So I've Heard

Record collectors have known the name of Switzerland’s Peter Maag for several
decades. In the early days of the long-playing record his Mozart performances,
with various European orchestras, were regarded as beacons of clarity and
strength. Something must have happened, however, because Maag’s belated debut
with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night in
the third in its skein of four all-Mozart programs, fell somewhat short in
both clarity and strength.Maag is now 72. He looks like Central Casting’s prototype of a distinguished
old-world musician, white hair and all. His podium manner is exemplary, modest
and direct. Joined by the pianist Peter Roesel in the C-major Piano Concerto
(known to movie buffs as the “Elvira Madigan” Concerto) he provided
orchestral support that was accurate and considerate. He even apparently
acquiesced to the pianist’s silly cadenzas (attributed in the program to
Robert Casadesus) and to his breakneck speed in the finale.On his own, however, the conductor introduced some strange devices into both
the opening “Magic Flute” Overture and the concluding Symphony No. 39.
Conductors obsessed with establishing their own recognition factor will
sometimes overstress some of the inner details in a score score, simply for
the sake of differentness. Maag laid himself open to suspicions along this
line. In the overture the conductor seemed obsessed with overstressing a line of
brass scoring buried in Mozart’s textures; in the concerto he more-or-less
invented a curious percussion effect; in the symphony he bent the recurrent,
garrulous theme of the finale completely out of shape by inserting a
gratuitous hiccup in each of its many recurrences. The good-sized crowd,
11,856 strong, may have thought they had come to hear Mozart; they ended up
hearing more of the conductor, less of the music.Moments here and there rose above this sorry norm, however. Conductor and
soloist did blend their resources beautifully in the slow movement of the
concerto: sublime, nocturnal music to blend with the radiant skies and the
full moon (if not with several passing aircraft). And, that one melodic quirk aside, the symphony did receive a respectable,
middle-of-the-road reading. It was, at least, a generous performance, with all
the section repeats observed. The wondrous clarinet duet in the Minuetto, as
played by Lorin Levee and Michele Zukovsky, could have been repeated another
dozen times with no objection from this corner.

John Crosby chose well.An opera coach and conductor, Yale-educated, making his way in New York circles in the early 1950s but suffering under the pace and the bad air of East Coast urban life, Crosby decided that sinuses and sanity demanded a change of venue. Santa Fe beckoned: still in 1956 the sleepy desert town that Willa Cather had celebrated in her “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” Here, the 30-year-old Crosby reasoned, he could stock up on much-needed r&r.In this one regard, he was wrong. Within a year Crosby had sensed something else about Santa Fe: that under that sleepy desert facade there was a magnificent cultural awakening just waiting to happen. Crosby gathered some friends, well-heeled themselves and with access to other local money, and presented them with a plan, an 18-page single-spaced memorandum that laid out costs down to the smallest dry-cleaning item for a new opera company offering six operatic presentations over an eight-week summer season. Never mind that the theater for these operas hadn’t even been built. Ten months later it was. On July 3, 1957 the Santa Fe Opera was born, right on schedule. The opera was Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”; Crosby himself was on the podium.This was not, by the way, just any old opera house. Crosby had come to Santa Fe to escape New York; now his opera house had to escape even the minimal urban encroachment of Santa Fe. A loan from Crosby’s father secured a parcel of land in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains 7 miles north of town: a natural bowl with space in front for a ranch-house office and dormitory, and a hillside onto which an indoor-outdoor performance facility could perch. The first theater seated 480; the success of the venture demanded expansion. In the summer of 1967, in the wee hours after an evening performance, the theater — which by then had grown to a nearly 1200-seat capacity — was completely destroyed by a fire whose cause remains a mystery.The company didn’t miss a performance that summer, working in a highschool auditorium without sets or costumes. By the next season a new theater had been built on the site, the present architectural marvel with a current capacity of 1,777 — the size, but not the shape, of most of the great houses of Europe.The shape is both a glory and a danger. The local architectural firm, Santa Fe’s McHugh and Kidder, marvelousy caught the dynamic of the site: the steep natural rake that promised a full stage view from every seat, with the distant prospect of more mountains, the distant lights of Los Alamos visible through the open back of the stage, and the occasional glimpse of dramatic mountain lightning storms through the open sides. Best of all, the roof would be split, with a wide swathe of sky visible between the front and rear portions. On clear, moonlit or starry nights, which Santa Fe sometimes (but not always) enjoys during the June-through-August opera season, there is no more exhilarating setting for opera anywhere in the world. The theater itself is ringed with further amenities: spacious refreshment areas on both sides, and a promenade up back.That’s the story on those clear nights. But that is not the entire weather picture of Santa Fe. The monsoons do come, especially in late July and August. The rains pour down in torrents through the split roof, and the winds take care to seek out and drench even those souls in the covered seats. This past summer has seen an above-average number of meteorological visitations; some 60 per cent of the summer’s operas were rained upon. Not rained out, mind you; just rained upon. Santa Fe’s busy opera season has no room for postponements. If management finally decides to fill in that roof, and reports out of Santa Fe indicate some talk in that direction, the loss in atmosphere will be great, but the loss in humidity will be universally welcomed. Meanwhile, the gift shop this past summer did a roaring business in ponchos.Credit Santa Fe’s audiences, at least, with holding their ground however soggy. It has to be a tribute to the high quality of the company’s world-class performing casts, and the comparable quality of the repertory itself — which can range from exquisitely formed Mozart performances to a dazzling excursion into brand-new, contemporary work — to see a capacity crowd sitting out a splendid night of opera in Santa Fe, the rains pouring down over them, nobody even daring to raise an umbrella. When you talk of operatic heroes, Santa Fe’s audience belong to their number.Not all of Santa Fe’s high culture has been planned in defiance of the elements. The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival is also firmly entrenched, in the (blessedly) roofed-over Saint Francis Auditorium in a handsome courtyard building just off the main downtown Plaza. Founded 19 years ago and, like the opera, largely funded by the local growing, culturally-aware population, the festival has grown into the largest event of its kind anywhere in the country: six weeks of events nearly every night, most of them sold out, combining a fascinating mix of serious contemporary fare with the classics.One thing you come up against in Santa Fe, as soon as you start hunting down the cultural resources: there’s an overt sense of support there that you sometimes miss in larger cities. The opera has come to attract an international audience of opera connoisseurs, but even among the locals the talk during intermissions is about opera, not about the high cost of baby-sitters.And the sense of community involvement is, if anything, even stronger around the Chamber Music Festival. In their infinite wisdom, the sponsors allow the public in to all rehearsals, free of charge. Instead of possibly cutting down attendance at the concerts themselves, this breeds a sense of greater interest. When new music is rehearsed, the composer is often on hand to explain the music.The atmosphere crackles, with musical wisdom and with pride. At 7,000 feet, Santa Fe has proven the bane of some singers and wind players who must fight extra hard for their oxygen fixes. But it isn’t only the physical Santa Fe that’s that high; it’s also the cultural standards of the place, and that’s why people keep coming back.

There’s a lot to be said for symphony concerts controlled by a firm hand at the
podium. Once in a while, there’s something to be said as well for concerts in
which the audience takes command. Something like that happened at the
Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night, and no harm was done.The program was all-Mozart, with Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich as conductor and
piano soloist. Since Mozart’s music demands a fairly small orchestra, without
the heavy brass and percussion usually in evidence at Bowl concerts, the
conductor decided to omit the customary “Star-Spangled Banner” at the start.
The audience began to stand when Bishop-Kovacevich made his entrance, only to
fall back as the orchestra struck up the “Marriage of Figaro” Overture
instead of the expected anthem.Considering the political situation, perhaps this wasn’t the night to omit the
anthem. Anyhow, no sooner had the conductor left the stage after the overture
than a bunch of singers over on the right side started up “The Star-Spangled
Banner” on their own. The sound spread; the crowd — 11,544 strong — came to
its feet and sang along. Some orchestral players joined in on their own. The
night was made safe for patriotism.It was made safe for Mozart as well. One of our most imaginative pianists,
Bishop-Kovacevich has also emerged as a splendid conductor in recent years.
The program’s concluding work, the great “Jupiter” Symphony, was capitally
set forth. The conductor’s broad, expressive tempos might be the despair of
the “authentic-performance” crowd, which likes its Mozart swift and crisp.
But this was another kind of authentic performance, authentically powerful
and, in the sublime slow movement, deeply moving.The solo piano concerto was a relatively early work, the A-major (K. 414).
Here, too, both pianist and conductor (who happened to be the same person)
worked for the expressive side of the young Mozart, and found it especially in
the sweet, serene slow movement. Two single movements for violin and
orchestra, sweetly and prettily played by Philharmonic member Michele Bovyer,
rounded out the evening’s pleasures.

At intermission at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday night, the season’s final
concert by the Philharmonic Institute Orchestra, Philharmonic managing
director Ernest Fleischmann came on stage. He had never, he told 8,725
listeners, come before an audience to ask for help, but the Philharmonic
Institute was now in trouble. Unless $250,000 can be raised before October 31,
Fleischmann said, the entire Institute program — a training venture for young
orchestral musicians and conductors, now rounding off its tenth year, of which
each summer’s orchestra has been the most visible and audible product — could
not continue.Fleischmann couldn’t have picked a better occasion to plead the cause of the
Institute. This year’s orchestra has been a spectacular venture, performing
with remarkable skill both under its own conductors-in-training and also with
some of the guest conductors booked for the current Bowl season. Sunday’s
program had some of both: two of the summer’s conducting fellows, Susan
Davenny Wyner and Thomas Dausgaard, conducting music by Bernstein and
Stravinsky before intermission and the redoutable Simon Rattle leading the
Mahler Fourth Symphony to end it, with Rattle’s wife, soprano Elise Ross, a
slightly quavery but eloquent soloist in the last movement.There were rough moments, to be sure. Dausgaard’s reading of the complete
“Petrouchka” ballet score had its nervous moments, a tendency now and then
to over-emphasize small details at the expense of momentum. At least this was
a big, energetic conception whose rawness will mellow in time, and it at least
drew beautiful playing from the orchestra all the way. The Mahler was, in a word, stunning. Rattle, too, might be accused of an
excess of concern with details, and there were moments where Mahler’s own
suggestions of flexibility of tempo got exaggerated to the point of
wilfulness. But there were also stunning moments, exquisite playing from the
string section with tones throttled down to just this side of audibility (and
with horrendously accurate intrusions from aircraft at exactly the worst
moments), marvelous dabs of light from winds and brass. If Los Angeles can annually develop an orchestra of this quality, out of young
and untried talent, in the mere seven weeks of the Institute, then the
question of whether the Philharmonic Institute deserves all the help it can
get becomes self-answering.

In a recent published statement a local air-traffic official claimed that the
unusual amount of intrusion by planes and helicopters over the Hollywood Bowl
was due to an exceptional amount of overcast this summer and the
consequent rerouting of landing patterns. Well, the skies were crystal-clear
on Thursday night — over the Bowl, and over Van Nuys, Burbank and Santa
Monica airports as well. Did it make any difference? Is the moon made of green
cheese? Four planes came over the Bowl during the first half of the concert,
interfering with large stretches of Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto (the
evening’s quietest music). Suspicions arise that the official regard, in high
places, for the quality of Bowl concerts is largely doubletalk. If nobody up
there is concerned, there was concern and annoyance on many faces among the
10,306 concertgoers.At least the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony, the last work on Simon Rattle’s program
with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, came through unscathed, probably because
small airports shut down after a certain hour. Any doubts about the young
Briton’s emergence as one of the spellbinding conductors of our time could be
set aside after this performance. Unlike some conductors not worth naming,
Rattle chose to explore the symphony rather than to hack at it. The beauty of the performance lay in the richness of its orchestral detail,
the clarity with which, for example, the solo strands of wind and string tone
twined around each other in the expansive, haunting slow movement. We’ve heard
the symphony more than once, to put it mildly, in this Prokofiev anniversary
year; it took Simon Rattle to reveal what the work is really about.Some doubts, in all frankness, had emerged about Rattle’s omnipotence in his
Beethoven Ninth on Tuesday night. Beethoven brought out some curious responses
this time as well. The evening’s soloist, the 20-year-old German keyboard whiz
Lars Vogt in his American debut, went after Beethoven’s marvelous lyric
patterns in a manner full of self-indulgence, a smart-aleck approach in which
much of Beethoven’s eloquent, subtle rhetoric got blown up into empty oratory.
This seemed to be the conductor’s way as well; the long invocation for
orchestra alone was fussed with, touched up with tempo changes that only
served to underline what was already obvious in the score.For starters Rattle and the orchestra got through Beethoven’s “Consecration of
the House” Overture in fine style. This is a work, after all, where a certain
amount of oversized oratory harmonizes with the composer’s plan. That’s what
it got this time.

Onstage and out front, Stravinsky, Beethoven and Simon Rattle filled the
Hollywood Bowl quite handsomely on Tuesday night. If the Beethoven Ninth can
draw one of the season’s largest crowds (17,073, just 900 short of capacity),
there’s hope for civilization after all.The night began wondrously well. Rattle led his reduced orchestral forces
(minus violins and violas) and the Los Angeles Master Chorale through a quiet,
radiant probing of Stravinsky’s short masterwork, his elegant and austere
“Symphony of Psalms” created in 1930 for the Boston Symphony’s 50th
anniversary. It’s not exactly an inviting work, with its colors all muted
bronze and silver. Rattle’s performance, remarkable especially for its quiet,
unhurried unfolding, made the work come alive even in the Bowl’s overlarge
space.The Beethoven Ninth fared less well. It had the feel of a learning process: a
conductor still in his mid-30s trying things out, testing how far he can get
away with bending Beethoven’s designs toward a personal statement. It came off
as a curious mingling of authenticity and wilfulness. The authentic touches
were excellent, with all repeats honored and with the orchestra, for once,
seated in proper classical formation with the first and second violins
downstage and the lower strings to the rear.But there were strange goings-on with changes of tempo, to underline effects
that Beethoven had made abundantly clear on their own. It seemed almost as if
the young conductor hadn’t yet come to trust the work, hadn’t quite gotten the
hang of the music’s own marvelous sense of flow.He wasn’t helped much by the vocal soloists, by Terry Cook’s delivery of the
baritone invocation, with its register break that made it sound as if to
unalike voices were sharing the line or Robert Tear’s tenor solo, strangulated
and unfocussed. Soprano Alison Hargan and mezzo Alfreda Hodgson sounded
merely okay, but Beethoven’s cruel writing for these soloists is no way to
judge a singer’s quality.With all its problems, and under a constant flow of air traffic sufficient to
cover the Normandy invasion, this was a recognizable Beethoven Ninth. It may,
for all anyone knows, carry the seeds of a great Ninth from Simon Rattle
sometime in the future. It’s not quite there, however.

In music-making, more may be merrier, but more is often mellower as well. That
theory was nicely put to the test at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night, when
the presence of two orchestras — 200 musicians — sounded at least as good,
perhaps even better, than either of the orchestras by itself.This was, in other words, the annual bout of duelling orchestras, when the
resident Los Angeles Philharmonic moved over to share its stage with the
youngsters of the Philharmonic Institute Orchestra. The result, it was easy to
sense, was one of those ideal occasions when the young players’ energy
provided a challenge to the Philharmonic’s old-timers, while the older group
could show the youngsters a thing or two about stability. All that, of course,
is only an outsider’s intuition, but it might go a long way to explain why the
combined forces sounded as good as they did that night.John Nelson was the evening’s conductor, formerly of the Indianapolis Symphony
and more recently an active Europe-based freelancer; his contribution included
the Barber Adagio for Strings and a set of selections from Wagner’s
“Gotterdammerung,” with the two orchestras, and the Grieg Piano Concerto
with the Philharmonic alone, and with the young Norwegian pianist Leif Ove
Andsnes, in his local debut, as soloist. On its own, the Institute Orchestra
was led by conductor-trainee Arthur Post in a brief Meditation from Leonard
Bernstein’s “Mass.” A rich, full evening it was. Where, in fact, to start? The popular Barber Adagio, composed originally for
four strings, was the evening’s only real failure in its drastic expansion;
the simple, quiet patterns simply do not work under the burden of all that
tone. Bernstein’s brief reworking of his “Mass” excerpt, arranged as a piece
for cello and orchestra (and beautifully played by Lynn Harrell) is an
elegant, impassioned tidbit from an otherwise grossly uneven work.
But these were as divine discourses compared to the mindless vulgarity of
Grieg’s strained and strenuous pomposities. Norwegian musicians must bear
their Grieg as an albatross, as Finnish conductors must bear Sibelius, but
Leif Ove Andsnes, at 21, is worthy of stronger challenges. The work demands
old-fashioned, flamboyant, rhetorical virtuosity; the Andsnes performance,
made up of interesting single moments but lacking in any real character, came
off as so much clatter.But then came the Wagner to storm the heavens — and even, for once, to drive
the air traffic from the skies. Nelson had put together a sweep across this
final chapter of the mighty “Ring of the Nibelung”: “Dawn and Siegfried’s
Rhine Journey” merging through a well-constructed bridge into the “Funeral
March” which then oozed, somewhat less successfully, into the entire last
scene of “Brunnhilde’s Immolation.” Without the voice, the final scene did have its aimless moments; some of it
might have been cut back with no real loss. The rest was glorious: the
marvelously paced, solemn March with its crashes like the harbingers of Doom,
the throat-grabbing lamentations as the final harmonies build their unbearable
tension. It’s all very well that we honor Mozart at the Bowl in this
anniversary year, but it’s always the right year to celebrate Wagner, at least
when it’s done this well.

As far as one can determine, given the peculiar acoustical and aeronautical
atmosphere at the Hollywood Bowl, Michael Morgan is a new arrival very much
worth your attention. Morgan, who conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic on
Tuesday night in a most impressive debut appearance, is 35, and is the
assistant conductor at the Chicago Symphony. More important, he’s the latest
hired to try, where others have failed, to bring the Oakland Symphony (or
Oakland East Bay Symphony, as it is now called) back to the glory it enjoyed
under the prematurely departed Calvin Simmons.If Tuesday’s concert is any criterion, Morgan can do the job up north. He led
an interesting program, more than usually challenging: Strauss’ “Don Juan,”
the Mendelssohn “Scottish” Symphony and, with Misha Dichter, the Beethoven
Third Piano Concerto.Never mind the Beethoven, which foundered on the inadequate visions of its
soloist, in another of those uninflected, clattery performances that seem to
characterize Dichter’s playing in recent years. What was truly exciting about
Morgan’s part of the program was the depth and firmness of his orchestral
command. He resisted the usual temptations to turn the Strauss tone-poem into a mere
orchestral dazzler. Aided immeasurably by David Weiss’ eloquent playing of the
long oboe solo, he made the work into something resembling poetry. The
balances between winds and strings were beautifully controlled; the noisy
passages were oratorical but not vulgar. That takes doing; “Don Juan” may be
a popular chestnut, but it is full of secrets as well, and these Morgan
unlocked remarkably well.The Mendelssohn also went well, in a solemn but nicely paced reading, again
agreeably free of the bombast that others have applied to this warm-hearted if
somewhat padded score. The orchestra sounded fine; the woodwinds, so often
entrusted in Mendelssohn’s scoring to shine little lights through the texture,
did just that. The final peroration was truly grandiose.The crowd numbered 7881. The air traffic numbered a mere 3, but they were
strategically placed: a helicopter to ruin the quiet ending of the Strauss,
another to try to awaken Misha Dichter during the first-movement cadenza of
the Beethoven, a third to out-roar the climax of the Mendelssohn finale.

At 10:50 on Sunday the final joyous strains of Mozart’s “The Marriage of
Figaro” filled the cool night air at the Hollywood Bowl. Billed variously as
a “Mozart Akademie” and a “Mozart Mini-Marathon,” the concert had begun 4
hours and 20 minutes earlier, and had covered a lot of ground, all of it
Mozartian. The crowd number 9,725, small by Bowl standards but a favorable
comparison to the total count of people who heard Mozart’s music during his
lifetime.It was a heady event: three overtures, a serenade for winds, three concertos
plus one extra concerto movement, one symphony and nearly the whole last act
from “Figaro” (minus only the arias for Marcellina and Basilio that are
usually left out anyway). Historians have noted that concerts of this length
were common in Mozart’s time, and that they did, indeed, go by the name
“Akademie.”The splendid young orchestra of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, the
orchestra’s summer training program, now in its tenth year and impossible to
praise too highly, held the stage all evening, although there were some
personnel substitutions along the way. A wide screen was used to cut down the
Bowl’s huge stage to fit the modest proportions of a Mozart-sized orchestra,
and this had the effect of brightening the sound considerably. In terms of ensemble quality, as well as the excellence of individual players,
this is a top-grade orchestra. Mozart’s scoring favors the wind contingent;
the flutes, oboes and clarinets of this year’s Institute Orchestra made some
elegant sounds throughout the long and demanding concert.At that there were some downs as well as ups. The guest instrumental soloists
were uniformly poor: Misha and Cipa Dichter clattering their way through the
Two-Piano Concerto (K. 365); Misha himself in as rash and unaffectionate
saunter through the A-major Concerto (K. 488) as any anti-Mozartian could
dream of hearing; Jaime Laredo, as conductor and soloist, clipping the wings
of the G-major Violin Concerto (K. 216) and throwing in some dreadful cadenzas
(by Sam Franko) along the way.As amends, there was a splendid vocal group, most of them younger Music Center
Opera stars-to-be, to do full justice to the changing moods, the sorrow and
the hilarity of the “Figaro” excerpt, done in concert format. Jennifer
Trost, who sang the Countess in her recent European opera debut, came home to
sing those few poignant phrases most disarmingly. Hector Vasquez and Jennifer
Smith were a delightful Mr. and Mrs. Figaro, standing stock still and even so
managing to suggest the drama in their roles, as did John Atkins as the ill-
tempered Count.The evening’s conductors included this summer’s four trainees: William Eddins,
Susan Davenny Wyner, Thomas Dausgaard and Arthur Post. David Alan Miller led
the two-piano concerto, and Lawrence Foster led the opera excerpt with a fine
sense of underlining the important role the orchestra plays in this
music.Overhead, the air traffic was a constant bane; one tended to lose count after a
dozen or so helicopters. But up there, too, beaming his benefice on the crowd,
was the little fellow whose music the night was intended to honor. Mozart
looked happy, this once.

Yuri Temirkanov, who conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood
Bowl on Tuesday night — the fourth of his five appearances here — remains
one of the most interesting of contemporary conductors. Perhaps
“interesting” conducting wasn’t exactly what Tuesday night’s program called
for, however.It was another of those solid, chestnut-studded programs: Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo
and Juliet” Overture, Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and
that old inevitable, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” junk food at its
tastiest. Nikolai Petrov was the pianist in the Rachmaninoff, no better and no
worse than his playing at his Ambassador recital a few seasons back — a
recital that somehow lingers in the memory as almost a textbook essay in
dullness.Given the minimal intellectual demands of this program, a case could be made
for a fairly straightforward, zippy approach to all three works. Nothing like
that was forthcoming, however. Temirkanov obviously takes considerable
pleasure in imposing his own stamp upon everything he plays, an approach that
used to be more common among conductors than it is in these electronic days.
The range of tempos in both the Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov works was
extreme: slowness to the point of an imperceptible ooze, speed to violate all
local traffic laws.The conductor has the technique to make all this work, and so, in his deadpan
way, did the pianist. Barring the allowable quota of bloopers (mostly in the
brass) it was a pretty good sounding program. But you could easily mistake
these works, under Temirkanov’s heavy hands, for something more serious than
their real nature. Nothing seemed to soar…Except, of course, the usual skyful of intrusions: a veritable regatta during
the Rachmaninoff, with two small planes flying directly overhead and a couple
of helicopters within easy earshot. A decent-sized crowd, 11623 strong, stayed
to cheer at the end. At that, they had reason; it’s hard to spoil
“Scheherazade.”