So I've Heard

Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings, out of which eight members of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic played the living daylights at the University of Judaism’s
Gindi Auditorium on Monday night, stirs the listener’s spirit in two quite
different ways. First there is its own store of beauty and exquisite
workmanship, to hold us spellbound over its half-hour-or-so length. But it is
also a humbling experience; what had we mere mortals accomplished at age 16 to
equal what the juvenile Mendelssohn had here created?
Even against the miracles by the adolescent Mozart, this Octet holds its own.
Mozart at 16 was making sublime use of a musical language in common usage at
the time. Mendelssohn invented a language: the long, poignant song melodies of
the slow movement, the elfin trippings of the scherzo, the exultant, visionary
outbursts that round off the cadences in first movement and finale.
The wonder of the Philharmonic performance — by Mitchell Newman, Guido Lamell,
Lawrence Sonderling and Judith Mass, violins; Evan Wilson and John Hayhurst,
violas, and Daniel Rothmuller and Stephen Custer, cellos — was the players’
remarkable response to the work’s fund of creative exuberance. It wasn’t
exactly a careful performance, but its flaws — a pushed note now and then, an
attack not quite precise — seemed to stem from the composer’s own daring.
It was almost as though all of us in that hall, on stage and off, had become 16
again for the duration of the music. At the end we all whooped and cheered like
16-year-olds, because that was what the performance, and the music, deserved.
This was one of the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society series at Gindi, seven
concerts through the season of interesting, stimulating programs played by the
orchestral members and occasional guests (pianist Yefim Bronfman next time, for
example, on February 4). If the Mendelssohn gave the evening its warmest glow,
it wasn’t the only delight.
Before had come five duets from 1911 by the Russian composer Reinhold Gliere,
scored for two cellos and played this time by cellist Stephen Custer and
bassist Jack Cousins: dippy little pieces sometimes perky and sometimes merely
gooey. Then came Prokofiev’s 1924 G-minor Quintet for winds (oboist Carolyn
Hove and clarinetist David Howard) and strings (violinist Barry Socher, violist
Meredith Snow and bassist Peter Rofe): marvelous sweet-sour music from the
Russian composer’s most experimental years. In a strange way, the Prokofiev and the Mendelssohn made a fascinating pairing.
Both works were about breaking through; both owe much of their appeal to that
very act of pushing back musical horizons. In both work — all evening, in fact
— the players seemed aware of the special kind of greatness in this music. It
came across.

Any lingering doubts as to the high place of Witold Lutoslawski among today’s
progressive composers can now be set aside. Thursday night the great Polish
composer led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program of his own music, and
drew the kind of cheers from a Music Center Philharmonicaudience unheard in
those precincts for a new-music concert since — well, since Lutoslawski’s last
visit there eight years ago.What is this, about Lutoslawski’s bristling, uncompromising music that exerts
this power, even over a large Philharmonic Thursday-night subscription
audience, an aggregation not noted for its spirit of adventure? It’s a quality
hard to define, but it works its spell nevertheless. Lutoslawski ended
Thursday’s program with his Third Symphony, now eight years old. It is a
strange, wondrous work, lasting about half an hour, fearsomely difficult for
the players, who must not only play passages of demanding virtuosity, but must
also make certain decisions on their own as to how the music fits together.
Yet the music, for all its abrasive counterpoint and dissonance, has a built-in
power to communicate. Whether you follow its intricacies with a score, or let
the music wash over you, somehow its violence, its surges of irresistible
energy, come across. Against all the doomsayings about music’s future, here is
a testimony to the continued strength of the symphony as a musical form.The composer, a sure and eloquent conductor of his own music, chose a beautiful
program to illustrate milestones along his own career path. To begin there was
an early work, the 1958 “Funeral Music” in memory of the greatly admired Bela
Bartok, whose music had long cast its spell over the younger composer.Composed
entirely for string ensemble, the work did indeed evoke such deep mysteries in
Bartok’s music as the slow movement of the Concerto for Orchestra.Bartok again played a role, curiously enough, in the latest work on the
program, the 1988 Piano Concerto, written for Christian Zimerman and
beautifully played by him on this occasion. Are those bird-like chirpings at
the start a tribute to
Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto? And might the tendency of the work to snap in
and out of a somewhat romantic posture — with an echo of, say, Scriabin here
and there — also be a tribute to that attractive last work that Bartok did
not live to finish? The excursions into romanticism are brief and congenial. The concerto is a
clattery, upbeat work, lasting about 25 minutes, that ought to become popular.
If it lacks the fierce thinking of Lutoslawski’s earlier masterpieces, in
delivers its own treasurable message: the greatest among our geniuses are the
ones who know how to smile.

Bored with the perishable artifacts of our own time, we travel far in search of something rooted in history. We come out of Rome’s train station to have our sensors astounded by the ruined grandeur of Diocletian’s Baths; we marvel at the enduring dome fashioned by Michelangelo over St. Peters. We don’t have to travel that far, however, to walk in the tracks of other civilizations of other times. There are some closer at hand, no further away than, say, New Mexico. Nobody can pretend, of course, that the remnants of the Indian civilizations that once thrived around Santa Fe can satisfy the same esthetic cravings as do the artworks of Italy. The hand of a Michelangelo may be absent; nomadic tribes tend not to cultivate stable artists. But the sense of history grabs us even so. The towering sandstone towers loom large over Pecos; the hillsides at Bandelier National Monument tell of multiple dwelling-places that make today’s condos seem puny. Santa Fe’s motivating passion is an obsession with its past. Sure, the clustered galleries along Canyon Road, and the clustered menus of the new restaurants around the Plaza, sing of the trendy, the mod. But let someone violate the ancient building code, put up a gas station or burger joint that breaks out of the adobe-bungalow cliche of the local architecture, and watch the vigilantes swarm. The adobe fetish borders on the absurd in downtown Santa Fe, but the devotion to the distant past is ardent and genuine in the surroundings. Pecos and Bandelier lie in opposite directions out of town, an hour’s drive in each case; you could do them both in a day, but that wouldn’t do them justice. Each of them tells of a way of life both pastoral and hazardous. The Santa Fe Plateau is ringed with narrow, deep valleys. Today they are semi-arid, washed by occasional flash floods but basically hostile to serious agriculture. That wasn’t the case, however, 800 years ago when, as near as anyone can tell, tribes of nomadic Indians pushed their way into the area from other blighted regions and found the land hospitable. Along the Pajarito Plateau northwest of the city the Anasazis (“ancient ones”) planted corn, beans and squash. At about the same time the Pueblo Indians settled along the Pecos River to the southeast; their farms were, if anything, more prosperous than those of their northern neighbors, and they developed a lively trade with neighboring tribes. In both places, the tribes dug in. The cliffs that frame Bandelier (which, by the way, takes its name from the Swiss archeologist Adolph Bandelier, who first surveyed and wrote about the ruins) are pockmarked by deep caves, the work of millennia of running water through sandstone. These gave the dwellers shelter, and also provided a way of anchoring huge dwelling complexes that seemed to lean back against the hill for support. Today we walk the two-mile trail through the valley, marvel at the extent of surviving foundations of living quarters on level land, and make the gentle climb up the cliffside to peer into the abandoned quarters of a people who once lived well on this land. Nobody knows why the Bandelier settlements failed, but around 1550, after four untroubled centuries, they simply fell apart. Drought, disease, massacres by unfriendly tribes: all explanations are plausible. The lot of Pecos’ Indians was somewhat more dramatic. By the 1500s the settlement numbered nearly 2000; the main pueblo, whose foundation remains, stood over five stories high and contained something like 660 rooms. Interspersed among the high-rises were the underground rooms (kivas) used for ceremonies. In the late 1500s the Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado arrived from the south, hellbent in his search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. Coronado and his followers sacked the pueblo; the Indians crept out under darkness, waited for the Spaniards’ departure, and then returned. By 1620 the Pecos pueblo had become gentrified. The Franciscans brought Christianity and built a church whose bulk dominated the landscape. A people’s revolt in 1680 destroyed the church, whereupon an even larger one took its place. That must have been some edifice for its time; what remains of its gigantic tower and huge encircling walls attest to the Christians’ obsession with making their message visible. By 1840 the Pecos Indian population had dwindled down to a couple of dozen. The land became overgrown; the mysterious round underground rooms filled in with the detritus of ages. Again, as at Bandelier, it was an outside archeologist — Alfred V. Kidder, in 1915-27 — who dug into both the stones and the history of Pecos, and restored it to view. The Pecos land fell eventually into private hands, those of rancher Buddy Fogelson and his wife, the actress Greer Garson. The Fogelsons donated the pueblo site to the government in 1964. Stop off at the Visitors’ Center at the entrance to the park; that soft, mellifluous British voice that narrates the ten-minute film is Greer Garson (Mrs. Miniver, to those of us of a certain age). Even if you’re old enough to remember Greer Garson movies, the circuit of Pecos is an easy stroll. You climb the ladder down into the restored kivas, and sense the isolation that made these rooms into magic places. From the rise near the church ruins, you can look down along the rolling Pecos Valley in one direction, or out to the truck and bus traffic along Interstate I-25 in another. The choice is yours.

Nobody has yet devised a more congenial concert companion than the six
“Brandenburg” Concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach, and it’s not likely that
anyone ever will. That being so, it should come as no surprise that UCLA’s
Royce Hall was packed to the rafters on Friday night, to hear Iona Brown and
the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in their elegant, bewitching performances of
all six of these marvelous orchestral essays.
A word, first, about that current bugaboo known as “authentic performance.”
If you look through the latest record catalogue, you’ll find several dozen
complete “Brandenburg” recordings: symphony orchestras, ensembles of
instruments from Bach’s own time, even an electronic version or two. The Los
Angeles Chamber Orchestra, made up as it is of sturdy studio freelancers, who
play Bach by night to purge their souls after playing panty-hose commercials by
day, makes no attempt to preserve the “authentic” sound of early instruments.
There are, after all, many other ways to honor the authentic spirit of old
music.
The performances Friday night handsomely illustrated the best of those ways.
Brown, conducting the ensemble while playing first violin (a perfectly
authentic touch, by the way) still allowed her group such modern expressive
techniques as crescendos, slowdowns at the ends of movements, and a marvelous
way of keeping the great Bach tunes aloft.
Yes, there were points where “authentic” instruments might have helped
clarify some inner voices. In the first movement of the first of these
concertos, the horns play a triplet figure to conflict with the eighth-note
passages in the rest of the orchestra, and chances are that no power on earth
can make that particular effect audible with the heavy tone of modern
instruments. In the first movement of the last of these concertos, however, the
solo violas in modern-instrument performances are nearly always buried by the
rumblings of cellos and basses, as they were this time. There is no question
that a lighter tone from the lower instruments would help to improve
balance.
Some of Friday’s playing, therefore, did fall heir to these performance
hazards. But there were so many redeeming features — the burbling flutes in
No. 4, the deliciously squawking oboes in the last movement of No. 1, and the
over-all vitality of Brown’s visions of these wondrous works — that it would
be downright mean-spirited to dwell upon passing deficiencies. It was a great
night for Bach and, therefore, for us all.

Even allowing for his usual boyish exuberance, Peter Sellars overstated the case for Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” only slightly, in his preamble to his famous video versions aired last winter. “A completely shattering experience,” he called the opera, “an evening in Hell.” “Don Giovanni” is all that, at least. If Mozart’s incredible artwork can strike modern ears that way (as it is bound to, when the Music Center Opera gives it the first of a five-performance run on October 7) think of what its effect might have been on its first audiences, in Prague 204 years ago. Even allowing for Prague as the most sophisticated artistic capital in Europe at the time, nobody had ever tried to put into an opera the devices that Mozart hurled into “Don Giovanni.” Opera at the time was usually beautiful, sometimes sublime, but it was still an entertainment of fairly conventional construction, a succession of musically independent separate numbers. The action went forward in the recitatives, then the characters held back and examined their feelings in the arias and duets. Even “The Marriage of Figaro,” Mozart’s masterpiece of 1786, the year before “Don Giovanni” starts out in time-honored fashion: a vocal number, some recitative accompanied only by the keyboard player, another vocal number, etc. “Don Giovanni” was like none of the above. Just take the first ten-or-so minutes; they burst through every convention of the time. Before we’ve even settled in our seats, Mozart (and, don’t forget, his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte) have stopped our breath. The overture, usually some joyous orchestral exercise (as in “Figaro”) that doesn’t necessarily relate to the music itself, starts off this time with the horrendous, jagged dissonances that will return, three hours later, to escort its miscreant hero to the Underworld. The overture doesn’t even come to a full stop; we are swept along into Leporello’s first aria, as the servant grumbles at his lot in life. Already that short pieces plunges us into the atmosphere of social awareness and struggle that will become a supporting thread as the opera unfolds.That short aria, too, doesn’t round off to a full ending. It breaks off. In bursts the Don himself, and clinging to him is Donna Anna, his latest attempted conquest. Is Anna trying to capture him? to shake loose of him? to get him to complete the rape? The music doesn’t stop its headlong pace long enough to tell us. The Commandant arrives; he and the Don fight and the old man is murdered, while Leporello, hidden on the sidelines, chatters away like a demented bassoon. Five minutes of overture, five more minutes of continuous, violent action: no opera in the world zooms so violently, so suddenly into orbit. Three hours later, it still hasn’t faltered. No less overtly than Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” or Strauss’ “Salome,” “Don Giovanni” draws its motive power from human sexuality. “We don’t have the words to talk about it,” Sellars has said, “but Mozart’s music goes right into the dark crevices of the human soul.” How soon that shows up in the opera! Soon after the murder we confront one of Giovanni’s latest rejects, Elvira, stalking the countryside like a starved panther, the archetypal woman driven mad by love (as with Dido of “The Trojans” here only last week). She comes onstage, her madness in full flower. She tries an aria, but Mozart keeps breaking off the vocal line into short, jagged phrases. That short spray of broken-off, confused declamation does, indeed, get into the crevices of Elvira’s soul and lay bare her passion. Mozart’s music has broken out of the notion that pretty tunes merely decorate a dramatic situation; words, music and emotion become the parts of a single-minded, intense drama. Mozart’s ability to match music to character is phenomenal. At one end of the social scale there is the jilted, high-born Elvira. At the other end there is the gullible peasant girl Zerlina. Moments after the first Elvira scene, Giovanni is all over the innocent maiden, trying to lure her back to his palace. Their duet, “La ci darem la mano,” is probably the opera’s best-known piece; it is a grand tune, but also a fabulous demonstration of music’s power over the mind. The device is simple enough: Giovanni lays down his proposition in a long musical phrase. Zerlina’s answering phrase is equally long. But as the message takes hold, the phrases get shorter, the two characters move closer together (on the stage and in their music), until they’re finally singing in close harmony. What more do you need to translate the act of seduction into music? No opera of any era works on so many levels of perception. Sellars’ controversial conception, with its background of gang warfare in a contemporary urban slum, had lifted the proportion between what was innovative in the opera in its own time and its social milieu, and transferred those proportions exactly to our own time. Again, it was the depth of Mozart’s own work that enabled the Sellars perception to achieve its purpose. Take, as proof, one final example. In the party scene that ends the first act, Mozart has pulled another amazing trick, to describe purely in musical terms the levels of society assembled in that grand salon in Giovanni’s palace. The aristocrats dance a minuet; the middle-classes do a contra-dance in contrasting rhythm; the peasants do some sort of clog-dance in yet another rhythm. Mozart’s incredible genius allows us, for a moment or two, to hear all three dances simultaneously, as if it were, indeed, possible for people on different social levels to coexist. But that dream is quickly shattered. Giovanni has gotten Zerlina off to a side room, and proceeds to dismantle her virtue. One scream from the girl, and the onstage dancing idyll is shattered. The social message is blindingly clear. The classes of society can coexist, only if the right of the upper class to rape the lower class remains intact. Imagine, putting all this into an opera! It only happened once, which is why “Don Giovanni” remains in a class by itself. Beyond doubt, Jonathan Miller, who directed the Music Center Opera’s production and Bob Israel, who designed it, have a vastly different “Don Giovanni” for our delectation here next week. But the power of the work remains. line Space”Don Giovanni” isn’t the only work of musical theater on the horizon, however. On October 4 and 5, at UCLA’s Royce Hall, Paul Dresher’s “Pioneer” will have its local premiere. If you know Dresher’s previous pieces, “Slow Fire” and “Power Failure,” with their brilliant fusion of pop, rock and extraordinary electronic invention, their devastating range of stage metaphorfor the myth and reality in contemporary life, you need no urging to make tracks for this latest venture. Old Dresher hands, among them the amazing singer/dancer Rinde Eckert, are again involved. Be there.

“You have to realize,” says a contestant at Moscow’s Ninth International
Tchaikovsky Competition, “that two weeks from now, one of us will be a world-
renowned pianist, and the rest of us will be right where we are, or maybe
running shops.” Honest, cynical and dismaying, the comment epitomizes Bill
Fertik’s 90-minute documentary on the competition, airing at 8 p.m. tonight on
KCET-TV (with simulcast on KUSC-FM). It may be the first clear-headed appraisal
ever put on film of the grueling psychological and physical horror of today’s
music competitions.
The irony, of course, is that Fertik has aimed his cameras at the latest
running of the very event that first put international virtuoso competitions in
the limelight. If Van Cliburn’s win at the first Tchaikovsky contest in the
summer of 1958 sent the Texas superboy into orbit, it did the same for the
whole institution of the competition.
Thirty-two years later Cliburn himself has all but disappeared from the scene;
his “comeback” concerts last year went nowhere. The competition in Fort Worth
that bears his name has become a ludicrous media circus. And the competition in
Moscow that launched him has, as Fertik’s probing cameras make devastatingly
clear, deteriorated into a parade of peevishness, bickering, unethical conduct
by both judges and contestants and over-all mismanagement. A dreadful paradox
obtains: a big competition win is still the best way to launch a career, and
yet there are so many competitions these days that the value of a big win has
sunk pathetically.
Fertik’s excellent documentary zeroes in on two contestants who become friends,
the American Stephen Prutsman and the Soviet Boris Berezovsky. Against a
background of Moscow in the throes of perestroika’s economic hardship —
terrible restaurant food, poor hotel service, pianos in disrepair and a paucity
of practice space — the two somehow hammer their way to the top. Berezovsky
takes the top prize but Prutsman, who comes in fourth, becomes a huge crowd
favorite. Tall, lanky and golden-haired, he is greeted as a Cliburn
reincarnation.
Does it matter? The history of competition winners lists few who went on to
long-term careers. At least Fertik’s documentary captures this air of pathos
and frustration. Comparison with Peter Rosen’s goody-goody piece on the 1989
Cliburn Competition (aired last winter on PBS as “Here to Make Music”) is
inevitable. This one tells it as it is.

Classical music is dead. So began a column encountered recently, by some writer
beyond the mountains hiding behind the generic name of Jones. The premise of
his morose words is that the giants have fled, and that they have taken their
art with them. The giants in this instance are Herbert von Karajan, who died
last year, and Leonard Bernstein, who left us last October.
Nobody with a working pair of ears takes this kind of guff seriously. Classical
music has died, with commendable regularity, throughout civilized history. It
died, attended by great public sorrowing, with Handel in 1759, with Beethoven
in 1827, with Verdi in 1901. It died less publicly noticed, with Mozart in 1791
(as we will not be allowed to forget in the anniversary year to come) and, most
tragically of all, when Schubert’s unfinished life ended in 1828. “Every day a
little death,” runs a lyric in a Stephen Sondheim show, and Sondheim is one of
several living proofs that music lives on, and gloriously.
The passing of Karajan and Bernstein happens, in fact, to be especially
inadequate testimony to the demise of music. Both were, themselves, capable and
confessed guardians of a dead art. Bernstein himself admitted as much more than
once. Karajan would have done the same if he had had Bernstein’s gift for the
public statement. Music’s particular glory has been its power of self-renewal,
and it has possessed that power since the time of the ancient Greeks. It feeds
upon itself to nourish its continual powers of growth and of change. It
preserves its own corpses with immaculate skill. Karajan was adept at this, and
so was Bernstein. The deaths of embalmers and pall-bearers do not, as writer
Jones would have us believe, spell out the death of the civilization they
serve.
What this writer mistakes for death, actually, is nothing more than the latest
stage in a pattern that runs through all the arts at all times. The phenomenon
of the charismatic conductor, engaged in a two-way mystic relationship (with
the music and with the audience) did, indeed, come to its long-drawn-out end
with the passing of these two masters of the podium. Already, in their time, a
rebirth of classical music had taken place in the presence of another species
of conductor. Rather than placing his own podium manner at the center of the
performance, this new breed relinquishes some of the spotlight to the music
itself. Some do it with a great show of concern for the “authentic” sounds of
music of the past. Others stay with the traditional sounds of the symphony
orchestra, and accomplish their new-fangled results though the force of their
intelligence.
It is the pastime of the media to replace fallen giants with their latter-day
clones. On Public Radio last week there was a serious and extended discussion
of who would be the next Aaron Copland; similar discussions in past months were
similarly concerned with “the next Bernstein.” These discussions, in both
cases, missed one most important point. There is no need for another Bernstein
or another Copland. These giants themselves fought the battles: for American
music, for young American conductors. Why reenact these struggles, when the
fruits of victory are already at hand? (The Copland replacements decided upon,
if you care, were Elliott Carter and John Adams.)
The easiest refutation for the notion of classical music’s death, of course, is
to direct our attention to those many who stand in living disproof. This being
the season of list-making, therefore, here is a handy list of ten guardians of
the future of music. It is not, please note, the one definitive top-ten
listing, but it’s a start. They are listed in no order except the way they
first came to mind.
[*] bo. Evgeny Kissin [B] The 19-year-old Soviet whizbang has served
irrefutable notice that the age of the musicianly romantic pianist has
recommenced. Unlike the torrent of flashy fingerwork paraded on and off our
concert stages in recent years, this sobersided, fiendishly talented youngster
plays real music. Check out the RCA album of his Carnegie Hall debut if you
still don’t believe.
[*]bo. Simon Rattle [B] Now 35 and, thus, safely out of the prodigy category,
Rattle has redefined the role of symphonic conductor in two ways. First, he has
taken hold of the cultural growth of his community (Birmingham) and has gone
most of the way to establish the city as a major British arts venue. Second,
his own versatility (Bach, Gershwin, Stravinsky, etc.) sounds the final knell
of the notion of a separating wall beween serious and pop.
[*]bo. James Levine [B] Not the greatest, but merely the most important of
traditional conductors, he has redefined opera — in his own Metropolitan and
in all houses — as a musical balance of singer and orchestra. Even when
results onstage are the despair of singing-buffs, he has made opera musically
valid once again.
[*]bo. Peter Sellars [B] Phenomenally interesting at all times, even at his
brattiest, Sellars has redefined the whole realm of performance art as a close
interweaving: music as drama as music.
[*]bo. Carlos Kleiber [B] No, the spectacle of the mysterious, unapproachable,
perfectionist conductor is not quite dead. Kleiber has achieved legend status
for the marvelous strength and clarity of his performance, for the narrowness
of his repertory (a fabulous opera conductor with only six operas in his
intellectual luggage) and for his penchant for cancelling when matters are not
to his liking. Like Maria Callas a generation ago, his stupendous performances
suggest that his idiosynacracies are worth putting up with.
[*]bo. Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina [B] Europe’s greatest composers,
Soviet masters of a wide range of expression, mostly abrasive and all of it
communicative. Schnittke’s Quartets and the Gubaidulina “OPffertorium,” on
records, are proof enough that there are still masterpieces to be created.
[*]bo. John Adams [B] A crossover darling, perhaps, but Adams’ major
contribution has been to compose thoroughly modern, approachable music within
traditional frameworks (including grand opera).
[*]bo. The Kronos Quartet [B] Like Adams, they are poised on the cusp of that
mythical barrier between serious and pop. What they play (Reich, Hendrix, a
medieval motet) they play with classical strength and depth. They make new
music matter, and that is a crucial accomplishment.
[*]bo. Stephen Sondheim [B] Like all the greatest artists, he forces upon us a
rethinking of artistic categories, and he bestrides the boundaries with assured
talent.
[*]bo. Thomas Hampson [B] The young American baritone has been opera’s latest
glory. (Check out his “Don Giovanni” on records.) Intelligent, versatile,
phenomenally endowed, he could be the cornerstone of opera’s next, eagerly
awaited golden age.
Hardly a pallbearers’ list, wouldn’t you agree?

Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, that grinning, gibbering fast ride across the
hellish environs, that most sacred of all symphonic monsters, ricocheted
dizzyingly through the Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center on Thursday night.
Everyone knew that Yuri Temirkanov, the Leningrad dragonslayer, would carry the
Los Angeles Philharmonic into outer space with his performance of this work in
this, the final event in his two-week guest stint. Everyone was right.
If there is such a thing as larger than larger than life, this work of Mahler’s
relatively tender years — be began it at 27 — is surely it. Even among the
wild jumble of his later works, nothing quite equals the Second for the
arrogance of its vision, the incredible variety of moods and devices that lie
across his path. Some conductors would minimize the breadth of contrasts and
impart to the work some sense of symphonic consistency. Not for Temirkanov,
however, this easy path.
It was, if anything, a performance full of illusion. It seemed, as it unfolded,
quite remarkably broad: a measured pace for the opening funeral march, a slow
dance through the andante with the opening upbeats oddly protracted, a finale
that swept toward the stage, inexorably but tantalizingly, from what seemed
like vast distances (but were only a few feet backstage, where the extra brass
and percussion were stationed). If Temirkanov’s tempo contrasts seemed extreme,
so did the dynamics, with the soft percussion strokes that began the finale
particularly memorable, and the quiet, other-worldly start of the final chorus
an effect bordering on the incredible.
Yet there was illusion here; a performance so broad, so full of sweeping,
mysterious oratory, seemed to go on for hours and yet ended up at the same
timing (82 minutes or thereabouts) as the swift-sounding, matter-of-fact
recordings by Georg Solti among others. Music plays tricks, and this strange
bulk of a symphony sounded, under Temirkanov’s fluent, intensely personal and
inventive direction, positively feather-light.
Mezzo-soprano Christine Cairns, remembered for her splendid solo in the Andre
Previn restoration of Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky” film score, seemed
somewhat out of her range in her first solo in the Mahler, but recovered nicely
for her brief invocation near the end. Soprano Susan Patterson’s brief last-
movement solo was properly angelic. And John Currie’s Master Chorale,
motionless on the stage for the first 70 minutes like silent watchers at the
brink of an inferno, blazed into its own brilliant life at the end. Wow.

Of all living composers generally accorded a place in the upper echelons, Hans
Werner Henze is one of the most difficult to classify. German by birth, his
musical inclinations are toward the earmarks of the French manner. To call him
a German Stravinsky is to propound an oxymoron, but the description comes
close.
This week’s Monday Evening Concert at the County Museum had as its final work a
major Henze score, 32 years old but unplayed on the West Coast up to now,
called, simply, “Chamber Music.” It is a work of great beauty, in that
special Henze manner in which beauty seems suspended in a dark void, both cold
and compelling.
The work, which runs 45 minutes, is a setting of a fragmentary text by the
mystical poet Friedrich Holderlin, meditations on beauty and on the
relationship of mankind to divinity. Henze has divided the text into six
sections, sung by tenor accompanied by guitar and, once in a while, a few wind
instruments. Between these songs, and again framing the entire work, are
passages for guitar, some solo and some with strings and winds. Quiet and
haunting, this is music that stays in the memory.
A recording exists, with the tenor Neil Jenkins on the Koch-Schwann label, but
Monday’s performance, conducted by Gerhard Samuel (one-time Los Angeles
Philharmonic associate conductor, now based in Cincinnati) was altogether
superior. Tenor Randall Gremillion curled his light, fluent voice beautifully
around Holderlin’s redolent poetry; guitarist David Tanenbaum, {cq} known on
his own for splendid recorded performance of Henze’s solo works, brought his
refined artistry to bear on this score. In a season marked by an unusual number
of truly rewarding new-music events, this one ranks high.
The concert began with Gremillion and the instrumental ensemble in an excerpt
from another major, neglected score, Luciano Berio’s wildly experimental work
of 1970 called, simply, “Opera.” (This was an evening for music with generic
titles.) It continued with Tanenbaum’s expert performance of Peter Maxwell
Davies’ rather faceless solo Guitar Sonata. Samuel himself was represented by
his “Outcries and Consolations,” a work for chamber ensemble, in its world
premiere.
Samuel, German-born and, later, a disciple of Paul Hindemith, is a composer of
some skill, in a rather academic style. Now and then some of his music gives
off sparks, but the new work seemed, on first hearing, like so much proficient
tinkering. On its own, however, the craftsmanship was constantly
impressive.

Historic site, historic sounds: the Tallis Scholars were in town again on Sunday
night, performing their superb repertory of Renaissance liturgical music, and
also performing their familiar miracle of cleansing the ears and raising the
spirit with the pure beauty of their singing.
This was the Scholars’ third visit, always under the aegis of MaryAnn Bonino’s
“Chamber Music in Historic Sites” series, this time at Pasadena’s handsome
neo-Gothic Westminster Presbyterian Church. The space was somewhat smaller than
last year’s venue (the First Congregational in downtown Los Angeles) and the
sound may have been a shade drier. But the gain was in clarity, the chance to
hear the contrapuntal lines in a Palestrina mass and a Lassus motet curl
gracefully and insinuatingly around one another.
Conductor Peter Phillips had chosen a program in keeping with the season, but
rewarding in any season. Anyone still under the delusion that all Renaissance
choral music sounds alike should have learned otherwise from the juxtaposition
of different composers’ settings of the same text: William Byrd’s quiet,
profound setting of “O magnum mysterium,” for example, against the simpler,
childlike setting by Palestrina. Clearly, the spectrum of musical styles was as
broad four centuries ago as it is today.
And anyone still deluded that early music is all dull and slow must have been
warmed and undeceived by the vitality of the ten-member Tallis group. Their
aim, since their founding in 1978, has been to recreate the authentic spirit,
rather than merely the sound, of old music. That, to Phillips, obviously means
letting go at times, of overstating, say the marvelous interplay of rhythms at
the end of the Gloria in the Palestrina “Ut re me fa” Mass, the crown of
Sunday’s program, to make its proper joyful noise.
And so, Phillips’ work is full of meaningful rhythmic liberties, all in the
quest for vitality. His choir includes women’s voices — five, against five
men, this year — because they are easier to put in tune than the customary
boys’ voices. The effect of his music-making, and that of his marvelously in-
tune small chorus, is to propound the gospel that, above all, early music can
be fun. Sunday’s concert, before a sold-out church, was fun all the way.