So I've Heard

Even when silent, the Getty Museum stands as continuing assurance that
civilization abides. Add music, and the proof becomes indisputable.This summer’s Saturday-night series at the Getty (long since sold out) is,
unsurprisingly, devoted to Mozart, whose music is the perfect match for the
classical decor in the small inner garden where the music is played. But the
fare is hardly garden-variety Mozart. The series is called “The Uncommon
Mozart” and that, judging from last Saturday’s concert, is putting it
mildly.The five concerts, put together by UCLA’s dynamic musicologist Robert Winter,
is arranged more-or-less chronological. Saturday’s program found Mozart in his
late teens, chafing at the provincial life in Salzburg but beginning to
develop his own musical voice. A Divertimento (K. 131 in the complete Mozart
catalog) from 1772, Mozart’s 16th year, was full of the richness of the later
Mozart: harmonic progressions and melodic turns that simply stop the breath,
marvelous effects in an uncommonly large orchestra (strings, solo winds and
four horns). A short Mass (K. 272b) from five years later was, once again, an amazingly rich
score, joyous and profound by turns and with a closing chorus that prophecied
moments in the later operas. And the slashing early G-minor Symphony (K. 183),
the evening’s one familiar work, struck the tragic notes that Mozart would
sound again, and often, in his mature years.Performances couldn’t have been better — not much, anyhow. Gregory Maldonado’s
Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra seems to get better with every hearing. This is
no longer merely a local early-instrument group standing up to the big guys,
but a splendid ensemble that plays with style and real sheen, makes European
tours, and has started to record. There was a little bit of rumpus among the
horns now and then, nothing serious. It could happen anywhere. A small chorus
from the Church of Saint Martin of Tours, led by Tracey Adams, joined forces
with the orchestra in the B-flat Mass. At the end there was wine and cheese and carrot cake alongside the Getty’s
long pool. Who says this isn’t the best of all worlds?

Old Sebastian Bach lived a lifetime without hearing a note of his
“Brandenburg” Concertos. There’s no information, in fact, that anyone — in
the castle of the Brandenburg nobles or anywhere else — heard these works in
their own time. Contrast that with the 7,549 souls privileged to sit through
all six of these iridescent scores at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday night, and
you may suspect that, in some ways at least, the world has improved somewhat
since Bach’s time.From any angle these are remarkable works. They constitute a compendium, first
of all, of some of the best devices of Baroque instrumentation: the use of
solo instruments against a larger ensemble, and the ways that ensemble can be
subdivided to present an infinite variety of sonority. They also offer a fair
study of the moods, the rhythms, the virtuosity of players available to
composers in the year 1721. Each of the works draws an entirely different set
of rules and expectations. An evening of all six “Brandenburgs” becomes an
adventure in glorious excess.One might raise doubts, even so, about the fitness for this music in so vast a
space as the Bowl, performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in groups
ranging in size from six players to 30. Truth to tell, the sound pattern
wasn’t always kind to Bach’s invention. The horns in the first concerto were
undermiked so that their marvelous rhythmic patterns of threes against the
other players’ twos weren’t always audible. The harpsichord in several works
was overmiked almost to the point of drowning out the ensemble. Nobody ever
claimed the Bowl as an ideal Baroque music venue, and nobody should,Yet there was vitality in iona Brown’s approach to the music, and high
expertise in the way her ensemble did her bidding. Sometimes, in truth,
vitality won out over repose; much of the music — the marvelous, burbling
fantasy of the fourth concerto, to cite one instance — went by so fast, and
with so little inflection, that it sounded smaller than life, even in its
larger-than life setting. Often as not, Brown’s conducting seemed to suggest
that she didn’t like the music very much, a most peculiar attitude if true.

The roar of drums split the evening air; the brassy strains of “The Star-
Spangled Banner” lit up the evening sky. At approximately 7:45 last Tuesday
evening a new season at the Hollywood Bowl sprang into life. From now until
September 21, the most generously planned of any urban music festival will be
going on right in our own backyard.Something else was new, as well, at this opening concert, since it also saw the
debut of a brand-new orchestra. The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was formed last
winter; it has already released “Hollywood Dreams,” its first recording,
under its permanent conductor John Mauceri. Made up of freelance musicians
from the Los Angeles studio scene, the orchestra’s principal summer job will
be to take over some of the lighter programs that the Los Angeles Philharmonic
used to have to play. The benefit is, of course, twofold: the new orchestra
gets the work, and the parent orchestra gets more time to rehearse its more
serious symphonic programs.So far as any orchestra can be judged in its early weeks of existence,
performing into microphones in a vast open space, the new ensemble shows every
sign of filling a long-felt need hereabouts, and filling it handsomely.
Conductor Mauceri, led it through a fine razzle-dazzle program, in which the
orchestra got the chance to anticipate on its own, purely through its music-
making, the fireworks that were to come at program’s end.Expectedly from musicians used to playing on sound stages into microphones, the
orchestra’s tone is big and brassy. It is capable, as well, of some soft and
elegant sounds. An orchestral version of an unfamiliar Gershwin song,
“Soon,” brought quite a lot of fine, silky playing from the strings. Like
Andre Previn and a few other wise conductors, Mauceri has seated the orchestra
with the violas, not the cellos, on the outside. The arrangement greatly
lightens the string sound; even through microphones and loudspeakers, the
difference showed.The concert was subtitled “America the Beautiful,” and was planned as a
light-hearted family journey through familiar territory. Leonard Bernstein’s
“Candide” Overture (well-known to Mauceri, who had conducted the Broadway
revival of the show) was the most substantial work. The splendid young
baritone Bruce Hubbard, who sings “Ol’ Man River” on the famous complete
“Show Boat” recording, did so again, and beautifully. He also sang five of
Copland’s “Old American” song settings and another unknown Gershwin song
whose lyrics have only recently been rediscovered, a blues number to a tune
from “An American in Paris.” Even an uneventful saunter through the tall
corn can sometimes turn up unexpected treasures.Mauceri proved a genial host, with some easy-going humor and even a little
subversion (“please feel free to applaud any time you feel like it”) to put
the crowd at ease. At the end came three Sousa marches, with fireworks to
match: spectacular stuff, amazingly well coordinated to the downbeats in the
music. Glowing likenesses of Desert Storm heroes emerged from the smoke and
flame; at the end the pictorial epitome of America glowed high overhead. The
audience of 13,155 happy souls appeared to be having the time of their
respective lives, as well they should.

The opera season ended with two ringing reaffirmations of the high quality of
scores some of us may have laid aside. A second visit to “La Fanciulla del
West” at the Music Center turned up details in Puccini’s score I hadn’t
previously bothered to notice: the marvelous breadth of the harmonic language,
the iridescent orchestration, the grandeur of the choral writing.
Then came an even more exciting rediscovery, Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of
the Screw,” in a stupendous staging that brilliantly underlined the
extraordinary depth of this score, the way so little time and so few players
are needed to fulfill Henry James’ wonderful story in music as mere words
never could. Strange to tell, neither opera has been adequately dealt with on records.
Against the dozens of “Bohemes” and “Toscas,” there are only two proper
recordings of “Fanciulla” (plus two dim-sounding “pirate” recordings).
Each has its brutalizing force: Mario del Monaco on the London set with Renata
Tebaldi, Zubin Mehta’s conducting on the DG set with Carol Neblett and Placido
Domingo. A new version is needed, especially one to preserve the astounding
performance given here by Gwyneth Jones.The “Turn of the Screw” lingers in the old London recording conducted by
Britten (with the very young David Hemmings, in his boy-soprano days, as
Miles). There is also a video version, a film by Petr Weigl with its imagery
full of smirking Freudian subtexts and with the singers’ voices dubbed onto a
cast of actors. But Helen Donath at least sings the role of the Governess, as
she did here, and that makes the video worth enduring.Britten’s 37-year-old opera abides as a proclamation of the validity of
contemporary harmonies and vocal lines as the bearers of operatic action. In
its taut, exquisitely structured way it is as important a score as, say,
“Wozzeck” or “Nixon in China”…or, as “Le Grand Macabre”
Gyorgy Ligeti composed “Le Grand Macabre” in 1978; it circulated to ecstatic
reception in several European houses, and has now finally achieved a proper
recording, a two-disc Wergo set just released. From its wild and wondrous
opening, a violent chorus of automobile horns that returns several times to
punctuate the diabolical tale, to its finale as the devils sizzle over an open
fire and bits of Mozart and Verdi are threaded through the orchestral
pandemonium, the sheer bravado of the work holds you enthralled.
Ligeti, 68, Hungarian by birth, now living in Germany, is still too little
known in this country, although Pierre Boulez brought a large chunk of his
music to Ojai two years ago. Two short, marvelously atmospheric pieces of his
were used (without his permission and without payment) in the score Stanley
Kubrick assembled for “2001.”Those who know Ligeti’s music have come to suspect him of omnipotence;
everything he has attempted, over a wide stylistic panorama, seems to work.
There are five CDs of his music on Wergo, including orchestral and chamber
music, and there isn’t a moment less than enthralling.
“Le Grand Macabre” is taken from a 1934 play by Michel de Ghelderode, who
in turn took his inspiration from Pieter Breughel’s ghastly fantasy “The
Triumph of Death.” Into this stewpot of influences Ligeti has stirred a
fantastic mix of his own. The characters include a nude Venus, a fat boy who
is the “Prince of Breughel-Land” and who in the London production was got up
to look like Prince Charles. The stage directions are loose; in Paris the
characters included Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers and Superman.
You’ll just have to believe that all this translates into music of the utmost
appeal. The musical pastiche is wild: jazz, ancient liturgy, some corny
waltzes — they all seem to hobnob, and the resultant mix is amazingly
entertaining. The recorded performance is a production of the Austrian Radio;
the conductor, who has given most of the performances of “Le Grand Macabre”
from the beginning, is the splendid Britisher Elgar Howarth. You won’t
recognize a single name in the cast, but it’s a fine ensemble and it sounds as
if it is having fun with this grotesque but appealing music. Perhaps you will,
too.Some kind of great operatic upsurge seems to be taking place in Finland, as
we’ll learn for ourselves when the Finnish National Opera comes over with
Aulis Sallinen’s “Kullervo” next February. Finland’s culture ministry,
working through the opera company, has been exemplary in commissioning new
works. Sallinen is becoming well known, and so is his compatriot Einojuhani
Rautavaara. (In Finnish, by the way, you pronounce all vowels separately;
there are six syllables in Rautavaara.)Rautavaara’s “Vincent” is at hand, an opera composed last year and recorded
on the Ondine label. Its subject is not lakes or mountains or ancient Finnish
heroes; the “Vincent” is Van Gogh, and the opera was written to celebrate
the painter’s centenary. It is a work of tremendous power.The composer, now 63, wrote his own libretto. Van Gogh, nearing death, lies in
a mental hospital. Voices call out to him, and the composer has fashioned a
dense, powerful counterpoint of sounds. Paul Gauguin, cynical and hostile,
wanders through the action. Later on Vincent’s mind wanders to his few moments
of a happy love affair. Then the clouds settle in once again. The ending is
devastating; Vincent tries to make a gift to the doctors of his remaining
paintings, but they are rejected as “too modern.”Rautavaara’s music is dense and tortured, and some of it sounds amazingly like
the way Van Gogh paintings look. Each of the opera’s three acts, by the way,
starts with a prelude that is supposed to represent a particular painting.
They might go together as an orchestral suite, in the manner of “Mathis der
Maler.” But the opera as a whole also deserves to be heard. In this
performance, conducted by Fuat Manchurov, the marvelous baritone Jorma
Hynninen is Van Gogh.On Virgin Classics there is John Casken’s “Golem,” winner of the Benjamin
Britten Award for composition last year. This story, too, is told in
flashback, as the mystical Rabbi Maharal tells of his creation of a Golem —
the guardian spirit in Yiddish folklore — and how, like the monster of
Frankenstein, the creation outgrew its purpose and turned violent. Casken,
born in Yorkshire in 1949, fashioned his own libretto.
Here, too, we have eloquent, skillful music drama. The Britten connection is
clear; Casken’s vocal melodies have that same dry-point, understated quality
that comes around and lingers in the memory. “Golem” isn’t quite a
masterpiece, although it is a most proficient work by a composer hitherto
unknown. The music uses a small orchestral ensemble plus tape; the
performance, under Richard Bernas, was recorded at the University of Durham in
the North of England. The best of it is the assurance that composers are still
composing opera. Someday John Casken will compose a better opera than
“Golem,” but at least he has been encouraged to make a start.

Like the story that inspired it, Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw”
holds you in its grip from beginning to end. So does the Music Center Opera’s
brilliant production of the work, which had the first of four performances at
the Music Center on Saturday night. Miss it at your peril.The power of the Henry James story, as every schoolboy knows, lies in its
ambiguity. We are left to guess which is real, the ghosts or the Governess who
thinks she sees them. Putting the story on stage, as play or opera, forces a
producer to choose a single alternative, and this Britten and his librettist
Myfanwy {cq} Piper have done in this masterful small opera of 1954. The ghosts
are real; they come on stage and sing. The Governess, too, is real, because
she too sings. And how, she sings!Yet, one beauty of this production, devised by Jonathan Miller for the English
National Opera in 1979, is its success in preserving ambiguities. Patrick
Robertson’s sets, with projections both on scrims and a back wall, so fill the
stage with with a jumble of images that characters seem to float in and out of
reality. The effect is both disturbing and stunning; you will look far before
you discover better justice done to this greatest of all psychological
thrillers, in any medium.The performances are, in a word, phenomenal. No milder word will do for the
overwhelming Governess of Helen Donath, previously known here only from
recordings. She has worked a magisterial voice and a powerful stage presence
into a consistent portrait. It might be described as lyric frazzlement, or it
might better reside beyond rational description. No less extraordinary is the
work of 12-year-old Nik{cq}Nackley as the haunted Miles: again, a marvelously
consistent performance at once angelic and sinister, and nicely sung
besides.Old friends round out the cast: Marvellee Cariaga as a strong yet troubled Mrs.
Grose, Jonathan Mack and Angelique Burzynski as a pair of reptilian ghosts,
Eileen Hulse as the other child (although clearly several times the age of
eight years specified in the script). The orchestra of a mere 13 players,
under Roderick Brydon’s alert, flexible direction, reproduces the wonders of
Britten’s iridescent scoring. And so a far-from-capacity crowd on opening night found itself, possibly with
some surprise, cheering to the rafters a 20th-century chamber opera on a
serious topic. “The Turn of the Screw” deserved no less. It has taken this
whole season for our opera company to come up with one production for which
the highest praise might pass as understatement. This time it happened.

The scene was the Leo Baeck Temple in Brentwood, at last week’s invitational
tribute to Leonard Bernstein. The veteran pianist Leo Smit came onstage to play
the opening work, tried to strike a few notes, and stopped. Something in the
Yamaha grand piano, furnished for the concert by David Abell, was decidedly
off-key. Smit tried a second time; no luck. “Is Leon Levitch in the house?”
the master of ceremonies called out.
There was a stir up back; Leon Levitch was definitely in the house. Down the
aisle he came, the smiling, diminutive, white-haired man of all pianos, looking
for all the world like Central Casting’s idea of a kindly old-world craftsman –
– which, indeed, he is. He twirled a couple of wing nuts under the piano, and
before you could say “Mieczyslaw Horszowski” he had the entire innards of the
instrument spread across the floor of the stage.
A dab, a twiddle, and Levitch had the piano back together again. “I don’t know
what I did,” he shouted out in all innocence, “but it seems to work.” Chalk
up another Leon Levitch victory.
Every city has its legendary piano wizard, about whom tales are told with
laughter and awe. Levitch, who now lives in Pacoima, is that man for Los
Angeles. Born in Yugoslavia 63 years ago, Levitch taught himself the rudiments
of piano building while interned in an Italian prison camp during World War II.
After Italy’s defeat, the Levitch family was part of a token group of freed
prisoners brought to the United States by Franklin D. Rossevelt and quartered –
– behind more barbed wire — in an abandoned army camp in upstate New York.
Word got out that the camp had among its inmates a teenage piano tuner, and
Levitch was frequently smuggled out under darkness, crawling through a break in
the barbed wire, to repair pianos in nearby Oswego.
Along the way, Levitch also studied composition, later working with Roy Harris
at UCLA. Several of his chamber compositions have been recorded, and he is now
at work on a Requiem, to be performed next year at the opening of a museum in
Oswego commemorating the wartime encampment.

The glory of the Ojai Music Festival surfaced once again this past weekend, as
it has every year since 1947 around this time, somewhat tarnished but
recognizable. No, it wasn’t the best festival ever, not as programming nor as
performance. It also wasn’t the worst. In five generously planned programs,
from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, there had to be something for nearly
everyone somewhere along the way.
The mix was interesting, to say the least: Mozart, the prolific American John
Harbison, the iconoclastic Briton Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Inevitably, the
flames of creativity burned the brightest in the Mozart; that would probably
have been the case no matter which contemporary figures had come on.
Even so, there was something uncommonly depressing, deadly even, about the
contemporary fare. Harbison, former composer-in-residence at the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, Pulitzer laureate, brought along two of his large-scale song-
cycles: one to words of Emily Dickinson, one to William Carlos Williams.
Handsomely sung — Janice Felty, Sanford Sylvan — they nevertheless seemed
like random notes curled willy-nilly around the respective texts but untouched
by the beauty or the passion of the poetry. Any moment of Mozart’s text-
settings heard over the weekend — a pair of concert arias, some extended
excerpts from his final opera “La Clemenza di Tito” — might have served as a
model for the way words and music can be blended into a higher art.
Such judgments are probably unfair; few composers past or present could survive
comparison with the divine Mozart. Still, the Ojai fare seemed almost
stubbornly designed to shame the present with the past. From Max Davies we got
two meandering, grossly extended concertos, one for clarinet and one for horn
and trumpet, part of a series he’s creating for the soloists in the Scottish
Chamber Orchestra. Of course they weren’t inflamed with the Mozartian spark,
but they seemed on this occasion to have no spark of any kind. A couple of folk
dances and a brand-new “Ojai Festival Overture” may have been small-scale
exercises on Davies’ part, but there was a sense of shape there, and also a
sense of pleasure, that the larger works didn’t have.The Mozart works were all drawn from his last year: the sublime Clarinet
Concerto, the operatic excerpts, the radiantly beautiful “Ave, verum corpus”
(which Harbison had the gall to link to his own slapdash setting of the same
text) and rather a lot of small dances. True, Mozart earned most of his money
at the end with these German dances and minuets for Viennese court functions,
but 27 of them at a throw, conducted with no excess of grace by Harbison and
Davies, came across as something of an overdose.In the absence of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — currently touring European
capitals and, according to reports, piling up ecstatic reviews — Ojai’s stage
band this time around was the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, playing with no
great distinction. The singers were marvelous; outstanding among the
instrumentalists were Dennis James, who brought along his “glass harmonica”
for two Mozart works for that eerie, captivating instrument and Charles
Neidich, tootling his way enchantingly through the Mozart Clarinet Concerto.
But violinist Rose Mary Harbison (the composer’s wife) led a sub-professional
reading of Mozart’s E-flat String Quintet that simply shouldn’t have been
allowed onstage. Oh well, there’s always next year, with the guesswork favoring a return to Ojai
of the Philharmonic and, dare we hope, Pierre Boulez. At least the weather was
sublime and the setting — outdoors in Ojai’s Libbey Park and indoors for one
late-night church event — beguiling beyond description. As long as these
factors remain constant, no running of Ojai’s Music Festival can be reckoned a
complete loss. Still…

Witold Lutoslawski is in town this week, for two Los Angeles Philharmonic
programs of his music. The Kronos Quartet’s program at UCLA on Saturday
includes music by Alfred Schnittke. George Enesco’s opera “Oedipus” has been
released on Angel-EMI, the first-ever recording of a kind of masterpiece by
Romania’s best-known composer. Comprehensive, six-CD surveys of Lutoslawski’s
music, and that of his countryman composer Karol Szymanowski, were released
last year on Poland’s Muza label. Krysztof Penderecki’s dark, intense “St.
Luke Passion” has been newly recorded, under the composer’s direction, on
Britain’s Argo label.
These matters are related. They suggest an emergence, a growing awareness, or
both, of a repertory of major significance, remote both geographically and
artistically from the musical mainstream. Sure, the mainstream Russian and
Soviet symphonic repertory has been with us for over a century. We’ve known
something, if not very much, about Polish music from a few salon tidbits by
Szymanowski and Paderewski’s Minuet in G. And Enesco’s first “Romanian
Rhapsody” has long been a pop-concert staple.
But the new music from Eastern Europe is none of the above. Szymanowski died in
1937, and it’s stretching a point, perhaps, to include him in a report of new
music. But these six CD’s of his works — big pieces, including three
extroverted, handsomely crafted symphonies, and stunning choral music — along
with the opera “King Roger” which Long Beach produced three seasons ago (and
which is also available in a recording on the Olympia label), point to a major,
original talent whose reevaluation in the West is long overdue. What’s more,
much of Szymanowski’s expressive style bears little resemblance to what anyone
else was doing in his time. Violently colorful in the Scriabin manner, it has
at the same time the jagged quirkiness of some of Stravinsky: a strange
mixture, but one which seems to work.
What you hear in Szymanowski’s music, most of all, is a fierce energy that
seems to stem from his obsession with breaking away from everyone else’s music.
And the generation of Polish composers that emerged after World War II —
Lutoslawski, and the younger Penderecki — picked up on that obsession.
Similar in intent, but not in style, to the revolutionaries of Western Europe –
– Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen above all — the new Poles set about
inventing their own musical language.
Life was made easy, for a time anyhow, by the cultural “thaw” that began in
1956 and lasted more or less until a new wave of artistic repression took hold
a dozen years later. While beleaguered Soviet musical renegades like Schnittke
were composing their progressive, abrasive scores in dark corners and
underground enclaves, Poland’s composers moved freely around the world, and
absorbed a broad spectrum of world outlooks.
Lutoslawski first came to the U.S. in 1962, invited by Aaron Copland to teach
at Tanglewood. We met that summer, and his warm, enthusiastic portrait of
Poland remains memorable: a land where the government sponsored no-strings
festivals of new art every autumn, where commissions for new works seemed to
grow on trees, where young composers could experiment in electronic labs and
study the works of Boulez and John Cage.
The cultural paradise Lutoslawski outlined in 1962 crumbled a few years later,
but the greatest of Poland’s composers did survive — at home in Lutoslawski’s
case, in exile for Penderecki.
Lutoslawski talked at our meeting, more than a quarter-century ago, about his
own musical tendency toward the kind of chance techniques explored by John
Cage, devices which allow the performer a certain range of choice within the
broad outlines of the piece. He had, at the time, made his first venture into
chance music with his “Venetian Games” for chamber orchestra, and that
captivating work (included in the Muza record series) retains its
freshness.
But the Third Symphony, which is on Lutoslawski’s Philharmonic program this
coming Thursday night (repeated Saturday night and Sunday afternoon) is
stronger yet. Even though long passages threaded throughout the half-hour work
challenge the orchestra’s powers of improvisation, the symphony as a whole
seems to derive its terrific energy and sense of cohesion from just those
creative challenges. It stands as one of the great symphonic creations of our
time, far removed from anyone else’s conception of how symphonies are supposed
to be built, fresh and explosive on its own.
(You may also remember that this work was on the Philharmonic program the day
Los Angeles first discovered the fresh-faced youth named Esa-Pekka Salonen. His
recording, for reasons beyond rational explanation, comes bundled at the end of
a two-disc set of Messiaen’s preternaturally vulgar “Turangalila” Symphony:
like having to buy a whole overcooked meatloaf blueplate special in order to
get the salad.)
Anyhow, Lutoslawski is with us this week, first with the Philharmonic New Music
Group tomorrow at the Japan-America Theater, in a program that also includes,
besides three chamber-orchestra Lutoslawski scores, a short work of
Szymanowski and another by a composer as yet unknown here, Pawel Szymanski. Do
not confuse the two; they are Poles apart.
As Szymanowski stood apart in his own time, so did Enesco in his: violinist
beyond compare, mentor (to, among others, the young Yehudi Menuhin),
extraordinary conductor and, least known of all, a remarkable composer.
“Oedipus,” comes to records from a startlingly star-studded studio session at
Monte Carlo in June, 1989 (Jose Van Dam as Oedipus, Barbara Hendricks, Brigitte
Fassbaender, Gabriel Bacquier, with Lawrence Foster conducting). Like “Roger”
for Szymanowski, “Oedipus” was to be for Enesco his crowning achievement. He
struggled with it over most of a lifetime, until it finally achieved a premiere
in 1936 — only to disappear almost immediately.
It deserves better. It is a work of dazzling ambition, even if only fitfully
realized. The evocation of antiquity through a kind of contrived paganism is
extravagant, absurd at one moment, truly grandiose at another. Now and then the
fraudulent exoticism of Carl Orff comes to mind, but this is better, more
honest stuff. There is a genuine lyricism here; Enesco’s own adoration for the
sweet fragrance of Gabriel Faure’s songs is easy to detect.
The music is dense and difficult; it would be hard to imagine a major opera
house taking it on, yet a major house would be needed for the opera’s extreme
difficulty. At least there is this recording, and it casts a magnificent
shadow.

The season winds down, but happily. Tuesday night’s concert at Royce Hall was,
indeed, a most happy and vital occasion: challenging, joyous and
rewarding.
Gidon Kremer is an old friend; he has performed here as violin soloist with the
Philharmonic, as recitalist on his own, and as a chamber player. Tuesday’s
program was none of the above; it had Kremer sharing the stage with another
violinist, nothing more. The other violinist, new to these parts, was none
other than Tatyana Grindenko. At one time she and Kremer were married, raising
a family in Moscow. Then he defected from both home and homeland, and found new
worlds and new wives in other lands. Grindenko, meanwhile, won a few prizes and
amassed a career on her own. Now, with glasnost, she is beginning to earn a
worldwide reputation.
Well she might; she’s an exciting performer, eloquent and gifted with a
dazzling technique. She made her way into a killer piece by Luciano Berio, the
“Sequenza VIII” for solo violin, snapped a string, fixed it and began the
whole work over again — an evening’s toil in itself for most violinists.
On his own, Kremer delivered a stupendous reading of the Bach Chaconne, the
only really familiar work on the program. He also took on six rather sweet
little Zodiac-inspired pieces by Stockhausen (the same music we heard when the
EAR Unit did his “Belly Music” a couple of months ago).
Together (Kremer plus Kremer, if a note of cuteness may intrude) the pair
played some truly fascinating music. First came a strange duet piece by the
late Luigi Nono, Italy’s great political and musical rebel — his last work,
entitled “We must go forth.” LIke most of Nono, this was a piece as much
theatrical as musical; the performers circle one another like slow-moving
panthers, coming to rest and playing some music off at the edge of audibility,
then moving on again. Irritating? Hypnotic? Nono had a way of being both.
Finally came the Prokofiev Two-Violin Sonata of 1932, and where has it been all
our lives? Wonderful music, this, from Prokofiev’s most robust period: four
tiny, terse movements full of charm, wisdom and, in the scherzo, some
enchanting arrogance. Violinist and violinist {cq} joined forces as one, in a
performance that came across as nothing less than a revelation. For dessert
there was a delicious ham sandwich, a pastiche of various romantic composers’
treatment of the famous “Carnival in Venice” tune, hilariously tossed off
with a hilarious larger-than-life delivery to send happily homeward a loving
but undersized crowd.

In its 14 years of presenting the joys of the Gilbert and Sullivan repertory in
unalloyed, untampered estate, Richard Sheldon’s Opera a la Carte has racked up
an impressive string of triumphant productions. It would be hard to imagine,
even so, a performance of more consistent delight than the company’s “Pirates
of Penzance” given this past Saturday night and Sunday afternoon before
capacity crowds at Ambassador Auditorium.
At a time when some producers feel the need to update these wise and witty
Victorian treasures with modern settings or revisionist jokesmanship, Sheldon’s
company remains steadfast in its belief that the authors knew best. Without any
sense of merely ransacking some museum of bygone mannerisms, Sheldon’s stage
direction has always been directly descended from the comic routines of the
works’ own times.
Better yet, he also clings to pristine orchestrations and full-length musical
numbers. Frank Fetta’s pit band for this “Pirates” may have been undersized,
but the sounds — the marvelous Mendelssohnian wind scoring in particular —
had the ring of authenticity. Above all, Sheldon’s company honors the most
important of all Gilbert-and-Sullivan rubrics, the demand for crisp, flawless
English diction. (Some well-placed floor-level microphones also helped
immeasurably, of course.)
So did the performance itself, an unusually strong and consistent cast this
time around, with a superb pair of lovers in Patrick Gallagher and Lova Lee
Hyatt and, of course, the redoutable Sheldon himself as the nimble-tongued
Major General. Joining them as welcome guest was the grandiose veteran of G&S
performances on two continents, the d’Oyly Carte veteran Donald Adams, whose
Pirate King is simply one of the great creations in any kind of musical theater
these days. Among the day’s veterans, a low bow is also due the magnificent
Eugenia Hamilton, who has done the repertory “heavies”– the nursemaid Ruth,
this time — with the company since its founding.
This, then, is a company to cherish, not only for its own work but also for its
missionary services in keeping this marvelous repertory alive. (Sheldon, for
example, has just been appointed artistic director of the Colorado Gilbert and
Sullivan Festival at Boulder this summer.) For this, and for one of the
season’s most delightful afternoons, “three cheers and one cheer more” are
very much in order.