So I've Heard

The news is not all bad. Over the usual sour coffee and sweet rolls last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced its upcoming season with something close to justifiable pride. It begins to look as if we have a music director once again. (Bet you’d forgotten, by the way, that Esa-Pekka Salonen is not the first-ever Finn to serve here in that capacity. The first was Georg Schneevoigt, who held the post in 1927-29 seasons.) Not that the new young maestro is planning to blow the Music Center apart with a steady diet of tone-rows and synthesizers. The ponderous romantics of the late 19th century still hold sway, as do their musical progeny of more recent decades. The season begins promisingly: four whole weeks before a note of Prokofiev or Sibelius is struck. On the fifth week, however, both composers appear, as if to atone for lost time. Then the goulash really hits the fan: Zubin Mehta in all-Tchaikovsky, followed by Zubin Mehta in all-Strauss. Oh well, this is the programming that sells tickets and placates elderly subscribers. What is more impressive are the flickers of genuine programming originality that shine through the murky pages of the new season’s published plans. I am, I must admit, a pushover for creative program-building, the kind that juxtaposes the devotional aura around Debussy’s “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian” with the dark radiance of the chorales in Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” and the Berg Violin Concerto; all three works share a most high-minded program sometime in February. You can also detect a creative hand in linking Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Clocks and Clouds” with the clouds that drift across Debussy’s “Nocturnes,” listed for around the same time. Symphonies of Haydn make a welcome return, after too long away. This wondrously inventive music draws out a sympathetic strain in Salonen, as his Sony recording and his recent adventure with the Symphony No. 80 clearly prove. A Haydn-Bartok program scheduled for March is another neat and imaginative juxtaposition: Hungarian composers two centuries apart, but linked in their love of devastating musical hi-jinks. Yes, it’s a splendid season. Among the guest conductors, the known quantities are no less exciting for being predictable: the marvelous old Kurt Sanderling doing the Beethoven Ninth, Witold Lutoslawski conducting yet another program of his abstruse but intensely civilized music. Anytime you entertain doubts about the cultural integrity of at least part of the Los Angeles audience, rememberthat Lutoslawski’s visits here, along with those of those other formiable composer/conductors Pierre Boulez and Oliver Knussen, invariably draw large and loving crowds.There is, in all this, a clear suggestion that Salonen’s gifts as music director, his vision of what a symphonic season in a hidebound establishment like the Music Center can and should embrace, are strong and original. The persistent noise, about managing director Ernest Fleischmann’s vision of the Philharmonic as his personal playpen, ought to be stilled by this enticing list. There is, in these prospects, a faint glimmer of a new and strong musical personality come to town. The job ahead will be to keep him happy.One of last year’s stranger stories dealt with the awarding of a prize in the amount of $250,000 to a middle-aged British pianist named David Owen Norris, through the offices of the Irving Gilmore Piano Foundation in far-off Kalamazoo. This was not a competition in the usual sense; the Gilmore judges surveyed the field of worthy pianists in secrecy and chose Norris much to his own surprise. As it happens, I heard Norris at the Sydney Piano Competition in 1981, where he played miles above the level of anyone else there, baffled the judges with a free-choice of contemporary British music instead of the expected Chopin and, not surprisingly, won nothing. Sometimes even in music, however, justice prevails. Norris plays at UCLA’s Royce Hall this coming Thursday. There’s reason to suspect that this will be the most interesting piano recital of the season (except, of course, for Maurizio Pollini at the Music Center on April 1, but that goes without saying). Amid all the moaning and gnashings from the voice buffs at the current dire shortage of star-quality singers, 25-year-old Cecilia Bartoli has emerged with radiant assurance that there is, after all, someone worth hearing in the firmament. Her recital at Ambassador last week, cobbled together at the last minute and, therefore, inadequately promoted, didn’t quite draw a capacity house. Those who were there, however, came away with delighted memories that will not soon fade. Th marvel of Bartoli is not only the way she sings — the voice an idealized clarinet, curling itself eloquently around ravishingly beautiful melodies with awesome accuracy and infectious ease. It is also in the way she seems, so far at least, to have paced her career with caution and intelligence. You think of the most recent phenomenon of her magnitude, Los Angeles’ own Aprile Millo, who soared to the heights as her genuine talent warranted, and almost immediately turned into a parody of herself. Something about Bartoli gives off the message that she is with us for the long haul, as an artist rather than a freak.Her Ambassador concert was all-Rossini: the delicious repertory of songs that occupied him in his late years, plus a couple of arias. The artistry was pure and enchanting; it extended to the Martin Katz’s marvelous support at the piano. Some of the program is duplicated on Bartoli’s latest London record, also a Rossini recital but including the dazzling Joan of Arc cantata. Bartoli also has a Mozart recording, this time with orchestra: arias for both Susanna and Cherubino from “Figaro” and some moments from “La Clemenza di Tito” that will just break your heart. This is what music is all about, or should be.

The mastery in “Kullervo” extends from the work itself — the words and music by Aulis Sallinen — to the splendor of the production at the Music Center. However strange Peter Hemmings’ gamble may have appeared, when he announced in 1990 that his own Music Center Opera planned to sponsor the world premiere of a contemporary opera by a relatively unknown composer, from a country both geographically and culturally remote, the gamble has been handsomely won. Sallinen has fashioned his story from pages in Finland’s dark, sprawling epic poem “Kalevala.” Kullervo lurks in those pages as an anti-hero, a loser turned plunderer and murderer by a world into which he doesn’t fit. Sallinen’s libretto exerts its own twists on the legend, and this is all to the good. What rattles around in the murky pages of “Kalevala” as hard-edged facts become transmuted in Sallinen’s own poetry into a beautifully conceived blend of fact and fantasy, moving in and out of reality as easily as the music moves through its vast stylistic vocabulary. As Kalle Holmberg’s production spans the gap between dream and reality, and between mythic time and modernity (so that, for example, a pop ballad singer with microphone and backup synthesizer shares the stage at one point with others in medieval robes), so do words and music hang tantalizingly free of definition. The three hours of “Kullervo” sweep through some remarkable music: sad, haunting arias, abrasive confrontations, and a short burst of leavening hilarity by a quartet of drunkards on their way to perpetrate a massacre. Sallinen’s music establishes him as a doctrinaire conservative, while pointing up the uselessness of such pat identifications. He draws upon the language of tonality, but shifts his harmonic focus easily and often. If further identification is needed, think Shostakovich tinged with Janacek’s exoticism, a dab of Strauss here, an authentic-sounding ripoff of contemporary Finnish cabaret there. The sounds themselves are wonderful: great, rolling choral sonorities, streamers of audible flame from the orchestra. Sallinen has been copiously recorded, mostly on the Ondine and Finlandia labels: three operas including, as of this week, “Kullervo,” three of his five symphonies, quite a lot of chamber music. He demands, and deserves, attention.So does the enlightened work of the Finnish forces on our stage. Start the list with Seppo Nurmimaa’s geometrically patterned backdrop that changes fantastically with the lighting, and his costumes that range from regal robes for the principals to modern street clothes for the chorus (a statement as to the opera’s timelessness, and a boon to the costume budget). Continue with the sophistication of Holmberg’s stage direction, a way of creating enormous impressions with the barest elements that some local directors might profitably study. To these marvels add the overpowering vocal presence of the great Jorma Hynninen in the title role, and of Eeva-Liisa Saarinen in the harrowing role of Kullervo’s tortured mother. End with the masterful musical leadership of Ulf Soederblom, splendidly seconded by the awesome precision of the chorus (misidentified here last week as being the same as the Helsinki University Chorus, which it isn’t) and our own pit band, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, more resonant and more responsive by far than the Helsinki orchestra on the recording. Beyond most of our expectations, I would safely guess, “Kullervo” turns out to be a towering musical experience, and an experience as well in a level of stagecraft and production integrity we would do well to observe. One performance remains, tomorrow night; be advised, be urged.Along the Finnish line: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s three weeks here, which ended last weekend, showed our young conqueror-designate in several lights, not all complimentary. The Mahler Fourth, the first week, was easily the low point: a misreading full of wilful distortions and mere smartass gimmickry. At the other end, however, was all of last weekend’s program: Haydn’s 80th Symphony with its cheeky innovations firmly in place, a most elegant performance of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto by Cho-Liang Lin, and a clean, bright, dry-eyed reading that did more for the Brahms Second Symphony than I might have believed possible. A conductor who can deliver this level of performance is one worth waiting for.To reach your seat in Houston’s new Wortham Opera House, you have to ride up, on an escalator bordered with weird sculptures probably filched from Darth Vader’s armory, then back down some stairs to the theater. You arrive in a mood for the quiet devotions of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” but this is destroyed by a pianist in the lobby, filling the space with cocktail-hour reveries. You decide that maybe Los Angeles isn’t the cultural pits after all. The “Parsifal” was Robert Wilson’s creation. Wilson hangs on Los Angeles’ conscience, after the failures, in consecutive years, to finance his “Civil Wars” and his “Einstein on the Beach,” both some kind of important masterwork. The “Parsifal,” co-produced with the Hamburg Opera, was a latter-day reminder of what we missed: stagecraft of the utmost subtlety and poignance, a vocabulary of light, scenery and movement that seems to flow unimpeded from the work itself. A deaf man could have realized the music in this supremely moving evening. Christoph Eschenbach, who now heads the Houston Symphony and often crosses the line to conduct for the Opera as well, led a musical performance worthy of the setting. Houston may not know how to build or maintain an opera house, but the company itself, under David Gockley’s 20-year leadership, has made an enviable mark in innovative repertory and productions. (The present house opened, in 1987, with the world premiere of “Nixon in China.”) Filling out last week’s playbill were two highly contrasting operas based on the “Beauty and the Beast” legend: the new “Desert of Roses” by the avant-garde-cultural-terrorist-turned-pussycat Robert Moran, and an updated version of Andre Gretry’s 1771 “Zemire et Azor” in which, to cite one instance, the father of Beauty, a medieval Persian prince in the original, is now an American vacuum-cleaner salesman. Get the idea?

It took about ten notes, sung by the Helsinki University Choir at the Music Center, at the start of last week’s Philharmonic concert, to remind us of what is sadly missing in the musical life of Los Angeles, and of most American cities for that matter. Here was a chorus, with a tradition of excellence extending back more than a century, which performed with standards like those of an idealized orchestra or chamber ensemble. It didn’t merely sing the right notes, or merely get the words out with something resembling a recognizable language. Even though this was, strictly speaking, half a chorus (men only), there was no limit to the beauty of their work, nor its awe-inspiring precision. You expect this level of work in small ensembles; the Tallis Scholars come to mind. Here were nearly 100 marvelously trained singers, who performed with amazing unanimity. There was a depth and a balance of tone here, a truly beautiful shaping of sounds, a command of diction that could make poetry sound not only clear but poetic. Without a scrap of knowledge of the Finnish language, any listener could grasp the sense of the words. It wasn’t only that the choir members knew what they were singing; they made us both know and care. Great choral singing is a cherished tradition in Northern Europe; it endures in the U.S. in some midwestern communities that maintain schools founded by Scandinavian immigrants: St. Olaf’s in Minnesota, for one. Our municipally maintained choirs, for the most part, fall below this level, probably from a lack of caring. Our Master Chorale, which follows a gruelling schedule every season, gets through the notes pretty well. It has a tradition of singing with great gusto that persists from the Roger Wagner days, and which survived every effort from its last leader, John Currie, to dampen it. But the standards of a group like the Helsinki (which, despite its name, is not a student group but a professional organization maintained by the university to benefit the community) are out of the reach of even the best of American municipal choirs. I hope all their leaders, from Robert Shaw on down, get to hear the chaps from Helsinki. They are here as the chorus in the Music Center Opera’s “Kullervo” this coming Tuesday, but also participated in the Philharmonic’s all-Sibelius program, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, last week as a warmup. Imagine, hearing a program of Sibelius, and wishing it wouldn’t end.Those last thoughts only apply to the first half of the program, however: a garland of short Sibelius choruses, written at various times in his career, works of great charm, in a rather outdoorsy romantic style (early Mahler, perhaps, with even a touch of Wagner). They displayed, at very least, a fine coloristic sense in the writing for voices, and they were nicely set forth under the Choir’s present director, Matti Hyokki. To the Sibelius “Kullervo,” which sprawled across the second part of the program, none of these words apply. I am hard pressed to come up with another stretch of 70 minutes, or even 30 or 10, by any reputable composer where so little takes place. Granted that this is the work of a young Sibelius (if 27 be reckoned young); granted, too, the bravery in creating a work in Finnish when that language was only slowly gaining recognition. All that granted, this is drab, tawdry, crude music in which the choral writing is dull, the vocal solos empty declamation, and the orchestra goes tearing around creating atmosphere out of tricks already tried and discarded by the minor Russians of a generation before. It’s hard to imagine that Esa-Pekka Salonen, who conducted a properly loud and frenzied performance that must have aroused lots of nostalgia among the movie buffs in the audience, chose on his own to bring out this tattered baggage. It does tie in rather neatly, of course, with Aulis Sallinen’s upcoming opera. Cooperation between the Philharmonic and the opera was doubtless helpful in bringing the chorus to town along with the superb baritone Jorma Hynninen. But even a rational admirer of Sibelius, one willing to award points, however grudgingly, to a a couple of symphonies and, perhaps, half of a tone-poem, has to be embarrassed by “Kullervo.” Unfortunately, the monolithic Sibelius hangs like an albatross around the collective necks of the excellent conductors, not to mention composers, that Finland has produced in modern, post-Sibelian times: Sallinen, Salonen and dozens more. Like the demons who haunt the hapless, doom-ridden Kullervo, Sibelius himself is ripe for exorcism. Don’t believe all the ads and other flackery about Gioacchino Rossini’s 200th birthday, or even his 50th. He was born on Leap Year Day, 1792. which makes him 200 years old next Saturday, on his 48th birthday. Any calendar freak will tell you that 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, for reasons beyond my allotted space. San Francisco’s opera company has a major Rossini festival planned for later this year. Los Angeles has no celebration, unless you count the Music Center Opera’s “Barber of Seville” earlier this season, with its chamber-pot sight gags and dull conducting. But there’s a wonderful new Rossini singer, a mezzo-soprano named Cecilia Bartoli, who has just brought out a spectacular recording (on London) of Rossini songs and his “Joan of Arc” cantata, which she sings with flair and with a wonderful way of caressing the gorgeous vocal lines. Better yet, Bartoli has been late-booked for a local appearance, shoehorned into an Ambassador Auditorium recital this coming Wednesday night. If she sounds anything like this new disc, you’ll come away happy.

Memories of last Wednesday’s unspeakable weather were handily dispelled that night at the Music Center, in the spell of enchantment cast by Barbara Hendricks. When did we last hear, anywhere in town, a program of pure art song — no operatic arias, no empty vocal showpieces — so handsomely delivered? Four years ago, by Peter Schreier, on a similarly rainy night? Nothing more recent comes to mind.Hendricks had sung with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic the week before, in a generally unsatisfactory, if not actually mindless concert. This time, with the excellent collaboration at the piano of Staffan Scheja {cq}, she ruled the stage. Nobody can pretend that the 3,000 seats of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion are any kind of venue for an art song program; the tragedy of the dropping of a subsidiary small concert room from the plans for Disney Hall becomes apparent at times like this. Hendricks helped, graciously summoning all hearers to fill in the spaces down front (and even directing stragglers to empty seats). Her art helped even more; her beautifully chosen program, and the way she sang it, turned the vastness of the place into intimate surroundings. The magic of Hendricks is her seemingly infinite power to react to the poetry in these songs. It’s that amazing skill she has for coloring the voice from an intuition about the composer’s own reactions to the text. It doesn’t do merely to sing the words of Schubert’s miraculous “Nacht und Traeume”; you must draw your vocal colors from the soft, dark clouds that play over Schubert’s setting, the sudden desolate shiver as the harmony topples into a chasm midway. It doesn’t do merely to fling forth the outcries that end each verse of Hugo Wolf’s “Kennst du das Land,” unless you can also bring the pain of those words into your own tone. The marvel of Hendricks’ program was the way she fulfilled all these hopes, with beauty of voice and high intelligence as well. Lots of opera singers drag small bouquets of art songs into their concert programs, along with the larger bouquets of showy blossoms from grand opera. It somehow establishes, in their own minds at least, their stature as “serious” artists, their own high purpose. Great singers willing to specialize in German lieder or French chansons — such as made up all of Hendricks’ program — are rare right now. Twenty years ago they flourished in abundance. Now Elisabeth Schwarzkopf has retired; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hermann Prey never seem to pass by this way; Peter Schreier is building a second career as a conductor. And so the wonderful Hendricks is virtually alone. UCLA doesn’t have a single art song recital this eason; Ambassador’s vocal series offers the usual mixed grill of aria-plus-song programs. What Los Angeles needs, and achingly so, is the proper small and comforting setting for concerts such as this one: not the vastness of the Music Center or Royce Hall, not the impersonal blandness of the Japan-America or the garish bad taste of Ambassador. The final miracle of Hendricks is that she created the illusion, even in the hostile surroundings of the Music Center, that we had all been transported to the most beautiful, intimate concert hall in the world, there to hear the most beautiful, intimate music. The Japan-America does work for certain kinds of concerts where a kinder, gentler atmosphere might actually be jarring. It works very well for the Philharmonic’s “Green Umbrella” series, which continues successful. By all odds the crowning glory of the most recent program (February 3) was Tod Machover’s Viola Concerto (subtitled “Song of Penance”) written for Kim Kashkashian and played by her with Stephen Mosko’s excellent podium support.Machover is a comer. With his curls, dimples and boyish grin, he has become a self-made media hero, marvelously voluble about his own work and about the new horizons he keeps on creating with all his electronic gadgetry at the M.I.T. Media Lab on the banks of the Charles. Fortunately, the quality of his work exonerates the manner of presentation; nobody can fault a composer just because he comes on strong, if the product justifies the presentation. His sci-fi opera based on Philip Dick’s “Valis,” recorded on Bridge, has caught on. Cheeky, eclectic, and devastatingly clever, it contains zillions of notes and doesn’t waste one. The Viola Concerto is cut from the same cloth. The deal here is that the solo viola is actually an electronic creation, with the usual strings but also with miles of cable connecting it to a bank of computers. The soloist’s sounds are, thus, drastically modified, as are the sounds of the surrounding instrumental ensemble. To thicken the brew even more, a tape of a singer, her voice also processed, is stirred in. Daunting as this sounds, the piece is immensely likeable. The sounds of the electronicized solo viola are so rich, and often so “human” in their impact, that just the sound of the piece is interesting enough. But there’s more: a genuine throb that goes beyond matters of technology, survives its own gadgetry and comes out sounding like some kind of great music. Machover has written another piece of similar intent, this time for electronic cello. We get to hear it during the upcoming CalArts Contemporary Music Festival at the end of March.

The notion of a cultural entente between Los Angeles and Helsinki may seem somewhat far-fetched, but it seems to be working. Evidence is easily at hand this month, as the shadow of Kullervo falls upon the Music Center. This week (Friday and Saturday nights and next Sunday afternoon) Esa-Pekka Salonen, a deputation of his fellow Finns and the Los Angeles Philharmonic busy themselves with Sibelius’ 70-minute symphony bearing that name. Later this month (four performances starting February 25), welcome please the visiting Finnish National Opera, bearing Aulis Sallinen’s brand new opera of the same name, in its world premiere under Music Center Opera auspices. Kullervo, “the blue-stockinged gaffer’s son, yellow-haired, handsome, fair of shoe,” the sad-sack anti-hero of Finland’s epic poem “Kalevala”: he hardly seems the heroic essence of symphony or opera. Rejected by his father, and again by his foster father, he roams the countryside as a brooding, dangerous loner. He rapes and murders a woman he finds on the road, and then discovers that she was his sister. He returns to confess his misdeeds to his parents, but only his mother acknowledges his presence. He leaves again to slaughter his father’s enemies, then takes his own life by self-immolation. ”No, he is not what you’d call a hero.” This is the great baritone Jorma Hynninen, who sings the music of Kullervo both in the Sibelius symphony this week and in the opera later on (and also on the recording of the opera, due out next week on the Ondine label). I talked to him in Helsinki last fall, when I sat in on some of the recording sessions. “But he epitomizes quite a lot of the Finnish soul, which can be very dark and sometimes very cruel. To me Kullervo is a lot like some of the Texas loners I’ve seen in films — like Hud, for example.”Both works, the Sibelius symphony of 1891 and the Sallinen opera of exactly a century later, spend much of their time in darkness. They are not otherwise, however, very much alike. The darkness in the Sibelius is the warm, enveloping Romantic night. Sallinen’s opera is cloaked in a more austere, intimidating darkness. It comes closer to the essence of the “Kalevala,” that 666-page long national epic that demands of its readers infinite patience and rewards them with some powerful folk drama. His orchestral textures are shot through with electric bolts of violent, glacial colors. His characters sing, exult, argue and grieve in long, rhetorical melodic lines of haunting beauty. There are great arias, not in the Verdian sense, but full of deep, personal passion. One aria in particular lingers in my memory after hearing the mezzo Eeva-Liisa Saarinen {cq} singing it in a Helsinki recording studio: a mother telling her son (Kullervo) that a mother’s love for a son outweighs any of that son’s wrongdoing. There is much we can learn from Finland’s musical life, and especially from that nation’s remarkable aptitude for supporting its own music. That comes out of a continuing pride of nationhood that people there seem eager to impart to all visitors. I was struck by Hynninen’s earnestness, for example, when he told me that he would rather sing new roles in unfamiliar operas in Finland than become a star on the international operatic circuit (which he could certainly be). “I like the life that’s a little dangerous,” he said. The “Kalevala” is a compendium of centuries-old legends about everything from the creation of the world (out of eggshells) to a final folkish retelling of the coming of Christ. It was only collected and published about 150 years ago, but that event had a profound impact on the country: the first substantial forward step toward the establishment of Finnish as an official language in a country starved for any national identity. Decades after the publication of the poem, Sibelius began writing symphonies and tone-poems inspired by episodes in the poem; that, too, became an important step. Whatever you may feel about Sibelius’ music (and I don’t happen to feel much), you have to award him points on the heroism that made a work like the “Kullervo” Symphony an act of political and cultural defiance. Perhaps inspired by Sibelius’ forthright heroism, Finland supports its contemporary composers handsomely. It does so even when their composers choose to live somewhere else. Sallinen, for example, lives in the south of France. “Whenever I come to Helsinki,” he told me, “my batteries go dead. Even Sibelius had to go to Italy now and then to warm up his talent.”Sallinen composed “Kullervo” to inaugurate Helsinki’s new opera house. When construction on that house fell behind schedule, the deal was made to bring it here for its on-the-road premiere: a coup for Los Angeles, some Los Angeles sunshine for the visiting Finns (including the Helsinki University Chorus, which sings in both the symphony and the opera). Sallinen has now composed four operas, all produced by Finnish forces and three of them now recorded. The Finnish National Opera (or “Ooppera,” with Finland’s typical propensity for too many letters) has a remarkable record of support for native composers; it produces, and usually records, at least one new work every season. The new operas aren’t all about the hardship of life on Finland’s rocky soil; check out Einojuhani Rautavaara’s splendid “Vincent” (about Van Gogh) on the Ondine label. By the standards of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s own music, or that of his compatriot Magnus Lindberg, the 56-year-old Sallinen ranks as a conservative. If that means that he works with sounds and ideas that composers before him have also tried, so be it. In Sallinen’s case, it also means that he uses these sounds and ideas in new ways. You will like “Kullervo”. Among the reasons is the assurance it bears that there is still someplace in the world, at least, where grand, romantic, accessible, dramatic opera is still being created, sung and supported.

When the roster of Los Angeles culture heroes is next compiled, the name of Lynn Harrell will figure close to the top. The smiling cellist, New York-born but of tall, blond Texas stock, has been a part of the local scene since he moved here in the 1980s. He has taught a generation of young cellists at USC’s School of Music as the heir to the equally tall, legendary, Gregor Piatigorsky. He has led, with enormous spirit and resource, the admirable summer Philharmonic Institute (now temporarily, but tragically, in abeyance). And he has turned on lights all over the area with the splendor of his playing. Thursday night he celebrated his 48th birthday by performing the solo cello part in Richard Strauss’ “Don Quixote,” a warhorse which he rode easily and masterfully. The week before, at the Philharmonic’s “Green Umbrella” new-music concert at the Japan-America Theater, he had been soloist in something even more extraordinary, the Concerto by Gyorgy Ligeti, a killer piece which he performed as easily, as masterfully, as — well, as the “Don Quixote.” Nothing holds terrors for Lynn Harrell. He is a performer whose adoration of the art he serves plays across his wonderful, outsize countenance, up there on the stage. He is a joy for the eye and the ear in equal measure. He comes by it naturally. His father was the great baritone Mack Harrell, who died at 50, far too young for the great art he gave us. Baritones and cellists have a lot in common, of course, but there is more that this father and son have in common. Harrell was a phenomenal artist who could take on almost any kind of music and do it full justice. If you were around New York in the 1940s and ’50s, you’d hear Mack Harrell in a Bach Cantata one week, a Schubert or Schumann song cycle the next, on the Metropolitan Opera stage in roles as diverse as Papageno and Amfortas. When the Met finally got around to Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” Harrell was the inevitable, and brilliant, choice to sing the diabolical Nick Shadow. When Dimitri Mitropolos and the New York Philharmonic broadcast Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” in 1951, the first time many of us had heard this landmark score, Harrell was the Wozzeck, the only member of the cast to sing the notes on pitch and with overpowering emotion as well. (If you’re lucky, you might find the recording.)Mack Harrell was more than a great artist, then; he was a valuable one, an artist who made things happen that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been there. That’s what his son has developed into as well. The world is well populated with cellists these days, more so than usual, perhaps. Some of them — you know their names — are among the greatest musicians today on any instrument. But there’s even more to Lynn Harrell than that, because of the many ways he makes things happen.Someone came up to me at the intermision of the first “Green Umbrella” concert, a highly placed and intelligent cultural leader. “You know,” she said, “I would swap a dozen Philharmonic subscription concerts for one like this.” She was on target; it was an extraordinary concert for all the best reasons: the music, the way it was played, and the way it was received. The only subscription concert that has come close to that level this season was last week’s with Dawn Upshaw. Yet, when the Philharmonic starts crying poverty, as it has this season, it’s the “Umbrella” series that gets cut back.It was, indeed, an exceptionally rewarding and challenging evening, with the formidable Elliott Carter on hand to beam pride at a clutch of his short chamber and solo pieces, and with Oliver Knussen, that great teddy-bear of a conductor, in charge. The Carter pieces were Carter as usual, mostly desiccated notes being pushed around a page seemingly at random but probably with a great skill that I cannot bring myself to recognize. The great Witold Lutoslawski had sent over a brand-new and most flavorsome song-cycle, delicious pieces about flowers that sing, and these songs were splendidly sung by Solveig Kringelborn, a new Scandinavian soprano who sounds as delightful as her name. And there was, as the evening’s high point, Harrell’s performance of the Ligeti: a stupendous musical conceit that seems to rise out of utter silence, flame forth in showers of sparks, only to fall back again into a void whose very emptiness one could actually feel. A work of great fantasy, this 13-minute score from 1966; at the “Umbrella” it fell into sympathetic hands and stirred an alert capacity audience to cheers. Meanwhile, back at the Philharmonic… This week’s program was only given twice, so you’ve already missed Harrell’s richly humorous traversal of Don Quixote’s famous escapades, with equally good-hearted support from the orchestra under David Zinman. The program also served to introduce Christopher Rouse, 42, currently teaching composition at Rochester’s Eastman School, and much performed by East Coast orchestras. Rouse’s best known works are a series of short orchestral workouts, fearsomely loud, fast and cloaked in a superficial virtuosity. Not so the First Symphony, designed as if in atonement as a single slow movement meandering through the better (or, let’s say, the longer) part of half an hour. On its meandering course, it take in a few gulps of Mahler, a fair chunk of Bruckner (including a direct quote from the Seventh Symphony) and rather a lot of Shostakovich. Pastiche? No, more like hodgepodge: a set of roughed-out eclectic episodes that hand off some interesting sounds along the way, ioncluding a few sonic booms to evoke memories of the Christopher Rouse we all know, but fail to come together in any way that might stand in as an individual composer with something to say. This was the only contemporary symphonic work on a Philharmonic subscription concert from now until the end of the season. It’s not hard to agree with that woman I talked to at the “Umbrella.” The next “Umbrella” concert, by the way, is tomorrow night.

The curtain went up on the Music Center Opera’s new production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” which began its five-performance run on Wednesday night. There, on the empty stage, stood the Carmen, a figure in whom beauty and menace were equally merged. Since Bizet’s opera actually doesn’t bring the Carmen on until some 25 minutes of scene-setting music has gone by, you could guess right off that you were in for one of those new-fangled conceptual productions, with the composer’s instructions tossed out the window and some smart director’s ideas substituted. But this “Carmen” isn’t all that bad; it belongs, in fact, among the opera company’s more successful escapades: not perfect, mind you, but close. It offers the company’s resident superstar in one of his best roles. It offers, in the title role, an exciting new young singer whose career has zoomed into orbit only in the last year. It offers a handsome, massive scenic production and a director who knows how to use it. It looks good and, for the most part, sounds good. Denyce Graves is the new Carmen, replacing the scheduled Agnes Baltsa whose mother is seriously ill. Graves is 27. Two years ago she was working the switchboard at the Washington Opera; since then she has made a specialty of being in the right place when scheduled Carmens have dropped out — in San Francisco, Vienna, and now here. She is impressively gifted: a big, bright mezzo-soprano voice, a gorgeous figure with face to match. This is the authentic look and sound of a Carmen. She has some distance still to cover, however. At Wednesday’s performance she sang beautifully most of the time, but she also let the pitch droop at crucial times and also lost coordination with conductor Randall Behr. She also displayed some bad stage manners, especially in the matter of avoiding eye contact with other singers and performing, instead, straight out to the audience. If I had been Placido Domingo during their final duet, I might have considered using a real dagger. Domingo was wonderful. That animal quality that gets into his voice at moments of high passion is, once again, the right sound for a Don José. On Wednesday it was powerful enough to cancel out his customary wooden stage manner; sound stood in for sight. Neither Angelique Burzinski’s Micaela (hard-voiced and tremulous) nor Michael Devlin’s Escamillo (strained at both ends of his range) were quite up to this level, but neither were distinctly bad. The production comes here from London’s Royal Opera. It is a vast piece of Spanish pseudo-stone work designed by Gerardo Vera. Franca Squarciapino’s costumes place the action around 1870, the time of the opera itself. Nuria Espert’s direction surrounds the central action with a swirl of people-props, including a large children’s contingent marvelously used. The version used is not the most up-to-date; it’s the old standard edition, with sung recitatives composed by an inferior hand after Bizet’s death, replacing the original spoken dialog. It’s an unfortunate choice, perhaps, in these enlightened times. But at least the usually lethargic Randall Behr seemed this once, on the production’s opening night, to have found the inner resources to create, from his podium, a reasonable likeness of this most grandiose grand opera. Chalk it up, then, as one of the Music Center Opera’s better offerings. It’s about time. LINE
Thursday night’s Philharmonic concert belonged to Dawn Upshaw. Five years ago the slender, smiling young Chicagoan made her local debut singing the ten-or-so notes allotted to the soprano in Mahler’s Second Symphony; a year later she had the eight-minute solo in the Brahms Requiem. This time she came as a soloist in her own right, acclaimed as one of the brightest fixtures in the operatic firmament, an artist whose every note breathes enchantment. This time — the concert is repeated this afternoon — she came with Samuel Barber’s exquisite, nostalgia-drenched setting of James Agee’s “Knoxville, Summer of 1915” and two Mozart concert arias, exceptionally rich and complex pieces. (She has recorded the “Knoxville,” on Nonesuch; it was everybody’s favorite vocal record a year ago.) With warm-hearted, pliant support from the orchestra under David Zinman, she filled the hall with that true, splender, beautifully airy voice of hers, further illuminated by her impeccable command of diction, and her manner of phrasing that makes everything she sings sound spontaneous and radiant. If these words suggest that Dawn Upshaw, in the brief orbit of her career so far, has ripened into a perfect musical artist, they are well chosen. Line
Apropos Samuel Barber: the haunting “Knoxville” piece from 1947, along with the even earlier First Symphony that was also on Zinman’s program, are the work of a poetic artist, robustly imaginative and totally in command of a musical language that managed to be both conservative and original. But Barber was soon to go into a sad decline. How sad, you can measure from his 1966 opera “Antony and Cleopatra,” written to open the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, a tired spinning-forth of exhausted formulas. The opera persists, on the strength of its famous origin and its composer’s stature. A recent production from the Chicago Lyric Opera, directed by Elijah Moshinsky in a version much edited and otherwise revised, circulated earlier this season on PBS. It was rejected by KCET, but it shows up tomorrow night on the Huntington Beach PBS outlet KOCE (Channel 50). Catherine Malfitano and Richard Cowan sing the title roles; Richard Buckley conducts. They do not quite rescue the opera from its deserved oblivion, but they come as close as the music allows.