So I've Heard

These haven’t been very good weeks at the Philharmonic. Two of the orchestra’s former leaders have been around as guest conductors, presenting new evidence as to why not to mourn their absence from our midst.Zubin Mehta’s visit ended earlier this month with a wad of Beethoven, including the Violin Concerto with Pinchas Zukerman and the Eighth Symphony. Trustworthy friends reported with some horror on a most depressing evening, with a faceless meander through the concerto, a loveless approach to this most lovable symphony, and a performance level at which the orchestra seemed to unravel. I missed the event, listening instead to poised, meticulous, spirited playing by an orchestra of mere freelancers in a concert hall in Tokyo. I returned for Andre Previn’s concerts this week and last; his last concert in this brace falls this afternoon. and “fall” may, indeed, be the right word. Actually, I confess to having only heard half the program; no searching of souls, Previn’s or mine, has come up with a reason to devote an hour or so to music from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” which either belongs on a stage with mice and a Christmas tree, or in Disney’s “Fantasia” with dancing mushrooms.The half I did hear had Radu Lupu in a depressingly heavy-handed onslaught on Mozart’s great C-major Piano Concerto, with his own dull, unstylish cadenzas in the first and last movements, and with orchestral support from Previn and the orchestra that seemed rushed at times and underrehearsed at others. Before had come Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” Overture, which lay flat on the page. The previous week’s programs had, at least, included something of nominal interest. Try as I might, however, I cannot detect the slightest glow of light or heat in the music of Sir Michael Tippett. It is an affliction of long standing, embracing the four symphonies, the operas (give or take a small fortunate accident here and there in “The Midsummer Marriage”) and, most recently, the Triple Concerto that formed the centerpiece of last weekend’s Los Angeles Philharmonic program. The concerto runs about 35 minutes, and dates from 1979. The scoring is interesting enough, involving as it does some nice, rattly percussion; the writing for solo instruments is mettlesome, and it was bravely dispatched on this occasion by three Philharmonic stalwarts — the violinist Elizabeth Baker, the violist John Hayhurst and the cellist Barry Gold. The viola writing is particularly attractive; Tippet knows how to favor the instrument’s coppery sonorities, and Hayhurst’s playing had something you would have taken for eloquence in better music.But what goes on in this piece — or in anything else of Tippett’s you might name, for that matter? The work is a thing of shreds and patches: a gambit in one direction here, then a reversal; the start of a promising line of musical oratory, and then a shift that dashes hopes. The element of surprise can be a wonderful thing in music; it certainly works well in Mozart. With the Tippett brand of illusion and disillusion, however, you cannot think back and recognize the composer’s bag of tricks — as you can with Mozart.It’s a scattershot style, as if the composer simply threw in everything he could devise, in the hope that something might work. The harmonic style is fairly dense; the music moves, with no clear logic, among several tonal plateaus. But the end result, from all I can glean after hearing the work live under Andre Previn last week, and from the recording under Colin Davis on Philips, comes off as deaf-and-blind manipulation, paper music or, at best, cardboard.You will know how mindlessly, agonizingly dull this work turned out when I tell you that the Brahms Fourth Symphony, which followed it on the program, sounded positively giddy by comparison. Giddiness is not, actually, one of Brahms’ more noticeable traits, and the truth of the matter is that the quotient of ponderosity in this Fourth Symphony is actually a fair match for the Tippett.But there are attractions, as well, and the least you can say is that when Brahms’ music starts off toward some particular goal, it usually gets there. Previn conducted the work interestingly this time around, somewhat more rhythmically plastic than on his Telarc recording. The orchestra, at least on Thursday, played badly for him, with long stretches of poor balance and some fuzzy entrances. Perhaps it had been corrected by the Sunday concert, perhaps not. Driving home I soothed my assaulted ears with some of Angel-EMI’s new recording of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” under Roger Norrington, with his London Classical Players on their reconstructed Mozartian instruments, and with an astonishingly good cast. Perhaps the world didn’t need another “Magic Flute,” with a full column of fine-print listings in the Schwann Catalog that includes the deliriously beautiful 1938 recording under Sir Thomas Beecham with his mostly-Nazi cast and the powerful 1987 performance under Nikolaus Harnoncourt. But there is an infectious quality to this Norrington performance. It sounds young and spirited, full of invention. Liberties are taken, including some orchestral interjections at key moments that may not be Mozart’s intention but do no harm. The Pamina of Dawn Upshaw is sheer delight, and the scene between Tamino (Anthony Rolfe Johnson) and the Speaker of Olaf Baer– the crucial moment when the plot takes its magical pivotal turn — is marvelously underscored by Norrington’s firm conductorial hand. The Mozart celebration continues, with just cause.

In Tokyo last Tuesday night, a crowd of nearly 3,000 clapped and cheered and went joyously mad after a concert by a visiting American orchestra. Another crowd of similar size had done the same on Monday, and on each of three days before that. No previous American conquest of Japan (of which there have been many) was more skilfully managed, or more joyously received. The conquerors this time were the 80 members of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, on its first-ever tour: two concerts over the New Year holiday in Osaka then five in Tokyo. The imponderables surrounding the event are many, but the over-all success of the venture renders them meaningless. It isn’t very often, for example, that a symphonic-sized orchestra would embark on an international concert tour less than a year after its founding. But the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra has led a backward life from the start, and it simply doesn’t matter. The Japan tour was booked, for example, before the roster of musicians had been filled in or even drawn up. So was the recording contract with Philips, which has already seen fruition in two compact discs that ended 1991 high on the charts (“Hollywood Dreams,” which was nearly everybody’s favorite crossover record last year, and “The Gershwins in Hollywood,” an even more substantial achievement). And so, of course, were the six weekends the orchestra played at the Bowl last summer, replacing the resident Los Angeles Philharmonic for the Friday/Saturday easy-listening series. There are some easy explanations, of course, as to why this orchestra had been so precipitously rushed into being. The birth pangs were lightened by the deal with Philips, which had lost its juicy Boston Pops Orchestra connection and needed a glamorous substitute. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, with its own plans that include a stint at the Salzburg Festival smack in the middle of next summer’s Bowl season, needed some reputable caretaker orchestra to hold down the home fort. Even against the wretched financial statistics in today’s orchestral world, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra made sense on paper long before the first downbeat. There’d be some justice, even so, in approaching the idea of this Japan tour as an act of precocity. This was, after all, an orchestra that had only been formed last February for the “Hollywood Dreams” recording session, whose members had come together again during the summer for the Bowl concerts, the Gershwin recording session and a Rodgers-Hammerstein session (out on discs come spring), and had then gone their separate ways again until this past December 27. On that day the orchestra reassembled on a Culver City sound stage, and ran two rehearsal sessions to prepare the 37 numbers that made up the Japan tour repertory. The Japan concerts — in Osaka’s Festival Hall and Tokyo’s Orchard Hall, both rather drab venues both visually and acoustically — also marked, mind you, the first times the orchestra had played in actual concert conditions, without microphones on a normal stage. The group sounded terrific through the Bowl’s microphones last summer, and it sounds even better on their first two state-of-the-art recordings. Playing a normal concert, however, presents a whole new set of conditions, the only proper lens for examining an orchestra’s true quality. Under that lens, the brand-new Hollywood Bowl Orchestra stands out as a genuine phenomenon. By the time of their seventh and last concert, these top Los Angeles freelance players had formed themselves into an orchestra with sheen and precision. The players seemed to recognize this no less than the audiences; along with the exhilaration of the players’ discoveries of Japan (with its shrines to ancient gods coexisting with its shrines to cut-rate electronic equipment) I’ve never picked up so much backstage conversation by orchestral players, genuinely proud at how good the whole group was sounding. Never mind that the programs for these concerts consisted mainly of showtunes from stage and screen, with some Tchaikovsky dances and Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” added for ballast. The first concerts had their rough spots, but the orchestra I heard at the final Tokyo concerts was an ensemble I would trust with the challenging transparencies of a Mozart symphony. Credit where due, of course: in John Mauceri the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra’s sponsors have hit upon the perfect force to weld these players into the ensemble they became this past week. Mauceri is now 46. I remember the blond curls and the winning grin when he presided over the first (and best) restoration of Bernstein’s “Candide” at the Brooklyn Academy in 1973; they’re still in place. He has grown in eclectic mastery; the week before Tokyo he had conducted Wagner’s “Die Walkuere” at the Scottish National Opera of which he is artistic director. He talked, and was entitled so to speak, about an American repertory of film and stage music as an entity deserving attention by symphonic-sized orchestras. He proved his point with such items on the Japan programs as the exquisite “Walking the Dog” number from Gershwin’s film score to the Astaire-Rogers “Shall We Dance.” Mauceri’s task was made lighter by the orchestra itself. “I looked for freelance players from around Los Angeles who already knew each other, who could travel and work together as friends,” he told me. “Many of these people I’ve known from my days conducting Opera Pacific in Costa Mesa. I hold onto my memories of the night I conducted ‘La Boheme’ there, when at my last bow onstage the players in the pit threw flowers at me. How do you take an aggregation of freelance players, even the best ones, and make them into an orchestra so quickly? ”I think that what I work for,” said Mauceri, “is what you could call a collective agreement. I try to unlock in every player the thing that made that person a musician in the first place. And then it just snowballs; the players hear how well everybody is playing, and so they play even better.” Pride of performance: it’s a pretty good perk for a freelancer, along with such added rewards as the chance to explore sushi at the source. Even so, several Hollywood Bowl Orchestra members took a money loss in playing with the orchestra. Daily salaries ranged from $140 to $210, with an daily $90 per diem (not exactly lavish at current Tokyo prices). At home in a Hollywood studio, playing for a TV commercial, the money can be a lot better. ”Sure, it’s better,” said violinist Jay Rosen. “But I’ll tell you the real payoff on a gig like the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. It’s the chance to take time off from the music business, and to play some music for a change.” PAGE 1PAGE 3

[*] STEVE: This comes in early because I’m off to Japan next week, (leaving Sunday 12/29) along with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra for its concerts in Osaka (New Year’s Eve) and Tokyo. We get back on January 8, so my column for the 12th will be a report on the tour (Jon knows about this). I’ll have photographs fromJapan fed-exed to you directly. [F/L]Seekers after the uncommon experience in the realm of chamber music have a rewarding month ahead. Just in the next couple of weeks, for example, three separate groups will bring in three marvelous and large-scale works of Dvorak: the E-flat-major Piano Quartet (played by the Los Angeles Piano Quartet at Doheny Mansion on Jan. 10th), the G-major String Quartet (by the Chester Quartet at the Southwest Museum on the afternoon of the 12th) and the A-major Piano Quintet (with Mona Golabek and the Cleveland Quartet at the Wilshire-Ebell Theater on the 15th).The Doheny and Southwest Museum concerts are, as you’ve probably guessed, part of the Da Camera Society’s “Chamber Music in Historic Sites” series. Historic sounds as well as sites. Before we get to any of these marvelous works, none of them heard all that often, consider another chamber concert scheduled for next Sunday (January 12 at 7 p.m. at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall), the start of the new season of the Music for Mischa concerts. That program offers a work even less often heard than any of the Dvoraks. Why is it, pray, that Ludwig van Beethoven’s C-major String Quintet has virtually disappeared from the repertory, both live and recorded? Against the dozens of recorded performances of Beethoven’s quartets, only one is currently listed of this quintet, and that on a small imported label.Ask an interesting question: if Beethoven had died, or stopped composing, after completing this particular work (Opus 29 in the chronological list), where would he rank today among composers? He would have had one symphony to his name, a brace of six string quartets, two piano concertos and quite a few piano sonatas. The symphonies, concertos and quartets would probably still hold their places as clear descendants of 18th-century models, with enough originality to establish Beethoven as a chap who might, someday soon, have blazed exciting new musical trails. The piano sonatas — the “Pathetique” and the “Moonlight” in particular — are even more clearly the work of a young composer eager to kick out against the restrictions of classical forms. Then there’s this C-major Quintet. The work dates from 1801; Beethoven was 31, and had already begun to make some noise around Vienna. Even so, the very start of this work might have startled its first hearers: Beethoven’s way of pushing his opening theme up the chromatic scale, rudely and forcefully. The effect is a little like that of a serpent slowly uncoiling. That’s startling enough.Move on to the slow movement. Mozart would have smiled at this, a haunting, songlike melody hovering over a simple accompaniment. Beethoven’s instrumental music doesn’t often seize the listener’s power to breathe this kind of melody that seems to imitate the intensity of human song; he would do so again in one or two of the slow movements of the later string quartets. He does it here, in this C-major Quintet, for the first time. Is this, then, the sort of music we, and the record companies, can choose to overlook?The finale is famous; it gave the entire work its nickname, “Storm.” It does, indeed, burst upon you: rolling, snarling tremors that sweep across all five performers. Then — surprise! — the storm is choked off, with a butter-wouldn’t-melt minuet that sneaks in out of nowhere. The storm returns. So does that minuet, now greatly changed. The sweet dance has grown oratorical, even petulant, and it is swept aside at the end with a violent harmonic change. Here is the shadow of the Beethoven to come!All credit, then, to cellist Robert Martin for pulling this remarkable, and remarkably little-known, work of Beethoven’s out of the shadows. This is the third “Music for Mischa” series at UCLA, produced by Martin and named for his late friend and colleague Mischa Schneider, cellist of the legendary Budapest Quartet. The quality of the programs — four this season — is worthy of the man whose name they bear.We could make the same case for Dvorak that we do for Beethoven: that we know many of his works all too well, at the expense of other works we know all too little. The G-major String Quartet is a case in point. The Dvorak quartet we know best is the F-major, subtitled “American” because he composed it during his sojourn in this country. The G-major is a later work, and its wisdom and intense beauty are the work of a man who has pondered deeply on the nature of his own art. It is a quiet work; the exuberance of the early Dvorak has given way to a deep calm, of the sort that often overtakes artists (Brahms of the Clarinet Quintet, Shakespeare of “The Tempest”) late in their careers. The scherzo does, to be sure, mirror the composer’s love of his own country’s folk dances; the slow movement, on the other hand, transcends all boundaries with Dvorak’s gorgeous theme and its ensuing variations. Again, this G-major Quartet is virtually ignored; a single recording exists, as opposed to 18 of the “American.” The Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet are full of that aforementioned exuberance; this is music that, from the first note, settles you back in your seat with the message that you’re in for a wonderful ride. Do both works go on a little long for their length? To be sure; yet in this music, as in all Dvorak, you’ll dig long and hard before you find a note you would willingly spare.

For this final Sunday of the Mozart year, another fond glance at music’s purest genius might be in order.The admirable project begun by Philips, to amass a complete recording of the Mozartian heritage in its numerical and radiant fullness, nears completion on schedule. Of 45 projected volumes, 37 are now at hand. Of the remaining eight, six will be reissues of recordings already familiar, complete operas conducted by Sir Colin Davis. The entire project — the quality of performance, the packaging and annotations — has been carried out on a high level of integrity and taste. The final volume, by the way, consists of a miscellany, including pieces from a sketchbook that the 9-year-old wunderkind compiled during a visit to London. Also in this volume is an uncompleted rondo for horn and orchestra, whose manuscript was only discovered this past year. The work may be inconsequential, but it stands as a reminder that the Mozart treasury continues to grow.The passion for completeness, surely one of the motivating forces behind this monolithic recording project, has its down side, of course. Nobody will be so foolhardy as to proclaim that every moment on every one of these 180 compact discs is the affirmation of high genius. Any rational-minded connoisseur must admit, on working his way through all or part of this treasurable collection, that there is a hierarchy of excellence clearly in evidence. My own lists of expendable Mozart have contained, from time to time, such varied repertory as the two big Vesper services, the Concerto for Three Pianos, the interminable variations that form the finale of the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds, and the opera about the Disguised Gardener that appears in the series in both Italian and German versions, each running over three hours. In every case I have returned to the works in question, listened again with ears somehow mysteriously refreshed, and discovered some haunting turn of phrase, some astounding harmonic progression or breath-stopping orchestral color that I had somehow missed before. These works are, then, banished from the dark lists and returned to favor — until the next time.The essence of mastery in a piece of music, of whatever extent, is its power to reveal new aspects on repeated hearings. To visit and revisit these Mozart packages over the past year, to check out one more time a work you think familiar, or to investigate some juvenile caprice you’ve never before heard, becomes an experience in continual revelation. When, before, did you hear the wind passage before the reprise in the slow movement of the 39th Symphony played with such exquisite balance as it is here by the winds of Neville Marriner’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields? How did you miss, until just now, the sheer boyish delight in the piece called “Galimathias musicum,” flung forth by this incredible child at the age of ten?The total of these 180 discs is a staggering outpouring of great music. It makes for a daunting stretch along eight feet of shelf space, yet the quality of its content makes it user-friendly in a way that, say, a similar project for Bach or Haydn might not be. The ultimate triumph of Mozart is the way a human voice is, almost always, close to the surface of the music. The voice may be impersonated by a clarinet or horn, as in the slow movements of his mature piano concertos. It may be the voice of a real person, as when Susanna sings of her marital bliss in the last act of “The Marriage of Figaro.” But Mozart has this way in his music of making you believe that he is talking to you alone, and nobody else. It’s a gift he never lost. The Philips Mozart project was not the only large-scale tribute to this angelic composer produced in the anniversary year; his music has been lavishly attended to by any number of producers. But the Philips series was by far the broadest, and it was also managed by a group of artists exceptionally well-suited to the task. For a record company with Marriner and Davis under contract among its conductors, with Alfred Brendel and Mitsuko Uchida as its pianists, with its violin repertory still fresh in older recordings by the late Arthur Grumiaux and Henryk Szeryng, and with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields to provide the idealized Mozartian orchestral sound, its all-out participation in a Mozart celebration was preordained. You will search long before you come across a project of this size with performance standards so consistently maintained.The question of so-called “authenticity” arises. Strange; when Marriner’s Academy made its first recordings, some 20 years ago, their Mozart was hailed as a revelation of the “authentic” Mozartian sound, mostly because of the careful balance between a relatively small string section and the winds — as opposed to the full-orchestra sound of, say, Seiji Ozawa’s Boston Symphony. Now, however, we have other ensembles (also mostly British) who dig deeper into the “authentic” sound, with instruments reconstructed from old models. By their standards, the Academy now sounds old-fashioned.And so it may be, and so may be the sound of Brendel and Uchida, playing on modern concert grand pianos. Yet there is another way of looking at this whole “authenticity” syndrome: the matter of fidelity to the spirit, no less than the sound. Someday, Heaven forfend, yet another record producer will hit upon the idea of a complete Mozart project, this time jiggered to as to produce exactly the sounds Mozart and his 18th-century audiences may have heard. It would be hard to conceive, however, that any such project could come as close to the authentic spirit of the music as you’ll find in the undertaking already at hand.

Some brain-dead hobgoblin decreed some time ago that the Christmas season is a time of silence. Our concert halls are empty, except for a stray sing-along “Messiah.” Home from the holidays, the kids might, you’d think, find diuersion or self-improvement in a live symphony concert, or even a string quartet. But no; out of one side of their collective mouths, our musical managements scream at finding themselves out of touch with the young audience, but then they blatantly talk their way around this one opportunity to reaching a sizable segment of that audience with challenging programming at this time of the season. We can, of course, ward off cultural starvation at home. Handel’s “Messiah” on the home stereo can be an uplifting experience (especially with the superb new Nicholas McGegan performance released this year on Harmonia Mundi) but there are other serious musical pleasures appropriate to the season and less often heard. Since the musical managements have abandoned their task of broadening our musical horizons (at least for the moment) it falls to your reporter to fill the breach. Here, then, are some great works you may have overlooked, which may help you to hold onto sanity in this interval until the Philharmonic, the Opera Company and the various other local groups are back in operation.When was the last time, for example, that you heard the Christmas Oratorio by Heinrich Schutz? Never, you say? You are, then, missing a work of simple, powerful beauty. Schutz (1585-1677) comes in at the start of the Baroque. Like his German contemporary, the painter Albrecht Durer, Schutz spent much time in Italy, thawing his Northern sensibilities under the Tuscan sun. The result is a wonderful mixture of craftsmanship and delight. This work from his mature years is full of fresh dramatic devices that were all new and startling in their time: voices interacting with instruments in a way that foreshadows operatic writing. Solo voices and chorus alternate in telling the story of the Nativity; near the end there’s a chorus in praise of God that is so simply, radiantly beautiful that you’ll need to play it again and again.The work is available on two recordings, both marvelous: Rene Jacobs and his Concerto Vocale on Harmonia Mundi and Andrew Parrott’s Taverner Choir and Players on Angel-EMI.Go back a few years, and revel in Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 “Vespers of the Blessed Virgin.” This is not Christmas music, strictly speaking; it’s a setting of the evening service in the Catholic Church at any time of the year. But this particular setting was composed by Monteverdi for a festive celebration at the Court in Mantua, and so it will do for Christmas as well as not. Monteverdi’s dates are 1567-1643, which fortells 1993 as a big year for this composer. The Vespers form an astounding work: 90 minutes in which one of music’s sovereign innovators revels in an astounding vocabulary of new musical inventions, some of them of his own devising. The opening is astounding enough: the chorus in the center, surround by the raucous brass contingent pealing forth their challenges as if to ring the whole thing by flames.Then Monteverdi moves us on, through a number of Psalm settings for soloists and chorus, up to one of the most stunning compositional feats of his or anyone else’s time. That would be the “Sonata sopra Sancta Maria.” The full Baroque orchestra — strings, winds, brass and organ — take on the measures of a dance: zany, wildly spirited, breathless, the rhythm constantly changing. Threaded through this glorious racket is a single line of chant, taken up by the sopranos and repeated 11 times: “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis” (“Blessed Mary, pray for us.”)There is something in these insistently repeated phrases, and in the flickering dances all around it, that suggests something grandiose, wild and infinite; there’s nothing else in music quite like this.Recordings: there are several excellent performances, but the one conducted by Philippe Herreweghe on Harmonia Mundi stands apart, with the brazen sound of archaic trumpets and trombones (played by a group called the Toulouse Sacqueboutiers) adding to the sense of grandeur. There is also considerable charm in Arthur Honegger’s “Christmas Cantata,” on a recent Erato disc. Honegger (1892-1955) is one of those composers whose fame falls through the cracks now and then, and then occasionally gets revived. He was one of the composers (the so-called “Group of Six”) who hung out with Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, and, like most of the others, turned toward a very simple, devotional musical style in his later scores. The “Christmas Cantata” dates from 1953; it is scored (very prettily) for baritone, children’s and adult choirs, organ and orchestra, with a simple devotional text hailing Jesus’ birth in ecumenical terms. The new recording, excellently led by Michel Corboz, also includes a more familiar Honegger work: “La Danse des Morts” (“Dance of the Dead”), decidedly not a Christmas text. It’s a marvelous work on its own, however, with the narrator howling forth the story of Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones and the chorus and soloists shrieking forth their commentary. Unless you can lay your hands on the historic (but, alas, long-discontinued) performance under Charles Munch, with the glorious oratory of Jean-Louis Barrault as narrator, this one will do fine.Happy holidays!

Two veterans of the local battlefields have been back among us these weeks. Zubin Mehta is currently here at his old stand, the Los Angeles Philharmonic podium; the first of his three programs here will be repeated this afternoon at the Music Center. Gerard Schwarz {cq}, who was never invited to the Philharmonic podium during his years as head of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, attained that podium for a pair of programs earlier this month.Neither of these conductors rank high in my personal pantheon, but that’s not the same as saying that their visits here were without interest. Schwarz, currently with the Seattle Symphony, has carved a small niche for himself as a proponent of American symphonic music from the recent past; his program here began with David Diamond’s Second Symphony, typical of the nuggets he has recently exhumed. Mehta’s program this past week began with a ghastly miscalculation not entirely his fault, but ended with some grand noise from the narrow repertory which he has come close to mastering.David Diamond is now 76. Thanks mostly to Schwarz’s efforts on his behalf, in concerts and on Delos Records, he seems to be enjoying a return to popularity — a reputation, you might say, for having a reputation. The Second Symphony dates from 1944, and was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony. It was, and remains, Koussevitzky’s kind of music: sonorous, bland, academically correct. (By coincidence, there was more of Koussevitzky’s kind of music at the Music Center last week; more on this later.)The work’s history may be interesting, but the music is not. What can we learn today from this kind of tepid, derivative tone-spinning, in style midway between Sibelius and Vaughan Williams but with none of either composer’s profile? Here was more of what we were talking about last week: music dated from the moment of birth, desiccated beyond repair. On Schwarz’s program here there was also newer music, Lukas Foss’ Clarinet Concerto in its American premiere. Again the matter at hand was a string of derivative gestures, designed so that a talented soloist — Richard Stoltzman, in this case — could strike handsome poses at the end of each section. Foss — another local warrior from times past, from when he taught at UCLA — has spent a lifetime as the great almost-ran among composers: nibbling skilfully at one modish musical style after another, never quite turning his serendipitous skill into real music. The new concerto is more of the same. Mehta’s hobbyhorse on his first program was the Bruckner Eighth Symphony, and he rode it skilfully. No, it wasn’t the kind of performance to take the full measure of the work’s grandiosity, the flooding of naive but heartfelt emotion that can make the slow movement practically glow in the dark. It was, instead, a careful, meticulous performance, nicely balanced, loud enough at the end to convince the capacity crowd that angels had, indeed, passed overhead, but slack at times so that the endless, repetitive vulgarity of that final movement became, as usual, an exercise in listeners’ frustration.Before had come Midori and her not-so-magical violin, at 20 no longer dismissable as a precocious nymphet. So out of touch she was with her music — the wondrous Violin Concerto of Alban Berg — that this listener’s hand itched to spank not only this oversized child but also whatever concert management dreamed up the notion that she was ready (or would ever be ready) to play the score. LINE
Gidon {cq} Kremer, a violinist and enkindling musician of quite a different order, brought his German Chamber Philharmonic into the Music Center earlier this past week for two programs partly wonderful partly (to say the least) curious. The orchestra itself, Frankfurt-based, is a marvelous small ensemble, warm in tone and astounding in precision and balance. Kremer, a performer of genuine creative skills of a breed that hardly exists these days, endowed the programs with a thread of gold by performing all five of Mozart’s Violin Concertos, leading the orchestra from his soloist’s stand.But the first program also included two sizable works by Arthur Lourie; Kremer had also performed some of his music at his Royce Hall concerts last season. Why Lourie? He was a Russian-born composer (1892-1966) who emigrated here shortly after the Revolution and landed for a time in Boston, at the feet of the aforementioned Serge Koussevitzky. He wrote an adulatory, if not exactly accurate, biography of Koussevitzky who then — surely more out of gratitude than musical taste — performed lots of Lourie’s music.The Lourie pieces Kremer played and conducted (with high skill, needless to say) were bland little exercises in a mostly backward style that made one think of cafe orchestras behind potted palms and punctuating cries of “Hey, Waiter!” Yet here is Kremer, one of the great musical adventurers of our time, carrying around the music of Arthur Lourie as something aflame with seraphic majesty. You just never know.1-line
Sian Edwards merits belated mention, the English lass who led the Philharmonic over Thanksgiving weekend and, thus, became only the second woman to lead the orchestra in a subscription concert. (Marin Alsop, the first, had only preceded her by two weeks.) Edwards is a real talent, although a strangely planned program partially did her in.It was strange, for example, to start with Ravel’s “Spanish Rhapsody,” a rousing concert-ending piece but here out of place. A rather tentative, colorless reading heightened that impression, as did the ensuing music, Peter Serkin’s show-offish performance of the Beethoven First Piano Concerto.But Edwards ended the program with a stunning reading of the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony, a work full of easy, rousing effects but full also of a dark profundity molded with a fine, dramatic hand. Edwards and the orchestra collaborated beautifully; this was major music-making.

SUGGESTED HED: CONTEMPORARY MUSIC, NEW AND OLDSome music, like some great stage ‘n’ screen stars, never shows its age. Some music, like minor luminaries, begins to wrinkle right at birth. You never know.After as much Mozart as we’ve heard in recent weeks, due to the anniversary celebration that officially (but probably not actually) ended last Thursday, it would still be hard to remember any performances that put this music across as anything but fresh, innovative, as inventive as if newly composed. Not even thepoorer occasions, the ones you remember the way you remember a stone in your shoe (Peter Maag’s conducting at the Bowl, for one of many examples) could erase the perpetual youthfulness in this music. Therein lies the Mozartian miracle: the phenomenon of a composer working in a time when musical form and style were fairly rigidly systematized, yet able through the clarity of his own vision to trick his way out of the system. The further miracle lies in the many ways Mozart found to work those tricks. Grasping the outlines of his style is no problem — for a 1991 audience, or even one in 1791. Against this familiar background, however, the Mozartian earmarks stand out in bold relief. Sometimes he chills a listener’s blood by merely wrenching the harmony into unexpected realms; the switch at the unmasking of Leporello in “Don Giovanni” is an ageless example. Sometimes it’s just a matter of a shift in tone; the slow movement of the Clarinet Concerto, which Richard Stoltzman played with the Philharmonic this past week, lingers in the memory because the melody demands of its soloist the tone of a human voice pure and haunting. There is nothing here that needs to be considered as very old music or very new; it remains timeless as a communicative act at its purest. These thoughts about aging and agelessness were brought on by a more negative experience. At last week’s Monday Evening Concert at the County Museum the composer-of-honor was Sylvano Bussotti, a major figure in avant-garde music both here and in Europe as recently as the mid-1960s. Bussotti, along with an ensemble of 12 musicians called Bussottioperaballet (one word), were flown here from Rome to give this single concert, the whole trip underwritten by several Italian cultural agencies here and abroad. The mind boggles at what this must have cost, and at how the money could have been better used.There was a style in vogue in the 1960s, whose earmarks were a kind of fragmented, insecure melodic line, lots of silences, an affectation of profundity through inscrutability, bits of straw passed off as diamonds. Anton Webern and John Cage were its progenitors; Lukas Foss (in town this weekend with his new Clarinet Concerto) was among its ardent disciples. Some of the music had a convincing shape that could pass for something close to a melody. The Italian contingent was especially good at that, the composers Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna along with Bussotti. They worked with pastiche and collage, and at least one work from that time– Berio’s Sinfonia — deserves its place in the repertory.Not much else does, I’m afraid. Bussotti came to town, charmed a couple of audiences with lectures, and brought a (blessedly) short program to the Museum, consisting for the most part of bloops and bleeps from this bygone style. More depressing was the fact that some of the music was quite recent: a noisy, incoherent pastiche of bird-imitations, all tossed together and performed as a 30-minute hullabaloo, that suggested that Bussotti was still mining the old veins. Here was music created during our lifetime, stillborn from the start, utterly devoid of anything like the energy that maintains the spark of life in Mozart’s music. Now it’s manifestly unfair, of course, to use the Mozartian miracle as a stick to clobber Silvano Bussotti, or any other composer living or recently dead. Yet the close comparisons that recent concerts have allowed do bring up this basic question about timelessness in music. Two nights after the Bussotti fiasco at the County Museum the EAR Unit came to the same auditorium with a program of works by Frederic Rzewski {cq}, with the composer himself on hand to play his new Piano Sonata. Again, it’s probably stretching a point to clobber the Italian innovator Bussotti with the American innovator Rzewski, yet the two evenings added up to a study in creative energy. From Rzewski we heard an evening of great, sprawling, untidy pieces. There was the Sonata, running on for some 40 minutes, cruising around some borrowed melodies that ran the gamut from a medieval folktune to “Three Blind Mice,” phenomenally difficult but marvelously dispatched by its creator. There were a couple of satiric pieces in Rzewski’s activist style, pastiches that kicked around familiar tunes and the cliches of modern advertising. Not everything came together, but everything had an energy that leaped from the stage. Even the Sonata, for all its length, held the crowd silent and spellbound. That wasn’t Mozart, either, but at least the music fairly glowed from its own energy level, which the performers caught and flung out into the hall. That’s what music is all about, or should be. Talk about energy! With 23 complete boxed sets of the Beethoven symphonies ensconced in the latest LP catalog, you’re justified in questioning the need for No. 24, but a few minutes with the latest entry — performances by Nikolaus Harnoncourt leading the Chamber Orchestra of Europe on five Teldec discs currently selling for the price of four — might make you wonder if you weren’t hearing nine newly composed essays in the symphonic form at its most incandescent. Harnoncourt, Berlin-born and best known for a lot of fairly ho-hum Baroque performances using authentic period instruments, seems to have undergone a rebirth of the spirit. Last year’s “Don Giovanni,” and now this Beethoven set, are the work of an enkindling, energized musical visionary. The orchestra uses modern instruments, except for the brass players, who use old-fashioned valveless trumpets and trombones with their slashing, hard vibrance. That sound, best of all in the Seventh Symphony, will simply send shivers up your spine. So will the more eloquent passages, like the mysterious, half-spoken slow movement of No. 4, which Harnoncourt takes to the edge of silence. The vocal soloists in the Ninth are merely adequate; everything else about this set is extraordinary. Even if you already own the other 23, Harnoncourt’s new recording will usurp a place of leadership.

STEVE: I have art for opera; will bring by Tuesday noonishRossini’s “Barber of Seville” — exquisitely comic, meticulously timed, both supple and subtle — has been put forward by the Music Center Opera as a mindless, vulgar laff show. Imposed, like wanton graffiti, upon this beautiful structure there are Pavarotti gags, chamber-pot gags, bad-breath gags. The scenery, a Magritte ripoff done up in finger paints, is its own set of gags. Some of the sight gags do, to be sure, distract from the inadequacy of much of the singing, but that can hardly condone the over-all sense of vandalism. Given that inadequacy — the squeaky, off-pitch Almaviva of Raul Gimenez, Louis Lebherz’s woolly Basilio, Rodney Gilfry’s cute but underpowered Figaro, adrift under the shapeless musical leadership of Randall Bore (sorry, Behr) — the obvious alternative might be to turn one’s back on the enterprise. That, however, would cost us the one positive element in the production, which steps out beyond the shadows and works in pure light. That, of course, is the Rosina of Frederica von Stade, a role she has long owned. Lovely in appearance, graceful in her every move, and totally in command of the mighty benevolence that Rossini has bestowed on the role (which, by the way, she sings in the original mezzo-soprano range), von Stade moved through the otherwise depressing evening as if ensconced on a whole ‘nother planet.To say that she saved the show, but that she deserved one more worth saving, is to propound the obvious.Two performances remain: tomorrow and Wednesday nights. Better by several light years was last weekend’s other music-drama entry, Philip Glass’ and Allen Ginsberg’s brilliant “Hydrogen Jukebox.” given two sold-out performances at UCLA’s Royce Hall. It was a glorious collaboration: two of our times’ rebellious archetypes, surprisingly adept at finding common cause. I say “surprisingly” for a reason. The typical Glass texts — the sci-fi pieces, the dense overlay of metaphor in the early operas — have always embodied a kind of indirection that also spilled over into the music, not always to its benefit. Here we got 20 poems of the good old Ginsberg, howling out his activist political posters, the sometimes drooling but well-meant sentiment, all in a slam-bang verbal onslaught in which metaphor played no part. And the impact upon Glass resulted in some of his strongest music in years.Six singers, all strong and wonderfully acrobatic, participated against Jerome Sirlin’s spectacularly textured projected scenery; Ginsberg himself came on stage for one gorgeous reading. There were, to be sure, moments of strain in the visual creation; words and music dwarfed the stage images most of the time. It’s good news, therefore, that “Hydrogen Jukebox” is up for a recording (on Sony) in a few months.What a busy weekend! In Long Beach on Saturday the brave JoAnn Falletta led her Long Beach Symphony and a chorus through Prokofiev’s complete score for “Alexander Nevsky,” with the great Eisenstein movie, in a beautifully restored print, on a screen overhead. It’s happened before, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic both indoors and out, but it cannot happen too often. The majesty of Eisenstein’s conception grows with repetition; his use of music (and of no music, when metal grinds upon metal in the battle scenes) deserves every filmmaker’s scrutiny. The production, in this enlightened restoration, cries out for capture on video.Philharmonic honcho Ernest Fleischmann, who in his time has brought to the Music Center a remarkable array of guest-conducting talent, struck gold once again last weekend with the local debut of Franz Welser-Moest. Now the conductor of the London Philharmonic (which he brings to the Music Center on March 16) the young (31) Welser-Moest delivered a powerful reading of the Mahler First Symphony, daredevil in the breadth of its contrasts but marvelously under control. He’s wonderful to watch, this Welser-Moest, with arms that look ten feet long, wheedling and shaping the music with splendid control. I also have a special fondness for a conductor modest enough to take a bow without removing his glasses; few do. That’s what I call spectacular.The Mozart celebrations come to a head this week. The financially-beset Philharmonic has only one all-Mozart concert (on Thursday, the actual 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death). But that concert has Richard Stoltzman to play the Clarinet Concerto, and there is no performer, on any instrument, with better command than Stoltzman’s of the shape of a Mozartian phrase, its power to wind itself around the hearer’s mind and heart.Two chamber orchestras are on hand, both under proven Mozartians: Sir Neville Marriner and his Academy of St. Martin in the Field at Ambassador tomorrow and Tuesday, our own Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Trevor Pinnock, Thursday at Royce, Friday at the Japan-America Theater downtown, Saturday at Ambassador. And another local band, the brave little Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra (adrift under guest conductors since the retirement of founder David Keith) has a charmer of an idea for next Saturday, the 7th. First, at 4 p.m., there’s a wake at — where else? — Forest Lawn (the Junior Achievement Patio), with champagne and a eulogy and with, the program states, “black arm band optional.” That’s followed by a concert in Forest Lawn’s Hall of Liberty, with the orchestra and the Cambridge Singers doing, among other things, Mozart’s Requiem.After that, we can all get back to business. Next year’s anniversary: Rossini, on Leap-Year Day. That should be fun.

Fame in music, as in other endeavors, comes and goes. Five years ago, for example, nobody could have foreseen the return to favor of Franz Schreker. Now here we are with three new recordings of Schreker operas. This past weekend, furthermore, Nov 15-17 [F/L] the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra revived Schreker’s 1916 Chamber Symphony (for 23 Solo Instruments). Schreker (1878-1934) had been at one time Europe’s most respected composer, his operas prized even above those of Richard Strauss, revered also as a teacher and conductor. His stage works — big, sprawling, superheated romances, the operatic equivalent of Barbara Cartland’s novels — appeared in dozens of houses throughout the German-speaking world. Shortly after World War I, however, his fame simply vanished; a new musical language, sparked by Europe’s frenzy over the new-fangled thing called jazz, made Schreker suddenly seem old fashioned. He hung on through the 1920s, but the Nazi rise cost the Jewish Schreker the remaining shreds of his fame, and brought on the heart attack that killed him.It might be stretching a point to think of Schreker as a genius rescued from undeserved neglect; he still sounds old-fashioned. So what? The operas, for all their gooey boy-loves-mountain-loses-girl mysticism, have some soaring,high-caloric, irresistible passages. The Chamber Symphony, which Christoph Perick led marvelously with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, is full of what the Germans call “Klangzauber”: magical sounds. The work is in one movement lasting half an hour. In that time it dances, sighs, weeps, and gives off showers of bright sparks: Mahler touched by a fairy wand.The Schreker was followed on this program by exactly the kind of music that did him in: Ravel’s shimmering, flip, jazz-infused Piano Concerto of 1930, nicely set forth by Pascal Roge. The final work was an even greater miracle, however, Haydn’s “London” Symphony (No. 104) in a performance under Perick that still, a week later, resounds in my head.Haydn symphonies are often used to start off orchestral programs: the undemanding, easy-listening classical symphony to set the crowd comfortably in its seats. Placed this time as the climactic work on the program, and conducted by Perick with marvelous vitality and breadth, the symphony became a revelation. Here is the great Haydn at the absolute zenith of his musical mastery, honoring his adoring London audience with music crammed with novelty. He wreaks all kinds of violence against the accepted structural practices of the time, launching (at one magical point in the slow movement) into a series of harmonic changes that would do credit to any composer of our own time. This isn’t just any old piece of 18th century note-spinning; this is a work of awesome mastery, and that was the way Perick and the soon-to-be-his orchestra played it. If memory serves (and, believe me, it does), this was the best orchestral concert of the year so far.The arrival of Disney’s “Fantasia” — finally and, apparently, briefly — at your local video store (drugstore, supermarket and probably pizzeria) is a public-relations triumph orchestrated with the skill of Leopold Stokowski orchestrating a Bach Toccata. Even so, the film is some kind of cherishable disaster, a curio surviving from a bygone culture naive and permissive beyond any contemporary understanding.Purely as music, there is a ghastliness here beyond measure. It doesn’t have to do only with the major cuts — Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” reduced by about half. At least the passages that remain are fairly extended. But even the small pieces are hacked at; in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” generally regarded as one of the better segments, there are agonizing deletions of two or four bars here and there, obviously done to match the music to the animation. In 1940 there weren’t the 25 recorded versions of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” to insure that we all know the music backward and forward; there was one, and one each of the “Pastoral” and the “Rite.” To most of us seeing the film for the first time, in theaters with the requisite outlandish stereo setup that the video release preserves, this was all new music. It’s astounding now, when our audiences achieve repertory literacy at a far earlier age, to discover what Leopold Stokowski and his touted Philadelphia Orchestra put over on Disney and on “Fantasia’s” first audiences 50 years ago.The playing is coarse and inaccurate; as early as the opening Bach “Toccata and Fugue” the strings proclaim their inability to play 16th-note passages together. This was the time when the flamboyant Stokowski was inflicting his famous orchestral experiments on Philadelphia, including ordering the strings not to bow in unison. This created a flowing, gooey sound that seemed to hang suspended with no downbeats. It would be impossible to imagine dancers working in time to Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” ballet in Stokowski’s treacly version. As a cultural document, a manifestation of the marketing of serious culture in times past, “Fantasia” has its value. (And has that brand of marketing, for that matter, really disappeared? Doesn’t it linger in the dose of pseudo-cultural pap ladled out daily by Karl Haas on KUSC-FM and its affiliates?) Oh well; just those opening moments, as the ethereally beautiful Stokowski mounts his podium in silhouette and raises his arms to conduct, and the studio lights catch just his hands and turn them to pure gold, you’re sure of two things. One: you’re being had. Two: it doesn’t matter.Then you should check out “Allegro non troppo,” also available on video. Bruno Bozzetto’s 1975 masterpiece was probably meant as a long-after-the-fact answer to “Fantasia,” but it’s a work of animation far better on its own in both concept and execution. Like the Disney, Bozzetto aims his animator’s imagination at a program of familiar pops chestnuts, in a series of contrived scenarios hilarious, loaded with compelling satire and in one instance (Sibelius’ “Valse triste”) authentically tragic. Run his version of Ravel’s “Bolero” after the Disney “Rite of Spring.” Bozzetto’s dinosaurs are the real thing, and he puts them to far better use.

Women conducting symphony orchestras: what will they think of next? This is meant in jest, I hastily add; the phenomenon is, as of some years now, a fact of life. And yet, in all the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 72-year history, no woman had dared to broach its podium during a seasonal subscription concert — no woman, that is, until Marin Alsop this weekend (including this afternoon at 2:30). Interestingly enough, the second claimant in that rarefied category, Britain’s Sian Edwards, makes her local debut in two weeks. A certain skewed perception is, therefore, inevitable. You think you hear genuine musical quality at work on the Music Center podium, but then you shut your eyes and think: am I being honorable, or merely chivalrous? In the case of the 35-year-old Marin Alsop, currently head of the orchestra at Eugene, Oregon, chivalry played no part (or not much, anyhow) this past Thursday night; here was a conductor to the manner born. Blonde, slender (just this side of petite) and refreshingly modest in her podium behavior, Alsop drew high-spirited, poised playing from the orchestra in a difficult program: Bartok’s marvelous Concerto for Orchestra, Tchaikovsky’s evergreen “Romeo and Juliet” and, midway, Leonard Bernstein’s 1954 Serenade for Violin and Strings, by turns winsome, boisterous, contrived and momentarily moving, with Dmitry {cq} Sitkovetzky {cq} as soloist. The Bartok might have been the problem piece, but not this time; Alsop’s reading was the work of someone who truly owns the work. The tempos were dangerous and exuberant — perhaps a little too much so in the finale, at least on Thursday, when details sometimes got blurred. But the playing was big and exciting, virtuoso playing for a masterpiece that merits no less. No, the problem came with the Bernstein. There is sweet music here, and some amusing racketing at the end. But the substance is mostly gesturesome to no purpose. It is a concert work, and yet the first notes of the opening theme also outline the spiky melodic motive that starts the song “Maria” in the “West Side Story” of three years later, and you can’t hear the one without the other. The gigantic Sitkovetzky (son and frequent partner of the Soviet emigre pianist Bella Davidovsky) played the work with the requisite slickness, and Alsop got the orchestral sound nicely throttled down to chamber-music sonority. Important music, however, simply did not come. The remainder of the program — including a dazzling rendition of the Tchaikovsky — made amends. line
Orchestras from abroad that engage in worldwide tours fall into two categories. There are the genuine star-quality ensembles (from Vienna, Amsterdam or Leningrad) which always sell out their American concerts and deservedly so. Then there are the lesser ensembles driven by some sort of nationalistic ego, which draw smaller crowds but usually garner a few reviews that read well back home. These events are at least valuable, if the visiting orchestra brings some of its country’s music that might otherwise escape American notice. The Oslo Philharmonic, which gave two programs this past week at the Music Center, brought along one attractive trifle from back home, Arne Nordheim’s “Canzona.” Otherwise the programs were undistinguished; if they were meant to tell us something about the Osla Philharmonic’s quality, they didn’t. The orchestra’s — and our — time was wasted with standard concertos with uninteresting soloists: Frank Peter Zimmermann in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto one night, Misha Dichter in the Beethoven First Piano Concerto the next. They reminded us merely that the Oslo Philharmonic’s recording career is largely as a backup orchestra for concertos. Whatever the reasons for Norsk Hydro, the Oslo power producer that supports the orchestra back home, to fling it into the international critical arena, those reasons escaped detection. As heard at the Music Center, the orchestra wasn’t bad, just ordinary in tone, often unreliable in attack. Mariss Jansons, its conductor, has appeared here under better circumstances, leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, more recently, the Leningrad Philharmonic. But his proven powers were useless against the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, which sprawled across 75 minutes of the first program. For all the work’s fame (as music composed during the Nazis’ siege of Leningrad and, thus, a paean to Soviet heroism and determination) the Seventh is minor Shostakovich, agonizingly dull and contrived at every moment once the trickery of the first movement has passed. Maybe the work demands the flamboyance of a Leonard Bernstein; maybe the unfurling of flags and the release of white doves at the end might help. Jansons played the music straight, and the result was agonizing. line
Awareness of the splendors of Mexican art, and the desire to pay it tribute, inundates the city these days, and the musical side of the celebration is not inconsiderable. Last Wednesday, however, there was a low point. Xochimoki is an ensemble consisting of the ethnomusicologist Jim Berenholtz and the composer Maxatl {cq} Galindo. At the County Museum they performed on an array of ancient Mexican instruments — flutes, whistles and a handsome array of percussion.There is no preserved repertory of indigenous Mexican music, so the two men made up their own instead: dull, thudding, unchanging drum rhythms, the other instruments spinning out the cliches you may remember from old South-Sea adventure flicks — a sort of generic exotica. If Dorothy Lamour had slunk across the stage in her sarong, it wouldn’t have been out of place. At the start the crowd overflowed the capacity of the museum’s Bing Theater, but by intermission many had left. I am not one to go against tides.More interesting Mexican music, by five contemporary composers, is on tap next Friday at the museum, in the season’s first performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group (prior to their “Green Umbrella” series that starts in January). Ticketholders can also visit the museum’s spectacular Mexican show.But also on that night (Nov. 22) there’s the opening of the Music Center Opera’s “Barber of Seville,” and the Philip Glass/Allen Ginsberg “Hydrogen Jukebox” at Royce Hall. You could go to “Hydrogen Jukebox” the next night, but then you’d miss the following: JoAnn Falletta and the Long Beach Symphony playing Prokofiev’s score to Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky” with the great film (newly restored) on the screen; Jorge Mester and the Pasadena Symphony in the Mahler Sixth Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the promising young German conductor Franz Welser-Moest. Most urgently, the city needs some kind of scheduling commission to coordinate the many performing groups now in action, and to prevent this kind of pileup. The musical life hereabouts is rich enough to merit that kind of supervision.