So I've Heard

Until this past week, the local cultural forces had honored the Mozart bicentennial with no particvlar distinction. There were lots of routine programs of predictable substance, and a half-hearted attempt by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, to commission a series of new pieces “in the style of…” that bore but withered fruit. Then came the Long Beach Opera’s production of “Lucio Silla,” and a note of true distinction was finally sounded. The work dates from Mozart’s 16th year, composed for a company in Milan whose own tradition rested largely in sustaining a repertory of artificial, serious, display operas set to old-fashioned plots. By and large, “Silla” honored that tradition. Giovanni di Gamerra’s plot held no surprises: the tyrannical Silla loves the virginal Giunia who loves the virtuous Cecilio who plots, with his friend Cinna (loved by Silla’s sister Celia) to assassinate Silla. The plotters are discovered, but Silla brings on the requisite happy ending by forgiving them all. The forgiveness gimmick was, of course, a basic 18th-century plot device; it showed up again in Mozart’s “Seraglio” and in “La Clemenza di Tito” and is also faintly echoed in “The Magic Flute,” in Sarastro’s sudden conversion from villain to saint.”Silla” was a success in Milan, on what must have been a grandiose staging with lots of clanking armor and elaborate sets. The Long Beach staging, which was none of the above, used the tiny space of the Center Theater to stunning effect; the company’s finest hours, over its 14-year existence, have been in that smaller of the Convention Center’s two theaters, in a repertory extending from Monteverdi to Britten. “Silla,” which has virtually no history of modern stagings in this country (although a fair number of cut-down concert performances), was a triumphant addition to this list. A single lush, green plant, in a lighted niche high above the stage, provided the one visual contrast. Most of director Roy Rallo’s action took place in heavy shadow, with single characters brought out with narrow spotlights, against a floor and a back wall done mostly in black.The plan of action made no attempt to do battle against the basically static manner of the music; the mind was left to feed, undistractedly, on the work’s multitudinous beauties. It all worked, surprisingly well. “Lucio Silla” is not an opera of action; its arias and set pieces are long, and the musical forces at Long Beach made no cuts in what is accepted as the opera’s authentic form. (The original Milan production ran some six hours, by dint of several inserted ballet episodes not by Mozart. The Long Beach production, with all repeats observed and nothing cut, came in at 3 1/2 hours.)For his “pit” band (actually located on a platform above the stage) impresario Michael Milenski chose wisely; Gregory Maldonado’s Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra is evolving into one of the area’s most valuable ensembles. For all the small accidents among horns and winds in the opening performance last Sunday, the orchestral sound was prevailingly sweet and strong. Patrick Summers, of the San Francisco Opera, conducted, and shaped a splendidly paced, unflagging performance. Conductors of this early-classic repertory must make many decisions on their own, and Summers’ decisions — in the matter of tempo. and in determining questions of the singers’ improvised ornamentations and cadenzas — seemed constantly just. Without gimmickry or intrusive attempts at updating, the essential power in this exquisite work of Mozart’s boyhood came across. An extraordinarily fine cast helped: not merely five singers of excellent technique and exemplary diction, but a cohesive enesemble that had obviously been well-trained in the elusive art of singing together. A brilliant young mezzo-soprano named Lynnen Yakes sang the Cecilio (a role orginally for castrato) with marvelous strength; Carmen Pelton, as his sweetheart Giunia, was equally touching. Lydia Mila, Anne Marie Ketchum and William Livingston (in the title role) rounded out this most remarkable group. ”Lucio Silla” exists on a splendid new recording on Teldec, under the lively, probing leadershipo of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with a fine cast that includes the delectable Dawn Upshaw as Celia. There’s no point in bemoaning the fact that a work as glorious as this hasn’t found its way to the major houses. A traditional staging at the Metropolitan or the Music Center would undoubtedly underscore the opera’s length and relative lack of action at the expense of its many musical wonders. The Long Beach production was exactly right, a tribute to this occasionally misguided, more often triumphant and always enterprising company, and a tribute to Mozart as well.Scholarly conscience dictates that I deliver a critical broadside against Paul McCartney’s “Liverpool Oratorio,” which sprawled across quite a lot of PBS’s time time a week or so ago. I cannot; something about the sweetness of the piece, underscored by the personality of Paul himself as it came out in the hourlong documentary that preceded the performance, drew out in me a benevolent tolerance toward the music itself that no exercise of common sense can quite obliterate. Sure it’s pure cornball, and its derivations stick out like a porcupine’s quills. Yet the piece is likeable, in exactly the ways that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sludge never is. It never overreaches itself, and that’s a rare achievement.I only wish Angel-EMI had issued the documentary along with the video of the performance. That, at least, was a work of art.

Melvyn Tan’s playing epitomizes quite a lot of what’s right, and what’s wrong, about this whole authentic-performance hangup. Tan, who specializes in playing old pianos (across the historical spectrum from the forte-piano of Mozart’s time to the piano-forte of later decades) is popular through his many records; surprisingly, however, his performances here over the past two weeks constituted his local debut.To start MaryAnn Bonino’s “Chamber Music in Historic Sites” a week ago Friday, Tan played the three sonatas of Beethoven’s Opus 2 plus an early sonata of Mozart. Then this past week, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium and UCLA’s Royce Hall, he played an early Mozart concerto and, more remarkable, participated in a brand-new piece (sort of brand-new, anyhow) by Stephen Hartke, the Chamber Orchestra’s composer-in-residence.Tan, born in Singapore in 1956 and now living in London, is not the only advocate of early pianos, but he has become the most flamboyant and, thus, popular. His affectations at the keyboard are what a lot of people think solo performers should look like — the head bobbing, the hands (whenever not otherwise employed) engaged in spinning gossamer cobwebs above the keyboard. The word “cute” made its way more than once into intermission conversations.Affectation on the part of performers’ stage deneanor is not necessary a sin in itself; you need look no farther than Leonard Bernstein for proof. But Melvyn Tan’s playing is also, you might say, “cute” and, in that way, most disturbing. He reduced great moments in the Beethoven Sonatas — of which there were many — to a series of fussy, overshaded, disconnected events. There are always reasons to suspect that a performer who takes up exotic instruments and nonstandard repertory, as Tan has built a reputation for doing, might be hiding inadequate musicianship behind the mask of authenticity. I have seen Tan often in other cities, notably with Roger Norrington’s London Classical Players for whom he is the house pianist. At the start I found it difficult to look at him while playing. These last two weeks I’ve found it difficult to listen to him as well.If it wasn’t all that interesting a week for fortepianists, it was a shade more interesting for small orchestras. At the end of last week Vladimir Spivakov brought his Moscow Virtuosi to Royce Hall; this week there has been our own Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.Spivakov’s marvelous orchestra didn’t draw very well; we happy few were well rewarded, however. Most of the music was for strings alone, but the two French horns that joined the ensemble for Mozart’s wondrous 29th Symphony brought out marvelously the element of the demoniac that Mozart had written for those instruments. Coming two nights after Tan’s first recital, that one performance restored the awareness of the many violent passions that sweep across the music of this indescribable genius. Mozart was 18 when he wrote it; call it a youthful work, but remember also that, at 18, half his life was over.The highlight of the Moscow program was yet another new discovery from Alfred Schnittke, a Sonata for Violin with the original piano accompaniment newly scored for chamber orchestra. Spivakov himself played the solo.What dazzling, edgy, thoroughly original music! One great sense in Schnittke’s music is the sureness in the way it unfolds. Sometimes it takes sideswipes at other people’s music — there is a hint or two of Stravinsky here and there in this Sonata. The best of it is the assurance it gives off that tough, serious, extended new music is still flowing off a few inspired pens somewhere.Alas, Stephen Hartke’s 9-minute work for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, offered no comparable heartsease. The orchestra’s management has had the clever idea of commissioning a number of American composers to write short works to form a latter-day tribute to Mozart. It’s not that bad an idea, as witness Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin” or Brahms’ Haydn Variations.It wasn’t a bad idea, the Hartke, just a bad piece. People sometimes ask why the current breed of American composers so often indulge in lightweight, insipid, forgettable compositions. One answer, of course, is that orchestral managements and audiences delight in the whole “it’s modern but no so bad” repertory. But that’s only a halfway answer, and we have the example of Mel Powell’s Pulitzer-winning Two-Piano Concerto of 1990 to prove that it doesn’t have to be that way.But the new Hartke piece, which goes by the imponderable name “I Kiss Your Hands a Thousand Times” (a familiar salutation in Mozart’s letters to his father), simply wasted everybody’s time: a kind of lavender later-romantic nocturne (Faure, perhaps). It included a few lines for Melvyn Tan’s fortepiano, but they might as well have been played on a kazoo for all the personality they embodied.

There was nothing all that remarkable about this weekend’s Los Angeles Philharmonic program (repeated this afternoon at 2:30). But excellent orchestral performance is always a remarkable event, and this week’s entry in the orchestra’s subscription series at the Music Center, under the estimable and reliable Kurt Sanderling, was certainly that. Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” Overture roared out its message of doom and false cheer as it hadn’t at the opera (under Lawrence Foster’s more timid baton) two weeks before. Richard Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben” spun out its web of sugar and hokum with something approaching eloquence. And in the middle there was the phenomenal Mitsuko Uchida, in a one-on-one discourse on the Beethoven C-minor Piano Concerto, enough glory in itself to stand in for a supreme evening of concertgoing.The wonder of truly great performances, whenever they sometimes come your way, is their power to make even the most familiar music seem freshly reborn. It didn’t matter that Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto lingers in the realm of thewell-roasted orchestral chestnut — heard less often, perhaps, than the “Emperor” but more often than the superior Fourth (which, by luck, turns up on next week’s program). The Third Concerto was heard in town as recently as the past summer at Hollywood Bowl. You might, quite pardonably, have slouched into Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion last Thursday night with an “oh no, not the Third again” scowl.But then the miracle took shape: the beautiful, caring shaping of the solos under Uchida’s life-giving musicianship, the sublime way she and Sanderling seemed enraptured in their mutual rediscoveries of the brave drama that the young Beethoven — 30 years old and firmly launched on his campaign to conquer the musical world — had poured into this work. The greatest performances are like clear windows through which masterpieces can be viewed. Uchida and Sanderling collaborated on one of those. You soon forgot to admire merely the presence of this handsome, dynamic woman in front of the orchestra, and began to sense through her work the creative energy that Beethoven had brought to his score: the fury in that stark opening theme, the obsessions in the way just the last five notes of that theme (TUM-ta-TUM-ta-TUM) echo again and again through the movement, a foretaste of the obsessiveness in the Fifth Symphony of eight years later. You heard the spirit of the composer soar toward far horizons, in the supremely quiet meditations of the slow movement. You heard the wonderful inventiveness in pure sound in Beethoven’s orchestration: the hushed mystery in the soft strings and drums after the first-movement cadenza, the spaced-out stillness in the quiet piano scales that accompany the closing moments of the slow movement. You heard all this, because Uchida’s and Sanderling’s performance was of that supreme order in which performers disappear and only the genius of the music remains. The ultimate test was the hush that fell over the house during the Thursday performance, and the reception at the end: not the usual automatic, perfunctory Los Angeles standing ovation, but a prolonged tribute to a rare and marvelous occasion. Common sense, and an instinct for self preservation, ordained a homeward journey after the Beethoven. But MaryAnn Bonino’s pre-concert talk, wise and clear-eyed, raised suspicions that there might be better music in Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” than meets the ear. No such thing, of course; few works in the repertory are so fully packed with audible agony as this wretchedly vulgar piece of Straussian self-indulgence. Yet the Sanderling performance had its attractions. He kept the orchestral sound well focussed and clear. Barring a few mishaps from the solo horn on Thursday night, the performance had power, sometimes even a touch of wit. If the work must be done — a matter open to some argument — let it be as it was this time. line
The preceding week found me in Helsinki — cold, damp but welcoming — to sit in on recording sessions for Aulis Sallinen’s “Kullervo,” the work that the Finnish National Opera brings to Los Angeles for its world premiere on February 25, 1992. Sallinen, who has created several operas performed and recorded by the Finnish National Opera, composed “Kullervo” to inaugurate Helsinki’s new opera house. Since that building won’t be ready until sometime in 1993, it was somebody’s bright idea to offer the work to Los Angeles for an out-of-town premiere. The good fortune is ours. I will write more about the opera closer to the premiere; the recording (on the Ondine label) will be on hand by mid-January.Kullervo is one of the tragic heroes from Finland’s epic poem “The Kalevala.” Sibelius also fashioned his story into a choral symphony which, surely not by coincidence, Esa-Pekka Salonen will perform with the Philharmonic here ten days before the opera premiere. (Do not confuse Sallinen with Salonen and don’t, for that matter, ask me for any rational explanation of the Finnish language.) From what I heard, “Kullervo” is a strong work, not exactly joyous but wonderfully written, in a style not distant from that of, say, Janacek. One of its strengths will be the presence of the great Jorma Hynninen in the title role, Finland’s superb baritone now at the height of his career. You can bone up on Sallinen’s operatic style with the recording of his “The Red Line,” which also has Hynninen in the principal role. Tense, devastating tragic drama, it reveals some surprising news about the current high estate of Finland’s new music. “Kullervo” will reinforce that news.

No composer, of this or any other era, enjoyed a longer, or more beneficial love affair with history’s muse than did Igor Stravinsky. As long ago as 1928, long before recording technology had advanced to where it could cope with the flamboyant orchestration of his early ballet scores, Stravinsky was in the studios of American and European Columbia, setting onto 78-rpm masters his own versions of “The Firebird” and “Petrouchka.” Long before the worldwide arguments had been settled on the relative sanity of his “Rite of Spring,” Stravinsky had entrusted to disc his views on that innovative blockbuster as well. And now Sony Classical, the corporate heir of Columbia, has issued its own blockbuster, 22 compact discs in one distinguished plastic box, containing Igor Stravinsky’s recorded legacy, his own recordings, or recordings made under his intimidating, critical eye, of nearly every work of consequence from his pen in the 61 years between the E-flat Symphony of 1905 and “The Owl and the Pussycat” of 1966. There are no surprises here. Every performance, even the half-hour of rehearsal takes and a chat with the composer and producer John McClure, has seen the light of day on previous issues, including the 31-LP blockbuster that Columbia had brought forth in 1982 for the centennial. The only Stravinsky anniversary that might occasion this new release is the current 20th anniversary of his death; you can be sure that 1996 will bring more widespread celebrations (including, of course, yet another reissue on the medium of choice at that time). What occasions this latest issue is the passion for the boxed set that currently sweeps both the pop and classical record market. If Mozart can rate the 180-disc whammo from Philips, can Stravinsky be far behind? The asking price for the Stravinsky package is $333. If Sony has immediate plans to issue the discs separately, nobody there is talking. You can bet it won’t be anytime this side of Christmas. Therein lie problems. There is no question of documentary value in a disc release of one of the most influential composers of our time involved in performances of more than 60 of his scores — lacking, in fact, only a few meagre scraps and arrangements that failed to engage the master’s hand. Would that we had similar documentary packages for other composers of this and past centuries! Of the musical values therein contained, more must be said. With few exceptions, the recordings now at hand date from the 1960s, when Stravinsky had moved to Hollywood and was lured back to the recording studios for a virtual remake of his entire repertory. He was then in his 80s, and increasingly dependent on Robert Craft for help even with performances that were issued under his own name. Most recordings were made with pickup studio orchestras under names like The Columbia Symphony Orchestra; they stood in for previous recordings made with earlier technology, but at least with genuine ensembles: the New York Philharmonic most notably. Even the generous Carlo Maria Giulini, not known for raising his hand against a colleague, said in a 70s interview that “even if Stravinsky were his own worst enemy, he couldn’t have done better to destroy himself” than by conducting his own music at that time. Whatever qualities Stravinsky might have had as a conductor in younger days, they are much diminished in these late products of his work on the podium. Like Toscanini, he lives in recorded history only by the deeds of his dotage. Unlike Toscanini, however, many earlier Stravinsky performances still linger — on collectors’ shelves or even, now and then, on compact disc reissues — to shame the new versions. Where is the diabolical eloquence in the dry-as-dust 1960 “Rite of Spring” to match the 1939 New York Philharmonic performance? Where, the wit in the 1960 “Petrouchka” to match the crackle in the 1928 version, still surprisingly vivid in a compact-disc reissue on England’s Pearl label? Where, the sardonic splendor of Jean Cocteau. reading his own text for “Oedipus Rex” in a 1950 Stravinsky-led performance from Cologne, no way challenged by the pomposity of John Westbrook in 1961?It all comes down to this. Even if someone didn’t already own a single disc of Stravinsky and wanted the composer whole, I could not recommend this package. There are too many superior alternatives: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s growing Stravinsky series (also on Sony Classical, apparently a label adept at shooting itself in the foot), Charles Dutoit’s glistening readings of the early ballets and “The Rake’s Progress” under Riccardo Chailly, both on London, Leonard Bernstein’s “Les Noces” on Deutsche Grammophon…and the list goes on.Like those boxed complete book editions your grandpa used to display with pride (but never opened), the new Stravinsky box seems fated to sit handsomely on a shelf gathering dust. At least the books came in handy for pressing flowers. The Stravinsky — box, booklets ‘n’ all — comes to a mere seven pounds: a lightweight in more ways than one.line
Tell me about there being no worthwhile music in Los Angeles! This week we have the finest of all American (arguably, world) orchestras, the Cleveland, with concerts at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Tuesday and Wednesday, and at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday. But Saturday is also the night for terrific programs by the Pasadena Symphony at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and the Long Beach Symphony at Long Beach’s Terrace Theater. Stuck in among these other not-to-be-missed events, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra offers Britten’s “Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings,” as beautiful a work as this century has produced, Friday night at Royce Hall and Saturday night at Ambassador Auditorium. Atop all this the Los Angeles Philharmonic, still under the beloved Kurt Sanderling, welcomes the exquisite pianist Mitsuko Uchida, Thursday and Saturday nights at the Music Center. All this, and the Vienna Choir Boys, too: Saturday matinee at CalTech’s Beckman Auditorium. Some week!

One message the Music Center Opera’s “Don Giovanni” made abundantly clear atits opening last Monday night: babies do not come from storks. From Giovanni’s first entrance, fresh from his aborted attack on Donna Anna’s virtue, still buttoning up his trousers and retrieving his boots from Leporello, to Zerlina’s calming of her angry sweetie by removing his belt as she sings her lovely aria, the carnal byplay in Mozart’s dark comedy becomes the dominant tone. When, at the end, Mozart’s anti-hero goes off to his deserved doom among the eternally damned, he is actually carried off by a bevy of maidens. We are left to guess, therefore, whether he has gone to damnation or a juicy reward. For the most part, the opera comes across; it would take a lot to destroy this riveting masterpiece. Jonathan Miller created the production last year, at the Florence May Festival; the local restaging, by his assistant Karen Stone, presumably maintains Miller’s outlines. It is, in fact, pure Miller: diabolically spirited, too clever by half at times, irritating and stimulatingby turns. Two performances remain, this coming Tuesday and Friday nights. Robert Israel, who worked here on Miller’s “Mahagonny” in 1987, is again the designer and his work, again, is vintage Robert Israel. Like the “Mahagonny” set, the new one again looks most of all like a theatrical warehouse, with free-standing wall units, predominantly gray (as opposed to “Mahagonny’s” predominant beige) pierced with doorways, carving the stage into angular performing spaces that sometimes cramp the action, but just as often surround it with uncharted emptiness. Lighting designer Duane Schuler’s sudden changes of tone, presumably attempting to reflect the violent clashes of mood in the work itself, become wearying. If it is possible for just the look of a production to add up to informational overload, this is it.Yet “Don Giovanni,” of all the masterpieces of the lyric repertory, can absorb this kind of treatment, and more drastic permutations as well. The cast in this instance is of enormous help, not only because the singing is, of itself, on a high level, but because the performing forces so keenly reflect the inner life of the opera. This is emphatically true of the three women, all of them superb singers but also neatly differentiated in manner and tone. As heard at the first performance, Karen Huffstodt’s Anna was a splendid study in self-indulgent, shrill frazzlement, wallowing in the delight of her own grief, yet wise enough to realize that her wimp of an Ottavio suddenly seems terribly small to a woman who has felt Giovanni’s caress. Rachel Gettler’s Elvira provided the perfect counterpart: thoroughly unhinged by her brief encounter with Giovanni, her mania pouring out in sharp, jagged melodic fragments. Balancing them both was the adorable and infinitely wise Zerlina of Gwendolyn Bradley, fully aware that those flashing eyes of hers, that melting smile are no less potent a seductive force than the blandishments of Giovanni himself.Thomas Allen was a superb Giovanni, sleek, insinuating, childishly self-centered, the supreme embodiment of everything you’ve ever read or wondered about the character’s twisted psyche; Kevin Langan’s wonderfully earthy Leporello was, again, a superb counterbalance. Local luminaries Jonathan Mack (his phrasing still eloquent but his once fluent tenor sounding rather tired these days) John Atkins and Louis Lebherz rounded out this superior vocal ensemble. Once again, however, some of this valuable effort was fogged over by Lawrence Foster’s workaday leadership on the podium. The orchestra that had soared and glowed in last month’s “Trojans” now sounded merely competent. Time and again the onrush of Mozart’s genius in this incredible work seemed to falter, as if the performance itself — not the individual singers — had run out of breath. The opera deserved better and so did the audience.line
There is a temptation to find parallels between the Mozart opera and “Pioneers,” the performance artwork by the Paul Dresher Ensemble that drew undeservedly small crowds to UCLA’s Royce Hall last weekend. The similarities have to do with dramatic archetypes in both works: the self-destructive mania of women stripped of reason by carnal yearnings, the mindless macho destructiveness of the rogue male, the wanton urge of the haves to despoil the have-nots. But the parallels are tenuous, and “Pioneers” stands on its own. If you saw the previous members of the trilogy (both done at UCLA in recent years), “Slow Fire” and “Power Failure,” both also dealing through extended metaphor with the destructive force of the materialist obsession, you only need to know that “Pioneer” is the best work of the three, the surest theatrically, the most attractive musically. The work is hung up with exploration, with the need to get someplace first, to be the first on the block to own, to buy, to flaunt. Dresher’s kaleidoscopic electronic score, played behind a wonderfully lit scrim, was fleshed out with a few hilarious pastiche ballads by Terry Allen. The singers included the Dresher stalwarts Rinde Eckert and John Duykers, plus the marvelous vulgar raunch of Jo Harvey Allen, the good ol’ Texas gal who told all those hilarious lies in David Byrne’s “True Stories.” If you weren’t there the loss is yours. line
At the Music Center this past Thursday the Philharmonic began its season by celebrating the end of the world — Richard Wagner’s world, that is, in its apotheosis in the final music of the mighty “Ring” cycle. The phenomenal soprano Jessye Norman was the center of the celebration, in all the volcanic majesty of her sight and sound. She is a phenomenon of our time, a force of nature beyond reckoning. She could also stand to pay better attention to diction, both in Wagner’s “Immolation” music and in Beethoven’s “Ah Perfido.” So much sound, so little meaning! Christof Perick conducted, in one of those rare and valuable instances in which one orchestra in a community “borrows” the leader of another. Perick, soon to take over the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, is clearly a splendid local catch: an ardent young musician full of old-world sensibilities. German conductors are in right now, as witness the latest acquisitions in New York and Philadelphia. Perick’s own contributions to the program began with the Beethoven First Symphony and continued with the familiar orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s music drama, all nicely set forth, large-scale and exuberant. The orchestra, after its month off, sounded rested. The omens are excellent.

There being little of musical consequence hereabouts for most of the past week,
it seemed like a good time to seek refreshment at the source. Word was out
that the Eastman School of Music, that singular adornment of Rochester, NY,
was holding a weekend-long American music festival, and that the program even
included music by California composers. That, plus the prospect of Upstate New
York apples, cider and foliage at this time of the year, became a siren call
too potent to ignore.Eastman, founded with the money and the blessing of the same George Eastman who
gave the world the Kodak camera and its film, is now 70 years old. It isn’t
the only school that could be described as a source, but it is one of the best
in the land, rivalled only by a couple of other East Coast schools and perhaps
— but at some distance — the music department at U.S.C. It operates under
the umbrella of the University of Rochester, but it is a separate institution
in most ways. Current enrollment is 700, of which about two-thirds are are
subsidized by scholarship funds.Even so, Eastman was, until recently, something of a joke among music schools.
You went there to study trombone, or bandmastership, or public-school music
education. The school had a bad reputation for its tendency to tell all
graduates that an Eastman diploma, waved in the air, would immediately open
all doors to hopeful performers. Thus, it became a school known for its
ability to sow seeds of disillusionment and heartbreak. Its present director,
a dynamic, fast-talking, supersalesman named Robert Freeman, has seen to it
that Eastman graduates now go out into the world with a firmer grip on
reality.He has also seen that they go out with a broader view of the musical panorama.
Eastman’s guiding spirit from its founding until about 20 years ago was the
composer Howard Hanson, in whom the spirit of arch conservatism resided full
time. (The story is that George Eastman had originally offered the job to Jan
Sibelius, who turned it down because the United States was in the throes of
Prohibition. Hanson was only the second choice, but he repaid Eastman’s
confidence by going on to compose music right out of the Sibelius
stylebook.)Anyhow, the Hanson ghost has now been thoroughly exorcised, and Eastman now
fields an impressive roster of composers who work in a wide variety of styles.
Joseph Schwantner and Christopher Rouse, two of this country’s leading
progressive spirits, are among the faculty luminaries; Samuel Adler, from a
somewhat older generation, heads the composition department. Rouse, by the way, has a symphony scheduled for the upcoming Los Angeles
Philharmonic season (January 30, 1992). During my weekend in Rochester I heard
one of his string quartets, strong and abrasive music nicely put together. The
performance, by the way, was by an amazingly talented young ensemble, the Ying
Quartet: four siblings named Ying, aged 21 to 27, born in Chicago and clearly
headed for a major career.The weekend’s music was programmed to honor Betty Freeman, the well-known
Beverly Hills music patron, who was on hand to exhibit her marvelous set of
photographs of major composers and to smile benevolently at being serenaded by
music she had commissioned. Most of the names,the composers Rand Steiger,
Ingram Marshall and Stephen Hartke, were unfamiliar to the Eastman audience.
California’s music, several people told me, still hasn’t made the trip
eastward in sufficient quantity. Only Berkeley’s John Adams flies high.
Eastman’s weekend of music, which also included some of the “Freeman Etudes”
composed for her by the ex-Californian John Cage, was of considerable help in
filling in the informational gap. I sat in on a class in which a group of
students jawboned some of the music they’d heard over the weekend, and the
comments were lively and informed; Eastman’s intellectual level struck me all
weekend as remarkably high. So was the performance level. The student new-music ensemble, Eastman Musica
Nova, works up tough, challenging programs like this once every three weeks.
Its conductor, Sydney Hodkinson, seems to have that rare gift for making
young, raw players want to perform on a level over their own heads. The
concerts were full of crackle, and they were also well attended. There is much
to envy on the Rochester musical scene. l-line
Local musical life starts in earnest this week: “Don Giovanni” opening
tomorrow night at the Music Center, the Philharmonic season starting on
Thursday, the marvelous Lucia Popp in a song recital at Ambassador this very
afternoon. By far the major event is the first local appearance of Evgeny
Kissin at the Music Center on Saturday night.
Kissin turns 20 this week. His many recordings, including a number taken from
live performances, herald him as a pianist of exceptional ability, and also
something of a throwback to a bygone manner of playing that most of us had
thought (with considerable regret) to have passed from the scene. It is
significant that Kissin has made his way totally without the usual crutch of a
competition win. That, in fact, may account for the remarkable amount of
freedom and individuality in his playing. One of the major blights on the competition circuit is the way performers take
on a deadly uniformity of interpretation, a style imagined as pleasing to the
typical competition judge. Kissin is the first pianist in a long time to which
the epithet “interesting” may be justly applied. Now he is launched on his
first American tour, after his spectacular one-shot New York appearance a year
ago. Pray that he can hold onto the extraordinary mix of freshness and
eloquence that ennobled that Carnegie Hall recital last year.line
The Mozart anniversary year has produced plenty of fine recordings but only a
handful of important books; that counts more as a blessing than a curse. One
extremely valuable book is “The Compleat Mozart,” (Norton, $29.95), compiled
by Neal Zaslaw with William Cowdery. The book is what its title suggests: a
gathering of analytical essays on every work from Mozart’s pen, written by a
number of major scholars who — unlike a few scholars one could name — are as
much captivated by the sound of the music they describe as by the surrounding
facts. The value of the book lies, above all, in its writers’ ability to define what
is unique (or, for that matter, what isn’t) in each work. Next to the complete
recording of the Mozart heritage, therefore, the book is the second-best way
to get close to the sublime genius whose catalog of miracles we currently
celebrate.

N.B.: NEW HED THE CLASSICAL COLUMNFairness demanded a second visit to the Music Center Opera’s “Madama
Butterfly” to check out the new tenor, Jorge Antonio Pita, who has replaced
Placido Domingo in the role of Lieut. B. F. Pinkerton in five of the six
performances. Fairness, however, has also turned out to be service beyond the
call. Pita, whose local debut this was, is 28, Cuban born with an impressive dossier
of performances with major European companies, including a Pinkerton six years
ago with the Vienna State Opera. He is tall, good looking, and reasonably
proficient in his stage presence, although his decision to smoke a cigarette
during his first long scene was rendered questionable by the way he held the
thing — as if it were his first ever. He sang the role badly, his thin vocal line disturbed by a tendency to sob on
the high notes. Did he really sing this way at the Vienna State Opera, with so
little thrust, so little projection of the many-sided characters in this role?
Granted, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion seats twice the capacity of the Vienna
House, and this discrepancy in size has brought singers to grief before. Chalk
up these latter “Butterfly” performances as the company’s first boo-boo of
the season. The Music Center Opera’s “The Trojans” has fared well, by and large, in the
national press. You’d think it might be high time, however, for visiting
reporters and critics to find another way of leading off a report from Los
Angeles than the usual invocation of smog and freeways. There are still lots
of slow learners, apparently, beyond the mountains. The accusation of “gimmickry” has been leveled on the production, however.
Upon a second visit — yes, all five hours — it is harder than ever to
substantiate this accusation. There are some egregious miscalculations, to be
sure. I would hope that both the director, Francesca Zambello, and the
choreographer, Susan Marshall, might someday weigh the relative importance of
the prestige of a note-for-note complete performance against the blatant
inferiority of the insanely protracted dance episode that simply delays the
sublime Love Duet in Act IV. Theatrically, this is the evening’s major
failure, but it is a partial failure on Berlioz’s part as well. Losing the
entire scene would be no loss. I had neglected to mention one other episode in the opera that represents a far
more illustrious choreographic achievement: the staging of the famous “Royal
Hunt and Storm” music. The few companies that have staged “The Trojans”
invariably come to grief at this episode. The Metropolitan Opera did it with
some dopey amateur movies when it first presented the work in 1973. In the
1983 revival they simply left the stage empty, in this most colorful and
action-packed orchestral episode. Zambello and Marshall have, at least, solved this one problem brilliantly, not
with hunting and storms, but with a splendid battle pantomime: Aeneas and his
Trojans vanquishing the enemies of Dido’s realm in some classy, stylized
balletic action. It works just fine. Two performances remain (this afternoon
and next Wednesday). Even if the production were less the brilliant near-
success that this one is, the chance to hear this rarely performed, wildly
ecstatic product of Berlioz’ superheated genius, set forth with comparable
genius under Charles Dutoit’s incomparable music direction, should be reason
enough to make tracks for the Music Center. LINE
The recent good news from the Baltic republics is a reminder of the remarkable
resurgence of that region in musical matters. Estonia’s Arvo Part (pronounced
PAIRT) fled his country in 1980, at the height of Soviet artistic repression
pre-glasnost; he now lives in Germany. The music he has created during his
years of exile has earned him regard as one of the most remarkable of
contemporary composers, and a new disc on the ECM label will surely add to his
renown. It contains two large vocal works, a Miserere for solo voices, small chorus and
instrumental ensemble, and a work entitled “Sarah Was 90 Years Old” for
voices, organ and percussion. In between comes “Festina Lente,” a brief work
for chamber orchestra. Paul Hillier, who has participated in many performances
of Part’s music in the past (including a concert here last season as part of
the “Historic Sites” series) conducts the voices; Dennis Russell Davies
leads the instrumental forces. The music on this disc is one of those
powerful, mysterious experiences that deserve to be regarded as essential.
Why this is so is not easy to explain. Like other works of Part on ECM, above
all his overwhelming, 70-minute setting of the St. John Passion which Hillier
also conducts, the surface of the music is a slow-moving, unruffled, austere
sequence of small events. Like ice crystals in a winter landscape, they
coalesce in the mind only gradually; you find yourself gripped by this music
almost before you know it. If you have seen, and are moved by, the films of
the great Soviet director Andrej Tarkovsky, you are on your way to
understanding the inexorable pace of Part’s music, the way it generates an
almost subliminal sense of exhilaration.On the subject of Soviet films, there is also an interesting two-disc set on
the Chant du Monde label (distributed in the U.S. by Harmonia Mundi of Los
Angeles): film and stage music familiar and rare by Serge Prokofiev, in vivid
if edgy performances by a vocal ensemble and the “Maly” Moscow Symphonic
Orchestra under Vladimir Ponkin. The familiar music is the delicious
“Lieutenant Kije” suite of 1933-34: music for a satiric film that was never
made, about a character who never existed. The remainder of the set is filled with rarer material also very much worth
while: music for a 1938 ballet version of Hamlet and a whole hour of
incidental music for a 1937 stage production of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin. The
“Onegin” also never actually materialized, but Prokokiev’s music did. He
cribbed some of it later for the opera “War and Peace” and the Eighth Piano
Sonata, but he also preserved his original sketches: orchestral music, songs
and vocal ensembles. The musicologist Elizaveta Dattel completed the
orchestration in 1973, and presented the world with an authentic Prokofiev
masterpiece that now, in its first recording, is the crown of this splendid
new release.

The curtain at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion came down at 11:28 on Saturday
night, five hours (minus a couple of minutes) after the start of the Music
Center Opera’s production of Berlioz’ “The Trojans.” There were cheers, a
few boos, a final cry of “Viva Berlioz!” Lively productions deserve lively
audiences.Yes, a few of those boos were deserved, but so were the cheers. The real news
is this: confronted with the most challenging artwork it has taken on in its
six-year existence (a work, by the way, that has had only two previous
American fullscale productions in its nearly 150-year history) our opera
company reached out bravely. It reached out for innovative if relatively
unknown staging talent; it took some big chances in casting; it found the
conductor as qualified as anyone alive to lead the score; it endowed its
forces with sufficient rehearsal time so that even this first performance (of
five) needed none of the apologies sometimes necessitated by present-day
operatic realities.It didn’t all work, of course. There are a few terrible things about this
“Trojans.” Most of the booing seemed directed at Susan Marshall’s silly
choreography, a writhing disco scene just before Dido and Aeneas fall into bed
in the fourth of the opera’s five acts, whose greatest sin was its failure to
connect with Berlioz’ music. Some of it may have reflected shock at some of
director Francesca Zambello’s basic concepts; again, her curious
constructivist vision of Berlioz’ Carthage may have been interesting in itself
but seemed mismatched to the music.Much more, however, is fully worthy of the score. The scenes at Troy, set into
designer John Conklin’s frame of a ruined, toppled building that will, five
hours later, rise from its own ruins to become Rome’s Pantheon, are powerfully
put forth, wonderfully lit by Pat Collins. Even as seen first in silhouette
behind a screen, and then merely as a head lying on the ground, the Trojan
horse is an overpowering, fearsome spectacle. So is the tableau that ends the
Trojan scene: the women in a powerful, writhing mass, oozing blood onto
costume designer Bruno Schwengl’s virginal white nighties. (The opera goes
through quite a lot of ketchup, by the way, or whatever it is they use these
days.)There is a quality of mind in all this: ill-advised at a few times, thrilling
at many more times. The main problems occur in that ill-defined area where
Zambello’s action-plan and Marshall’s choreography meet. Given the, let’s say,
limited acting ability of tenor Gary Lakes (the Aeneas) and Carol Neblett (the
Dido), it was a ludicrous notion to let them mix into the pseudo-disco
dancing. Somewhere out in Weight-Watcher Land there might be a Dido and Aeneas
with the voices these singers have, and the onstage grace they don’t; until
they are found this one scene cries out for restaging. Ironic notion: Maria
Ewing, so miscast as Butterfly two nights before, would probably have been the
ideal Dido in both sight and sound, as Neblett wasn’t quite.Lakes is a splendid Aeneas. The highest compliment is that on Saturday night he
constantly awakened memories of Jon Vickers in the role: the voice strong,
plangent, beautifully lit with a golden thread that can turn both heroic and
tender. The Cassandra for the Trojan scenes, Nadine Secunde, was also
splendid, a strong vocal presence in a killer role, and a striking sight later
on, as Zambello hatches the bright notion of using her as a ghostly visual
presence in some of the Carthage music.Smaller roles were handsomely taken, for the most part, by the good local Music
Center Opera stalwarts: Michael Gallup, Jonathan Mack (barring a momentary
mishap on a cruelly exposed high note), Louis Lebherz and, best of all, the
splendid youngster Nikolas{{cq} Nackley, so fine in last season’s “Turn of
the Screw,” and fine again as the boy Ascanius.Over it all was the lively, probing, surging leadership of the great Dutoit,
hero of some of the best Berlioz recordings in the catalog, and now a
Berliozian hero in person as well. Under any circumstances the Los Angeles
Chamber Orchestra is one of the world’s best pit bands; under these
circumstances (and, of course, filled out far beyond “chamber orchestra”
size) it became the seething, churning, multicolored mirror of the composer’s
orchestral genius. Whatever other problems this brave, challenging, uneven
production may present, the sounds of “The Trojans” at the Music Center
these nights add up to an exhilarating imperative.THE FACTS:What: The Music Center Opera’s production of Hector Berlioz’ “The
Trojans.”Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Music Center.When: 6:30 p.m. tonight, Friday and Sept. 25; 1 p.m. Sept. 22.Starring: Gary Lakes, Nadine Secunde, Carol Neblett.Behind the scenes: staged by Francesca Zambello, conducted by Charles Dutoit,
designed by John Conklin and Bruno Schwengl, choreographed by Susan
Marshall.Tickets: $17 to $85; for information call 213 972-7211.Our rating: * * *

Hail, this land of no seasons, where you can go to indoor grand opera one night
and the Hollywood Bowl the next. These two cultural manifestations overlapped
by one day this year; the Bowl went out with a bang — actually, with several-
– this past weekend. A crowd of 17,942 (five short of capacity) was on hand on
Friday night to witness the grand finale.It was, actually, quite grand. Whatever you can say against the notion of
outdoor music in Cahuenga Pass, the one undisputed triumph is the massive
fireworks displays at the weekend programs. Once again, to the great tunes of
Handel’s “Royal Fireworks” Music, the whole place blazed into vivid action:
pinwheels, rockets, pots of flame, even an effigy of Handel himself rising
over it all. Friday’s weather added to the show; a heavy cloud layer trapped
the smoke close to the ground, imparting a soft mistiness to the color scheme:
modern technology as Manet might have painted it (as long as he didn’t have to
breathe).David Alan Miller was part of the farewell; by Bowl time next year he will no
longer be the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s associate conductor, to the Albany
Symphony Orchestra’s gain. His program was the usual weekend grabbag,
listener-friendly for the most part: nice, rambunctious performances of some
Dvorak tidbits, Ronald Leonard’s sturdy runthrough of the Saint-Saens Cello
Concerto No. 1 (with the solo cello badly overmiked) and all that Handel. The
latter was done in a modern recreation of what might have been the original
scoring, with 16 oboes, 9 horns, 9 trumpets, 13 bassoons or contrabassoons and
3 drums: sonorous as all get-out.Not all the banging came from fireworks and drums. The evening’s second soloist
was the Scots-born Evelyn Glennie, who banged with commendable agility on an
array of clatter-machines (xylophone, marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel) in
an endearing medley that included more Saint-Saens (the “Introduction and
Rondo Capriccioso,” originally written for violin) Richard Rodgers’
“Slaughter on 10th Avenue,” and, if you’re ready, Rimsky-Korsakoff’s
“Flight of the Bumblebee.” Glennie, 28 and, with her major hair, an alluring spectacle, won hearts. One
might, even so, question the usefulness of capricious rondos and bumblebees
transmuted into workout-pieces for percussion. The result seemed a little like
butter sculpture or painting on velvet: feasible but why bother? The cheers of
the crowd, however, suggested a different attitude.The air traffic, busy enough during the first half, kept its distance once the
fireworks began. Perhaps that’s the answer to the overhead noise problem:
continuous fireworks at all concerts. Worse ideas have been proposed.

The opera season began on Thursday night with all the fixings: gala crowd,
sold-out house, Placido Domingo to sing, high-society supper afterwards.
Musically, too, the news wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t all good, either. This was the Music Center Opera’s second try at Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”
The other one came during the company’s first season, in 1986, and the less
said the better. Version No. 2 suggested that the company still hasn’t quite
got the hang of the piece.As any opera buff will tell you, Puccini’s operas are all about singing, and
they’re very good of their kind. Perhaps the works don’t attain the
sophistication level of, say, his illustrious predecessor, Giuseppe Verdi. But
they display an uncommon gift for using the human throat, and the human
lungs, to project a sense of high drama. “Butterfly” has its great tunes,
but it also has all the material in between those high spots, music that curls
itself with high skill around the sad and helpless characters and the poignant
drama of their destruction. All that being so, we can easily overlook one more important earmark of these
Puccini almost-masterworks, that even with superior singing they don’t perform
themselves. The element most lacking in Thursday’s performance was the sense
of momentum that a superior conductor can bring to the work, without which
even the best singers are lost in a sea of apathy. Randall Behr, the evening’s
conductor, seemed unable to generate that momentum. Long sections seemed to slip by without sense of shape; the long love duet that
ends the first act, to cite an egregious example, made these ears aware of the
sense of interminable repetition, less aware of the subtle buildup of tender
passion threaded through the music. It was hard, and at some moments
impossible, to get the sense that the singers were at all interested in what
they were about.There was nothing particularly wrong with Randall Behr’s leadership; there just
wasn’t enough right. Behr is the company’s resident conductor, and is slated
to conduct three of the season’s eight productions. Suspicions arise that
perhaps the company might try a little harder in the podium department. (Such
suspicions, of course, will be temporarily allayed by the arrival of Charles
Dutoit for tonight’s “The Trojans.”) Meanwhile, back on the stage. Placido Domingo was the one-time-only Pinkerton;
he heads for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Girl of the Golden
West,” with his place taken for the remainder of the “Butterfly” run by his
protege Juan Antonio Pita. Domingo at 50 remains a phenomenon; nobody can
touch him for sheer, animal vibrance of tone which he can produce over a
phenomenal range of volume. As an actor he remains a clunk: one arm doing the
semaphore gestures, the other hanging useless as if belonging to someone else.
The real acting is in his singing; as many times as Domingo has sung this one
role he could still, on this occasion, command that heartbroken throb in the
last act, when the brutality of his actions finally confronts him.The Butterfly was Maria Ewing’s first-ever; Los Angeles seems to have become
her tryout town for new roles. This did not, this first time out, seem like
the role for her. She sounded like what she is, a retreaded mezzo dazzling in
some dramatic soprano roles but out of her element in the lyric repertory. Ian
Judge’s stage direction had given her some interesting stage tricks to divert
awareness that she is hardly the wounded adolescent of Puccini’s drama, but
the heaviness of her voice (apart from many moments under the pitch) betrayed
her more than once.The cast was filled out decently with Thomas Allen’ strong, sympathetic
Sharpless and Stephanie Vlahos’ somewhat hooty Suzuki. And a tiny tot named
Stephen M. Gilbert, in the silent but surefire role of Trouble (rechristened
“Sorrow” in the supertitles) stole the show by just toddling across the
stage a couple of times.John Gunter’s all-purpose indoor-outdoor set right out of Sunset Magazine, a
sort of Malibu beachhouse with the Jacuzzi just out of view, was, let’s say,
strange. A garish red frame upstage, setting off the background as if through
an enormous picture window, completed the illusion. In the pit, the Los
Angeles Chamber Orchestra seemed a little lackadaisical at times about
togetherness. It was obvious that the upcoming Berlioz opera had gotten the
bulk of the rehearsal time this week.THE FACTSWhat: Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” presented by the Los Angeles Music Center
Opera.Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. in downtown Los
Angeles.When: 8 p.m., Sept. 15, 18, 21, 24; 2 p.m. Sept. 29.Starring: Maria Ewing and Juan Antonio Pita, with Randall Behr conducting.Behind the scenes: directed by Ian Judge, designed by John Gunter and Liz da
Costa.Tickets: $17-$85; for information call 213 972-7211.Our rating: **