So I've Heard

Every year around this time, the excellent local ensemble called the Armadillo String Quartet puts on a concert of
music by its anointed composer-in-nonresidence, Peter Schickele. Peter comes out from New York for the concert; sometimes – as a pretty good pianist – he mixes in with the string players, and he also delivers program notes before each piece that mainly tell us, as if we needed telling, that making up musical ideas and setting them down on paper is the world’s most enjoyable practice, bar none.

Schickele, I also don’t need to tell you, has gone through much of his life as an alter ego named P.D.Q. Bach. In that disguise he has created a wonderful repertory (much of it now recorded on TelArc) of musical spoofs both wise and hilarious, the kind of gloss on the works of the Great Masters that can only make sense after you’ve thoroughly absorbed the original targets of these manic rewrites. To fashion such latter-day masterworks as the 1712 Overture or the too-true-to-be-good Philip Glass takeoff called Einstein on the Fritz demands more than merely the ability to look funny onstage; it demands knowledge. Like other advocates of the proposition that the way to make music ridiculous is to tell the truth about it – Anna Russell and Gerald Hoffnung, but not the glib, patronizing Victor Borge – P.D.Q.’s music constitutes both a parody and a celebration. He claims to have retired his doppelgänger from the touring circuit in favor of increased activity as a “serious” composer; don’t be too sure.

Last week’s concert, in the exceptionally pleasant setting of Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church, suggested that the separation between the halves of Schickele’s musical persona is not as complete as he would have us think. The program consisted of chamber works and four-hand piano music, including a brand-new String Quintet: music serious in intent and immensely charming in performance. Schickele’s music falls under the rubric of conservatism; sometimes it turns rather lavender and sets out to rephrase Gabriel Fauré. He thinks in tonalities and is unafraid of diatonic triads. Conservative, radical: This business of categories doesn’t mean very much, actually. I would rather be serenaded by the soft accents of a Peter Schickele quartet, even when it’s full of other people’s music, than be pulverized under the intellectualized grindings of an Elliott Carter. A composer’s choice of tools is a lot less important than what he manages to build with them.

P.D.Q. Bach helps with the building, deny his presence as Schickele might. A set of piano duets called Little Mushrooms (from the nickname given to Franz Schubert by his Viennese friends) turned out to be an uncanny simulacrum of Schubert’s breathtaking harmonic adventures and gift for melody floating unfettered. Maybe Mushrooms is more serious in tone than the P.D.Q. repertory, but it gives off the same sense of rip-off-as-love-letter. The new quintet, at 35 minutes one of the more substantial of Schickele’s chamber works, is full of endearing, romantic sounds; you realize shortly into the work that these are not all that far removed from the sounds that make Mozart’s string quintets the masterworks they are.

I cannot predict that any of Schickele’s music, from either half of his brain, will be around and admired in, say, 2098; I know that two hours of it came together last week to form a modestly challenging, eminently satisfying, feel-good sort of concert. We could use more of same. The Armadillos – Barry Socher, Steven Scharf, Raymond Tischer and Armen Ksajikian – delivered with love of music and pride of ownership; Schickele and Bryan Pezzone played the Mushrooms; violist Roland Kato and clarinetist Ralph Williams were also on hand, and a good time was had, I think, by all.

Slowly, the management of the Getty Center moves toward a resumption of concert activities; a representative told me last week that they’re “in the works.” It won’t be easy, perhaps, to match the euphoric setting of the old summer concerts in the handsome, intimate Inner Peristyle Garden in Malibu, but life moves on, and last Friday’s sunset from Mr. Getty’s new parapet was worth fighting crowds and traffic. The occasion was the concert by House Blend, a newly formed and newly named chamber ensemble of old friends: pianists Gloria Cheng-Cochran and Grant Gershon, violinist Elizabeth Baker and soprano Elissa Johnston. Getty’s indoor auditorium is a functional, comfortable room seating 450, which is the right size; it’s dry to the ear and boring to the eye in, alas, the tradition of performing spaces in museums.

The House Blenders’ program offered a nice assortment of novelties: Colin MacPhee’s remarkably effective transcriptions for two pianos of Balinese gamelan music; Messiaen’s early, Debussy-tinged La Mort du Nombre, the evening’s one work involving all four performers, with Gershon transformed for the moment into a reedy but accurate tenor; new songs by local Donalds Crockett and Davis and by New York’s Aaron Kernis; and Hallelujah Junction, a bouncy new work for two pianos by John Adams, full of amusing rhythmic dead ends, maybe a little long for its 15-minute length. The music I took home in my head was “Morning Innocents,” one of Kernis’ Songs of Innocents, a line of vocal melody poignant and truly beautiful.

In December 1996 I returned from a trip to Germany singing the praises of
a young composer named Hanna Kulenty (b. 1961), Polish-born and living in the Netherlands, where she has studied contemporary techniques at the knee of the genial terrorist Louis Andriessen. I had seen Kulenty’s chamber opera Mother of Black-Winged Dreams in Munich, and found it brave and resourceful. Kulenty was at USC last Saturday, participating in panels organized by the school’s Polish Music Reference Center on what it means to be a Polish composer and what it means to be a woman composer. At night, before a paltry audience at Hancock Hall, three chamber works by Kulenty were performed; one, A Sixth Circle for trumpet and piano, had its world premiere.

I will continue to sing her praises. What I have heard of Kulenty tells me of a headstrong experimenter with some powerful ideas about pounding on and rewarding a hearer’s senses. Best of all on Saturday night – on first hearing, anyway – was the new trumpet piece, running about 10 minutes, setting a strong and shapely lyric line (plus a lot of sonic tricks) for Tal Bar-Niv’s trumpet against a breathless perpetuum mobile from Sergei Silvansky’s piano. Nothing of Kulenty’s is listed in the current Schwann; there are recordings avail-
able abroad, including her Second Piano
Concerto, a knockout piece. Tell me about there not being any new composers.

One thing is certain: Royce Hall, grand architectural landmark on the UCLA campus, 1,829-seat concert hall of matchless comfort, beauty and sonic amenities, reopens next Wednesday. After four years and three months of repair, reconstruction and retrofitting in the wake of the Northridge earthquake – four years in which ticket holders for the lavish offerings of the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts have endured the flaking plaster and flaky acoustics of alternative theaters rushed into service – the Westside’s premiere performance space is ready once again for an audience.

What that audience is in for, on opening night and for the ensuing 10 nights and two matinees, is not so easily explained. If you’re hoping for a proud demonstration of the hall’s legendary acoustics, be warned that everything this time will emerge from loudspeakers, probably amplified up the bazooty. The work itself, Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’ Monsters of Grace 1.0, has a text consisting of steamy love-lyrics by a 13th-century mystic, and action in the form of 3-D film to be projected onto a screen filling the 40-foot proscenium. Up front, the information is enticing: This is the first creative collaboration in 14 years of two of the most controversial, influential and – here and there, anyway – highly regarded creative spirits these days. When the Texas-born director-playwright-designer-poet-etc. Wilson first merged his visions with those of the Baltimore-born New York taxi-driver-cum-minimalist-composer Glass, the result was an incredible five-hour-plus stage work called Einstein on the Beach, which left audiences both baffled and enthralled. Everyone agreed, at least, that the marriage of music and theater had produced an offspring of spectacular importance, perhaps even greatness. But nobody was exactly sure of how to put it into words.

“Phil and I have been working on Monsters for something like three years,” Wilson says in a wee-hours phone call from his hotel in Paris, where he has just flown in from Bogotá and is about to fly off to Milan. “No, it hasn’t been like the way we worked on Einstein, together for hours and days – we’re both too busy. But now we know each other, and can do our collaboration in a kind of shorthand. It’s important that we share this sense of aim. We think alike.”

In 1976, when Einstein achieved two performances at Manhattan’s august Metropolitan Opera House (underwritten not by the opera company, however, but by Wilson and Glass themselves), Glass had already produced a repertory of seductive, hypnotic music relying chiefly on small melodic particles obsessively repeated. Wilson had produced one play lasting 12 hours, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, and another called I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating that didn’t last much longer than its title. Like Mozart and Da Ponte, like Gilbert and Sullivan – but vastly different from all four – Wilson and Glass found a way to clone each other’s cultural thumbprint. Einstein, in case you’re wondering, did deal in an indirect sort of way with the great scientist, as lover, mathematician, violinist and designer of spaceships; it also dealt – in an “aria” repeated verbatim 43 times – with bathing caps, Fourth of July plumes and the beach.

Glass had to drive his cab for another year or two to pay off the Einstein bills, but by 1980 he and Wilson were permanently entrenched in the ranks of those progress-minded souls who cannot bear to leave well enough alone. In 1984 the producers of Los Angeles’ Olympic Arts Festival, an impressive gathering of performing forces from around the world, had conceived a vast original theatrical entertainment as the festive centerpiece: a 15-hour dramatic panorama, the CIVIL warS, with a text by Wilson and music by half a dozen composers of varying backgrounds, its separate parts staged in various theaters overseas and the whole shebang then assembled in Los Angeles. Glass composed the last of the five acts, which had its premiere at the Rome Opera in March 1984. By the time that curtain had gone up, word had already arrived from Los Angeles that the CIVIL warS would not take place. Wilson’s subtitle for the work, “a tree is best measured when it is down,” took on a prophetic ring.

Fourteen years later, Wilson, 56, is now hailed as the supreme theatrical innovator of the time, with a repertory that includes staging of traditional operas (Gluck’s Alceste in Stuttgart), original musical theater (Black Rider, to music by Tom Waits) and a spectacular legacy of plays. Glass, just past 60, is . . . well, Glass: of opera, movie (Kundun, etc.) and Violin Concerto fame. Technology marches on; no longer a couple of flesh-and-blood wooers in a railway carriage lurching through the night (as in Einstein), no longer an Abe Lincoln on 20-foot stilts or a singer in a birdcage high above the stage (as in the CIVIL warS), the major action in Monsters of Grace 1.0 has been enshrined onto 3-D film, with other singers and the Philip Glass instrumental ensemble functioning on the sidelines. Objects – a shoe, a boy on a bicycle, a house – tumble through seemingly limitless space; a starscape stretches out toward infinity. The audience catches the 3-D effects by watching through polarized glasses, designed by L.A. Eyeworks and handed out free at the door. Anyone else remember House of Wax? 1953, wasn’t it?

The title and plot, if such there be, stem from the poetry of the Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, greatest of the Sufi poets, ——–
AUTHOR of ecstatic love-poetry – and founder of the order of dervishes, religious celebrants whose whirling movements while praying represent the movement of the human soul around God. I wonder at the “1.0,” which looks suspiciously like the indication on a preliminary version of computer software. The press handout supports my suspicion by referring to it as a “beta” version; will it, perhaps, self-destruct in the middle of the hero’s big aria? Producer Jed Wheeler, on the phone from New York, explains: “It simply means that there are still more questions than answers.” Jeff Kleiser, who with Diana Wal czak created the 3-D film, converting Wilson’s storyboards into computerized images, explains further: “The entire performance runs about 70 minutes, and we have completed about half that amount on film. The rest will be done at Royce by live actors and singers. As we complete more film before future engagements, we’ll keep plugging in the segments until, eventually, the entire work is on film.” Fine and dandy; Monsters of Grace, in whatever version, could be the world’s first self-constructing opera.

Memories, memories . . . At rehearsals of the CIVIL warS at the Rome Opera in 1984, I watched in amazement as Wilson took as much as two hours to adjust the angle of lighting to the angle of a singer’s hand. I sat with Glass and Wilson at a hotel bar in Rome, demolishing the brandy supply and sweating out the uprisings as the various operatic unions took turns going on strike to protest the repetitions in Glass’ music, which forced them to count. We were in the bar when the news came of the Los Angeles cancellation. Whatever else the realities and unrealities of Monsters of Grace, Los Angeles, at least, is getting its long overdue first shot of Wilson-Glass.

But what, in fact, are we getting? On the phone from Paris, Wilson points out the difference between two hours’ work on a single image on a live stage and manipulating the computer-created visuals. “I turned over the storyboards to Jeff and Diana last October. Now it’s April, we go on in two weeks, and I haven’t even seen the final results. Maybe I’ll come out to see them in Los Angeles. All that exacting work I’ve always done on the stage, that’s out of my hands now. Maybe I’ll love it, maybe not.”

“Now that’s music,” whispered the man behind me to his companion, as Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic launched into the merry A-major opening bars of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony. After a stiff dose of forward-marching works from his own century to start off last week’s program, my neighbor had finally achieved heartsease in this music from the listener-friendly distant past. Never mind that neither of the two preceding works – Dmitri Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto and Jerry Goldsmith’s Music for Orchestra – ranked particularly high as standard-bearers for 20th-century innovation. The lightweight Shostakovich concerto, written as an adult toy for the composer’s pianist son Maxim and masterfully toyed with last week by Yefim Bronfman, burbles along in a crystalline F-major, throws in some quirky rhythmic changes to recognize its own time and place, but tells us little we couldn’t learn from a scampering, virtuoso exercise from a century before. Goldsmith’s eight-minute sequence of agreeable noises, composed in 1972 but only now achieving its West Coast premiere – so much for Southern California and its close-knit arts community – is the same kind of loose compilation of favorite moments from here and there (Stravinsky, Ravel, Rach, you name it) that light up the soundtrack creations by some of Hollywood’s more literate music spinners.

The music page of the March 22 New York Times carried a couple of articles that explored the queasy relationship between the music of this century and what should be (but seldom is) a receptive audience, scattering blame over the fallow fields as a farmer might manure. The lively, controversial Paul Griffiths takes to task a pronouncement by Julian Lloyd Webber (brother of Andrew and a cellist on his own) that the blame for the decline of admiration and support for new music rests on the composers of the last 40 or so years, who have failed to provide the public with music they could like. New music terrifies people or makes them angry, says Lloyd Webber; they then seek revenge by boycotting the classical masters as well. Not only Carter and Babbitt but also Beethoven and Haydn wither away, and record producers go belly-up. Balderdash, retorts Griffiths. Fear stalks the land, he agrees, but the blame shouldn’t fall only on the composers.

“Exposure to the best new music,” he claims, “remains woefully inadequate,” and the entire musical landscape – from its failure to take root in schools to the timidity of managements to risk brave programming – shares the blame.

Farther down the page is Peter Gelb’s message of comfort and joy. Yes, says the president of Sony Classical, composers of new music have egregiously misbehaved in the last four or five decades. “A major record label,” he states, “has an obligation to make records that are relevant . . . It is neither commercially rewarding nor artistically relevant for us to make recordings that sell only a few thousand copies . . . For far too long classical-music audiences have been subjected to – and sometimes suffered through – an almost exclusive diet of new music that was atonal and difficult to enjoy.” Accessible new music, claims Gelb, has until now been “blocked by a cabal of atonal composers, academics and [!] classical-music critics”; now – thanks to the emergence of a new breed of “relevant” composers (all under contract to Sony, as it happens), typified by the slushmastery of John Corigliano and the slick opportunism of Tan Dun – the millennium is at hand, the atonal beast has been slain. (I love the way Gelb employs the epithet “atonal” as a synonym for “bogeyman.”) As for the notion of ascribing blame for music’s problems to the musical press – beheading the messenger for the message, in other words – would that we made that much difference in the health of new music or old!

What saddens me the most in Gelb’s article is the realization that he is the direct descendant of one of classical music’s unchallenged heroes, the late Goddard Lieberson. Long before the Sony takeover, when the label bore the revered name of Columbia, Lieberson built a stupendous catalog of the new and important music of his time: a vast American repertory including songs by Copland and chamber music by Schuman, the first recordings of Boulez and Stockhausen, the first samples of the emerging electronic music, even a big and disturbing piece of minimalism, Steve Reich’s Come Out. These records never sold more than Gelb’s “only a few thousand copies”; Lieberson liked to fess up that the losses were covered by sales of Columbia’s Andre Kostelanetz and original-cast discs. His legacy – which also included extensive surveys of such giants as Stravinsky and Schoenberg – added up to one of the most glowing testimonials to the relevance of new-music recording. There was word a couple of years ago that Sony was planning a major reissue of the Lieberson repertory; then there was word that the people hired to pursue that project had all been sacked. Sony’s one current new-music project of great value, but of uncertain future, is its Gyorgy Ligeti series under Esa-Pekka Salonen – financed not by Sony but by a private individual who happens to worship Ligeti’s music, but who also happens at the moment to be in an English prison awaiting trial on a manslaughter rap.

For about 150 years (1720-1870, say) of its millennium-long history, serious music derived most of its motive power from harmony, the interaction of consonance and dissonance to develop a sequence of urgencies and resolutions. Drama was heightened when a resolution took an unexpected turn: the shattering key change at the end of the “Crucifixus” in Bach’s Mass, the howling of Beethoven’s trumpets in the Funeral March of the “Eroica”; the torrents of audible ecstasy as Siegmund draws the sword in Wagner’s Die Walkure. Before those 150 years, and since that time, music has drawn upon other devices as well.

In the second of two concerts last week, at Irvine’s Barclay Theater, the Arditti Quartet, masters of contemporary chamber music in any of the most daunting styles you can name, began their program with the “Grosse Fugue” that Beethoven had originally planned as the finale of his Opus 130 Quartet but which he later – on the urging of friends, ancestors perhaps of Peter Gelb – replaced with a kinder, gentler piece. It’s an amazing work, that 15-minute exercise in contrapuntal perversity, with Beethoven hurling great handfuls of craggy, twisted melodic lines at one another and commanding them to cohere, and with the players themselves – yes, even the phenomenal Ardittis – driven to violate their instruments’ gentler nature with heaven-storming squalls and outcries.

The remainder of the program that night included three more-recent works of killer status – Elliott Carter’s new Quartet No. 5, the Second Quartet of Akira Nishimura and the Second of Ligeti; the Carter and Nishimura had also been on the previous night’s concert at the County Museum, with lesser pieces by Jonathan Harvey and Roger Reynolds. At the Irvine concert the Beethoven of 1826 seemed to belong in this late-20th-century company, joining heart and mind to share the element that above all sustains the art of great composers of any time: the passion to be brave, and to assume bravery in the audience as well. The crowd at the County Museum was full of Arditti groupies (I am one); the Irvine turnout was older, subscribers to a chamber-music series that had previously included more comforting fare. Yet the exit doors were seldom used during this extraordinary concert; bravery was in the air.

Robert Ashley’s music offends me, insults my intelligence, wearies my posterior. Twice in my career as ear-for-hire I have been moved to issue a resonant “boo” at a public event. Once was at a Bang on a Can marathon concert in New York three years ago, 55 minutes into an interminable improvised reminiscence by Ashley, with musical punctuation, on the subject of his mother’s tomato-soup recipe; the other was last Tuesday at the Japan America Theater, after the 35-or-so minutes of a new Ashley work called Superior Seven. In neither case did my verbal reaction attract kindred souls; mine was the sole voice in the wilderness.

For “wilderness” read “trackless waste.” Superior Seven — its title and basic pulse drawn from the word rhythms in some real estate ads Ashley happened upon – slogs through an aimless melodic unwinding with no discernible direction or goal. Solo flute and piano play in unison most of the time; the supporting chamber ensemble doubles their phrases. We are supposed to think about gamelans, or south Indian musical texture, or perhaps the ethereal minimalism of Górecki; the abject poverty of the ideas, and the unconscionable lengths to which they are stretched, make such legitimate associations impossible.

The concert was the yearly contribution of the CalArts music department to the Philharmonic’s “Green Umbrella” series; Ashley has been a guest artist at the school this year. He is 68 and apparently well-regarded. His own New York–based record label – Lovely Music, one of the world’s great misnomers – is well-stocked with his works. Young and hopeful composers can, I suppose, benefit from occasional access to their elders in the field, and Ashley’s affected macho-hip demeanor, with music to match, might bridge the age gap. You have to wonder, though, how a novice composer in search of such basic matters as the right way to bring a work to a logical ending might profit from the presence of an elder spirit who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to know such things himself.

Neither the Ashley nor two similarly inconsequential works by Alvin Lucier and the late Salvatore Martirano furnished much in the way of festivity to this CalArts Spring Music Festival. As a matter of fact, the paltry material at the last two or three CalArts “Umbrella” events, by other composers who have had residencies at the school, should be cause for concern. Years ago these festivals were stimulating gatherings of illustrious creators from all points of the compass. Now they have become . . . Swell, Robert Ashley.

Two works by the marvelous Chen Yi, also a recent CalArts resident, made the evening worth the venturing, however: marvelous, resourceful interminglings of cultural outlooks a world apart, the Duo Ye for small orchestra (recorded on New Albion) and the haunting Song in Winter for a mix of Chinese and Western instruments. China has sent out (or kicked out) dozens of important composers in the last few years, all of them understandably obsessed with effecting some kind of ocean-spanning mix between their identities and ours. Chen – smiling, tiny, looking for all the world like your favorite aunt bearing a fresh batch of cookies – has been one of the most successful. Song in Winter, with its important part for the zheng (a plucked instrument resembling the Japanese koto), is an enchanting piece about flickering. Strands of melody twist in and out of Asian and Western harmonies, the wisps of color pass from the stately Chinese instrument to the more demonstrative piano and percussion; the flute, that most “international” of all instruments, serves as a binding force.

If the music didn’t always speak well of CalArts, at least the level of performances did, with David Rosenboom leading the latest incarnation of the school’s New Century Players. The Ashley enlisted the services of flutist Rachel Rudich and pianist Bryan Pezzone; cellist Erika Duke-Kirpatrick, ubiquitous heroine of the new-music cause, formed the firm foundation for the first Chen Yi piece; the sounds of Weishan Liu playing her zheng were like cooling breezes.

These have been busy, rewarding weeks, and I don’t have nearly the space to do them justice. Britain’s Emma Kirkby sang baroque songs and arias at the County Museum; our own Dawn Upshaw sang Rachmaninoff, Strauss and the achingly beautiful “Mirabai” songs of John Harbison at the Music Center; if you listened carefully, you surely heard the flutter of angel wings above both events. The Penderecki String Quartet – Polish by name, Canadian by residence – gave a spectacular program of tough, mostly new works at the museum, including György Kurtág’s coiled-spring, intensely beautiful Memorial Mass for Andreae Szervanszky and the String Quartet No. 2 by the group’s namesake, its quotient of violence a poignant reminder of Penderecki’s greatness before he went easy-listening. Leonard Stein’s “Piano Spheres” concert at the Pasadena Neighborhood Church ended with music of surprising eloquence: Stein’s own piano transcription of Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative, which never had much to tell me in its original scoring for organ, now brought to life.

At the museum, too, the staunch California EAR Unit sails ever upward, bloodied, unbowed, through music now abject and now invigorating, through the dismal spectacle of a 600-seat theater less than 10 percent full. The remarkable Alison Knowles was on hand for the March 11 concert, a composer/visual artist/ soundscape creator and remarkable in whatever she does. Frijoles Canyon Live, which had its world premiere that night, is a somewhat gorgeous conflation of the range of sounds that might (just might) define the trajectory of a voyage from Santa Fe’s Frijoles Canyon to northern Ontario: animal songs, the percussive impacts of city life, the unmeasurable expanse of empty space. Years ago, lesser spirits – Roy Harris, say, or Howard Hanson – played with the idea of translating American vastness into “pure” music: long-held cello tones for the Kansas night sky, or newly contrived yippee-ay-yay tunes for the Texas part. Knowles’ piece comes closer, not because she draws upon authentic noises for some of her effects, but because a superior sense of form and motion makes her audible landscape into something recognizable and powerful.

Her music was followed by Kamran Ince’s 1996 Turquoise, another work of extraordinary, pulsating beauty. It was my first encounter with Ince – born in Montana of Turkish and American parents – and not, I hope, my last. He knows how to make music move – a talent you don’t find on every tree.

It was Magnus Lindberg’s week: music long awaited, handsomely produced, agreeably if not ecstatically received. Finnish-born in 1958 – three days older than Esa-Pekka Salonen – Lindberg is already known here for some extraordinary works on disc, music of intense, raw energy, its dusky instrumental colors pierced now and then by lightning bolts. In their conservatory days, Lindberg and Salonen worked together to give their country a musical life that honored its one historic monolith, but looked toward a creative future in which the Sibelius shadow might dwindle somewhat. They founded a new-music ensemble, Toimii, to serve Finland the way the California EAR Unit and the Philharmonic’s New Music Group serve Los Angeles: as a message to new composers with new ideas that their music has a chance of being heard. Largely through their efforts, Finland has attained a musical stature beyond anything in its Sibelian past.

Even though both young men forsook their native land to chart broader horizons – in Paris, with the violently innovative group gathered at the feet of Pierre Boulez – neither completely turned his back on his musical heritage. Lindberg lives once again in Helsinki, and Salonen conducts the music of Sibelius. (On a recent quick trip to New York – confronted with the grim specter of a Sibelius program at Carnegie Hall as the only accessible entertainment – I heard Salonen and a visiting student orchestra from the Sibelius Academy in a hurtle through the Fifth Symphony that left me exhilarated for hours. You never can tell.)

Until last week, Lindberg’s best-known work was Kraft, a blazing, high-voltage half-hour recorded (on Finlandia) in 1985 by the Toimii players and a full orchestra under Salonen’s direction. At Tuesday’s “Green Umbrella” concert, three remarkable Lindberg works got their first local hearings: Related Rocks, violent, dark-hued music for percussion and synthesizer; the fluid, lyrical Duo Concertante for small orchestra with clarinet and cello solos; and another knockout piece, Arena II. All have been recorded; a large Lindberg discography already exists on Finland’s two labels, Ondine and Finlandia, which are kind to native composers to an extent that companies in other countries could well take to heart. On Thursday, Salonen and the Philharmonic played music commissioned from Lindberg by enlightened Los Angeles money, the 22-minute Fresco.

It’s the sheer energy of Lindberg’s music that hits you first off: dense clouds of sound, melodic lines circling one another in constant whirlwind motion, driven onward by a remarkable variety of textures. The 1990 Duo Concertante – its solo lines gorgeously played at the “Green Umbrella” by Lorin Levee and Gloria Lum – is the most immediately likable of the four Lindberg works heard here last week. I love its sense of hovering in clear, cold air: long, wispy melodic lines that curl around one another and push forward, its harmonic language unrelated to the classical “rules” yet logical in itself. Fresco, the Philharmonic piece, seemed on first hearing imbued with the same fierceness, but with perhaps less of the clean-burning energy of the works for smaller ensemble. In the Chandler Pavilion’s grossly imperfect acoustics, some of the great sound-swirls were merely muddy – merely (dare I say it?) Sibelian. You can hear the work on the Philharmonic’s new broadcast series on KKGO-FM the week of May 18; that will be the time for judgment. I know already that Lindberg is a major composer and that his visit here was a major event.

I am not fond of Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade under good circumstances; hearing it after Lindberg’s Fresco did it even greater cruelty. The work is cloaked in self-esteem: “Look, Ma, I’m reading Plato.” Even without the Platonic titles, the music is thin and dreary, more accessible than the Lindberg (if sweet harmonies and pretty tunes are your idea of access) but utterly devoid of anything that guides the listener in a logical trajectory from A to B, as Lindberg’s music constantly does. Concertmaster Martin Chalifour’s performance was all the notes demanded and perhaps a bit more. He played it without a score, which suggests that he values it enough to memorize it; I wish I knew why. At the end came the Schumann “Rhenish” Symphony in an okay unfolding, another tentative step in Salonen’s current incursion into the Romantic repertory. (Next week: the Mendelssohn “Italian.”) Nice tunes in thick, ungainly sound: The Schumann symphonies add up to one of music’s most honorable failures. Perhaps – to reverse one of my recent obsessions – someone ought to rescore them for string quartet.

Nothing prompted my recent trip east except a plane ticket about to expire. In Boston there was Brahms; in New York, Sibelius: not my idea of meaningful travel. But the sound of Boston’s Symphony Hall – not the orchestra itself in its present shaggy state, and certainly not the soggy performances under Andre Previn – remains one of the world’s marvels. I sat in the second balcony, where, in times less complex, I had served as usher, and the years fell away.

The splendid if still somewhat raw Finnish orchestra had come over to serve as guinea pig for one of Carnegie Hall’s annual conductors’ workshops. Salonen was among the advisers, along with Finland’s legendary Jorma Panula (who taught but, alas, did not conduct); Grant Gershon, recently of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was one of the participants. Again, however, the sound of the hall, after the recent rebuilding to correct a boo-boo from the previous overhaul, was what I really wanted to hear: lustrous, warm, wonderfully clear even in the muddiest passages in the music at hand that night.

At the Metropolitan Opera there was Edo de Waart’s supple conducting of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, on the marvelous David Hockney sets but with only a so-so cast, except for Kurt Moll’s majestic Sarastro. I went mostly to check out the house’s new translation device: a small screen set into each seatback, enabling you to watch both the opera and its translation without the neck isometrics needed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The system worked perfectly well: a fairly modest light level to ward off glare to adjoining seats, and an on-off switch. But when the Queen of the Night entered in her chariot suspended over the stage, the woman in front of me leaned back to see her and her hair completely covered my screen. My advice to future Met-goers: Wait until they do The Barber of Seville, or bring scissors.

A few weeks ago I expressed some rude thoughts in this space concerning the program chosen for the Philharmonic debut concert of the young British conductor Daniel Harding. Specifically, I feared that a string-orchestra version of Anton Bruckner’s String Quintet, sprawling over nearly an hour of precious concert time, might be a paltry test for the conductor, and a torture for the audience. I must now eat those words – some of them, anyhow.

The music itself made some remarkable points in this orchestral expansion, more so than in other works similarly defiled: Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet inflated for full string section, or the Brahms G-minor Piano Quartet in Schoenberg’s Wagner-size rewrite. It did so because Bruckner’s piece never had much to do with a recognizable chamber-music style in the first place. The members of a chamber ensemble discourse, each as an individual, on serious and complex matters that would be buried if entrusted to a symphony orchestra. Even as played by the intended five strings, Bruckner’s Quintet sounds like an evaporated Bruckner symphony. In the string-orchestra version, under the splendid young conductor, the music surged, charmed, occasionally nattered but sometimes moved, like everything else that composer has inflicted upon the repertory – with an exceptionally beautiful slow movement, which in Brucknerland (Austria and Germany) is often performed as a separate concert piece. Rather than deplore the ruination of this music by its conversion to an orchestral piece, I would advocate an even more sonorous treatment: not just strings but great dark clouds of Brucknerian close harmonies for horns and trombones, trumpets blasting away at the Pearly Gates, aggregations of the anointed dancing atop the kettledrums. I don’t happen to think that the world needs another Bruckner symphony, but I know people who do.

Beyond my expectations, the Bruckner – and, for that matter, the entire Philharmonic program – became a triumph for the 22-year-old Harding, an appealing golden-haired sprite who, with a dab of help from a Hollywood agent, could make off with some of Leonardo’s lovesick maidens just for the asking. His work on the podium conjures memories of Simon Rattle – whose protege he once was – in his early days: exuberant with a touch of flamboyant, but remarkable in the way his sweeping gestures produce sweeping results. After his convincing Bruckner venture, Harding led the reduced orchestra as an eloquent participant in Robert Levin’s imaginative take on the last of Mozart’s piano concertos; at the end Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin music engulfed the hall in audible lava. Watch this kid; he’s on his way.

I remember saying that about Dawn Upshaw back in 1984, when I wandered into an all-Schubert program performed by then-unknowns in New York’s dowdy Symphony Space. Now, at 37, she has fashioned herself into an artist as close to flawless as never mind: a voice of silken, radiant beauty, in the service of words and music dispatched with impeccable taste, a lively imagination that opens doorways in the repertory that other singers would never aspire to enter. All this, plus the intelligence to shape and pace a career built around her own keen definition of excellence. Some singers I know began with Mozart and Schubert as steppingstones to Tosca, and ruined their voices thereby. She manages her own career with a keen awareness of her own sublime musicianship – and even its boundaries. Miss her solo recital, Sunday night at the Music Center, at your peril.

With Salonen and the Philharmonic, Upshaw sang music of this century: arias from Copland and Stravinsky operas, and Lukas Foss’ Time Cycle, that strange, misshapen showoff piece that some people around 1960 – including that year’s Pulitzer Prize jury – mistook for a genuinely modern spirit embarking bravely into the future. Foss has never been that; his real talent has been in sniffing out new currents and coming in mere split-seconds behind: not the first opportunist among composers, but one of the most charming. Time has long run out on Time Cycle; not the urgency of Upshaw’s singing, nor the elegance of the surrounding orchestra, could convert its ashes into a believable form.

Salonen began and ended the program with music from Mexico: Jose Pablo Moncayo’s folkish Huapango at the start, and Silvestre Revueltas’ what-hit-me La Noche de las Mayas, with its percussion that, if performed anywhere but at the staid Music Center, might have brought the cops. Great, boisterous stuff this, revealing a side of Salonen’s musical sympathies one might not have guessed a few years ago. I have heard Revueltas’ 25-minute work led by Mexican conductors, in person and on records, lots of noisy fun but not much more. Perhaps it requires a Finnish interpreter; the exuberance in Salonen’s performance pounded on the chest, but the outcries and the pain in this remarkable score lingered even longer.

A certain romance hovers over Johann Sebastian Bach’s six suites for solo cello. Like the similar suites, sonatas and partitas for solo violin and for keyboard, the works are sets of dance-paraphrases, each prefaced by an extended prelude and ending with something jovial in jig-time. There’s nothing in the Cello Suites with harmonies as heartbreaking as those in the Sarabande from the Third “English” Suite for keyboard, nothing as majestically conceived as the Chaconne in the D-minor Partita for violin. Still, the mystique around the Cello Suites made the notion of playing them all together less stultifying and more magical than you might have believed. Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of all six suites, in two concerts under UCLA auspices at the Grand Central Station-size Bel Air Presbyterian Church, drew full houses and filled them with lively, sometimes rather merry, sometimes melancholy music making of high order.

These pieces take on a semblance of life before large audiences, more entrancing than their actual quality might suggest. The cello itself is part of the reason; it enables the performer to look straight ahead, unencumbered by violin or viola anchored in the jowls or preoccupied by the keyboard, to make faces at the audience, the music itself, or the Almighty who dictated it. Three of the great cellists of our time – Rostropovich, Harrell and Ma – also happen to be among today’s great face-makers. The sound of the instrument is also part of the reason: the throb of the low notes, the ecstasy of the highs. The music demands free, romantic, “inauthentic” if you will, playing, which is what it always has received – from Pablo Casals, who made the first recordings with rubatos that Chopin might have sanctioned, from Harrell and Rostropovich, and last weekend from Ma. One thing he brought to his playing that some other cellists may have missed: the fact that playing these sovereign pieces before a loving audience in a strange and slightly wacko setting was, above all else, great, infectious fun.

In the realm of symphony-orchestra management there was some delicious double talk last week. On Friday, The New York Times broke the story that Kurt Masur, who has led the New York Philharmonic since 1991 and brought it out of the morass of irrelevance of the Zubin Mehta years, had begun to rub some of the orchestra’s management the wrong way, including honcho Deborah Borda. They haven’t exactly fired him, and he hasn’t exactly resigned, but he now has an oddly worded contract that might, or might not, keep him on the job a specific number of years, then will enlist his aid in finding a successor; the paperwork as much as states that if he wants to leave earlier, or to reduce his activities even further, that will be all right, too. (Where were those masters of contractual gobbledygook when the Mehta depression needed this kind of escape hatch?) Next day, The Times ran interviews with the new management team at the Vienna Philharmonic (which happened to be visiting New York), younger than that orchestra’s traditional board of Professoren and locked in the struggle to update a glorious but stifling history, seeking ways to make the orchestra meaningful once again after last year’s Schrecklichkeit over (Himmel!) the hiring of a woman.

Against those far-flung goings-on, the tremendous news right here in Los Angeles – that for the first time in the mature lives of most people still able to walk unassisted, Ernest Fleischmann no longer controls the destiny of the Philharmonic – conjures visions of sweetness and light, which may actually be true. Fleischmann’s successor, Willem Wijnbergen, is holding his first press conference the day this page comes off the press, so judgment must be withheld for the moment.

Fleischmann may be gone from the Philharmonic’s top job in corporeal essence, but he remains in both mind and spirit. Symphony orchestras must plan their programs at least three years ahead, which means that the Fleischmann hand will cast its shadow – alongside, of course, the hands of Esa-Pekka Salonen and others on the planning staff – at least through the century’s end, including a massive end-of-century festival whose planning is well along. Since Salonen plans to take the year 2000 as sabbatical – to compose an opera, as he announced at a New York press conference last week – the full impact of his interaction with the new management won’t be felt until at least 2001.

Nine years ago, Martin Bernheimer’s Fleischmann profile in the Los Angeles Times bore the title “The Tyrant of the Philharmonic.” Mark Swed’s valedictorian piece two weeks ago dubbed him “A Force of Nature.” Farewell, then, to both Attila and El Nino and, perhaps – closer to the point – Prince Metternich, Austria’s master of wily political game playing in the aftermath of Napoleon’s overthrow.

Fleischmann and the Philharmonic merged their destinies in 1969. The orchestra had been settled into its new home at the Music Center for five years; Mehta had been in charge for seven, much adored by some, much deplored by others. “I came at a time,” Fleischmann told me recently, “when anyone new would have made some inroads into the orchestra’s problems. Zubin had developed a rapport with the players; everybody was everybody’s pal. But he desperately wanted the orchestra to be better, and had no idea how to go about it.”

Fleischmann had an idea, however. He urged Mehta to abdicate as the orchestra’s music director – which involved programming, scanning horizons for new guest artists and better orchestral players, speaking convincingly to doubting supporters, all that and conducting as well – and concentrate on the latter. He, Fleischmann, took the other duties upon himself. Nine years later, Mehta was gone and – for reasons of image restoration no less than musical integrity – Fleischmann was determined to lure the eloquent but diffident Carlo Maria Giulini to the Philharmonic podium. He did so by promising the noble Italian that he, too, would only have to concentrate on conducting while Fleischmann continued as front man. As the Giulini presence drastically raised the Philharmonic’s worldwide reputation, Fleischmann himself became a bastion of power unchallenged anywhere in the world.

It made for an unholy alliance, however: management as dictator of both artistic and economic matters; conductors as hired stick wavers and not much else. Not even the most sanguine soothsayer could believe that the pattern would hold when Giulini left the post and Andre Previn came in. Previn, battle-scarred from management fights in London and Pittsburgh, spent a large part of his five-year tenure at the Music Center attempting in vain to earn his own latchkey as music director in both name and fact. Previn resigned in 1990 over Fleischmann’s signing of Salonen as principal guest conductor without consultation, just as Georg Solti, 28 years before, had resigned over the board’s hiring of Mehta as assistant conductor. Plus ca change . . .

Fleischmann’s hold on the duties of music director was open to challenge – they have now been returned to Salonen’s rightful ownership – but nobody can contest his role as kingmaker. His appetite for new, young conductors is, and always has been, voracious; like a pig after truffles, he knows where to dig. If the Philharmonic earns no other place in history, it will do so as the American launching pad for the likes of Salonen, Simon Rattle, Franz Welser-Moest, and the latest wonder-child as of last week’s concert, the phenomenal, 22-year-old Daniel Harding. The story of Fleischmann’s just happening to be in London in 1983, when the 25-year-old Salonen was called in by the Philharmonia as replacement for the ailing Michael Tilson Thomas, is one of those Music Center legends that everybody tells differently. It was also Fleischmann’s brilliant idea to bring in the aged but incandescent Kurt Sanderling as frequent guest conductor in the 1980s, to remind the orchestra of eloquence and probity as antidote to Previn’s disconnectedness.

It’s easy to tick off Fleischmann’s accomplishments, from the reinvention of the Hollywood Bowl as a musical venue of consequence, to the development of chamber-music and new-music concerts away from the Music Center as an extension of the orchestra’s identity. (It’s worth noting that Pierre Boulez, in his time with the New York Philharmonic, also tried the same kinds of off-site projects, without anything like the success of Los Angeles ventures.) Fleischmann’s capture of Salonen was one of his triumphs; so was the subtle cajoling that brought us Giulini. When I did some backstage interviews last summer for a Philharmonic cover story, several other American orchestras were out on strike, or had recently been so. Everyone I asked pointed to Fleischmann as the bulwark against labor instability at the Music Center. Why? “Because he’s one of us,” the answer usually ran, “a manager but also a musician.”

Out of diverse elements – show biz, the purity of music’s supreme classics, a sense of youthful innovation – Fleischmann has constructed an orchestra that stands alone, apart from and above the competition. Under whatever title he may choose, he will continue to leave his mark on the Philharmonic and, for that matter, on the future (if any) of the institution of the symphony orchestra as an entity worth any and all efforts to preserve.

Here’s a letter, one of many. Its writer – whom I’ll identify only by noting that we have the same initials – has been rendered morose by my words that suggest a negative reaction to music closer to his heart than to mine.

“There is no composition of any era . . . that deserves the words ‘trash’ or ‘abomination,'” the writer claims. Ah, if only it were true; the post of music critic could then be abolished, and we professional listeners could spend our days eating lotus and wallowing in the trashy abominations of the Scharwenka Fourth Piano Concerto and the Rach 3 – whose self-appointed protector Mr. R. has become. He invokes the name of Eduard Hanslick, the well-known scourge of Wagner and Tchaikovsky, the defending angel of Brahms and Verdi, the role model of any God-fearing music critic who dreams of getting turned into a big operatic role, as Wagner transformed Hanslick into Die Meistersinger’s Beckmesser. “Hanslick tried to dispose of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto . . . as ‘odiously Russian,'” my correspondent goes on, “but aside from academics, who remembers Hanslick?” Gotcha that time, Mr. R.; everybody remembers Hanslick, who also wrote of Tchaikovsky’s concerto, “It stinks in the ear.”

“Music is the most abstract of the arts,” proclaims Mr. R.; no problem there. “So writing about it must be painful,” he continues, on shakier ground. Sure, there are pains of the standard variety: long hours, meager pay, 405 freeway to Costa Mesa in a rush-hour cloudburst, or letters like this one. Mr. R. has only to check out his Freud to realize how close pleasure and pain can sometimes be. (Sometimes, I said.) I have the feeling that after Hanslick relieved himself on the matter of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, he tumbled into bed purged, proud and happy.

It’s the very abstractness of music that warms the backsides of letter writers. Whether you listen for pleasure or pain, or for both plus a paycheck, music cuts you adrift to think and react for yourself. It comes with a few user’s manuals, of course; Aaron Copland’s What To Listen For in Music, first published in 1939, is (despite its grammatically clumsy title) an infallible guide for directing your ears toward the music itself, its chain of events, and the composer’s skill in inserting a few surprising and thrilling links into that chain. What it tells you eventually, however, cannot be more than “This is the music, this is what happens in it, and this is how I react”: not a brainwasher, in other words, but a role model.

For Mr. R. – and his co-complainers by the hundreds – being cut loose to form your own musical opinions is frightening; finding opinions differing from your own in the exalted state of printed permanence is all the more terrifying. At the supermarket you find packages labeled with everything you need – calories, carbs, protein – to identify the quality of the product. If each of those packages also bore a label with dissenting facts and numbers, you might become confused and start writing hostile letters. That phenomenon, however, doesn’t exist in supermarkets; it does in concert halls and record stores.

With deference to Aaron Copland – the hem of whose toga I am unworthy to touch – I gladly admit that role modeling is the most important aspect of setting down opinions about the experience of music, even more so (despite colleagues’ howls of protest) than in writing about film and theater. “This is what I heard, where and by whom,” the rubrics of journalism ordain at the start. “This is what the music was like” – continuing our trek toward the heart of the matter – “what the performance was like. How does it match up with my personal vision of the music (in the case of a familiar work), and (in the case of a new work, and quoting the eternally crucial line of the worldly-wise composer/critic/curmudgeon Virgil Thomson) “is it merely a piece of clockwork or does it actually tell time?” And finally, “This is what I heard, this is what I thought about it, and these are the reasons I arrived at this opinion and the processes that got me there. Now go do it for yourself.”

Mr. R. does get into deep water at times. He has nursed a canker since last summer, when I objected to incongruous cadenzas inserted into Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. “A cadenza,” he reveals from his own podium, “is a tribute to the work performed,” and an opinion to the contrary is “a stupid insult to the performer . . .” Fine and dandy, provided the improv sounds as if it belongs to the piece itself, as last summer’s pianist’s did not. About the recent performance of John Williams’ Violin Concerto, he is miffed that I should be miffed that Williams hasn’t yet conquered the classical field as well as other fields. “That’s called creative growth, Mr. Rich,” he glowers; so would it be if I took up bricklaying along with my modest talent as an answerer of letters. I know better, and tried to express the wistful wish that John Williams knew better as well.

Writers of letters to music critics have their own repertory of cliches. “I wonder if you and I heard the same concert . . .” is one of the most familiar. “You need a hearing aid, and I enclose a catalog” is another. Mr. R. falls back on one of the hoariest, the fact that such-and-such

a performance drew a standing ovation and, therefore, how dare I, etc. “Mr. Rich probably would react by thinking, ‘So what?'” True enough. It would take only a few concerts to convince Mr. R. of the particularities of the Los Angeles standing ovation, which you can get just by showing up onstage in matching socks, and which has become the Music Center equivalent of the seventh-inning stretch.

The critic has the responsibility to develop a writing style – throbbing with passion, including such value-judgment words as “trash” and “abomination” – horny enough to attract potential converts. “Hey,” I like to think of myself as saying, “there’s something going on out there, and I’m excited about it, and here’s why, and maybe you should check it out, too.” The worst that can happen to a musical community is to be drained of curiosity about anything beyond the Top 50 Masterworks. Los Angeles at the moment is well-served symphonically, less well operatically, and terrifically within the thorny stalks of new music. I’m enough of an egotist to believe that the critical press – thanks to the improvements at the L.A. Times above all – has something to do with this.

“There will be ‘wrong’ critics only as long as there are lazy listeners,” wrote Virgil Thomson. “The critic cannot stop at merely handing out grades . . . but also to nag, wheedle, cajole and – if the occasion calls for it – pontificate. It is not the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of a judgment that is valuable to other people. What other people profit from following is the activity itself, the spectacle of a mind at work . . . A musical judgment is of value to others less for conclusions reached than for the methods they have been, not even arrived at, but elaborated, defended and expressed.”

Fifty-plus years old, Thomson’s brave new words say it all.

Well, that was more like it.

After a season pretty far down in the operatic dumps so far, our aspiring if not yet perfect company has rediscovered enchantment at the most likely fountainhead, the music of Mozart. Last week’s Magic Flute, even braving the Friday-the-13th curse for its opening night, may have had its flaws, but they were minor alongside the grand favors. From the moment conductor Julius Rudel led his orchestra into the overture, with the wind chords perfectly voiced and the strings dancing with each other in immaculate precision, you knew that this wasn’t going to be an evening to join the sadnesses in the season’s five previous outings. Nothing can rescue a sagging opera season better than the sublimity of Mozart’s music sublimely dispatched.

This production, designed by the gadfly cartoonist Gerald Scarfe and staged by Sir Peter Hall, was new here in January 1993, the crown jewel in a season that also included Janacek’s Makropoulos Case and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; shed a tear for enterprise. What passed for the competition in those days found the staging “clumsy,” “incongruous” and “tedious”; I begged to differ. Look upon the opera, if you will, as an intermingling of lovemaking sacred and secular; what the Gerald Scarfe designs and the Peter Hall staging – now re-created by his assistant, Paul L. King – accomplished is to play out the colors in Mozart’s score into their exact visual counterparts.

Children of all ages will find instant gratification in Scarfe’s stage-filling serpent in the first scene and the parade of invented animals that dance to Tamino’s flute later on; what I found even more gratifying was his capture of the iridescent colors in this lush score from one scene to the next, from the dark C-minor of Tamino’s initial plight to the radiant C-major of trumpets and drums in the Trial Scene, from the lustrous darkness around the Queen of the Night to the sunlight that blazes on the orange-gold costumes of Sarastro’s priests (with, however, their Planet of the Apes headdresses, which I don’t quite understand) and the fantastic getup that keenly depicts Papageno’s subtle mix of elf and earthling.

The Magic Flute, with its famous built-in plot ambiguities, suffers much at the hands of producers, not to mention critics. Peter Sellars enraged and titillated a Glyndebourne audience by setting the work on the Los Angeles freeways and by eliminating all spoken dialogue. I have seen Jonathan Miller’s setting in London’s Masonic Lodge headquarters, done all in black and white, with the Queen as an interloping suffragette. Beni Montresor’s 1966 New York City Opera production, probably now in tatters, accomplished what Scarfe has also done, translating the clarinets and horns of Mozart’s orchestra into their visible complements. I have deplored the Metropolitan Opera’s incongruous Marc Chagall sets – so laden with Chagall’s own symbols that the opera should have been sung in Russian – and delighted in the David Hockney designs that have now replaced them (and can be had on video). The version now at the Music Center (through March 1) comes as close as any I’ve seen to honoring the subtle and supple magic that lies within this radiant score. It does, however, make certain demands; the spoken dialogue (in German) is here rendered uncut, including jokes that were already old in Vienna in 1791. One sidebar for today’s world: The First Priest’s “Ein Weib tut wenig, plaudert viel . . .” (“A woman does little and chatters lots”) goes untranslated in the supertitles.

Greg Fedderly, who was the Monostatos in 1993, now sings the Tamino – in a strange red wig that looks as if it’s on backward. He’s a fine, intelligent singer, a credit to Peter Hemmings’ intention of developing a repertory unit within the company and – since this was his third major role this season – obviously a handy man to have around. But I heard sounds last Friday that disturbed me, most of all a rough edge around the high tones that bespoke overwork, and that made me wonder about young singers cutting their operatic teeth in a 3,200-seat opera house. Gwendolyn Bradley, too long away, presented a rather stately Pamina, but broke hearts with her haunting “Ach, ich fuhl’s.” The Sarastro of Kenneth Cox I found somewhat underpowered; considering the majesty of his music (which Bernard Shaw noted as fit for the mouth of God), most people come to a Flute performance with some favored Sarastro in their ears: Alexander Kipnis, Wilhelm Strienz, Kurt Moll. It can’t be easy.

Wolfgang Holzmair, he of all those superb Schubert and Schumann art-song recordings, was the Papageno: his first American operatic appearance, a wonderful performance both hilarious and wise – if, again, a little rough at the top early on. And Sally Wolf, who last season replaced Jane Eaglen in the last two performances of Norma, sang a Queen of the Night that included bull’s-eyes on all but one of the murderous high F’s but also included a strength of tone and phrasing not often encountered in the chirpier exponents of this role.

The 1993 production was conducted by nobody in particular; now we have Julius Rudel’s marvelously colored, spirited dissertation on the music’s unique wonders. By this distance, at least, our opera company has put the intervening years to good use.

At the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium up in Sepulveda Pass (now better known as Culture Gulch), the Philharmonic’s chamber-music concerts – performed by orchestra members plus an occasional visit from the week’s Music Center concerto soloist – have drawn large audiences and rewarded them handsomely. Chamber music, of course, breeds a secret kinship among its idolators almost comparable to that of opera nuts; the crowds at Gindi both stir and dispel memories of the 1950s at New York’s YM-YWHA, with its buttoned-up worshipers at the shrine of Beethoven and the Budapest Quartet – German-accented elders glaring with territorial protectiveness at a college-age kid daring to breach their stronghold.

The Gindi audience is far less hidebound by either dress or age code; above all, these concerts are great fun. Drawing on the orchestra’s resources allows the Gindi planners a wide range of instrumentation. Last week’s concert, as good as it gets, included a quartet of wind players performing Mozart’s wondrous E-flat Quintet with visiting pianist Stephen Kovacevich. A tiny but delicious Schubert String Trio raised the curtain; Schubert’s glorious, garrulous Octet for Winds and Strings provided an hour well-spent at the close. I suspected that Kovacevich’s Brahms performance at the Philharmonic the week before was sabotaged by elements beyond his control; the mellow, affectionate chamberishness of his performance this time confirmed my suspicions.

Caught up in the charms of Ervin Schulhoff’s First String Quartet – as played by the Petersen Quartet at the Doheny Mansion last week in one of the Da Camera Society’s “Chamber Music and Historic Sites” concerts – I found it was hard to avoid shedding a tear for what might have been. Schulhoff was born in Prague in 1894; 48 years later he died at Nazi hands in a prison camp at Wuelzburg, where he had been sent for the double crime of being Jewish and communist. It might be amusing sometime – might be, I said – to hear his cantata that sets the entire text of the Marx/Engels Communist Manifesto, composed in 1932 but not performed until 30 years later.

My tattered 1985 Schwann Catalog lists a single work of Schulhoff’s; the current Schwann lists 49, many in multiple versions. Six ensembles, the Petersen among them, have recorded the First Quartet. We now have enough of his music to intuit a prototype of a talented composer between world wars, lured from his provincial milieu to the cultural hurly-burly in Germany’s major cities, sampling the new currents that swirled through music at the time – jazz, Africa-inspired percussion, Schoenberg’s harmonic anarchies – and pondering where they might lead. The Jewish Kurt Weill and Berthold Goldschmidt, and dozens of others, fit that prototype, as did the Catholic Ernst Krenek and the Protestant Paul Hindemith, among the survivors, along with the others whose bones abide in Nazidom’s poisoned soil. The London Records project to rescue and restore some of this repertory in its “Entartete (Degenerate) Musik” series has been enormously valuable. Now, I hear, it has been discontinued.

Schulhoff’s First Quartet dates from 1924 and runs about 20 minutes: three perky, fast movements and a concluding Andante as long as the others together. The composer makes no secret of his origins. Bohemian rhythms abound, with the stomping on the second beat that we know so well from Dvorak; so does that peculiarly Slavic harmonic eagerness that won’t let you escape even if you want to. Now and then Schulhoff reaches out to shake hands with Bela Bartok, a dozen years his senior; other moments suggest that their composer has heard an American jazz band or two. The finale, rich-textured and profound, rouses the ghost of Mahler, close behind and smiling his approval. This is all wonderful – arguably great – music. Most of all, it can stand by itself as a document, evidence that there was once a thriving culture in a thriving place. Its power to stir the imagination toward what might have been – the denied and potentially glorious repertory from a generation of composers uprooted, persecuted and murdered – is its most potent impact.

A splendid stewpot of artistic styles and outlook made up the Berlin scene from 1920 until the Reichstag burning: a thriving opera house under a mandate to produce contemporary works (yo, Peter Hemmings!); a National Radio underwriting new scores by Hindemith and Weill, with texts by Bertolt Brecht and Georg Kaiser; political cabarets teeming with mordant and important words and music. The striking thing about Berlin’s music in its heyday is its feverish, eclectic activity, comparable to Vienna in Beethoven’s time or Debussy’s Paris. What Germany then lost, however, is exactly what makes a great stew more than just a collection of ingredients. No sooner had a whole generation of new arrivals created their brave new world of music than they were gone, driven out of a country that, for the lifetime of its new regime, was to subsist on the feeble academism of a Hans Pfitzner and the over-the-hill Richard Strauss and the goose-stepping pseudo-archaisms of Carl Orff.

Don’t jump to the conclusion that an untimely death in a concentration camp, or survival in a dangerous and hostile milieu, automatically confers greatness. The London “Entartete” series advanced quite a lot of proof to the contrary: for example, that the hapless Franz Schreker, for all his prolific operatic output, comes over as a pale Richard Strauss clone; that Krenek’s famous Jonny spielt auf is not so much a jazz opera as an overstuffed Romantic essay with a few jazzy moments as overlay. For its revelations of the greatness of Berthold Goldschmidt (who died in 1996, at 93) and Ervin Schulhoff, and the extraordinary if neglected Symphony No. 2 of Krenek, the series has been important, the sort of project that justifies the existence of the record industry even in these days of insane overproduction. This is not to promise that London won’t take the whole issue off the market day after tomorrow. That’s the way it runs.

The Petersens had to perform last week with a substitute violist; if I hadn’t known this, I still would have had no trouble in regarding them as a splendidly unified, spirited young (30-ish) group. Their program began with Haydn, not Papa but Baby, one of the Opus 1 quartets already teeming with tricks and original beauties. At the end came Beethoven’s Opus 132, vast, rawboned and mysterious. The entire program had to do with daring and modernness, a rewarding mix. Afterward, as usual, hostess/producer MaryAnn Bonino presided over a splendid catered spread, with wine to match. The world is not so bad, after all.

Of the triumph Britain’s Mark Wigglesworth may have enjoyed on his last Music Center visit (“. . . taut, nicely controlled!” -Rich, L.A. Weekly), none remained on his latest stint with the Philharmonic. The program should have been a pushover: Brahms at his friendliest, Beethoven at his most Beethovenian, with a pianist in the Brahms Second Concerto renowned for his excellence. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony seemed to crash its way into Mrs. Chandler’s playhouse in the same armored tanks that Wigglesworth had used for the Shostakovich Seventh in 1995. In the Seventh, Beethoven scores his horns higher than in any other of his symphonies; if you have the old Toscanini/N.Y. Philharmonic recording, you know how thrilling those high E’s can be. Under Wigglesworth, they merely out-screeched everyone else; the timpani (properly played with hard sticks) drowned out winds and strings. He’s cute, all right, this diminutive Brit with the bouncy arm movements that look like the way record collectors contort themselves in front of the stereo. The word I took away last Thursday night was bratty; at 33, Mark Wigglesworth might consider giving up the greasy kid stuff in favor of a more responsible kind of musicality.

The usually excellent Stephen Kovacevich delivered a much-under-par account of Brahms’ Second Concerto, out of touch with the orchestra and, even worse, out of touch with a fair number of the notes. I’ve known Kovacevich (as Stephen Bishop) since when, at 17, he told me he was going to become the world’s greatest pianist. I’ve been pleased at how close he’s come. His problems last Thursday stemmed, I’m willing to swear, from a breakdown of communication with the conductor, a lapse understandable and forgettable.