So I've Heard

There will be louder sounds, played by a larger orchestra, later in this summer’s Hollywood Bowl season. It’s doubtful, however, whether any future concert will include more exquisite music, better played, than was offered by this past weekend’s two all-Mozart “preview” concerts by a cut-down Los Angeles Philharmonic under its two assistant conductors — David Alan Miller on Friday night, Heichiro Ohyama on Saturday. Previews they might have been (in terms of a reduced orchestra at reduced ticket prices), but the crowds were of mid-season size: nearly 11,000 on Friday, over 12,000 on Saturday. Don’t tell me people don’t know a good thing when they see it.
Cutting back the orchestra — three stands of first and second violins, two basses — did wonders for Mozart’s scoring, as both conductors clearly understood. In Miller’s marvelously warm-hearted, expansive reading of Mozart’s 39th Symphony the plangent sounds of winds and brasses — clarinets and horns in a velvety sonority punctuated by soft chords from trumpets and drums — held their own against the strings as they seldom do in full-scale performances.
The same happened in Ohyama’s nicely controlled version of No. 41 (the “Jupiter”) on Saturday, again with winds and brass quietly marking time against the cascading passage-work from muted strings in that slow movement of indescribable, poignant beauty. It was all Mozart at his most magical, in the capable hands of two young conductors who knew the secrets of letting this music sing out at its own pace. (If only Ohyama had honored Mozart’s specified repeats in the first movement and finale, as Miller had the night before, the pace would have been even surer.)
Jean-Pierre Rampal was the soloist on Friday night, in Mozart’s G-major  Concerto and two single movements for flute and orchestra.  Has he been playing at being Rampal a little too long? I remember concerts (at New York’s “Mostly Mozart” especially) when this jovial Frenchman and his magic flute held a capacity audience in some kind of trance as the ethereal tones of his instrument hung weightless in the air. This didn’t happen this time.
Granted, it isn’t all that easy to put 11,000 listeners into a trance, what with helicopters overhead and wine bottles clanking. But Rampal might have tried; that’s what performance is all about. Instead I heard lazy phrasing, blurred passagework, a definite sense of “it’s Friday so this must be the Bowl.” Artists do get that way sometimes, and the smart ones know to take a vacation from fame at that point, perhaps to go off and look at sunsets.
There were no such problems on Saturday, when Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich took on the awesome challenge of the C-major Piano Concerto (K-503). He isn’t merely one of our best pianists; he’s one of our best Mozart pianists, which is the mark of superior insights and intelligence. This concerto makes enormous intellectual demands; it is seldom played for just that reason. Its substance arrives in fragmented state at the start of each movement, and each time only comes together later. “Craggy,” even “austere,” are applicable adjectives; the composer, already at work on his “Don Giovanni” seems — here, as there — to entertain visions of a future kind of music.  The genial, easy-going Mozart of our familiar image arrives late, a sublime but brief moment midway in the finale when winds and soloists engage in that special kind of Mozartian dialogue that always brings tears.
The performance was worthy of the music: the pianist’s vivid, beautifully spacious performance (including a stylish first-movement cadenza of his own making), and the superior collaboration of Ohyama and the orchestra. Music doesn’t get much better than this; the Bowl season is happily launched.

It was a strange evening of contrasts, but at least — on Tuesday night, six performances into the summer schedule — Hollywood Bowl finally achieved its official opening concert. Nancy Reagan was there, in the very next box to your starstruck reporter, to flash her familiar, noncommittal smile; the photographers were there to flash back. Mikhail Gorbachev wasn’t there, but he might have felt right at home as Soviet conductor Yuri Temirkhanov, with a mighty sweep of his right arm, started things off by galvanizing the Los Angeles Philharmonic into a larger-than-life version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The new international benevolence, as I was saying, breeds strange contrasts.
Travel demands had obliged me to miss Temirkhanov’s stint here last season. He’s now becoming known in the West, but is apparently happily rooted as the Leningrad Philharmonic’s chief conductor, the Soviet Union’s top job. I like him and so, apparently, does most of the Philharmonic. Tall and handsome, not afraid of invoking a little body english to underscore points of interpretation, he got some bright, alert playing out of the orchestra in a program that may have been routine but was anything but self-performing: Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture and the Fourth Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.
(Is it my imagination, by the way, or does the newly corrected sound system at the Bowl bring out a sheen in the string tone at least as clear, perhaps even more so, than the unmiked sound at the Music Center? I noticed the improvement during last weekend’s Mozart concerts, where it could have been the result of using a smaller orchestra. But I also noticed it with the full band on Tuesday.)
Temirkhanov’s slam-bang assault on the Tchaikovsky Fourth was concocted out of extremes — of dynamics, and also of grandiose, dizzying speed-ups and changes of tempo. This is, to be sure, one legitimate way of getting all the juice out of this juicy old warhorse; if you know your Mengelberg recordings, you know how this approach can work. Kurt Sanderling’s more straightforward reading, which lit lights at the Music Center earlier this year, may have dealt more honorably with the score’s brimming rhetoric, however. Both performances had the special advantage of Loren Levee’s marvelously plangent clarinet in the work’s many solo passages.
Did someone mention glasnost? Yes, there was Vladimir Feltsman, who had last appeared with Temirkhanov, back in the U.S.S.R., all of 15 years ago, now a New Yorker by residence and inclination. Feltsman played the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto; the teamwork between him and the conductor was immaculate, the interpretation somewhat puzzling.
The opening piano solo — slow, quiet, meditative — raised expectations for one kind of performance, but gave no hint of the brusque, rather brittle reading  that actually ensued. There were superior moments here and there — some beautiful,  quiet poetry in the interchange between soloist and orchestra in the slow movement, and a fair amount of charm in the finale — but they weren’t consistent with the soloist’s over-all view of the work. A couple of blurred runs aside, Feltsman played the piano very well; he played Beethoven’s wondrous concerto slightly less well, however.

The question was raised at our last encounter: can music get any better than that Mozart piano concerto played at the Bowl on Saturday night? The answer was quick to arrive, as the Emerson Quartet gave the first of its two Monday night concerts at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater across the way: It can, and it did. This was a concert to take home and replay in the memory, and I mean more than once.
The Emersons have been here before, notably in the complete Beethoven cycle two seasons ago at several concert venues; they’ve been together for over a decade. They show no apparent interest in brand-new music or production gimmicks; they are just the latest in a line of superbly trained American ensembles — Juilliard, Lenox, Guarneri, Cleveland, Sequoia — who can approach the heartwood of the chamber-music legacy with fresh young eyes, ears and hands, and keep this repertory alive as one of civilization’s commanding glories.
On Monday night, in that idyllic setting on Cahuenga Pass still known to relatively few, the Emersons played Prokofiev, Haydn and Beethoven, and played it all with flawless technique and great spirit. Without stretching points, they demonstrated some interesting links between Prokofiev’s B-minor Quartet (Opus 50), which began the evening, and the Haydn “Joke” Quartet (Opus 33 No. 2) which followed, especially in the matter of texture — the clear contrapuntal interplay in the faster sections of the Prokofiev, the great melodic arches in the slow movements, the whole structure clear and classically well-defined, the similar virtues throughout the Haydn.
Best of all, the group takes chances, with daring bursts of speed and with a dangerously wide dynamic range from very soft to very loud. Violinist Philip Setzer defined the risks as he began Beethoven’s stark, mystery-laden C-sharp minor Quartet (Opus 131), playing the initial chromatic fugue subject so softly as to suggest a voice from beyond the mountains. The entire first movement seemed to unwind organically from that initial challenge, in a crescendo of both loudness and passion.
The whole work, in fact, went by like that: the demonic smatterings of dissonant triplets throughout the first allegro; the mystical glow as the set of slow variations seems to break apart  into sharp, jagged particles of sound, and then to pull itself back together in that final, lushly scored reworking of the theme; the savagery in that grim, pounding finale.
The Emersons took the full measure of this extraordinary score; there, amid the trees and under the stars at that jewel of a concert venue,  its splendid natural acoustics unsullied by electronic interference, the stature of this gigantic flight of Beethoven’s ripe genius took shape. As an encore there was the deep, resonant stillness of yet more music from that incredible time, the D-flat {ITAL lento assai {ENDITAL from the last of the quartets (Opus 135), a movement that Beethoven had originally planned for the Opus 131.
Can music get any better than this? I will withhold the question for now because next Monday, same time same place, the Emersons (plus Lynn Harrell) take on Schubert’s C-major String Quartet. I can taste it already.

The best new record in weeks is Telarc’s compact disk of six orchestral works of P.D.Q. Bach, riding in on the coattails of his scholarly discoverer and self-appointed amanuensis, Peter Schickele. All of the music is new, not previously recorded. All of it further suggests that, 25 years (as of next April) into their interlinked career as master and slave (and don’t ask me which is which), there is still much to be learned about this “last and least of J.S. Bach’s 20-odd offspring,” and that Schickele remains the prime source of that learning.
Making funny but true jokes about music is an ancient process. The sublime Mozart did it brilliantly in his “Musical Joke” Sextet, a work (K-522) whose technique clearly prefigures Schickele’s own: a [ITAL reductio ad absurdum [ENDITAL of the most cliche-ridden practices of the time  by building them into deformed musical structures predestined to topple. Mozart’s village musicians improvise themselves into a corner from which no known harmonic progression can free them. Schickele’s hapless pianist in his “Einstein on the Fritz,” a devastating commentary on the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson stage masterpiece, becomes mired in a knee-deep sludge of arpeggios (cribbed from the first Prelude in Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”) which he, too, cannot escape.
The new record is a trove of similar observations on well-known works: a “Bach Portrait” that rips off the Copland-Lincoln collaboration, with authentic readings from Bach’s letters (Johann Sebastian, this time) full of grumble and fuss about financial woes; a ballet, “The Preachers of Crimetheus (get it?) that would tangle the toe-shoes of a Kirov troupe.
My own favorite is the “1712 Overture,” composed in 1985 for the centenary of the Boston Pops, but played here — like everything else — by the “Greater Hoople Area Off-Season Philharmonic” under the baton of a certain “Walter Bruno.” It’s a marvelous piece on its own, but it also is a touchstone for assessing the ongoing success of Schickele and his entourage.
You know the Tchaikovsky “1812,” of course, how it opens with an old Russian hymn in a lush orchestration for low strings, how that tune does battle with other tunes (including “The Marseillaise”) along the way, and how it soars triumphant at the end, accompanied by cannons and fireworks. The P.D.Q. Bach version follows a similar course, but the duelling tunes here are “Yankee Doodle” and “Pop! Goes the Weasel,” and with bursting balloons at the end instead of Tchaikovsky’s cannons.  If you know the Tchaikovsky backwards and forwards, the wit and accuracy of Schickele’s reworking will amaze you at every turn. If you don’t…there’s still the delight in hearing old familiar folktunes dolled up in this symphonic context. And if that doesn’t get to you, there are always those balloons.
It’s this ability to reach audiences on any level of sophistication, without consciously playing down, and without any need to falsify the original material, that accounts, I think, for Schickele’s amazing success. There are other musical comics around, and there is plenty of material within the realm of serious music for them to turn to their own uses. But Victor Borge operates from the notion that classical music is an arcane, closed world in which the hoariest cliches — the fat lady sopranos in opera, the languid pianist with the long hair — still hold true. The great Anna Russell came closer to the truth in her takeoffs. (“I’m not making this up, you know,” she would scream, at the point in Wagner’s “Ring” when the heroic Siegfried fell in with a succession of sopranos all of them his aunts.) But with Russell, too, you had to do your homework; she spoke most clearly to the musically educated insider.
Schickele has earned the respect of musicologists, by not telling the kind of lies about music that Borge seems to find necessary, but his appeal is also marvelously broad. You really have to work hard to disenjoy one of his live appearances, and it’s also remarkable how much of his essence comes over even on a record. One of the nice things about this new Telarc release is that the performances were done in a studio. Most of the earlier Vanguard stuff was recorded at live concerts, with bursts of laughter and applause that left the mere listener in the dark as to what was going on.
There is, of course, one lavish P.D.Q. Bach visual, the Video Arts International videocassette of his opera “The Abduction of Figaro,” from its 1984 premiere by the Minnesota Opera. As the title suggests, this is a Mozartian takeoff, both text and music a glorious pastiche of the mechanisms behind 18th-century operatic plotting and its music. It’s a full-length opera, and it’s amazing how seldom the inspiration flags. (You know the character of Papageno in “The Magic Flute”? Well, this opera has both a Papa Geno and a Mama Geno.)
Near the end of this “Figaro” there comes a moment that’s pure Schickele. The performance grinds to a halt and  a verbal debate erupts involving the manager of opera company, Schickele on the podium, and a preening singer on stage who feels he’s been short-changed by having too few arias. It’s a hilarious moment on its own, and it also relates to history, to the strutting divas and divos whom Mozart constantly had to placate with extra music.) You can read all the music history books you care to; Peter Schickele and his prolific sidekick make that history come alive, no less hilarious for their obsession with telling the truth.
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Erich Korngold was one of the first of the central-European composers dispatched to the Hollywood studios by Mr. Hitler’s Nazis. He was already an illustrious figure in Europe, thanks largely to his opera “Die Tote Stadt,” which he composed at around the age of 20. The fact that his father was the influential critic Julius Korngold, successor to Hanslick in Vienna, did his career no harm.
In Hollywood Korngold put together the Mendelssohn pastiche for the Max Reinhardt “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and went on to compose a repertory of densely romantic Hollywood epics all of which demanded and consumed lots of music. He wrote the cello concerto that Paul Henreid played in “Deception”; the cantata that Charles Boyer composed in “The Constant Nymph,” and enough “Kings Row” music to make an hour-long symphonic suite on its own. The movie stuff was his best music; even in the European scores before his emigration you hear “Kings Row” and “Deception” music in embryonic form.
But Korngold persisted, wrong-headedly for the most part, in the delusion that he was cut out to be a serious composer, and the new RCA release of his First and Third String Quartets, nicely played by the Chilingirian Quartet, point up the error of his ways. The first was from pre-Hitler Europe, the second was fabricated in postwar Hollywood, both share a depressing lack of direction, a chromatic aimlessness far inferior to what Korngold accomplished in the studies. Alongside this record RCA has also sent along a CD reissue of some of the movie music; the record is called “The Sea Hawk.” By any name, it puts the ambitions of the futile, “serious” Korngold to shame.

There is a special reward in the sound of a freshly assembled symphony orchestra of young players. This year’s Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute Orchestra, which gave the inaugural concert of its summer season at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Sunday night, could not be mistaken for an ensemble from Vienna or even Cleveland. The strings don’t yet have the sheen that comes from long association; the horns went awry somewhat more often than the legal limit. Yet what came over — as it has every summer since the Institute’s founding in 1982 — was the vitality, the exuberance of skillful young performers taking on music that has not yet become, for them, a matter of yearly routine.
The Institute, I hope I don’t need to remind you, is one of the Philharmonic’s noblest and most valuable ventures, a training orchestra formed anew every summer to offer professional performance experience to its members and also to serve as guinea pigs for a selected group of student conductors. During the summer they get the chance to meet and work with most of the guest conductors booked in for the Hollywood Bowl season; they work up several programs at Royce, several more on Sunday nights at the Bowl, and at least one on which they combine forces with the Philharmonic for some sort of monster rally. (That event is slated for July 25, when Neeme Jarvi will lead the 200-plus players in Sibelius’ Second Symphony.)
Anyhow, Sunday’s concert got the orchestra off to a strong start. Two of the three student conductors took part:  Elsa Tamarkin, who becomes associate conductor of the Dallas Symphony this fall, and Keith Lockhart, currently head of the Pittsburgh Civic Symphony.
Elsa Tamarkin had the more grateful assignment, Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide, ” a piece easy to love at first hearing, but not without its built-in problems, including the considerable task of making it sound like a piece of music, not merely a lesson in orchestration. This Tamarkin did, indeed, manage, with a strong, clear beat that kept the music aloft and fresh-sounding.
To Lockhart fell the less grateful task of surrounding Lynn Harrell’s oversized, overphrased reading of Haydn’s gentle C-major Cello Concerto with an orchestral support that might sound as if it belonged to the same piece. An excellent cellist for romantic repertory but perhaps not quite at home in anything earlier, Mr. Harrell seemed to have mistakenly viewed the work as belonging somewhere on the stylistic spectrum between Schumann and Dvorak. This did not make things easy for his young colleague; despite young Lockhart’s graceful, assured podium manner the outcome was something of a mellifluous mess.
The program ended with Brahms, lots of Brahms, the Second Symphony with all the repeats, stretched out to something close to 50 minutes of high-toned oratory, not a little wearying to the nonbelievers. Heichiro Ohyama, one of the Philharmonic’s assistant conductors as well as principal violist, led a strong, logical performance; there were no loose ends despite the less-than-heavenly lengths, and for the young orchestra the performance must have been a substantial listening experience.
Next Sunday, again at Royce Hall, the orchestra faces an even greater challenge, the glorious sweep of Aaron Copland’s big, rawboned Third Symphony. Be there.

From all accounts, the musical celebration of the French bicentennial is going fairly well — everywhere, that is, except in Paris. Here at home we’ve not done too badly so far, what with Pierre Boulez at the Philharmonic and Beaumarchais at Long Beach, and there’s more to come. It’s doubtful, however, if any musical salute hereabouts has been planned with greater imagination and resource than the Getty Museum’s “Music and the French Revolution,” a five-concert series that began this past weekend and continues on alternate Saturday nights through August 26.
Summer concerts at the Getty are now in their fourth year; word of them hasn’t spread too widely, for the simple reason that they have usually been sold out. I have no sensible advice, therefore, on how to get in, except that — if last Saturday’s concert is any indicator — it’s worth any effort. You might try a note from your doctor, or a Sherman tank.
This season’s series began with a celebration of a pre-Revolutionary event, important in musical history, although not much noticed by the Parisians at the time: Mozart’s visit to Paris around 1778. He came there with his mother, who died during the visit; he noted the specialized taste of Parisian audiences and wrote some splendid music to honor that taste. Paris was particularly gaga over woodwind virtuosos, and Saturday’s program began with a  flute concerto by Francois Devienne, dating from a couple of years after Mozart’s visit, lovely to hear and striking in the clear links between the style of this work and Mozart’s own inclinations at the time.
The crown of the Devienne concerto is the sweetly melancholic slow movement. It reflects its own past in its resemblance to the flute solos in Gluck’s “Orpheus,” and at the same time partakes of the exquisite brand of French-accented  poignance that Mozart brought, say, to the slow movements of the K-271 Piano Concerto or the K-285 Flute Quartet.
But the concerto was more than merely a historical exercise. It  had its own charms, and was exquisitely set forth by Stephen Schultz, playing a modern copy of a flute of the time, a handsome instrument in wood, with but a single key compared to the 14 on a modern flute. Mr. Schultz and his magical flute went on to light lights in Mozart’s A-major Flute Quartet (K.-298) and, with Kathleen Moon, the Flute and Harp Concerto (K. 299), burbling, joy-filled products of Mozart’s Parisian sojourn.
Stronger than either of these, in sheer emotional and inventive power, was the E-minor Violin Sonata (K.-304), terse but lavish music, the work of a young composer learning to distinguish the accents of his own musical voice from the formal cliche-spinning of the Deviennes and Salieris of the world. Violinist Gregory Maldonado, with Robert Winter at a handsome copy of a Mozart fortepiano, played the work for all its raw power, not a pretty-pretty performance but a knowing one.
In charge throughout the concert was Maldonado’s first-rate Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra. It is a splendid group; the sounds, even in the Getty’s handsome but acoustically iffy Inner Peristyle Garden, were bright and powerful; horns and woodwinds rang out with particular bravery. The group returns for the last two concerts in the series, precious programs indeed: Cherubini’s famous but never-performed opera “Les Deux Journees,” (with the splendid I Cantori taking the vocal parts) and — for the fellow who thinks he’s heard everything — Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony in the composer’s 1818 version for nine — 9! — instruments.
The setting was fabulous, the music close to that. Add to the quality of these concerts — with their introductory talks by Robert Winter and their handsome program book with excellent notes by Janet Johnson — the fact that the museum itself is kept open on concert nights, and you might suspect that the Age of Enlightenment may not yet have run its course after all.

In local cultural annals these few weeks are generally thought of as the musical doldrums, the uneventful time between the end of the Philharmonic season and the Bowl. This year, however, this interval has hardly lived up (or down) to its name. Count the blessings: a Handel opera in Santa Monica, a new-music festival in East L.A. and, this past Wednesday, an uncommonly interesting and lively program of American music at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, sung by that excellent group that goes by the generic name of I Cantori (“The Singers”).
The group, under its founder and conductor Edward Cansino, is now in its 14th year; to my embarassment, this was my first encounter, but not my last. The ensemble consists of eight singers plus, on occasion, Mr. Cansino. They sing with finesse and a most attractive tone. Somewhere along the line, someone made the admirable decision that the sight of a vocal group merely lined up in concert formation might lead to boredom; at Wednesday’s concert, in the informal setting of the church’s Fellowship Hall, the singers moved freely around the performing area, like entertainers at a particularly friendly salon. One of their number, baritone Kenneth Knight, even did some decent baton-twirling tricks during a light-hearted group of Charles Ives songs.
It was an interesting program, ranging from 1894 (the year of Ives’ mettlesome choral setting of Psalm 67) to 1989 (the year of the program’s opening work, Cansino’s own “Design.”) Along the way there were two marvelous Joan La Barbara pieces involving advanced vocal techniques — one, called “Time(d) {cq}Trials and Unscheduled Events” was composed for the 1984 Olympics, and consists mostly of heavy athletic breathing in strict rhythms) — some powerfully conceived short works by Copland and Barber, a set of rather strained, anti-lyrical songs by George Rochberg from his pre-post-romantic years, {cq} and some of George Crumb’s Madrigals, settings of tiny fragments of Garcia Lorca texts.
For leavening there was also a most beguiling set of songs and dances from Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha.” Maybe the opera itself is too sweetly naive to persist in the repertory as a whole. Maybe also the sight of these  indigenous pieces being sung and romped to by a concert group in white tie and ball gowns strains the image somewhat. The results, nevertheless, were enchanting; one of the numbers was wisely brought back as an encore at program’s end.
Along the way all of the group members had their solo flings: Sandra Stowe in the Rochberg songs and Diane Thomas in the Madrigals were especially fine. Three instrumentalists helped out where needed: pianist Lorna Eder, flutist Lisa Edelstein and percussionist Timm {cq}  Boatman.
Mr. Cansino’s own piece consisted of a medley of shreds and patches out of vocal works from Gregorian Chant to the present, all sung more or less simultaneously: a trick nicely managed by, say, Luciano Berio in the collage movement from his “Sinfonia,” managed less well in this instance. Fortunately, it was placed first on the program; considering the delights that ensued it was soon, deservedly, forgotten.

“The Gould problem,” intones the oracular voice as if from the very slopes of Delphi, “has not gone away.” The Gould problem, the Callas problem, the Rubinstein mystique, the Toscanini magic…these are the essential propositions on which the video documentary must rest: that curious media hybrid in which mortal scriptwriters grapple with immortal artistry, most often to preordained failure.
Kultur Video has added a Glenn Gould documentary to its small but excellent catalogue of arts-oriented video cassettes. The program runs 105 minutes; it was produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1985, and contains enough footage of Gould in action, at or away from his piano, to be worth the attention of anyone who can be reached by the extraordinary playing of this strange, solitary musical visionary. At the same time, it ruins a great deal of that valuable material, all for the sake of what are known in media circles as  production values.
Thus, a tantalizing piece of black-and-white footage, a very young Gould immersed in one of the early-Baroque tidbits he dredged up out of obscurity, is overlain with a succession of color shots of old admirers and friends croaking out their protestations of undying love. Time after time, moments of potential musical fascination are undercut this way; program producers Vincent Tovill and Eric Till, who also do most of the solemn narration, propose the existence of a “Glenn Gould Problem,” and then allow everyone to work on its solution except Gould himself.
What, then, {ITALwas {ENDITAL this so-called problem? It was, simply, the refusal or the failure (or both) of this abnormally bright and insightful musician to satisfy the world’s image of what a musician was supposed to be. His repertory choices went against the grain; his playing, especially of any music before, say, 1830, was eccentric in relation to the way anyone else played this music; then there were the incidental matters: the curious bandy-legged chair, the humming (nay, caterwauling) that became an inseparable part of Gould’s playing, the strange clothing choices, including mufflers and galoshes on hot summer days.
The media latched onto these  eccentricities early in Gould’s career, and you can see the results on this documentary. What other rising young pianist, for example, could show up at a piano warehouse to choose an instrument, with a camera crew also on hand? Who but Glenn Gould would willingly submit to being photographed singing a Mahler song to an apathetic herd of zoo elephants? Reclusive, crowd-dodging misanthrope that he became in his late years, Gould operated from the start with a keen sense of the importance of the image. His very dodging of that image-making process, from his abjuration of live stage performances following his Los Angeles recital of April 10, 1964, created for him the most powerful image of all.
This documentary wastes a lot of time on the image; too little on the man and his music. Out of his copious outpouring of musical wisdom, via radio and television in Canada and Great Britain, the producers have winnowed relatively little: Gould and violinist Yehudi Menuhin exchanging words on the Schoenberg Fantasy they are about to play together, Menuhin baffled by the music, Gould ecstatic. The original of that program, shown a few years ago at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum, is full of warm and fascinating discourse; only a tantalizing snippet shows up on the documentary.
What remains is, of course, never less than fascinating; some — the look of the boyish, exultant iconoclast against the hunched-over, weary, ingrown figure of those final studio sessions — comes across powerful and tragic. But nowhere is Gould shown filling out the dimensions of his own musical visions, of his demonic  joy in kicking over accepted idols, in the reflective processes that led him to his first interpretive decisions about Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and the drastic changes that shaped his later recorded version. These, of course, are the elements that defy even the most sophisticated video cameras, even the all-hearing microphone.
Perhaps those missing parts of the portrait are too much to ask from a public-consumption documentary, even from as responsible a source as the CBC. Television audiences don’t want their idols to elucidate on Bach phrasing; they want them at play in the zoo, or strolling in soft focus through fog-swept wilderness. They want old Dad Gould telling how the three-day-old Baby Glenn’s fingers kept moving, as though he already knew what lay ahead.
Fortunately, there are other ways of solving the “Gould problem,” if problem it be. Otto Friedrich’s recent biography is detailed and soberly written, the point of view of a lifelong fan who also knows how to research. Unfortunately, the fan in Friedrich leads now and then to his book’s few howlers; he lets himself believe, for example, Leonard Bernstein’s own self-serving, error-strewn account of the famous Brahms Concerto episode, even when it contradicts Bernstein’s previous, equally erroneous accounting in an essay in an earlier haphazard and scattershot book called “Glenn Gould Variations.”
Shall I relate that episode one more time? On April 8, 1962, Bernstein made a speech before a New York Philharmonic performance, explaining that he and Gould had disagreed on the way the Brahms D-minor Concerto should go, but that he (Bernstein) was going along out of admiration for the pianist. The ensuing performance (preserved on tape and now distributed by the Philharmonic to donors to the orchestra) was not the least iconoclastic, barring a few details such as a somewwhat softer-than-usual approach to those smashing octaves midway in the first movement.
Yet Harold Schonberg of the New York Times, at that very performance, reacted more to Bernstein’s speech than Gould’s performance  and delivered a killer if completely misinformed review. Punchline: Bernstein, after complaining about Gould’s alleged slow tempos, later made another recording of the same concerto (with Christian Zimerman) even slower, but without disclaimer.
All of which proves nothing, except to detail an extreme example of a media event built on an unfounded premise, but kept aloft by the ongoing legend of Glenn Gould. You don’t need this to approach the essential Gould, however. When you’ve worked your way through that extraordinary legacy of recordings, then you start on the offbeat, unpredictable, intellectual serendipity of the essays collected in Tim Page’s “Glenn Gould Reader.” Then you realize that diversions like this video documentary are mere scratchings around the base of the gigantic stature of Glenn Gould, never to be fully comprehended, always a source of heat and light.
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Some good new music in a good new locale: that sums up the events  at California State University Los Angeles (CSULA from now on), as the three-day First Pacific Contemporary Music Festival ended on Saturday night, with everybody on stage thanking everybody else, and a capacity crowd in the school’s 400-or-so-seat Playhouse cheering them all. The school had never before dabbled in concert production on so large a scale; composer and faculty member Byong-kon Kim, who organized this festival, has done an impressive piece of work.
CSULA’s music department operates in the shadow of the school’s huge statue of Confucius; not surprisingly, therefore, it pays a fair amount of attention to music of Oriental composers or, to be more specific, music from the whole circumference of the Pacific Rim. A second festival, in which the school will again participate, is set for June, 1990 in Korea.
This first festival involved the sterling services of the California E.A.R. Unit, whose praises have filled this space before, an ensemble of the region’s phenomenally gifted new-music performers, virtuosos often on more than just a single instrument. (On Friday’s concert, for example, violinist Robin Lorentz and cellist Erika Duke doubled on their own respective instruments and, in one work, on spraycans. Arthur Jarvinen, composer of the work in question, performed in it both as percussionist and on a chromatic harmonica.)
A scheduling conflict kept me from the first concert. The two I heard offered a neat selection of Pacific Rim music, along with some out-of-area interlopers, possibly for ballast. Among the latter were George Crumb, whose “Idyll for the Misbegotten,” a gorgeously scored (solo flute, wondrously played by Dorothy Stone, 3 percussionists) piece in Crumb’s most magical, mystical, atmospheric style; Stephen Albert (Pulitzer laureate a few years back), whose overextended, mealy-conservative song-cycle “To Wake the Dead” had me fighting off sleep; Elliot Carter, whose “Triple Duos” amounted to another large slice of his usual self-indulgent complexity.
Against these the Pacific composers more than held their own. On Friday Erika Duke played Toru Takemitzu’s “Orion”; on Saturday, Isang Yun’s “Nore,” both beautifully formed, throbbing, intensely colorful pieces. On Friday harpist Ruth Inglefield played Juan Orrego-Salas’ “Variations on a Chant,” large-scale, inventive music full of unusual effects for the solo instrument; another harp solo on Saturday, Byong-kon Kim’s “Sori,” was not as far-reaching in its experimentation, perhaps, but displayed a nice range of coloration.
Friday’s concert began with a strong ensemble piece, “In Tension,” by Elena Katz-Chernin, a Soviet-born composer now living in Australia: hectic, energetic music, fascinatingly built out of abrasive small fragments. But a set of “Episodes” for piano, by Taiwan’s Tsang-Houei Hsu, nicely played by Gloria Cheng, indicates that the Orient, too, has carved out its colonies on Windham Hill.
Those were, for this listener the musical highs and lows; let the record also show, for those fonder than I of Carter’s kind of charmless note-spinning, that the ensemble under Rand Steiger’s energetic direction did itself proud. And that Arthur Jarvinen’s “Egyptian Two-Step,” for all the damage those spraycans may have done to the ozone layer, has an agreeable kickiness that I haven’t heard in his other works. And that the members of the E.A.R. Unit,  together or separately,  constitute one of those local treasures that makes it possible to look forward to new-music events with assurance and delight.

The Abbe Prevost had his Manon Lescaut die in a “desert near New Orleans”; Alexis de Tocqueville brought home to France glowing reports on the American political system; Albert Bierstadt painted our rivers and mountains. Foreign visitors have always reacted strongly and interestingly to the American landscape; few have acted as colorfully, as flamboyantly — and, I have to add, as noisily — as did Olivier Messiaen in a piece for piano, solo horn, percussion and orchestra called “From the Canyons to the Stars.”
The work, in 12 movements and lasting 89 minutes, has an amusing history. The great music patron Alice Tully  commissioned Messiaen for a small piece for the American Bicentennial, to be played by her beloved Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The composer looked through some picture books and fell in love with a photograph of Bryce Canyon, in Utah. But after Messiaen made the trip, the modest piece for chamber orchestra launched upon an uncontrollable process of growth: a larger orchestra, a pianist, more time, more instruments. The travelogue also expanded, from the Utah desert to Hawaii to (at least in the composer’s mind) Belshazzar’s palace in ancient Babylon. “The piece just grew, like Topsy, ” Tully told me once, “and the expenses grew with it. But I didn’t mind.”
The result is an amazing outlay of sheer musical bravado. Messiaen is one of music’s great imponderables: on the one hand, the humble servant of God and St. Francis, both of whom he has often honored in his music; on the other, the master showman, who paints his vast musical canvases in lurid poster colors. (At the Lincoln Center premiere of “Canyons,” the piano part was played by Messiaen’s wife, Yvonne Loriod, her massive frame draped in a flaming red-orange robe so that she looked exactly like sunrise over a Utah mountain. )
Anyhow, there is a lot to “From the Canyons to the Stars,” and the new CBS recording, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the London Sinfonietta,  with Paul Crossley, pianist, will give you a trip into audible psychodelia. The only piece, in fact, that carries the same power is also by Messiaen, the gaudy, knock-’em-down “Turangalila” Symphony, but that work I find oppressively vulgar compared to “Canyons.”
If you know any Messiaen, you will expect to encounter his major obsessions in this piece: his fascination with translating the songs of birds into music, his passion for instilling into all his music a sense of reverence that  has taken shape during his many years in his organ loft at the Church of the Trinity in Paris and that reflects the broad span of personal belief in this venerable, 81-year-old French individualist. You can resist the clatter in this music, and resist also the composer’s extreme demands on a listener’s time. Sooner or later, however, this music will nail you to your seat.
The performance under Salonen is powerful and sure; he also recorded the “Turangalila,” and his own strong sensibility keeps that score well under control, as well as this. The new album is rounded out with Messiaen’s most popular instrumental work,  the musical aviary “Exotic Birds” (again with Crossley the excellent pianist) and the crabbed, intense “Colors of the Celestial City,” a work that gives me some problems.
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Witold Lutoslawski is now 76; every new work adds to his luster as one of the strongest, most original musical figures of his time. He came to the U.S. first in the 1960s, when the world rejoiced in the cultural thaw that had enabled Polish composers, writers and artists to express themselves freely and originally. I remember chatting with him at Tanglewood in 1961 about his hopes for his country’s integrity of expression. That process has encountered setbacks, yet Lutoslawski (alongside Penderecki and a few younger compatriots) have flourished both at home and abroad.
For the spectacularly endowed (in many ways) violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter Lutoslawski has recast a violin and piano piece into a Partita for Violin and Orchestra, an elegant and expressive work. The title suggests a look back at older music, and there are movements in this five-part work that carry a suggestion of the Bach imprint, mostly in the sense of a rhythmic kinship. These dance-like movements alternate, however, with other sections in which the soloist operates with greater freedom, almost as improvisation.
That is an important part of Lutoslawski’s musical manner, and always has been. If you remember the Third Symphony, which Esa-Pekka Salonen performed at the Music Center,  to spectacular acclaim, on his first-ever appearance here, you may recall the  vibrant interplay between written-down, prescribed matter and places where the orchestra is left to improvise (within given limits). That makes this music hard to bring off, but it endows it with a rhapsodic quality that I find irresistible. On this record, which has Mutter playing with the BBC Symphony conducted by the composer, there is also an earlier Lutoslawski work that has become popular, the “Chain 2” of 1984, along with the Violin Concerto in D of Stravinsky, which sounds in this company like the crackling of dried-out parchment.
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Some of Stravinsky’s shadow falls across the Violin Concerto of Kurt Weill, a piece dating from 1924 — four years before the start of the collaboration with Bertolt Brecht that established Weill’s international fame. Here is a young composer, 24, newly arrived in Berlin, fine-tuned by his teacher, the great Busoni, to pick up on musical currents sweeping through that most current-swept city of its time. Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto, with its scoring for only wind band, must have made its effect; Weill’s Violin Concerto has the same scoring.
But the tone is the young composer’s own: wry, sardonic, marvelously colorful. Earlier scores by Weill are only now coming to light: chamber works, glorious songs, some orchestral experiments. But the Violin Concerto stands as his great leap forward. On a Musicmasters recording Naoko Tanaka plays the concerto with tremendous control over the work’s sense of mystery, of never quite revealing its secrets. And Julius Rudel conducts the winds of New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s as a splendid background.
Also on the record: Rudel’s extraordinary performance of the “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik,” the suite for small jazz orchestra that Weill made from the “Three-Penny Opera” in the despairing belief that the opera would flop and that something from it, at least, needed rescue. Nothing of the sort transpired, but Weill’s arrangement survives as a separate concert piece, its songs quite different in many ways from their appearance in the stage version. Rudel knows the secret of this music remarkably well; I have never heard it better performed — not even in the 1930 “pirate” by Otto Klemperer, for whom it was composed — than on this  record.