So I've Heard

A mighty man, this Yuri Temirkanov. He proved it last month, when he brought his
own Leningrad Philharmonic to the Music Center and had it jumping through
hoops. He proved it again on Friday afternoon with the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, in the first of a two-program appearance as guest conductor.
As with the Leningrad, Friday’s program had been planned as all-Russian, but
Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City,” played to honor the late composer, was a
welcome substitution for a piece of Rimsky-Korsakov fluff. The gods move
strangely to bestow their favors.
Temirkanov is great fun to watch. He hurls himself around in the grand, old-
fashioned manner, with an occasional “how’m I doing?” look over his shoulder.
Some may find it all excessive, but even the naysayers can’t help but notice
Temirkanov’s galvanizing effect on the orchestra. Like Kurt Sanderling, but in
an entirely different way, he gets the players to give their best.
Nobody can really have wanted to hear Rachmaninov’s “Symphonic Dances,” the
big orchestral work that ended the program. But nobody could have expected the
music to gleam forth, in a grand burst of extroverted energy, as it did under
Temirkanov.
Arguably, this late work from Rachmaninov’s pen, with its occasional
interesting flicker of sinister, sardonic harmony and even a quote from the
“Day of Wrath” liturgical chant at the end, hangs together more cohesively
than some of his orchestral flapdoodle, but that isn’t saying much. That
Temirkanov found the impulse to make the music into a thrilling orchestral romp
is, however, saying much for the conductor’s skills.
Karine Georgian, 1966 gold medalist in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition, was
the splendid soloist in the Second Cello Concerto of Shostakovich: glistening,
sinister music wondrously played. Perhaps the First Concerto has more emotional
depth, but this work of 1966 is, all the way, a startling sound exercise. Most
interesting of all is the strange clickety-clack for percussion right at the
end, a curious anticipation of the 15th Symphony of six years later. Its quiet,
inward solo writing has few rewards for a mere virtuoso. Karine Georgian, who
has given much of her time to the new music of her Soviet countryman, brought
to the work the intelligence and imagination it requires. She is clearly a
major artist, here for the first time.
Later this week the flamboyant Temirkanov ends his visit by conducting Mahler’s
equally flamboyant Second Symphony, one of his few ventures here into non-
Russian repertory. Can’t you just taste it?

Ï€[*] laby2;p1205. By Alan Rich [B] Daily News Music Critic [B] TO JIM JOHNSON: NO OTHER ART AVAILABLE; GO WITH COPLAND [F/L]As the final event in its month-long celebration of Aaron Copland, underwritten
by the E. Nakamichi Foundation — meant originally to honor the composer’s 90th
birthday but now serving as a memorial as well — the forces of the U.S.C.
School of Music took up the considerable task of a complete performance of
“The Tender Land.” Composed in 1954, the work deserves some attention as
Copland’s only full-scale opera. Even so, and despite the valiant efforts of
well-trained student performers, nothing happened at Thursday night’s first
performance (of four this weekend) to vanquish the suspicion that “The Tender
Land” is better off as a statistic in the Copland legacy than an actuality on
the stage.
Horace Everett’s libretto is set in, as if you couldn’t guess, the American
midwest, where sweet Laurie falls for Martin the wanderer, only to be pulled
out of his clutches by her mean and glowering granddad. The plot evokes dozens
of well-known models, of which the play and movie called “The Heiress” comes
quickly to mind. Is it coincidence that Copland did the film score for that
very play?
The fault, however, lies not in the timeworn plot but in the facelessness of
Copland’s music, and particularly the clumsiness in almost all of his writing
for solo voice. There are fine things in “The Tender Land,” mostly in the
square-dancing choruses and orchestral interludes in the second act. But we
don’t need to look into this otherwise bland stage work to establish Copland’s
excellence in composing gfood square-dance music. E/P]
Of character depiction and dramatic impetus, there is little in Copland’s score
to establish its composer as any kind of master of the lyric stage. The opera’s
most famous vocal scene, a 12-minute duet for the two principals, is a collage
of small, incoherent patches. The musical idiom itself, Copland at his most
open-handed, the harmonies sweet and inocuous, demands some sort of melodic
profile and a sense of climax. None is readily at hand.
For the U.S.C. production conductor Larry Rachleff used a greatly reduced
orchestration, by Murry {cq} Sidlin, of Copland’s own revised and cut-down
orchestra, and in the dull acoustics of U.S.C.’s Bing Theater not much sound
got out of the pit. Thursday’s cast, one of two which will perform in
alternation, had Susan Holsonbake and Scott Herrick as the romantic leads; that
group will also sing on Saturday. Frans Boerlage’s staging had a curious
tendency to clump most of the action on stage right; he did, however, succeed
in drawing some lively action patterns out of the U.S.C. Chamber Singers, who
consituted the chorus.
THE FACTS
*What: the U.S.C. Opera performance of Aaron Copland’s “The Tender
Land.”
*Where: Bing Theater, U.S.C. campus, near the Jefferson/McClintock
entrance.
*When: 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday.
*Tickets: $4-$7.50; for information call 213 743-7111.

So vast is the expanse of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, so audience-
involving its outlay of violent, palpable emotion, that any performance that
gets through the work unscathed is bound to seem at least skillful. Even so,
the performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Kurt Sanderling on
Thursday night must rank as an extraordinary achievement.The music — 85 minutes of heaven-storming, demoniacal grimacing and, at the
end, sublime, eloquent leave-taking — is as challenging as anything in the
symphonic repertory, to conductor and audience alike. As at previous
performances of the work in recent years, the Music Center audience was not
entirely equal to the challenge; there were some premature departures.The forces onstage were more than equal, however. Search your memories as you
may, it will be hard to remember playing as poised, as beautifully balanced,
as the final five-or-so minutes of Mahler’s finale, with the sublime last
melody working its way through the strings, ever softer until sound and
silence become a single unity. Ungainly on the podium as he is, with his
baton clumsily held as if it might turn and attack, Sanderling was
nevertheless the shaping force in a supremely communicative performance.
Those who question the high qualities of this orchestra under proper
circumstances are invited to sample memories of this one experience.Starting the program there was an authentic and endearing novelty: early Haydn
(the Symphony No. 39), charming, witty and full of beans, a symphony in G
minor that even ended in that key, against the common practice of always
coming around to a “happy ending” in the major. With music like this, the German symphonic tradition began; with the Mahler
Ninth, it came to its close. At both ends, Sanderling reigned supreme.

The history of serious progressive music in the Soviet Union is only now coming
into focus. It’s a history of oppression, of composers harrassed by official
governmental forces, denied access to music from the West, and commanded to
straitjacket their own compositions to fit the needs of the state. It is also
the story of a few brave composers working virtually in secret, smuggling
forbidden scores in and out of the country, an avant-garde underground.
This past weekend several departments at U.S.C. combined to present a symposium
on “forbidden” Soviet art, and the climactic event occurred at the Schoenberg
Institute on Saturday night: a fascinating concert of Soviet avant-garde music
from the 1920s to the present. The performers were members of Continuum, the
New York-based new-music organization led by by Joel Sachs and Cheryl Seltzer.
It’s only recently, as Sachs explained in a pre-concert talk, that Soviet
composers have gained access to the masterworks of their own time. Like beggars
at a banquet, Sachs said, they eagerly assimilated 75 years’ worth of outside
influence, and some of their new music teems with the results of this new
assimilation.
That was certainly the case, on Saturday’s program, with a wildly eclectic,
fearsomely energetic work by Alfred Schnittke for violin and piano, subtitled
“Quasi una Sonata,” in which both instruments seemed bent on tearing huge
holes in the atmosphere with the passion of their outcries. A Sonata for
clarinet alone by Elena Firsova seemed motivated by the same intentions; in no
more than ten minutes it explored with furious skill the full range of the
instrument’s possibilities, and a few impossibilities as well.
Two expansive vocal works were among the evening’s high points. “Pain and
Silence,” Edison Denisov’s settings of lines from Osip Mandelstamm, was the
one work that could, from any standpoint, be thought of as beautiful; Ukranian
composer Leonid Hrabovsky’s {cq} “Kogda,” commissioned by Continuum, set some
tiny poems of Velimir Khlebnikov (author of the mystical “Zangesi,” produced
several years ago at MOCA) into a background full of such avant-garde toys as a
thunder sheet and a brake drum banged upon with a hammer.
Starting off the program was some short pieces from Soviet music’s early days:
some dreary piano works and songs by Nicolay Roslavets and Alexander Mosolov —
the latter best known for his piece of orchestrated social realism, “The Steel
Foundry.” Also included was a 1949 Trio by Galina Ustvolskaya, a dry-point but
well-crafted work by a Soviet iconoclast who was exploring her own brand of
Western-style dissonance at a time when she might have been shot for doing
so.
Performances couldn’t have been better, with Sachs and Seltzer sharing the
burdens at the piano, the stalwart mezzo-soprano Ellen Lang, violinist Mia Wu
and clarinetist Nathan Williams. New York’s new-music audience is notoriously
fickle, but their support of Continuum over 25 years suggests that they do know
quality when they hear it. So did the cheering, capacity crowd at Schoenberg
Institute, for a most worthy event.

Michael Milenski has done it again.On paper, the opening offering of Milenski’s Long Beach Opera’s 13th season,
introduced on Wednesday night and repeated next Sunday afternoon, may have
looked like marking time. Given the company’s reputation for innovative fare,
a revival of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” may have seemed like warmed-
over turkey; Massenet’s “La Navarraise,” which completed the double bill,
is less familiar, yet cut from very much the same cloth. But paper is fragile stuff, and Long Beach has, once again, put on a terrific
show. The reasons are numerous. They begin with two spellbinding performances
by Elizabeth Day, who sang the leading roles in both short operas. The list
continues with the stunning work of director/designer Hugo De Ana, whose
staging of both operas was full of fresh ideas including, in the Massenet,
some battlefield fireworks that could easily blow you out of your seat. They
also include the conducting of Michael Recchiuti, who delivered two poised,
nicely balanced readings.Elizabeth Day is not a newcomer; she was the Elisabetta in the Long beach
“Don Carlo” of 1986 and the Tatiana in the “Eugene Onegin” the year
before. Those were roles for a dramatic soprano; Santuzza and the Navarraise
actually call for a high mezzo. (Marilyn Horne’s recording of “La
Navarraise” is the way most of us know the opera.) In this range Day is
marvelously communicative. There were a couple of rough spots in the
Mascagni, which may have just been warming up. In the Massenet she dominated
the stage with some stunning vocalism, and a marvelous stage presence to
match. This was, make no mistake, the work of a big new star.The rest of the vocal work was at least competent, sometimes more so. Arturo
Spinetti’s big, burly Turiddu, delivered fortissimo for the most part, is
surely one of several legitimate ways of getting through “Cav” (if not the
only one). Kirk Redmann, the love interest in “La Navarraise” got through
the notes acceptably, but might consider narrowing his rather juicy vibrato.
Excellent support in minor roles was provided by Paula Rasmussen (a perky
Lola in the “Cav”) and Louis Lebherz, in the villain’s role in “Nav.”
Not the least of the evening’s pleasures was the rediscovery of that latter
work. We know Massenet from the lavender and gossamer of his big, romantic
operas. “La Navarraise” has its share, but also some gorgeous large-scale
thunder. Its action-packed brief duration is a marvel of dramatic
compression. Nobody ever said that about “Cav,” and nobody ever will.
THE FACTS:What: The Long Beach Opera presents Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” and
Massenet’s “La Navarraise.”Where: Terrace Theater, Long Beach Convention Center.When: 2 p.m., Sunday, December 2.Starring: Elizabeth Day, Arturo Spinetti, Kirk Redmann.Behind the Scenes: Conducted by Michael Recchiuti; designed and directed by
Hugo De Ana.Tickets: $10-$55. Information: 213 596-5556.Our rating: * * * *

Aaron Copland turned 90 on November 14, and the event has been widely and
wisely celebrated. It is doubtful, however, whether a more loving and
imaginative tribute has been staged anywhere than this week’s Monday Evening
Concert at the County Museum.The turnout was one of the largest in the series’ history; nearly every seat
in the drab Bing Auditorium was filled. The crowd had come for Copland, of
course, but also for Leo Smit, the great composer, pianist and toiler in the
cause of new music, now officially retired but still glowing with his
wonderful energy. Smit was the pianist throughout the concert: first in
Copland’s Piano Quartet (with string players Elizabeth Baker, Valerie Dimond
{cq} and Roger Lebow), then as partner to soprano Rosalind Rees in a bouquet
of songs by Copland himself and 18 of Copland’s close friends, and finally
with pianist Adam Stern in a two-piano version of Copland’s “Billy the Kid”
ballet.It was an evening full of rewards. Copland’s 1950 Piano Quartet isn’t often
heard; it’s a tough work, full of a rough-cut, honest beauty that demands
close listening. It represents Copland at a sort of crossroads, moving away
from the easy style of the great ballet scores and toward a denser harmonic
manner, and at the same time looking back to the gritty, dissonant works of
his early days. It is also a wonderfully brainy work, with a final slow
movement that resolves all previous problems and dies out in an angelic calm. Between the Quartet and the ballet of 12 years earlier the stylistic gap is
wide. For all the loss of instrumental color, hearing “Billy the Kid” in
Copland’s piano version makes it easy to concentrate on the hard-edged
originality of the work, its pungent harmonies, its sheer bravado in, for
example, ramming melodic lines together in separate and unrelated keys.
The song group was beautifully chosen: a set of bright, brief birthday cards,
sung with great style and exemplary diction by Rosalind Rees (wife of the
noted choral conductor, Gregg Smith). With the auditorium in darkness (why?)
it was sometimes hard to remember which song was which, but such beauties as
Virgil Thomson’s setting of Gertrude Stein’s “Susie Asado” and Elliott
Carter’s of the Robert Frost “The Line-Gang,” were easy to identify and
hard to forget. So was David Raksin’s well-worn but still haunting “Laura”
and an unfamiliar, ravishing Leonard Bernstein song, the 1950 “My House” to
a text of his own.Performances throughout were of top-quality, but the evening’s highest
pleasure was the sight of Smit at the piano, obviously standing in for
Copland himself, having a whale of a good time and anxious to share
it.

It didn’t take much imagination to predict that the stars would be in their
proper places for this past weekend’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts. With
Murray Perahia, our most serious romantic pianist, on hand to play Brahms,
and Kurt Sanderling, one of the last of the old-school classicist, involved
with Beethoven, Friday night’s program (repeated on Saturday and Sunday)
added up to a couldn’t-lose situation.And so it was. Perahia and the orchestra began with a spacious, warm-hearted
reading of the Brahms Second Concerto. It lasted nearly an hour, but it was
paved with gold all the way.Actually, there is no other way to play this work. In a meeting of minds that
bridged the age gap between soloist (42) and conductor (78), Perahia and
Sanderling mined the vast expanses of the Brahms for its fund of eloquence
and sweet poetry. The slow movement, brought on by the melting warmth of
Ronald Leonard’s cello solo, properly became the sort of quiet reverie that
you hear with your inner ear. The buoyant finale positively scampered.A routine program-planner might have scheduled the Brahms at the end, and the
quieter joys of the Beethoven “Pastoral” Symphony for starters. By
reversing the order, however, and by conducting the Beethoven in a manner so
miraculous that the work almost seemed newly composed, Sanderling sent the
crowd home with all kinds of new thoughts about this much-loved and yet
little-known flight of Beethoven’s purest fantasy.Do we, for example, pay enough attention to the miracle of Beethoven’s
instrumentation in this work — a quality not at all evident, by the way, in
the mangled version used in Disney’s “Fantasia?” Here, in the subtle glints
of this music, is the extraordinary case of a composer going rapidly deaf,
yet able in his mind to concoct a rainbow of sounds — the blend of strings
and a solo bassoon that rounds off the first movement, the music of the
second-movement brook, its own murmuring constantly echoed by other dabs of
murmuring in the woodwinds, the radiant joy of horns and other brass
instruments in the sunlight after the storm.All this came across in the quiet, understated Sanderling performance, in
which the overriding concern seemed to be the preservation of absolute
orchestral clarity. There was one miscalculation: the specified repeat in the
first movement went unobserved, and the over-all balance of the movement
suffered thereby. Still, there was the exuberance of Beethoven’s remarkable
invention, otherwise beautifully honored under Sanderling’s probing
leadership.

A small office building stands at the corner of Tampa Ave. and Roscoe Blvd. in
Northridge. From its half-timbered, archaic look, it might have been designed
by and for a gang of Munchkins. Instead, it houses the headquarters of DCC
Compact Classics, which is the outfit you talk to whenever you’re looking for
recordings from Bulgaria.
DCC is a label both old and new. Old, it was known as Dunhill, with a strong
pop identification and a catalog listing the likes of Sammy Davis Jr,, Judy
Garland and Ray Charles. Then, sometime last year, the makers of Dunhill
cigarettes brought suit against the use of their name, and so Marshall
Blonfield, the head of Dunhill-the-record, set up new quarters in Northridge,
with a new label, DCC in which the “D” — which doesn’t require an
encyclopedia to figure out — maintains the link with the past.
What has any of this got to do with Bulgaria? Enter Jerry Tolmich, one of the
surviving patriarchs of the classical record business, p-r executive for a
time at Columbia Records on both coasts, currently head of his own company
called AVM (“Audio-Visual Masterpieces”) which is the exclusive American
affiliate of Balkanton, which is Bulgaria’s major classical label. Under a
DCC-AVM alliance, Tolmich has moved his office, too, up to the Munchkin
building in Northridge, making that corner the Bulgarian records capitol of
the entire Western World.
“AVM is a company to be reckoned with, now and in the future,” says the
hearty, garrulous Tolmich. Already, his catalog bears out his boast.
Everything in it so far is some kind of premiere. One disc contains all of
Bartok’s Piano Concertos — the first time all three have been on a single
record. Another contains three Liszt Piano Concertos: the familiar Nos. 1 & 2,
and an obscure orchestration of the solo “Concerto Pathetique” and also,
thus, a world premiere. A complete recording of Debussy’s piano Preludes is
listed as “the first time complete Preludes in stereo on 1 CD.” One genuine
curiosity is a piano transcription of, of all things, Edward Elgar’s First
Symphony. Responding to a raised eyebrow, Tolmich asserted that the pile of
advance orders for that undoubted rarity was already mountainous.
One AVM-DCC disc clearly bound for success is an operatic recital, recorded in
1981, by the legendary Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff, with chorus and
orchestra conducted by Ettore Gracis. “That one is only a western-world
premiere,” smiled Tolmich. “It has never been issued outside Bulgaria.”
One major breakthrough concerns price: AVM’s classical line lists at $8.98.
with an even cheaper “Best of Composer” line priced at $5.98. Even here
there are surprises: a “Best of Gershwin” disc with performances of
“Rhapsody in Blue” and the Concerto in F, by the Bulgarian Broadcasting
Symphony under Jo Alfidi.
Remember Jo Alfidi? They called him Joey back in 1960, when as a dimpled
cherub of 10 he had played his Piano Concerto for the Queen Mother Elisabeth
of Belgium. Two years later, he got her to visit his own home in Yonkers; now
there he is, conducting Gershwin in Sofia for records distributed out of
Northridge. Small, indeed, is the world!
[*]bo. Where and When? [B] Trying to discover the extent of Los Angeles-area
music making is frustrating at best, and becomes more so as the number of
events increases year after year. No daily or weekly newspaper has room for
the complete list, nor the facility to hunt down all the information.
This, then, is by way of greeting the 1990/91 Cauer Calendar of Classical
Musical Events, fresh at hand, a 36-page well-printed listing of the entire
ongoing musical season so far as it is presently known. Robert Cauer is a
violin restorer and dealer, with a shop at 2242 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood
90068. He has produced his calendar free of charge, supported by a few
advertisers.
It’s a remarkable job, covering the concert and operatic scene from the San
Fernando Valley down to Costa Mesa and east to Riverside. It even includes
such added amenities as an accurate phone list of musical venues, including
churches. Blessings upon Robert Cauer, for recognizing one of this community’s
most urgent needs and fulfilling it so well.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is many kinds of orchestra, depending on the
circumstances. For the young conductors, it is quirky and edgy; under Andre
Previn, it matches his grayness; for Kurt Sanderling, it is somehow
transformed into a noble, resonant ensemble in the best European manner.
Thursday night at the Music Center, Sanderling began his annual stint that has
become a high point in every Philharmonic season; a large crowd made it clear
that he had been missed. Nobody in the orchestra has ever advanced a
satisfactory explanation as to why this venerable veteran, now 78, invariably
makes our local ensemble sound better than you’d think it could. It’s not a
matter of technical wizardry so much as simple mutual respect and love. “It’s
just that he makes us aware of the music itself,” one player once said. It’s
as simple as that.
Sanderling’s major work on this, the first of four programs he is down for
this season, was the Bruckner Fourth, that majestic symphonic corpse. It would
be stretching a point to suggest that he brought the work completely to life,
since that is a task beyond human capability. But he and the orchestra did
join forces in 75 minutes of marvelous sound-spinning, from the first
throbbing of the strings, like an intake of breath right at the edge of
silence, to the exultant hunting horns of the scherzo, to those final pages
(of triumph? or simply of relief?) when the heavens do, indeed, open and the
hot celestial light pours through.
That, one presumes, is why people bother with Bruckner at all: those hours of
pain and the ensuing moments of blessed release. In defense of the Fourth, it
can at least be ascertained that the work is shorter than some.
Miriam Fried was the evening’s soloist, the good Romanian-born violinist now
living in New York, one-time protegee of Isaac Stern. She played the Mozart
A-major Violin Concerto, for which Sanderling had wisely cut down the
orchestra to chamber-ensemble size.
Even so, she did not seem happy in the work. The term “dead-pan” is not very
kind, but it came to mind at many junctures in the performance. She used the
corny, sentimental cadenzas of Joseph Joachim, which strengthened the
impression that she didn’t really know, or care, what this lovely, unruffled
music is really about.

The ultimate test of quality for any chamber-music ensemble, and for its
audience as well, is the slow movement from any of Beethoven’s mature string
quartet. The sublime blend of vision, passion and mystery, the way Beethoven
combines so few notes to signify so much: these stand as the definitive
statement on the power that music exerts at both ends of the process of
communication.
And it was this moment in the Emerson Quartet’s concert on Sunday afternoon,
at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall before a turnaway crowd, that most glowingly
affirmed the greatness of the event. These four young men, together now for 14
years, delivered the slow movement of Beethoven’s Second “Rasoumovsky”
Quartet with an extraordinary blend of intensity and intense calm. If the
legend that Beethoven conceived this particular music while contemplating the
starry sky has any validity, the Emersons’ performance fulfilled the story.The
silence their playing inspired out front was something you could almost taste.
None of this should come as any surprise. The Emerson Quartet is a frequent
and welcome visitor, with series of concerts at the John Anson Ford
Amphitheater and a Beethoven cycle at several historic sites among their
recent local credits. In an era when cool meticulousness is especially prized,
this group stands apart by virtue of the passion in their work and their
fearless risk-taking (ub their choices of extreme ranges of tempo and
dynamics, for example). They seem capable of every musical emotion except
boredom.
They are proficient, as well, in a wide range. Sunday’s program included
Mozart’s stern, chill C-minor Adagio and Fugue, Elliot Carter’s pliant little
Elegy for Quartet (early Carter, somewhat French in its musical manner) and
the exuberant First Quartet of Bela Bartok, music teeming with its own energy
and full also of prophecies of the greater composer to come. Even the one
encore was uncommonly interesting: a Mozart Rondo, planned for the A-major
Quartet but left unfinished. By a composer’s triumphs, and by his abandoned
projects as well, we learn his full stature.
All this was superbly played, but the Beethoven surpassed all else, even so.
Music restless, full of grit and defiance, at rest only in the amusing
quotation of a Russian folksong in the scherzo: it clearly held the four
players in its spell, and they communicated the magic. First violinist Philip
Setzer, who had occupied the second violinist’s chair during the program’s
first half, got his instrument to soar enchantingly in that slow movement. His
colleagues: violinist Eugene Drucker, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist
David Finckel were no less in tune with this one-of-a-kind masterwork.