1987, the EAR (“Experimental and Recent”) Unit belongs in the small company of new-music ensembles – including the Klangforum Wien due here week after next – for whom neither 12-tone row nor no-tone improv holds terror. Honoring its Californian identity, the group has also ventured into mixed media, notably an eveninglong rainforest piece some years ago with performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, not easily forgotten.

Audiences for new music remain small but loyal, even passionate; at LACMA’s Monday Evening Concerts you can still run into people who attended the first of these events (under their previous name, “Evenings on the Roof”) in 1939. With advertising budgets for new-music events down to practically zero, it’s more depressing that so few people even know about these concerts than that so few show up. Less than 200 attended this season’s final EAR Unit event; even fewer usually show up at the Monday events, scattered through the drab and uninviting 600-seat space that serves the County Museum as a pretty good place for movies but not much else. Better there than nowhere, however.

With the Symphony of the Canyons – much of whose membership is drawn from the music faculty at the college of that name – Duke-Kirkpatrick played another brand-new piece composed for her, Michael Jon Fink’s Touchless Light Alone, its light this time less incandescent than in La Barbara’s work, the cello writing intensely and rewardingly lyrical, the mood, alas, somewhat on the morose side. (Fink’s funk?) Its 18 minutes go by as a series of slow forebodings of events that never materialize; after 10 or so minutes of soulfulness you long for the music to turn naughty, and it never does. Robert E. Lawson leads the orchestra, which gives five ambitious programs a year in the acoustically and visually wretched setting of the college cafeteria. Before the new work came the Overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser, which, the program noted, had been composed in 1815 – surely the first known opera by a 2-year-old womanizer. The prospect of a Mahler First by such meager forces sent me homeward at intermission. I am honor-bound to report, however, that the crowd seemed to be having a swell time – small babies and all.

Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church is a far more welcoming venue, and the season’s final “Piano Spheres” program drew a deservedly large crowd that braved rain, fog, and hard new music punctuated by occasional onslaughts from tape and percussion. Founded four seasons back by the area’s five most adventurous pianists – Gloria Cheng-Cochran, Vicki Ray, Mark Robson, Leonard Stein and Susan Svrcek – the series could stand as a programming model, a fine-tuned progression of the lesser- and better-known, of the abrasive and soothing. The Vicki Ray concert included a set of beguiling, entrancing, tiny pieces by Gyorgy Kurtág, a splendid new sonata by Steven Hartke that had the shadow of George Gershwin smiling from the wings, and a piece by EAR Unit percussion goddess Amy Knoles, a hilarious tribute to a favored Belgian restaurant in London.

The Music Hall at Cal State L.A. is small, somewhat drab but friendly; “New Music From the Pacific Rim” filled it with strong and attractive ideas. Best came last: Spiral II by Cambodia’s Chinary Ung (now on the faculty at UC San Diego), for soprano (Jacqueline Bobak), piano (Lisa Sylvester) and – if you’re ready – tuba (Douglas Tornquist). Don’t worry, it seemed to say, our contemporary composers aren’t going to run out of ideas anytime soon.

So far, the Philharmonic’s extraordinary celebration of Gyorgy Ligeti’s music has concentrated on his work from the 1960s – the decade of assassinations, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missiles and the walk on the moon. For Ligeti it was also the decade of hope, hopes dashed and betrayal for his native Hungary, and the time of his first worldwide fame – bestowed with neither his knowledge nor his consent when Stanley Kubrick appropriated three of his works as part of the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Later works are still to come in this “Around Ligeti” festival: the whimsical, affectionate Horn Trio and the death-defying Piano Etudes at Gindi Auditorium on May 18, and the spellbinding Piano Concerto in the season’s final subscription weekend, May 22-24.

Circumstance is important in evaluat-ing Ligeti’s music – as it might not be in the case of, let’s say, Harrison Birtwistle or Elliott Carter. He lets us know early on the forces that shaped his world-views: personal (the death of father and brother in Nazi camps) as well as political. The Requiem of 1963-65, whose performance here under Esa-Pekka Salonen, with the Master Chorale trained by Grant Gershon to sing far above its norm, must be reckoned one of the luminous events in local cultural history. The piece mingles its accents of sorrow with moments of sardonic, grotesque cackle right out of Hieronymus Bosch; better yet, it lets us hear these accents as if from Ligeti himself – the captivating countenance (lines of sorrow etched over an endearing smile) in the photographs clearly belongs to the composer whose hand shaped this music.

This is elusive music; it demands and handsomely rewards superhuman performers and listeners of comparable strength. (The exit doors saw much action during the Requiem performance; call it the “Ligeti Split.”) The Requiem seems to transcend the realm of sound and turn into something as much sight as well. It also happens in the shorter orchestral pieces, Atmospheres and Lontano: mist-shrouded, mysterious mountainscapes that conjure visions of – who? Well, Mark Rothko for one. The “Kyrie” from the Requiem (which Kubrick used to splendid effect at the end of 2001’s big light show and the approach to Jupiter) spins a dark, shimmering web out of tiny fragments of choral tone jammed together; the final “Lacrimosa” dispels the clouds and ends in a burst of pure white light. (Think for a moment, perchance to dream, about what a collaboration between Ligeti and Robert Wilson might accomplish.) Between these comes the “Dies Irae” with its grinning, Boschian monsters, lit up in audible flames of lurid crimson and saffron from chorus and orchestra; you can shut your eyes if you wish, but the colors remain.

At the Philharmonic’s previous Ligeti celebration, in February 1993 with the composer in attendance, Salonen had the admirable idea of surrounding his orchestral works with Debussy, thus extending the notion of audible color. This time there was Haydn: three symphonies (Nos. 43, 45 and 49) from the time when the composer (with the blessing of his employer, Prince Esterhazy, a role model for all patrons) felt free to experiment, to stray far from the norms of symphony construction and to invent and explore new worlds. Thus we had the amusing and clever slow decrescendo at the end of the “Farewell” Symphony, No. 45, in which the musicians leave the stage (or this time merely turned off their lamps) one by one, and the immensely sad “Passion” Symphony (No. 49), with its excruciating outcries from horns at the top of their range. Haydn between Ligeti became like wonderfully refreshing sorbet between courses at some illustrious and memorable banquet.

Last week’s “Green Umbrella” – all Ligeti except for Mel Powell’s haunting “Nocturne” for solo violin, played by Mark Baranov in memory of the composer – included one recent piece, Mysteries of the Macabre, a conflation of three bewitching and insane bits from the 1978 Le Grand Macabre, turned into a suite for soprano and ensemble in 1991, gloriously screamed by the phenomenal Sibylle Ehlert (who has also recorded the work with Salonen in Sony’s ongoing Ligeti series). The two sets of Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures (1963/65) represent Ligeti’s ardent participation in the ferment of the time, mingling traditional and off-the-wall musical thinking. “Burn the opera houses!” Pierre Boulez had once proclaimed; these prickly little non-operas light the fuses. (Two nights after hoary old Il Trovatore, the contrast, I am sure, was lost on nobody.)

The text is Ligeti’s own gibberish concoction; the singers bounce their nonsensical phrases off each other with a confrontational passion worthy of romantic grand opera. The players, dashing around the stage to pull their musical semblances from a banged-upon ashcan and scraps of torn paper as well as a few more “normal” noisemakers, enhance the impression that, just beyond the veil of ostensible non-meaning, something of intense, imaginative significance is taking place. Once again no real boundary between visual and sound stimulus is anywhere discernible; the music appears to float within a vast, undefinable continuum, and we are invited to float along. Salonen led performances both vivid and suave; his vocalists included the splendid Phyllis Bryn-Julson, whose heroism in the cause of new music has been celebrated in this space more than once, and will surely be again.

These, you will not be surprised to learn, are hazardous times for the record industry, and nobody knows (or is willing to let on) how long Sony’s Ligeti project will continue. The seven discs that have so far appeared are superb. They include the Macabre music and Aventures under Salonen, with the same vocal forces that sang them here; the Etudes in astonishing performances by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (who will play them at Gindi); and a wonderful disc of Ligeti’s “mechanical” music for player piano, barrel organ and – in a piece he calls, with thumb to nose, Poeme Symphonique – 100 metronomes, ticking away and each slowing down at its own rate. How can you not love the guy who could dream up something like that?