So I've Heard

Recitals by strong-fingered pianists are reasonably common. Strong-fingered
pianists with equally strong musical intelligence are a far rarer phenomenon.
Monday night’s Music Center concert by Andras Schiff, however, proved
eminently satisfactory on both counts.
The program itself was a particularly brainy selection. Large works of
Beethoven (the B-flat Sonata, Opus 22) and Schumann (the Symphonic Etudes)
formed the end-pieces. In between were shorter works by both composers:
Beethoven’s strange, prophetic Opus 126 Bagatelles, and two charming genre
pieces (and a third as an encore) in which Schumann seemed to fulfill that
prophecy. It added up to a lovely mixture, all of it beautifully played.
The Beethoven sonata was a special joy, one of the less-often performed of
the 32, but one of the most remarkable. Already, in 1800, the composer was
pushing toward unexplored territories. The work is full of what must have
been at the time strange, unaccustomed sounds. Here and there the pianist’s
left hand takes the principal melodic line, an effect new in Beethoven’s time
that was to become one of Schumann’s favorite devices. The finale, light-
textured and smiling, seems to float in a manner almost Schubertian. Early
Beethoven though the sonata surely is, its stylistic adventures make it seem
later than you think.
The loving, expansive performance by Schiff seemed to take cognizance of all
this. Without overstatement or excessive underlining, he managed to suggest
both the similarities and the violent contrasts between this congenial work
of Beethoven’s youth and the quirky, disjointed outbursts in that strange,
inward set of late-period Bagatelles.
If anything, the evening’s Schumann performances, for all the music’s
romantic exuberance, seemed more classic, more controlled. This is music, the
pianist seemed to say, that can speak for itself. And so it did.

[*] laby2;p1205.By Alan Rich [B]Daily News Music Critic[B] Considering the number of years the musical world has basked in the glow of
Leontyne Price’s artistry — 33, since her lustrous Aida at the San Francisco
Opera — one might have regarded the soprano’s Royce Hall recital on Saturday
night as an exercise in nostalgia. No such thing; the years rolled back on
that magical evening, and there stood that achingly beautiful artist, still,
mioraculously, at the top of her vocal form.
Some artists travel with easy-listening programs for the boonies, made up of
the chestnuts of the repertory. Not Price; she paid her compliment to the
capacity audience with a substantial and rewarding program: two big classic
arias, groups of German and French songs, four by the contemporary American
Lee Hoiby, the “Pace, pace” from Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” and a
final spiritual that, in turn, activated a generous outlay of encores.
One of the classic arias was Electra’s Mad Scene from Mozart’s “Idomeneo”
which, by coincidence, had been performed in its operatic context at the
Music Center the night before. It stretches no point to suggest that the
piano support of the veteran David Garvey at the recital was noticeably more
responsive to the drama of the music than the orchestral forces at the opera.
The voice of Price, now as then, is a wondrous instrument. It is especially
so in the music of Verdi’s tragic heroines; there is a vibrance there that
curls itself enchantingly around those big lyric lines, lands with awesome
splendor on those final notes (the B-flat in the “Forza” aria as a shining
example) and shades them down until you feel them throbbing under your own
skin.
There was a time when she tended to overuse the chest tone as a dramatic
device. This time, in the “Forza” aria and also in arias from “Madama {cq}
Butterfly” and “Adriana Lecouvreur” among the encores, one heard instead
singing of remarkable purity, no less communicative but ravishing in its very
freedom.
That’s the word, “ravishing.” The German song group included two
charming deceits by the underrated late romantic Joseph Marx along with three
unfamiliar Richard Strauss works. The Hoiby group also had some exceptional
material. A composer of conservative leanings (most recently known for his
tiny operatic setting of a Julia Child chocolate cake recipe), Hoiby’s songs
display a firmer art than one might otherwise believe. Outstanding among the
four chosen by Price were two Emily Dickinson settings, “Wild Nights” and
“There came a Wind.” On stage — in something of dusky green in the first half, blue in the second
— Price seduced the eye no less than the ear; just that generous smile of
hers is enough to light lights anywhere. She lights even more lights with her
art, of course; she could put on an evening of nothing but C-major scales and
still send the crowd home happy. She was, and she remains, one of our few
remaining genuine class acts.

Try as they might, not even the assembled forces of the Music Center Opera
could obliterate the radiant beauties of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.” The
question must be raised, therefore: why did they even try?
The production, which opened on Wednesday night and runs for three more
performances, was brought in from Santa Fe, where it was staged last summer.
There are grand mountain vistas at Santa Fe’s outdoor opera house, which might
have taken an observer’s mind off the ugliness of Steven Rubin’s set, but the
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion offers no such distraction. We face the mess on
stage straight on. the creaky revolving panels with their artsy-craftsy-glitzy
projections, the shaky shadow projections, the drab lighting.
We try to keep from laughing at the dancing — Kimi Okada’s choreography
perpetrated by the nine members of San Francisco’s Oberlin Dance Company —
with no great success. The hootchy-kootch of the denizens of Hades is bad
enough; hell, by Okada’s standards, is somewhere close to Las Vegas. The crowd
in the Elysian Fields, on the other hand, all in virginal white, brings back
memories of Greek Day at the Weedhaven Laughing Academy.
Yet the music is honorably treated, and this makes the evening at least
tolerable, and often more. Marilyn Horne, it comes as no news, owns the role
of Orpheus for this generation. Perhaps the voice has lost some of its plummy
resonance; perhaps there are even hints now and then of a faltering
marksmanship (always, however, corrected within a note or two). But the
sublime musicianship remains intact, the absolute rhythmic accuracy, those
urgent, tragic tones of hers that simply disarm all resistance, most of all in
that great scene of the taming of the furies.
The Euridice of Benita Valente is almost as good. This supremely intelligent
singer, her sweet, limpid soprano still a marvel after three decades of noble
use, was as always a joy to hear. She had been given some silly stage business
early on, weaving and bobbing to touch hands with dancers, and she is not the
most graceful of actresses. What she does, however — sing a classic line with
clarity and conviction — she did once again on this occasion. As the Love-
Goddess we had the delicious small bundle of a Tracy Dahl (last season’s
Euridice, if anyone has the misfortune to remember the company’s otherwise
disgraceful venture into the Offenbach “Orpheus”), done up as a sort of
Spaceman-Cupid.
Randall Behr conducted an unexceptionable performance, with the brass nicely
brassy for the Hades scenes. The version used was basically that prepared by
Hector Berlioz, itself a hodge-podge of parts from Gluck’s several versions,
with an added bravura aria (plus cadenza) at the end of Act One that violates
all of Gluck’s own principles about not pandering to singers’ show-off needs.
Oh well, if Gluck had had Marilyn Horne to conjure with, he’d probably never
have made those rules.
THE FACTS:
What: The Music Center Opera Company’s production of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed
Euridice.”
Starring: Marilyn Horne as Orfeo; Benita Valente as Euridice; Benita Valente
as Amor.
Behind the Scenes: Randall Behr, conductor; Lamont Johnson, director; Steven
Rubin, designer; Kimi Okada, chorographer.
Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. in downtown.
When: 8 p.m., Saturday, 10/9, 10/14.
Tickets: $10-$75; information: 213 480–3232, or 213 972-7219.

“It’s not quite true, what it says in the gallery brochure,” said Maurice
Sendak, “that I only got into opera so that I could design “Idomeneo,” but
it’s close. All those old-time “Idomeneo” lovers, they all look down on us
newcomers as some sort of cultural yuppies. But I’m 62, and I’ve loved that
opera, above all others, since adolescence.”
Softspoken, witty in the abrasive New York manner, Sendak took a few minutes
off from applying finishing touches to the Music Center Opera’s upcoming
“Idomeneo” for a quick sandwich at the pleasant little cafe at MOCA, just
down the street. He was obviously aglow from this labor of love. “I needed to
do this,” he said, “not only out of love for the opera, but also to get out
of the kiddie-book-illustrator-turned-opera-designer mold for once.”
At that, he hasn’t gotten very far out of it. See for yourself. Mozart’s
masterful opera may stand at some remove from the world of the kiddie-book
illustrator, but all of Sendak’s set and costume sketches for the opera go on
display this week (September 25 through October 28) at Every Picture Tells a
Story, that most charming gallery of children’s-book art at 836 N. LaBrea in
West Hollywood, where they will sit surrounded by a vivid selection of
Sendak’s really-truly kiddie books.You can buy the books, but not the
sketches.
Even within the mold of kiddie-oriented opera, of course, Sendak’s work hasn’t
been exactly frivolous. “I think of “The Magic Flute” as the most serious
of all Mozart’s operas. Sure, there were those barnyard animals in Janacek’s
“Cunning Little Vixen,” but the opera was really about Janacek’s last
thoughts on humanity. And “Higgledy” was the most tragic of them all.”
“Idomeneo” stands as a work apart. Its American career has been relatively
brief. Its first performance, by an operatic workshop at Tangelwood, wasn’t
until 1947, 166 years after its premiere. It only made it to the Metropolitan
Opera in 1982, where its initial reception at the box-office was insured by
the presence of Luciano Pavarotti in the title role. The darker side of its
reputation has everywhere preceded it: that it is long, that its plot is full
of old-fashioned devices, that it is serious and complex.
“Idomeneo” is all of those things; its plot devices (father bound by the
gods to sacrifice a favorite child, multi-level conflict of love and honor,
last-minute redemption after the avenging god — Neptune, in this case —
changes his mind) were indeed well-worn by Mozart’s time.
But there is one aspect of the work that conquers all else: its radiant, noble
beauty. It’s interesting, and fortuitous, that the Music Center Opera’s
“Idomeneo” should be flanked on the schedule by Gluck’s “Orfeo ed
Euridice” and Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” because in a very real sense, Mozart’s
sublime creation forges a link, musical and dramatic, between the other two
operas.
“I want to do “Idomeneo,” ” Sendak continued, “because I am happiest
doing fantasy operas. “Cosi fan Tutte,” or “Don Giovanni” or “The
Marriage of Figaro” — they’re all basically room operas. Unless I can
overcome my extraordinary limitations — like, how to get in and out of
properly designed rooms — I can’t do them; I can’t vibrate to them. Sure, I
saw the Peter Sellars “Don Giovanni” in New York last summer, and it was set
outdoors. It was plenty vibrant, but they weren’t my vibrations.
“I do fantasy operas, because I can set them in some place of my own
invention. I’ve seen “Idomeneo” productions that had no fantasy. There was
one at Caramoor {the elegant summer festival just outside New York), but all I
can remember is a lot of slaves being pushed around. And the one at the Met:
well it was just your basic Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, may he rest in peace:
pillars and schmattas.”
We had by now walked back to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. On stage there
were no pillars, no schmattas, just a Maurice Sendak fantasy ship in two
guises, whole and wrecked.
Sendak had a confession. “I really should have become a musician. The truth
is, my family couldn’t afford a piano, and watercolors were cheaper. This kind
of work” — a sweep of that supremely endowed right hand toward the ships on
stage — “is the closest I can get. I stand here at rehearsal while the
chorus sings its music, and I nearly faint from the beauty, and I wonder if
those bums in the chorus know how jealous I am of just what they’re doing as
their routine job.”
All of Sendak’s operatic work so far has been with director Corsaro. “We sit
at a table. He talks, I doodle. We agree on something or other, so I go home
and do the sketches. Then, the next day, he sees the sketches, yells “what
the hell is this!” and we discuss some more. Finally we come to an agreement.
It’s a marvelous arrangement, because we work so closely. I couldn’t work any
other way, with a director or with a writer. If some writer tells me that he
trusts me to do the illustrations, that he doesn’t want to see them, I know I
can’t work with him.”
The future? Sendak listed a “Hansel and Gretel” for the Music Center Opera
two seasons from now. “Now that I’ve broken the kiddie-book identification
with “Idomeneo,” I can go back to it.” For further down the line, he talks
of starting a children’s theater, probably near his current home in
Connecticut, “where I can have complete control over design and direction,
where I can develop new works, small and complex like my books.”
“Control? “That’s the most important thing. Ideal, of course, is for the
designer to be his own director, like Ponnelle. Working so closely with Frank,
that’s the next best thing. I love the opera company here, because they offer
respect, and freedom, and control; that’s rare. If anyone is trying to
sabotage me here, it’s so subtle that I haven’t noticed it.
THE FACTS:
WHAT: The Music Center Opera Company production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”
WHERE: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.
WHEN: 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Friday and Oct. 2 and 5.
STARRING: Siegfried Jerusalem, Susan Quittmeyer, Christine Weidinger.
BEHIND THE SCENES: Directed by Frank Corsaro. Designed by Maurice Sendak.
Conducted by Roderick Brydon.
TICKETS: $15 to $80. For ticket information call (213) 480-3232. For more
information, call (213) 972-7219.

Of all musical instruments, the clarinets come closest to the sound of the
human voice. You might, therefore, expect a concert by two expert clarinetists
to come close to the sound of real conversation. You’d be right.
Exactly that happened, in fact, in a splendidly communicative encounter by two
of this region’s most valued progressive musicians, David Ocker and Vinnie
Golia. Ocker, a member of the chamber group called Xtet {cq} is usually
thought of as part of the classical world; Golia usually busies himself with
jazz.
The music at their joint concert Saturday afternoon, part of the Los Angeles
Festival offshoot known as the “Open Festival,” given in the charming garden
in back of the Joanne Warfield Gallery in West Hollywood, hovered around the
invisible line between the two worlds: fluent and improvisatory in the jazz
sense, splendidly complex, full of bright contrapuntal exchange, to appease
the classicists.
Between them (and with the added assistance in one piece of visiting New York
clarinetist Jane Ira Bloom), the players managed something like a dozen
different sizes of clarinet, along with a few flutes plus a Chinese
harmonica-type gadget called the Shang. The afternoon was, in fact, a little
like a family reunion of the wind family. The huge contrabass clarinet, with
enough plumbing to equip a small town, hobnobbed with tiny bamboo flutes; the
piccolo shrieked its greeting to the sopranino saxophone.
More important, however, was the sense that the players were well in tune with
each other.There was a sense of solid music-making, even in passages that
exploited the more arcane possibilities of the instruments: the squawk of the
overblown clarinet, for one. The music, some of it improvised, floated
through the garden like bright butterflies. Most of the pieces had no names;
they needed none. There ought to be more concerts as informal, as full of
inventiveness, with the sense of togetherness, the pure pleasure of music-
making, that this one had.

I HAVE NEW ART, 1 VERTICAL OF DICK ‘N’ PAT, WILL BRING IN [F/L]It would be possible, with a little hard work, to have a terrible time at the Music Center Opera’s “Nixon in China,” but why waste the effort? However you may feel about the particularities of the work — the broad eclecticism of John Adams’ musical style (sometimes repetitive, sometimes abrasive, often romantic) or the liberties Alice Goodman’s text takes with historical characters (some still living) — the fact remains that the sheer energy of the piece, the level of daring in both its music and its text, not to mention Peter Sellars’ marvelously adept staging, and its moments of irresistible beauty add up to a spellbinding experience in contemporary musical theater. Miss it at your peril. You surely know the details by now; “Nixon in China”is, if nothing else, the most famous American opera since “Porgy and Bess.” The opera makes its initial appeal through its abundance of good theatrical fun. That starts right off with the landing of the American plane at the Peking airport (and never mind that wide-bodied aircraft do not make vertical, helicopter-style landings; all opera demands some suspension of belief). It runs on through the tender comedy of poor, bemused Pat Nixon being pushed this way and that through her obligatory guided tour of Peking. It embraces the horrendous/hilarious night at the Chinese ballet (where choreographer Mark Morris has based his work on Madame Mao’s actual jingoistic creation, “The Red Detachment of Women” with its army lads and lassies doing their military maneuvers en pointe). But what really remains in the memory is the opera’s deeper undercurrent, captured in the poetic, wondrously observant libretto and subtly undescored in Adams’ equally observant score: the Nixon-Mao meeting with its tangle of verbal cross-purposes, and the final, surrealistic scene with its counterpoint of self-revelations. You may hear some sneers about the use of supertitles in this English-language opera in which the cast’s diction is fair enough, yet the subtleties of Goodman’s word-choices are worth underscoring in this manner. The opera has made the rounds, since its Houston premiere three years ago, but the cast has remained constant, to its greater glory. Small subtleties abound; James Maddalena’s rightness in the title role, his little twitches of incomprehension in the scene with Mao, his homely, clumsy gestures of affection toward Pat, create a whole character; maybe it isn’t Richard Nixon,maybe it is; it certainly is somebody. And what is true of Maddalena’s work extends through the cast: Carolann Page’s frightened, fluttering Pat, Trudy Ellen Craney’s shrieking, malevolent Madame Mao, Sanford Sylvan’s deep, quiet Chou En-lai. Along the way from the Houston performance (which was also televised), director Sellars has made certain changes, all for the better. His ballet scene now ends in a riot reminiscent of last year’s Tianamen Square tragedy; his last act, which seemed a little bare at Houston, is now nicely filled out with dancing and some added props. And there is Kent Nagano’s conducting of his superb orchestral forces: strong, vivid, finely spirited. “Nixon in China” has fared well on the podium: John DeMain in Houston, Edo de Waart in Brooklyn and on the Nonesuch recording. Nagano is worthy of these predecessors; his role in an altogether enthralling night of genuine, stirring opera is considerable. FACTS: WHAT: The Music Center Opera’s production of John Adams’ and Alice Goodman’s “Nixon in China.” STARRING: James Maddalena as Nixon, with Carolann Page, Trudy Ellen Craney, John Duykers and Sanford Sylvan. BEHIND THE SCENES: Directed by Peter Sellars, with choreography by Mark Morris; conducted by Kent Nagano; designed by Adrianne Lobel and Dunya Ramicova. WHERE: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 No. Grand Ave., in downtown Los Angeles. WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and 9/29; 2 p.m. 9/16 and 10/7. TICKETS: $15 to $80; reservations: 213 480-3232; information: 213 972- 7219.

The aim of the Los Angeles Festival, as frequently stated by its producers, is
to expand the horizons of local audiences through new and mysterious artistic
experiences. That being so, Saturday night’s visit to the Japan-America
Theater by the Kun Opera of China must be reckoned a success. It was a most
mysterious evening.
There is only one valid way, actually, for an audience unaccustomed to this
kind of exotic musical/dramatic art (or any kind for that matter) to deal with
its challenge: to approach it as a child might approach an unfamiliar toy, to
examine it first for its outward glitter and ponder its meaning later on. The
Kun — artistic descendants of a centuries-old Chinese company which was, for
a time, scattered during the so-called “Cultural Revolution” but now
reassembled — was a joy to watch and to hear, even if merely for the
acrobatic skill of its performers and the jangly charm of its music (a few
raucous small gongs, a couple of wind instruments and a small harp).
Yet the mystery was needlessly compounded on this occasion; there were no
programs, and the three works performed — all of them excerpts from longer
classic works — were only scantily described by an announcer at the start of
each. Most of the vocalism was in the form of artifically inflected speech,
with now and then a sweet, small song accompanied by instruments in unison.
Never was the case for supertitles more eloquently stated.
Except for a musicians’ area on the side marked off in red fabric, the stage
was bare; surely this cannot be a Chinese operatic tradition, considering the
brilliant fantasy of the costumes — including a pair of marvelous, elongated
plumes on a headdress in the first piece that seemed to execute their own
graceful choreography.
This report, then, is of what seemed to happen and probably did. In the first
piece a Monkey King (played by Chen Tongshen) tries to capture the magic fan
belonging to a Princess (Shi Jehua), and succeeds only when he changes himself
into a fly which the Princess then accidentally swallows. In the second, a
monk (Zhong Weide) tries to escape the monastic life, comes down the mountain,
battles a wine merchant (Kai Qinling) and imbibes his wares, does a drunken
dance and then returns up the mountain. In the third, a girl (the lovely Hua
Wen-yi) repressed by her parents falls asleep in a peony patch, dreams of a
love affair, but then wakes to reality.
All of this was acted out, sung and played in a style of movement full of
symbols honed over centuries. Beautiful, and sometimes extremely funny, as it
all was to watch, a little elucidation out front would have deepened the
experience. Still, anyone from any culture had to react to the extraordinarily
lithe acrobatics of Chen Tongshen’s Monkey King, and the hilarious
“bellyache-dance” of his Princess when she has swallowed that fly. And that
Monk’s drunken dance in the second piece did seem to speak for all imbibers
anywhere in the world: a universal language if ever one was.

Has any opera company of any size, anywhere in the world, run up in its first
five years a more distinguished string of successes than that of our own Music
Center Opera. Sure, there have been lapses along the way, but Tuesday night’s
“Fidelio” wasn’t one of them.
The very excellence of the high points in Beethoven’s sole operatic venture
makes “Fidelio” one of opera’s great problem pieces. One problem is the
difficult balance between the shattering passions at the work’s sublime
moments and those other moments — the love/hate bickering between the
juvenile lovers, and the crushing vulgarity of the final chorus — that raise
questions about the composer’s sanity. Another problem is the theme of its
story, and the temptations it presents to a stage director to turn those plot
elements — the political oppression meted out to defenders of truth, and the
heroism of their rescuers — into some sort of contemporary allegory.
There is no question what contemporary images the opera has stirred in
director Goetz Friedrich’s own imagination. His Prisoners’ Chorus is
unmistakably a vignette out of Buchenwald or Dachau; his final scene, with the
prison now pulled apart into fragments of scenery and the citizens daubing
graffiti on every available surface, is just as obviously the destruction of
the Berlin Wall.
Those are his references; to his credit, he does not pound us over the head
with them. Designer Peter Sykora’s costumes are, perhaps purposely, of no
particular period: some Biedermeier, some Victorian. The arch-villain Pizarro
(sung a little drily by Michael Devlin), is by contrast a most fearsome, up-
to-date 1990’s skinhead in floor-length leather coat; his office, furthermore,
sports an electric fan.
If this “Fidelio” bounces around in various historical eras, its musical
direction is commendably straightforward. Aided considerably by the splendid
impulse of Jiri Kout’s conducting, Friedrich gets us past even the opera’s
real nuisance scenes with remarkable dispatch. His Marzelline (Karen
Beardsley) and Jacquino (Jonathan Mack) have become, this once, creatures of
flesh, blood and a fair amount of anger. Wise old Father Rocco, his garrulous,
patchy music splendidly thundered forth by Matti Salminen, is also a far more
compelling figure than usual.
The Fidelio is Karan {cq} Armstrong; the Florestan, Gary Bachlund. These are
roles often visited by the Wagnerian contingent, and the sheer animal
intensity of a Nilsson or a Vickers isn’t easily gotten out of the memory.
Those are not the sounds at the Music Center, however. Armstrong is a
marvelous actress, and sings like one. Her smallish, over-bright tones on
opening night went harsh at the top, yet she had the consistent ability to
make her singing mean something, and that counted for a lot.
Bachlund’s Florestan was, similarly, a dramatic creation of genuine power.
Lighter of voice than most tenors who brave the role, he still produced some
thrilling sounds at the start of his stupendous aria, which he began virtually
prostrate; when he stood up near the end, however, the music seemed to run out
of steam.
These are minor points, however; the major point is that this uneven but
spellbinding masterpiece of Beethoven’s has received full treatment at the
hands of conductor Kout and director Goetz Friedrich and their assembled
forces, and when the climactic scene arrived and Fidelio flung forth her
incredible revelation, that moment was observed at the Music Center through
not very many dry eyes.
THE FACTS: WHAT: Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” produced by the Los Angeles Music
Center Opera.
THE CAST: Karan Armstrong as Fidelio; Gary Bachlund as Florestan; Michael
Devlin as Pizarro.
BEHIND THE SCENES: Goetz Friedrich, stage director; Jiri Kout, conductor, with
the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Peter Sykora, designer.
WHERE: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.
WHEN: 8 p.m., September 7, 12, 15; 2 p.m., September 9.
TICKETS: $15-$80; information: 213 972-7219; 213 480-3232.
OUR RATING: * * * *

Operatically inclined radio listeners within reach of New York’s WQXR know the voice and the wisdom of George Jellinek. For years, especially on his program called “The Vocal Scene,” he has expounded on the great voices of our time, without indulging in the kind of hysterical jabberwock that some opera fanatics assume as their lingua franca. Among his other accomplishments, jellinek wrote the first major biography of Maria Callas; it still stands up.Now Jellinek goes nationwide, by means of a new weekly radio series, “Texaco/Metropolitan Opera: Echoes from the Last 50 Years,” which starts Saturday, September 1 on KUSC-FM at 9:30 a.m., honoring Texaco’s 50-year sponsoship of the Met broadcasts. Peter Allen, host of those broadcasts, will be the host, but the words and the wisdom will be Jellinek’s own. First: a survey of “Aida” performances from the Met, with rare recordings (some from broadcast tapes) as far back as Giovanni Martinelli and as up-to-date as Aprile Millo. — ALAN RICH

The 18,000-or-so fortunate souls who sat at Ella Fitzgerald’s feet (in a manner
of speaking) at the Bowl last Wednesday night were treated a display of pure
style, a rare and precious commodity becoming more rare, more precious, in our
lifetime. Homage was due this smiling, crippled old lady not as a relic but as
a continuing presence, not merely for what she has done but for what she still
can do.
Style; the word gets kicked around a lot, but it takes on many shapes for many
pairs of ears. What it means above all, to this pair of ears, is the power
some musicians have to absorb the music — not merely the notes but the
lingering echoes of the energy that created those notes — and then to become
transformed into the essence of that music. Ella, now 72, may have needed a
little help on and offstage at her concert (and it was wonderful to see her
coming out on the supporting arm of her 83-year-old jazz buddy Benny Carter),
but once she was in place, it was the music that kept her aloft.
That’s what happens with those few great stylists among today’s performers;
for the listener it simply means being glued to your seat by the power and the
purity of the experience. Last week, on some cable station, there was another
of these stylistic revelations. It came in an unlikely place, a dreary and
pretentious TV special on Great Moments from the Metropolitan Opera, snippets
from Met telecasts over the years with the singers themselves mouthing the
usual music-appreciationese platitudes before each performance.
But in the middle of all this pseudo-cultural bathwater Teresa Stratas came
on and sang Mimi’s Farewell from “La Boheme,” and for those four minutes the
tiny body, the burnished-bronze thread of tone and the harrowing dark eyes of
Stratas literally transformed themselves into the fragile tragedy of Puccini’s
haunting music. That, too, was style: not a singer here, a composer there, a
TV camera somewhere else, but a single musical essence which, when it ended,
required an act of will on the viewer’s part to return to Earth.
Then, also last week, there came in the mail a most wondrous three-record set:
the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who at 65 is still most people’s favorite
singer of artsongs, in some of the Schubert songs he recorded in 1951 and ’52.
This was the start of his career, and what these disks capture above all is
the rich glow of revelation, as an ardent young singer with a voice of pure
velvet makes his first discoveries of what it feels like to sing this glorious
music. That glow illuminates this Angel-EMI release, again a venture in pure
style.
And that’s what Ella kept doing in front of that capacity crowd last
Wednesday. At one point she got Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” into her
clutches, and what she didn’t do with that evergreen if much-mistreated
venerable ballad! What she did — after singing it through straight and
gloriously — was to take both words and music and turn them into toys,
tossing little fragments (“Night, Night, Night, Day, Day, Day”) up into the
air until they seemed to reflect the starlight overhead like so many diamonds,
then catching each one of them in her warm and loving lap.
If you weren’t paying attention, you could write off that sort of thing as
pure trickery, and the Lord knows Ella’s own bag of tricks is as big as
anyone’s — as you’ll easily agree if you stayed around for that great scat
medley with Ella and all her jazz pals at the concert’s end. But that “Night
and Day” wasn’t just trick stuff; it was a woman clutching that song close to
her heart, and then just poking around inside it to help make it shine better
than ever. That’s not tricks; that’s art, as when Stratas sings Puccini’s
heroines and Fischer-Dieskau sings Schubert.
There are no pat definitions for this matter of style, which is to say that
there are many. Pure technical mastery — Pavarotti getting one of Donizetti’s
high B-flats lodged in his throat, and holding onto it for longer than human
strength should allow, Nureyev dashing up into the stratosphere and just
sitting there for a while — is for many cultural consumers reason enough to
shell out hard cash for tickets. Others demand artistry.
Kathleen Battle, who looks a million on the stage, owns a pure and pretty
voice which she used with superior marksmanship, and also drew large crowds
to her recent Bowl concerts, strikes these ears nevertheless as a singer not
often involved in what she sings; recent published words to that effect drew
some heavy mail. One man’s stale, apparently, is another’s style.
Here, for what it’s worth, is a personal little list of recordings, or of
moments on recordings, that glow particularly bright in the stylistic
firmament. Of Ella there is generous representations, best of all in the huge
“Song Book” series (Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, etc., two or three disks each,
all out now on CD) she recorded for Verve (and with Verve) in the 1950s:
vintage stuff, a treasury!Of the young Bing Crosby, much underestimated today as a fabulous master of
rhythm and the lyric line (and a scat artist right up there with Ella) there
is, alas, little currently available. One ASV single of Crosby with Bix
Beiderbecke is around, and it is essential.
On the other side of the fence: the best news, for all worshippers of
performing style at its most radiant, is the reissue on Angel-EMI of Pablo
Casals’ performance of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto (with Georg Szell and the Czech
Philharmonic). Just that mighty swipe by the Casals bow at the start of his
first solo carries the assurance that this noble musician is deep inside the
music and knows exactly what to do.
The list also includes, for as an example of pure flair and stylistic bravado
in action, Glenn Gould’s first recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations on
CBS, Carlo Maria Giulini’s Mahler Ninth Symphony (with the Chicago Symphony)
on DG, and…
There may be more, but these words are being written with the sound of Ella
still in the ears, and that’s hard to dislodge.