So I've Heard

And so the Philharmonic season ended, not with a whimper but with several bangs.
The final subscription concert, Thursday night at the Music Center, drew only a
small crowd; perhaps anything would be an anticlimax after the Salonen weeks.
Those who showed up were well rewarded, however.
John Nelson was the conductor, replacing the scheduled Neeme Jarvi; Peter
Frankl was the soloist, replacing the scheduled Zoltan Kocsis. The program
began with Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” replacing the scheduled
work by Eduard Tubin. Otherwise, there was the Bartok Second Piano Concerto and
the Dvorak Sixth Symphony, as scheduled.
Nelson, an old friend from the Cabrillo Festival as well as several Hollywood
Bowl appearances, is a practiced hand with an orchestra. Still, whoever dreamed
up the Ives as a concert opener must live on another planet. Four flutes
constituted the stage contingent; a small string ensemble played, pianissimo,
backstage; solo trumpeter Donald Green was somewhere in the loges — all
according to Ives’ plan in this haunting, nocturnal essay.
Yes, but… It took at least a minute, out of the work’s total of five, for the
people out front to realize the music had begun. The ushers slammed doors shut
during the music; the audience made the noises that Thursday night subscription
audiences usually make. This was listed as the work’s first hearing at a
Philharmonic concert, but it remains unheard.
Peter Frankl’s stunning traversal of the Bartok was thoroughly audible,
however: a big, rawboned, dazzling performance of some of the most difficult
piano music on this planet. What a work this is: the slithery, shimmering
scoring in the quiet moments, the thrilling moments when piano and orchestra
are transformed into some kind of super-drum. This performance was worthy of
the music, and then some.
Then came the delicious, rambunctious, lovable Dvorak, the perfect symphony for
a May evening. Elliott Carter once wrote of “Dvorak fans” as the “little
folk in the hills,” and Carter can go climb a tree. There is a special
grandeur in this music; it takes patience (especially as Nelson chose to
observe each and every one of the optional repeats) and it rewards patience.
Nelson was inspired to allot an extra mini-second or two to give the grand,
discursive themes plenty of breathing space, and it all worked. A lovely
ending, to a mostly splendid season.

The performers’ parts for Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, on the Boston
Symphony Orchestra’s music stands at the Music Center on Tuesday night, were
yellowed with respectable old age. They’re entitled; this was the orchestra,
after all, that gave the work its world premiere, on November 30, 1944, before
these very ears. (They then belonged to a second-balcony usher at Boston’s
Symphony Hall.)
To those ears, however, the historic relationship between the Boston Symphony
and Bartok’s autumnal masterwork has fallen on poor days. Under Seiji Ozawa’s
flamboyant but flippant direction the other night, Bartok’s exploration into
the personality of a great symphony ended up as merely an essay on how well the
Boston Symphony can perform. It was a performance that laid bare the subtle but
crucial difference between music-making and mere playing and came down,
unfortunately, on the wrong side.
The Boston Symphony plays very well, and always has. Its strings, even in an
unfamiliar and untried acoustical setting, have a burnished lustre superior to
the sound of any other American string section. Its winds are mellow virtuosi;
its brass can blow you out of your seat. And all of this has been known to come
together, now and then during the 18 years of Ozawa’s stewardship, in some
performances beyond reproach.
But Tuesday’s concert was the work of a tired orchestra under the command of a
leader in a rampaging mood. He led the orchestra on a cold-hearted dash through
Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, with a few moments most accurately described as
vulgar. He gave the Bartok no warmth of feeling, no regard for the rich humor
of the work. He did somewhat better with the dear, lightweight “Semiramide”
Overture of Rossini, in which the woodwinds chirped most engagingly and the
music took on something close to a sense of spirit and momentum.
But those last were exactly the qualities lacking in the rest of the concert.
It’s seldom realistic to judge any orchestra on tour, especially when the
realities of touring don’t allow for proper testing of a hall’s acoustic before
concert time. But there were signs, even so, that the Boston Symphony is not,
these days, in pristine shape — a temporary affliction, let us pray. 30.

Mention the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and good vibrations arise. Here is a
musical organization whose very name suggests longevity (210 years, in fact),
distinguished bloodlines (Felix Mendelssohn was one of its conductors) and
adherence to solid, middle-class virtues. (The Gewandhaus was the home of
Leipzig’s fabric merchants, and it once housed a concert hall as well.)
Current conditions bear out these virtues. Kurt Masur, its conductor for the
past 21 years, is known for his solid, middle-of-the-road recordings of the
most respected classical masters. Inevitably, he has recorded the Beethoven
Nine, and these performances are correct as correct can be. On top of all that,
he cuts a handsome figure, conducts most of his repertory from memory, and
gives off a most statesmanlike aura. New York, of whose Philharmonic he is
conductor-designate, will gobble him up after its years with the erratic Zubin.
“Erratic” and Kurt Masur are strangers to one another.
That being so, this report on Tuesday’s concert at the Music Center, the second
of three appearances by Masur and his orchestra in our midst these past few
days, ought to give off clouds of praise. It cannot, however. It wasn’t an
awful concert, just a dull one. Drowning as we are in the surfeit of Prokofiev
in this 100th birthday year, did we need another round of “Romeo and Juliet”
cuttings? Masur’s half-a-program’s-worth of excerpts may have included material
left out of the usual suites, but his orchestra’s strings were no match for the
passionate declamation of this ballet’s great moments. The music simply did not
dance.
The evening’s novelty, at least in name, was Hans Werner Henze’s “Seven Love
Songs,” a kind of anti-concerto for solo cello and large orchestra, its
inspiration drawn from English poems which, however, the composer declines to
name. There is nothing in it less than proficient. The orchestral palette is
vast, although sometimes to the point of overpowering the soloist. The style is
basic Henze: an eclectic mix, some Stravinsky, some merely generic-trendy-mod.
Henze’s stage works are brilliant, teeming with personality, even personal
rage. The blandness of this orchestral work, despite the eloquent pleading of
cellist Jurnjakob Timm and the orchestra, make it all the clearer that Henze’s
music is at its happiest when built around a text.
All this faceless music should have made the final work, Strauss’ perennial
“Till Eulenspiegel,” more than usually welcome. But where was the humor in
the work, the scamper, the blowsy tongue-in-cheek vulgarity? The performance
was merely careful. Even the solo horn sounded timid. Yet the crowd cheered on
and on, and for their trouble they got a reprise of the last moments of
“Till,” torn bleeding out of context. Is that any way to treat a tone
poem?

There were only two people on the stage, and not many more in the audience, for
this week’s Monday Evening Concert at the County Museum. The concert was
extraordinary even so, a reunion with one of the most remarkable musical minds
of our time.
Gyorgy Kurtag is reasonably well known among the new-music crowd. Five years
ago he made his first, and so far only, American appearance, as composer in
residence at the 1986 Ojai Festival. The lucky audiences there encountered a
shy, soft-spoken Hungarian gentleman in his early 60s. Better yet, they
encountered the richness, the robust iconoclasm of his music, especially his
song-cycle “Messages of R.V. Troussova,” which Susan Narucki sang
magnificently.
Monday’s concert was all one piece, Kurtag’s hour-long song-cycle “Kafka
Fragments,” and the remarkable Susan Narucki was again the singer, joined by
the equally remarkable Bay Area violinist Roy Malan. One song-cycle, 40 songs
(mostly extremely brief or, better said, compressed), one singer, one
violinist: that’s all it took for a powerful, fulfilling musical experience, as
much so as any of this season’s offerings at the Museum. That, in this
rewarding season, is saying a lot.
Kurtag’s texts are drawn from Kafka’s diaries and letters, fragmentary
impressions, sometimes just two or three words of stabbing eloquence. Around
these texts Kurtag weaves his two voices: the singer explicitly tied to the
texts, the violinist soaring on flights of fantasy inspired by the texts. Some
moments are overtly pictorial: the shrieking of birds, the undulating crawling
of snakes, a fiddler on a tramcar. Now and then the sharp-eared might detect a
reference to the work of Kurtag’s great countryman, Bela Bartok.
Kurtag does not flinch at wandering into exotic harmonic effects: quarter-
tones, a violin deliberately mistuned. You come away aware, not so much of the
juncture of composer, singer and instrumentalist, but of a oneness in which the
separate voices transcend themselves. “Kafka Fragments” is one of those rare
works, like the late Beethoven quartets, where the listener’s imagination is
teased to fill in around the sparseness of the music. Without stretching a
point, hearing this music in the capable care of these musicians became a
cleansing experience. Some sixty rapt listeners, adrift in an auditorium with
room for ten times as many, mustered a fine sendoff at the end. But where were
you?

Suddenly, there are Estonian composers where there were none before. The past
few years have seen the emergence of Estonia’s Arvo Part, whose quiet,
mystical compositions have won a large following. As Wednesday night’s County
Museum concert by the California EAR Unit suggested, Part is not the only man
of his country worth our attention.
The concert included Part’s best-known work, “Fratres,” an 11-minute, slowly
unfolding exploration of a single fragment of melody, repeated over and over
with a rhapsodic line taking flight above it. The work exists in many scorings;
here it has also been played by the Philharmonic and by the Kronos Quartet. At
the EAR Unit concert the performers were violinist Robin Lorentz and pianist
Vicki Ray. In any scoring, the work exerts its magic.
So did the evening’s other Estonian work, Errki-Sven Tuur’s [*] yes that’s the
way it’s spelled [F/L] “Architectonics III,” subtitled “Post Meta-minimal
Dream.” Unlike his countryman Part, who has emigrated to the West, Tuur (born
in 1959) remains in Estonia. “Architectonics III” is a striking work, 15-or-
so minutes of dazzling instrumental writing, somewhat touched by the style of
American minimalism, but also rhapsodic in a way that reveals the composer’s
exotic origins. Cold, glistening and exhilarating, the work nurtures a
listener’s desire to hear more from this remarkable composer.
The Estonian works were the program highlights; a thoroughly American work,
Michael McCandless’ “Against Nature” was not far behind. A charter member of
the EAR Unit at its founding in 1980, McCandless has since defected to the New
York area. His work, claims descent from “Against the Grain,” the famous
Huysmanns novel about non-conformity, and it might even be that the form of
this work — in which a long lyric line for clarinet seems to thread its way
through opposing forces from the rest of the ensemble — owes something to the
book.
That possibility aside, this is an attractive piece, strong and compelling. An
editor’s hand might help near the end; the composer seems to pass through a
number of logical stopping-places before finding the one that suits his fancy.
But the music was tidiness personified compared to the two other works on the
program: Greg Fish’s garrulous, unmannered “The Powers that Be,” and Mary C.
Wright’s self-consciously jazzy “He Don’t Care.”
Win a few lose a few; the collective skills of this attractive group of young
new-music wizards is, and was, never less than rewarding.

The Ardittis have done it again.Miracle workers in the cause of contemporary music, master musicians unafraid,
the London-based Arditti Quartet came to town once again on Tuesday night,
drawing a large (but not capacity) crowd to USC’s Bovard Auditorium, taking on
a fearsome program and…
Well, let’s pause there. Even the Ardittis’ splendid performance fell short of
transforming the Fourth Quartet of Elliott Carter into a silk purse, because it
simply cannot be done. Faced with all that desiccated note-spinning, the dense
clusters of notes pushed around on page after page with no apparent reason or
destination, the Ardittis at least succeeded in turning the whole dreary
exercise into a stupendous study in pure momentum. That much, on its own, was
exhilarating.
The Carter Quartet, and the Fifth Quartet of Bela Bartok, were the evening’s
“classics.” One of the Ardittis’ noble deeds, however, is to perform music by
local composers at many of their tour stops; they can apparently produce
handsome performances virtually at sight.
And so Tuesday’s program was pieced out with local works: Donald Crockett’s
1987 “Array” (which the Kronos Quartet also has played) and Stephen Cohn’s
“Eye of Chaos,” the latter in its world premiere. Both composers were born in
1951; Crockett is on the USC faculty, and Cohn is the vice-president of ICA
(the Independent Composers Association) which sponsored the program. Wheels
within wheels, you might say.
Neither score suggested itself as permanent repertory material for even the
most liberal-minded of performing groups, but the Crockett — 20 minutes or so
of carefully worked-out musical patterning with a fine academic hand at
dissonant counterpoint — was at least the work of a competent craftsman. Cohn,
a successful composer of film and TV scores, has pathetically overvalued his
own limited talents, producing music of the consistency of tepid mush, loaded
down with a sorry collection of worn-out cliches. Its position on the program,
after the Carter, should have saved it if anything could. Nothing could.
That left the grand, pulsating Bartok to bring about the evening’s one melding
of high performance and music worth the effort. What a work: sizzling, icy,
deeply mysterious in its nocturnal passages, hilarious in its tiny bit of nose-
tweaking at the end. And what a performance! Here, finally, the amazing
Ardittis rode to glory in a vehicle worthy of their efforts.

For a few hours last Saturday morning and early afternoon, the center of Los
Angeles’ musical life shifted northward from its usual downtown location to
some dusty, sunbaked real estate in the Santa Clarita Valley. The occasion was
“A Day in the Old West,”organized by the indefatigable MaryAnn Bonino as an
event in her “Chamber Music in Historic Sites” series.
The sites were nothing if not historic. In the morning the splendid local
group, the Santa Clarita Chamber Players, performed in the ancient (1887)
Saugus train station (moved from its original location but handsomely
restored). In the afternoon there was an old-fashioned outdoor brass concert in
the vast (and unrestored) ruins of Melody Ranch, Gene Autry’s old stamping
ground, in Placerita Canyon.
In between, there were the opportunities to ramble through other local
landmarks, including the one-time estate of another Western movie star, William
S. Hart, which now stands as a museum at the center of Hart Park in Saugus.
Ticket-holders were also furnished with a box lunch.
If this sounds like a happy, folksy outing, that’s pretty much what it was. The
Chamber Players’ concert did, to be sure, have its challenging side, including
a handsome set of songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams on William Blake texts,
scored for soprano and oboe and nicely performed by Maurita Phillips-Thornburgh
and Alan Vogel. Works by Haydn, Friedemann Bach and Villa-Lobos made up the
rest of the rewarding program.
The afternoon program made up for all that seriousness, however. The occasion
was folksy as all get-out, with the Da Camera Brass Quintet struggling to
protect their sheet music against the stiff breezes (some colorful clothespins
helped) and struggling less happily against the demands in a set of perky
little nose-thumbing marches by Charles Ives and a few Scott Joplin rags. The
crowd seemed happy, however. If nothing else, the afternoon afforded the crowd
of 150-or-so the chance for a start on this season’s suntans.

There were many empty seats at the Music Center at the start of Thursday night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert, and many more after intermission. The sounds of electronic beepers and the squeal of moribund hearing aids rang out in the vast spaces. Even after 250 years, the three-hour-plus bulk of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” is an intimidating presence. In all frankness, the work is a strange presence as a subscription event at a series mostly dedicated to noisy romantic symphonies. (It was even more out of place at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer of 1985, when the haunting moment describing the death of Jesus was punctuated by a car alarm.) Yet the nature of the work, its hold on the emotions of any listener willing to give in to its splendors, demands some kind of hearing in some kind of context. Peter Schreier, who conducted this week’s performances (repeated tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and Sunday afternoon at the Music Center) has dreamed up his own manner of presentation, and for the most part it worked; when it didn’t, on Thursday night, the fault was not his. Schreier is, of course, better known as singer than conductor; he can only conduct, he said recently, music that he also sings. The idea of combining the role of Bach’s Evangelist with conducting makes a great deal of sense, furthermore, since his is the central role in the work, and his own vocal lines tend to activate most of the music’s other elements. To make this work, Schreier has fashioned his view of the Evangelist’s music around a highly emotional delivery. He breaks through the mask of stylized Baroque singing. He erupts in anger and scorn at the lies and corruptions of those who have sent Jesus to the Cross; he melts in agony as he tells of Peter’s threefold betrayal. His Jesus was the marvelous young bass Olaf Baer, known chiefly for his splendid artsong recordings. The heartbreaking vulnerability of Baer’s delivery became the perfect balance to the intensity of Schreier’s conception. If only the other soloists had been up to this level! Memories of bygone Elisabeth Schumann, Janet Baker or Kathleen Ferrier recordings reflected no glory on the thin, pinched singing of soprano Ulrika Sonntag and contralto Elisabeth von Magnus. It was even more depressing to experience the watery singing of the tenor and bass arias by David Gordon and David Evitts, standing next to the singers — Schreier and Baer — who could have sent this music heavenward.It was, then, a only a fair representation of a work deserving far better. The Philharmonic’s forces performed well, as did a small contingent from the Master Chorale. The Paulist Boy Choristers, who sang the chorale that floats across the top of the amazing opening chorus, could barely be heard — the fault, most likely, of the curious stage arrangement to allow Schreier some eyeball contact with singers and orchestra, while singing toward the front.Oh well, it was a noble idea that almost worked. Sibelius next week; back, alas, to normalcy.

I HAVE ART, ONE VERTICAL; WILL BRING IN THURSDAY A.M. [F/L]The music at Wednesday night’s concert by Ensemble P.A.N. (“Project Ars Nova”)
may have been old in years, but it was thoroughly modern in spirit. It was, if
anything. fairly aflame with the energy of its own innovation.
This splendid ensemble. five singers and performers on instruments proper to
the Middle Ages and Renaissance, takes its name from a period of great change
in musical history, the “New Art” of the 14th and early 15th century.
Wednesday’s concert, of the County Museum’s low-priced Bing series, consisted
of a joyous romp over about a century of musical progress: vocal works both
sacred and secular, dances and instrumental versions of vocal pieces.
Naturally, we have to hear this music from a historical perspective. What
sounded strange and somewhat mannered in music of the Flemish Johannes Ciconia
(circa 1335-1411) was actually the work of one of the earliest contrapuntal
composers, working his colorful combinations of harmony and rhythm at a time
when virtually every new composition was a step into unexplored territory. Yet
this music — the motets and lovesongs, songs of celebration and warfare —
cannot be reckoned as primitive. It is highly developed, remarkably complex at
times, a likely forerunner in its intricacies of the manneristic painting of
two centuries later. It works best today, when heard by fresh ears free of too
much information about later musical developments.
Heard on its own, with the group’s splendid performance manner that, rightly,
perceived no harm in an occasional slowing-down of the pace, even a
“romantic” enhancement now and then of a particularly loving phrase, the
music sounded vivid, and timeless as well. In style, the program ranged from
the early mannerisms of Ciconia and his contemporaries, to the truly “modern”
music of Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) in which rhythms and harmonies become
“ironed out” to approach a style closer to our contemporary concert
experience.
Ensemble P.A.N. was founded in 1980 in Switzerland; its members are currently
scattered from Basel to Boston, coming together for occasional concert tours
and recordings (on the New Albion label). Their recordings so far — one of
secular music and one of music from a remarkable manuscript from the island of
Cyprus — were enough to draw a near-capacity crowd to the museum.
The presentation had its flaws; it didn’t occur to anyone until after the
intermission that there might be an incompatibility between furnishing printed
song-texts and turning the lights so low that they couldn’t be read. And midway
in the second half, one misguided listener wrecked the beautiful mood of the
musical flow by loudly demanding further program information from the
performers, then and there. It was, therefore, a better night for musical mannerism than for concert
manners. In any case, Ensemble P.A.N. deserves a R.A.V.E.

Like the shock waves streaming from Dr. Mesmer’s magnets that figure in its
dizzy plotline, Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” seems to have had a revitalizing
effect on the Music Center Opera. The production, cheered to the rafters at its
first performance on Monday night, represented enlightened opera at fairly
close to its best: stimulating, controversial and, for the most part,
beguiling. Four more performances of the opera are scheduled; any or all of
them are very much worth your while.
Sir Peter Hall created the production for the company in 1988, with his then
wife, Maria Ewing, as an alluring but grossly overdirected Dorabella. The Halls
have since divorced, and neither were on hand for this revival; Stephen Lawless
is credited with the updated staging, vastly different in tone, superior in
many respects, and definitely challenging. There is an unseen hand involved
here, as well: the hand of Peter Sellars, whose revisionist “Cosi,” seen on
television earlier this year, has made it virtually impossible to return to the
standard regard of the work as artificial, mannered comedy.
Perhaps Stephen Lawless has actually arrived at his view of “Cosi” free of
outside influences; that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the powerful,
truly dramatic tone he has achieved, in which the comedy of artifice and the
tragedy of deception and betrayal play equal roles. Conductor Randall Behr
must, of course, also be reckoned in these credits, since his altogether
original pacing of the score contributes much to the intensity of the
experience.
The result, to be sure, won’t be everybody’s “Cosi.” For one thing, every
scrap of music that Mozart wrote for the first or subsequent performances,
minus one short aria which he later replaced with a better long one, has been
restored: arias, ensembles and long stretches of recitative as well, music
usually cut in live performances and even on records. Behr’s pacing allows for
frequent long pauses (a Sellars trick as well) to give dramatic points plenty
of time for fermentation. The result, between the pauses and the restorations,
stretches the evening out to almost Wagnerian length; Monday’s performance came
in mere moments short of four hours.
Yet it was time well spent. The best news is that the six-member cast formed an
acting unit beautifully in tune with the staging concept: Christine Weidinger’s
violent, stupendously sung, sacred monster of a Fiordiligi, Jeanne Piland’s
dear, dithering Dorabella, Anne Howells’ deliciously frumpy Despina. (The
supertitles quite properly step around the “girl of 15 years” line of Howells’
big aria.) The male side of the cast was almost as fine: Rodney Gilfry’s first-
ever Guglielmo was another step up by this splendid young baritone, and veteran
Richard Stillwell’s Alfonso was, as expected, rock-solid. Only the Ferrando,
Jonathan Mack, whose long and valuable career has now brought him to the point
of strain, seemed in over his head.
The music is there, and it is honorably treated. John Bury’s handsome,
breakaway set leaves plenty of room for stagefuls of extraneous characters
without any sense of clutter. And there are arias sung in the moonlight of the
uncredited stage lighting that look almost as beautiful as they sound.
Considering that the sound is by Mozart, that’s saying a lot.
THE FACTS
What: The Music Center Opera’s production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.
When: 7:30 p.m., Saturday, April 15 and 17; 1 p.m. April 20.
Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Avenue, downtown L.A.
Behind the scenes: Staged by Stephen Lawless, designed by John Bury, conducted
by Randall Behr, with Christine Weidinger, Jeanne Piland, Anne Howells and
Rodney Gilfry.
Tickets: $15 to $80. Phone 213 480-3232 or 213 972-7211.
Our rating: * * *