So I've Heard

Never let it be said of your doting correspondent, that he flinched from undergoing the tortures of Hades on behalf of the edification and uplift of his loyal readers. He did just that last Sunday afternoon, in fact, forsaking domestic comforts and bright sunshine to join the paltry crowds at the scene of that notorious crime, the Music Center Opera’s current production of Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld.”
Why? News was out that Dom DeLuise, whose casting in the role of Public Opinion had been the major flaw in the production on opening night, had been replaced, at least temporarily, by one Roderick Cook. That {ITAL had {ENDITAL to be an improvement worth checking out. Besides, despite what you think, no critic worth his word processor gets that much pleasure out of running his verbal bulldozer over honest human effort. Perhaps I was out of sorts that first night; perhaps {ITAL they {ENDITAL were.
Sorry, no such luck. Mr. Cook, best known as the author and star of “Oh, Coward,”  at least makes the effort to take aim at some of Offenbach’s music, and often comes within hailing distance of the right pitch. But his prissy-Brit mannerisms have no more to do with his part — the crucial role in the whole work, I remind you, the character who stands in for the librettists’ and Offenbach’s visions as they skewed the ancient legend around to fit the tastes of Belle-Epoque Paris — than Dom DeLuise’s epic vulgarity.
Whatever he might have accomplished on his own, Mr. Cook must play along with all the {ITALshtik {ENDITAL that designer Gerald Scarfe and director Peter Schifter have contrived for the role. Worst of all is that ugly, bloated, stage-filling bustle-shaped conveyance on which he must ride.
There was, in fact, one definite change for the better at Sunday’s performance, David Eisler (remember? Candide?) as Pluto, with his clean young-sounding tenor and his superior diction replacing the nanny-goat squalling of Ronald Stevens, who was reported as ailing. Grateful we must be for such small favors; yet nothing can save this misbegotten misrepresention, over-all,  of the Offenbach genius.
Once again, however, the glorious moment of Michael Smith’s Act-2 entrance as Mercury, done up in silver and truly mercurial, contained the concentrated energy, dash and immense good humor that the show otherwise lacked. I would suggest to management, in fact, that   Mr. Smith and his all-but-airborne performance be preserved and inserted into all operas from now on, whenever affairs on stage seem without hope.
I  neglected to mention the rest of the dancing in my first review; after my second visit I remembered why. They can can that can-can.

There could have been no doubt that Aleksei Sultanov could play the piano– not, at least, after the diminutive, 19-year-old Soviet black-belt (Tae Kwon Do) owner stormed through the  ranks of contenders at the Eighth Annual Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at Forth Worth13 days ago, and ended high in the saddle. The question  to be settled at his debut recital Thursday night at Ambassador, however, was how whether he could also  play  music. The answer so far: some day, perhaps, but not yet.
Young Mr. Sultanov chose a challenging  program program: Mozart and Beethoven Sonatas, the Prokofiev Seventh, Chopin’s B-flat minor Scherzo and Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz: a classic calling-card to present to a competition jury. I missed the goings-on at Fort Worth this time, but it’s a safe guess that Sultanov knocked the judges off their perches with this  machine-made programming in performances spurred on by the  adrenalin such events inevitably generate. (I also assume his platform manners at Fort Worth were different from his grim, unsmiling, let’s-get-it-over-with demeanor at Ambassador.)
Chances are that no Cliburn contender will ever play again the way they all did at Fort Worth, unless any of them is so foolhardy as to remain on the competition treadmill. That’s the tragedy, the irony of competitions; after a while the adrenalin just runs out, and it had certainly run out on young  Sultanov at Pasadena.  At this generally dreadful concert — easily the worst debut recital I’ve attended since the last Cliburn winner earned his obligatory Ambassador engagement –I heard the workings of an impressive piano-playing machine run by an unimpressive musical conscience. You wanted constantly to reach up and turn down the speed control; but for the steady stream of perspiration that fell like gumdrops on keyboard and floor, you might have guessed that there was nobody at the piano at all.
The tone was set in the opening Mozart sonata (in C, K. 330), which Sultanov merely rippled though as so much finger exercise. The Beethoven “Appassionata” fared little better: great gobs of notes at breakneck speed, with  no shaping of events. One might have held some hope for the later works on the program, most of all the  Prokofiev, but no; those raging, swirling Sultanov fingers formed a juggernaut, obliterating everything in its path. As the first encore there was the much-loved E-flat Valse Brillante of Chopin, pulverized, brutalized, with arbitrarily placed stops and starts almost like a parody of a self-indulgent performing superstar.
And so, the tragedy of the world of musical competition adds another chapter. True, Aleksei Sultanov is only 19, and already he has the fingers (not to mention the major hair) for some sort of career. Whatever the judges at Fort Worth heard, I heard piano playing utterly without point of view. If this had been any old debut recital, my advice to the young musician would be to take time off to learn something about the art of music. But Sultanov, of course, can’t; he has his prize money, his recording contract and his list of concert bookings stretching on for years. His prize has become his trap.

Despite ugly rumors to the contrary, there are still new things –even old new things — under the sun. When, for example, did you last hear George Frideric Handel’s “Il Pastor Fido” — not, moreover, in the composer’s 1734 updating but as originally set down on paper in 1712? If your answer is “never,” you’re probably right. Nobody connected with the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra — which performed that very work, splendidly by the way, at Santa Monica’s St. Paul Lutheran Church, on Friday night — has unearthed any evidence of that work, in that version, ever having been given previously in these parts.
If Handel’s opera is known at all, it is from the noisy orchestration of some of its music perpetrated by Sir Thomas Beecham as “The Faithful Shepherd” (that being the work’s English title). That farrago, with its racketing snaredrums and squalling brass, enthusiastically hailed by a bygone generation that believed that Baroque music was supposed to sound that way, does indeed draw its music from the opera, but — as Gregory Maldonado and his instrumental and vocal forces demonstrated over the weekend (with subsequent performances on Saturday and Sunday in other local churches), it sounds better Handel’s way than Beecham’s.
The Handel opera is one of those pastoral nonsenses: Mirtillo loves Amarillis who is betrothed to Silvio who is loved by Dorinda but who himself only loves hunting and thus realizes Dorinda’s love after she puts on a bearskin and hides in a tree whereupon he shoots her(not fatally). This, apparently, was a hot scenario in Handel’s day; Jean-Philippe Rameau also set it, almost as beautifully as Handel. Wimpy text or no, this gentle drama drew out of both composers music of utmost charm, once in a while reminiscent of routine Baroque machinery but mostly radiantly beautiful.
Even with an orchestra of three winds, a few strings and keyboard, Handel — only 27 at the time — knew how to make everything sing. Act 3 of “Il Pastor” starts with a gorgeous piece of orchestral mood-painting, with oboes and bassoon spinning out a nocturnal melody that holds you motionless as it unwinds. Hard-hearted Silvio has a couple of rollicking hunting songs; true-love Amarillis pulls down one glorious tune after another.
The Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra has now completed its third year. Its players, for the most part, use contemporary copies of 17th and 18th-century instruments, and play them with authentic technique — a light bow pressure on the strings, for example. Best of all their playing is nicely animated; not for Maldonado’s group the notion that old music will shatter under a lively touch.
Some good singers showed up — skilled, like the orchestra, in the manner of voice placement and use or non-use of vibrato, and also nicely adept at adding a few vocal ornaments whenever a tune came around for its obligatory repeat. Mary Rawcliffe was scheduled for the leading role but took sick; Kari Windingstad replaced her on short notice, began tentatively, but was the full mistress of the Handelian long phrase, and even the Handelian trill, by evening’s end. Susan Judy, heroine of much local performance of music old and new, was a fetching Amarillis; barring an occasional lapse into hootiness, countertenor Lawrence Lipnik was a sturdy Silvio.
The altogether fine cast was rounded out by Sondra Stowe, Catherine McCord Larsen and Edward Levy — as the inevitable {ITALdeus ex machina {ENDITAL who comes on at the end of all these operas, announces oratorically than black equals white and thus that all mortal problems are henceforth resolved. Mr. Levy didn’t quite clear up for me why the lovelorn Dorinda was up in that tree disguised as a bear. But as the great Anna Russell keenly observed in another context, you can get away with anything in opera so long as you sing it. And sing it these good people in Santa Monica certainly did.

SAN FRANCISCO Since his arrival on the musical scene some 20 years ago, Philip Glass has made important noises on many fronts. He is beyond question our most prolific and often-produced composer of opera; concerts of his music have done turn-away business as classical events, as rock events, and in that gray in-between area variously known as “crossover” or “new age.” He has lately been criticized for an overabundance of facility, of possibly being stuck in a lucrative groove otherwise known as a rut.
But “Satyagraha,” which yesterday completed a well-attended (but not sold out) five-performance run at the San Francisco Opera, evokes no such deplorations; it is a gravely beautiful, powerful work, arguably Glass’s masterpiece to date, possibly also the most eloquent  statement yet made on the dramatic potential of the minimalist style of composition. It is a pure example of that style; each of its nine scenes is based on long strings of repetitions of simple, easy-to-grasp melodic and harmonic patterns. A listener bored at a performance of “Satyagraha” — if such a rare creature there be — can at least pass the time by counting; one whole scene, for example, is built on no fewer than 143 repetitions of a four-chord harmonic progression. Mohandas Gandhi’s spellbinding final aria consists entirely of a scale passage repeated identically, with shifting orchestrations, 30 times.
But that is far from the point. “Satyagraha” is, as you’ve surely read by now, a musical account of early struggles of Gandhi, his attempts to galvanize the Indian community in South Africa to an assertion of its identity in the face of hostility from the country’s European leaders. (The title, from Gandhi’s writings, suggests a fusion of honor and strength.)  There is no dramatic dialog as such; the libretto, by Glass himself and Constance De Jong, uses instead a text, in the original Sanskrit, from classic Indian sources that details Gandhi’s latter-day struggles by indirection and analogy. This manner of fashioning the drama is sure and skillful, and it works beautifully with the time-scale dictated by the music.
That quality of interaction, above all, turns all of “Satyagraha” into an opera that is both profoundly, satisfyingly original and fulfills at the same time the classic definition: words and music blending into an art higher than its parts. The production, now nine years old and much-traveled (Seattle and Chicago most recently) is basically unchanged, but for a few minor directorial subtleties, from David Pountney’s staging at the1980 Rotterdam premiere. It becomes part of this oneness: Robert Israel’s simple, stylized set-pieces (small house-models carried in and out on platforms, a spectacular mockup of an old printing press with its turning flywheel that suggests an ancient Shiva sculpture) are beautifully lit behind a scrim that lends a chalky texture over-all. I remember pictures of old Indian cave paintings that had that same tone.
Douglas Perry was San Francisco’s Gandhi; a vivid interpreter of comprimario parts (e.g., the Idiot in “Boris Godunov”), he has made a whole separate career out of his ownership of this one role, which he does superbly. His voice, soft-textured but accurate over a wide range, lends a disembodied quality that, again, becomes part of the opera’s dramatic whole. Bruce Ferden, who conducted, has also been part of the “Satyagraha” scene, and of the entire Glass operatic repertory, from the beginning. (Christopher Keene, however, conducted the New York City Opera performances and the CBS recording, not nearly so incisively or as sure-footedly, as Ferden.)
“Satyagraha” belongs in the repertory. With its modest instrumentation (basically a Mozart orchestra, with one synthesizer that merely doubles) it demands only superb musicianship. It submits to a variety of stagings; for proof of that there is the lavish, wildly inventive Stuttgart production by Achim Freyer that shows up on cable TV now and then,
as different from the Robert Israel conception as fireworks from fireflies. The opera itself endures,  a work of noble beauty and truth; its great moments, of which there are many, are genuinely moving.
San Francisco’s opera audiences do not share the Los Angeles propensity for according standing ovations to anything that can cross a stage without falling down.  At Friday night’s “Satyagraha,” however, there were many who stood.

The sun finally burned through the  fog late Sunday afternoon, in time to lend its glow to the last measures of Pierre Boulez’s “Improvisations sur Mallarme” and, thus, to the end of the 43rd annual Ojai Festival. Even in the preceding chill and gloom, however, there had been warmth and light; the final all-Boulez concert was a stunning climax.
Many words, mostly adulatory, have been spilled over Boulez in this space since he betook himself hither a month ago — to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in three weekends at UCLA’s Royce Hall and now at Ojai. Yet this final concert, the only entire program of Boulez’ music during his stay, bore more than its share of revelations, as a stylistic survey of a musician who has devoted a lifetime to challenging old-fashioned artistic norms and exploring far horizons.
And so, in this final concert, we had the Boulez of 1949 in his “Livre pour Cordes,” aloof, abrasive, clearly an obeisance to the bristling atonality of the Schoenberg school, suggesting the far-fetched notion that design itself — removed from melodic shapes and other easy appeals to a hearer’s memory, not to mention his gut — might support an extended musical offering. On Saturday the Arditti Quartet had played the entire “Livre” in its original form; now, on Sunday, Boulez began his concert with his reworking of just the first section.
The Sunday concert then went on to a far later Boulez, the relaxed tone-spinner of recent decades, with two works, the “Eclat” of 1965 and the  1985 “Memoriale.” The battles have now been won; here is the mature Boulez working with light and color, even now and there with a [ITAL soupcon [ENDITAL of charm. Lovely music, it received lovely performances, with the arabesques of the solo flute line in “Memoriale” beautifully retraced by the Philharmonic’s Anne Diener Giles.
Finally had come the Mallarme improvisations, completed in 1962 but many times revised since, repeats from the Los Angeles “Green Umbrella” and Royce Hall concerts, with Phyllis Bryn-Julson’s mastery of the vocal lines once again a source of wonderment. The three movements are, of course, merely the centerpiece of a longer work, “Pli selon pli.” Just by themselves, however, they stand as an extraordinary penetration into music, poetry, and the way the two arts intersect.
On Sunday morning there had been other delights in a marvelous concert by Ursula Oppens and Alan Feinberg. They are two of the most honored pianists in the service of new music, friends and neighbors in New York; still, this was their first joint concert, and the quality of their work together suggests that we may have all witnessed the birth of a great new team.
At Ojai they played only the most adventurous music — in which category I would certainly place their opening work, Mozart’s only two-piano sonata –ending with Bartok’s still-amazing Sonata for Pianos and Percussion (with Amy Knoles and William Winant beautifully managing the kitchenware), and lingering along the way at some vivid, finger-crushing works by Witold Lutoslawski and Gyorgy Ligeti. The performances, the works themselves — like everything else in this astonishing festival — were suffused with the joy of great music-making.

The question needs to be asked: is today’s American composer really better off than his predecessor a generation or two ago? Is there an audience — meaning, in down-to-earth terms, a market — for serious, challenging, original, large-scale, new native compositions, such as would earn high marks worldwide for their respective composers?
Of course there is, shout the managers, and they offer printouts of their recent symphonic seasons to prove their point. Here is the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with a new work on almost every program; there is the Pasadena Symphony with a new symphony by Tom McKinley on its March program; down the road there’s the Long Beach Symphony, which offered a brand-new work as curtain-raiser on every one of its programs this past season.
Did someone say “curtain-raiser?” Aha; now were getting someplace. It begins to look as if there’s a new breed of new music, out on the horizon and getting closer by the minute. It consists of a repertory of short, thin-textured pieces  designed to open programs and then recede into the shadows. All you can say about the Philharmonic’s throwaway pieces — by the likes of Primosch, Stokes, Harbison, Stucky, and all the others you and I have already (understandably) forgotten — is that they went down easily with the orchestra and the audience, leaving our minds uncluttered for the Brahms or Prokofiev that was to follow,  and that they allowed management to swell its statistics on performances of new American music with a minimum of effort.
(Part of Andre Previn’s catatonia, when faced with Robert Erickson’s “Corona” scheduled to start off one concert last February, could very well have been his discovery that, at 26 minutes, the piece couldn’t qualify as a curtain raiser. He then proceded, like Procrustes with his bed, to chop it down to proper size.)EP
There is no law, in any of the expressive arts, that stipulates that works of long duration are superior to miniatures. Any one of my favorite Chopin Mazurkas tells me as much about sublimity and infinity, perhaps more, than any concerto of Brahms a dozen times as long. The best new work on the year’s Philharmonic programs was also one of the shortest, Arvo Part’s “Fratres” on the substitute final program conducted by Neeme Jarvi. But that work at least filled its 11-or-so minutes with original, serious beauty, and left us with thoughts far larger than its duration by the time clock.
Somewhere in this world large-scale music is still being written. In London I have heard huge, gut-grabbing pieces by Harry Birtwistle — his “Earth Dances” and “The Triumph of Time.” These were being performed by the government-funded BBC Symphony, which meant that they got the rehearsal time they needed. From Russian tapes I have discovered a sizable repertory of serious, demanding symphonic music, by Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and the Soviet Georgian Giya Kancheli, again in performances that sounded as though time (and, therefore, money) had gone into their preparation.
Could these performances have happened here, within the time-frame of a typical American orchestra’s rehearsal schedule? Probably not, if the sad tales told by most American composers are to be believed. As long as this notion persists, that the way to buy off the American composer is to commission the kind of tidbit that constituted most of our local orchestras’ lip-service to native music this year, American orchestral music will remain mired in triviality.
Why am I writing all this now? Mostly, because I have only now gotten around to a record that arrived several months ago, but which I’d been putting off hearing, a Nonesuch disk of two works by Charles Wuorinen: his Piano Concerto No. 3 and “The Golden Dance,” which is also for piano and orchestra. Here we have a couple of fair-sized, new American works (30 and 23 minutes, respectively) that march fearlessly into the maelstrom: exuberant, original, challenging, rewarding.
Wuorinen has been for some years composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony, which commissioned “The Golden Dance”; the Concerto was a commission from the Albany Symphony and the pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who is soloist in both works. In the 1960s Wuorinen was an active provocative agent in New York musical circles; among other good deeds, he guided the hand of Nonesuch in recording a distinguished repertory of new American music — including his own Pulitzer-winning “Time’s Encomium,” along with works of George Crumb, Jacob Druckman, Milton Babbitt and other prime figures in the East Coast establishment.
As an avatar of that establishment, Wuorinen seemed a curious choice to succeed John Adams in the San Francisco post, and it’s obvious from his new scores that the move hasn’t inspired him to dabble in minimalist patternings or exotic scales. On their own, however, these are powerful, agressive, disturbing works; they do, furthermore, constitute a hopeful answer to my fears about the waning of strength in our new music. The concerto is, by a slight margin, my preferred of the two works; the jagged, edgy rhythms of the outer movements frame, in the elegiac and extended slow movement, a feeling for gorgeous, soaring melody.
You will need to spend some time with these, or with any of Wuorinen’s music; he isn’t one for revealing his secrets on first meeting. There is plenty of his music on records — surprisingly little, however, on CD, for a man whose “Time’s Encomium” revealed so vast an electronic horizon The new record is essential Wuorinen, and essential new American music.
ZINKA MILANOV (MAY 17, 1906-MAY 31, 1989)
Zinka Milanov is gone, another large serving of a bygone grandeur that we will never recapture. She was, among other things, a grandmaster of entrances and exits; it’s sad to think that no composer was on hand to set her own death scene to music.
She retired from opera when the old Metropolitan shut down in 1966; two grand structures lost simultaneously. She was famous for her devastating digs at her colleagues and rivals, none of which I can repeat in a family newspaper, all of which were probably authentic. She flirted outrageously with her fans; she understood, for example, the greater importance of the opera queens’ jabberwock over any press release from the Met’s front office, and she would invite the most ardent standees home to tea to feed their gossip network.
Long after she stopped singing, she could walk down the aisle of either the old or the new Met and draw a standing ovation. New York was the home of her art, if not her politics. I once saw her arrive, unnoticed and uncheered, at an outdoor opera festival in Italy; that struck me as so wrong that I got up the courage, for once in my life, to go over and tell her that someone in that alien crowd, at least, remembered her.
Remembered…that is…that hot lyrical throat of hers, put on earth to embody the particular passion of Verdi’s Leonoras, the heroines in “Il Trovatore”  and  “La Forza del Destino.” Her old recording of “Trovatore,” with Jussi Bjoerling and LeonardWarren, has survived into the CD era. Even with the cuts, the loss of her “Tu vedrai” in the last act that we have to savor only in our fantasies, it is my way of knowing what Verdi and Verdian melody were about in that opera.
She wasn’t much to look at; near the end she forgot lines and had to hover near the prompter’s box. That’s not what we remember. She was the embodiment of the grandest music in the grandest operas. The singers today who occasionally get hailed as the new Zinka can, for now, stand in the shade. There was, and is, only one Zinka.

Some composers work with a quill pen, some with a computer. Andrew Lloyd Webber may not be the first composer to operate on a treadmill, but he is certainly the best paid.
We’ve heard it all before. From the beginning — or at least from “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” which came close to the beginning — you could be deaf and still recognize the emptiness in the music, the sweeping if faceless melodic gestures, the gambits picked up out of the pre-existing repertory as a street-cleaner impales bits of litter on a pointed stick. Other composers have operated on a, let’s say, eclectic level since the beginnings of time, or at least of the Broadway musical; Jerry Herman lost a famous court case to the composer Mack David over the provenance of the first nine notes of “Hello, Dolly!” and could have lost a few others to the likes of Tchaikovsky, Gounod and, for all I know, Max Reger if those gentlemen hadn’t already lapsed into public domain.
But Herman pulls his source material together with a practiced hand; perhaps he cribbed from Mack David’s “Sunflower,” but at least “Hello, Dolly” has its own kind of grandeur. With Lloyd Webber’s music, the stitchery sometimes shows more clearly than the material. One number  of “Dolly’s” stature would redeem the unredeemed depression of “The Phantom of the Opera’s” steady progression of bland, forgettable parlando that serves not to illuminate Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics, but rather clings to them like seaweed to ancient hawsers. The play’s Phantom at least shows half a face; Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music shows none.
It’s as unfair, of course, to expect glorious, rolling showtunes in the grand old manner to surface from today’s musical theater as it would be to expect a latter-day Beethoven to emerge from the depths of Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM. The world is lucky if it can acquire a “Some Enchanted Evening” once in a century. A song like “I Get a Kick Out of You” happened only because there was an Ethel Merman to fling it skyward (without the aid of microphones, please remember). Even so, the greatness of a contemporary theatrical master lies in the way music can make words and dramatic situations into some kind of art. The springy athleticism of Stephen Sondheim’s songs are hardly Richard Rodgers redux, but they at least relate to happenings on stage; once in a while, furthermore — as in “Anyone can Whistle” or “Send in the Clowns” –  they can coalesce into something worthy of the theater’s lyrical pantheon.
But the drab, uninflected, formula-ridden vocal lines of Lloyd-Webber accomplish no such lyric miracles. The show is, at heart, a package of clever stage trickery; the music is merely disposable shiny wrapping. He donates generously, but from a pathetically small fund of inventiveness; the same jiggety-jog triplets of the opening scenes of “Phantom” had turned up in the hyped-to-the-bazooty Requiem, in large chunks of the Variations he wrote for his cellist brother Julian, and in almost every turn of page in the ghastly, second-rate score for “Cats.” Lloyd Webber does for 6/8 time what Lorne Green does for dog food.
You gotta admit, however, that your nerve-endings are well-tickled while the show is going on. It’s only when you’re halfway home that it suddenly hits that you’ve been tricked into thinking you’ve dined heartily on the arts, while you’ve actually been circumnavigating the smorgasbord with your hands tied. The trick here, I think, is in the casting. Hand your songs over to singers  adept at a certain kind of raw , sandpaper-textured throb that  seems to pass for high emotional singing in some circles — Mr. Crawford, as an implausible instance, or better yet, Patinkin and LuPone in “Evita” — and you can get away with a lot. You can, with Mr. Lloyd Webber’s gall and the smooth show-biz mechanism he commands, even pass phantoms off as opera.

It was an exhilarating ending to a remarkable concert series: Pierre Boulez and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ending their three weeks at UCLA’s Royce Hall, not with a whimper but a bang — many bangs, in fact.
The piece was Edgar Varese’s “Ameriques,” the first work completed by that Franco-Italo-expatriate upon settling in New York in 1921. Somewhere in a program note Boulez confesses a fondness for musical outsiders; this Varese certainly was. (So was Charles Ives, whose “Three Places in New England” also appeared on this program.) Every one of Varese’s surviving twelve works postulates its own esthetic laws, and follows no tenets gleaned from any previous work. That makes him wonderful to hear, hard to write about.
“Ameriques” — identified by the composer as a kind of tone-poem tribute, not only to his newly adopted country but to its whole hemisphere — is as wild and unruly as any work I know. Yet, there is a unifying core, the composer’s obvious fascination with the most famous and widely-discussed work of its time, Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps.”
Huge chunks of “Le Sacre” are ripped out of Stravinsky’s context and cast into the volcanic melee of “Ameriques,” — there not merely to be cribbed verbatim, but newly digested and redefined. The whole piece becomes, among its many other things, a homage to a work that Varese already recognized as the enabling force for a new musical century.
But “Ameriques” does not sit quietly on a shelf as a historical footnote. Boulez and his marvelously responsive orchestra hurled the work at a stunned Royce Hall audience on Saturday night, and the response out front was a series of “what hit me?” looks that clearly suggested that the immense power of the work was still alive.
As with most of his work here since his arrival a few weeks back, Boulez surely had planned this concert not only as powerful musical entertainment but as a testimonial to the creative shock. I doubt if any sane conductor would want to maintain the programming of these three weeks as a standard for symphonic fare over a season; the exhaustion upon performers, audiences — not to mention critics — would be formidable. As a one-time experience in total immersion, however, these have been overwhelming events.
Before had come the Ives pieces, those amazing — if at times persnickety  — ventures into twisting the tail of the musical tiger and carefully notating the roar. I confess to a problem with Ives, a difficulty at times in sorting out what happens in his music through accident and what through the outlay of compositional effort. “Three Places” is the one orchestral work that gives me no trouble, however. I love the colors of the piece,  intense and gorgeous; the incredible show-off counterpoint in the second movement (which, absent Boulez, could otherwise gainfully employ a whole corps of conductors, one for each meter); the deep spiritual calm of the final “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” music as deeply beautiful as just the sound of its name.
All these were magically detailed by the orchestra under Boulez — again, as in the Varese, clearly motivated by his passion for nonconformist music. But is sheer musical beauty ever truly “nonconformist?”
This concert began with music of Boulez himself: the first and third Mallarme Improvisations from his “Pli selon pli” and the string-orchestra version of   the first part of his “Livre pour cordes.”  Without the need to push such music into journalistic pigeonholes — “this passage derives from the Impressionists, this from Mondrian” — the artist’s sensibility informs this music; we hear it as line, but also as color. And when in one of the “Improvisations” the mallet-instrument players set up a racketing that is hot, loud and golden, we react to its beauty with all of our sense at once, each engaged in its own definition of music.
Once again (as at last Monday’s “Umbrella” concert, Phyllis-Bryn Julson sang the Mallarme pieces with infinite, awesome skill. All three of these works are listed for the last of the Ojai Festival programs this coming weekend, along with a further lavish outlay of the music Boulez tends to perform better than anyone else around. The miracle continues.

Twenty years have passed since the happy crowds dashed through Count Almaviva’s palace to celebrate the marriage of Figaro and Susanna. Figaro and Susanna are still the Count’s faithful retainers, and the entourage is increased by the presence of a pair of bastard children: Leon, born to the Countess after a dalliance with Cherubino, and Florestine, daughter of Lord-only-knows with the help of the Count. The kids are in love, and it takes all of Caron de Beaumarchais’ “The Guilty Mother” to assure them that they are not blood-brother-and-sister, and that [ITAL their [ENDITAL love, at least, is guiltless.
To round out its cycle of Beaumarchais stagings that the Long Beach Opera has mounted as its bicentennial gift to France, the company has chosen curiously but well. “The Guilty Mother” is, by consensus. the weakest of the plays, by turns farcical and dark. The only known musical setting was created by Darius Milhaud as recently as 1965; Long Beach opted instead to do the play straight — well, as straight as it probably deserves — with a new incidental score by the fast-rising young composer Mark McGurty. One performance remains, at the trim little Center Theater, tomorrow afternoon.
The play is, to be sure, something of a mess; yet there are powerful moments. It could also be seen as the dark side of “Cosi fan tutte,” since it unrolls as a game of couples — three pairs, as in that opera, whom fate brings together, moves apart, and plays off against one another in  rational but not symmetrical fashion. There is some powerful writing about halfway through the second half, a moving confrontation scene in which all characters drop masks and engage in some direct language about relationships. These are the winged words of the Beaumarchais of “The Marriage of Figaro,” back to stir his audiences to introspection one more time. The ending, too, is delicious farce.
For these reasons alone I urge you to head to Long Beach; you are not, after all, likely to see this rounding-off of the Beaumarchais trilogy that often. McGurty’s score is slight but handsome; in a set of mood-pieces for a small ensemble (strings, mostly, with piano and percussion) he has captured a fair measure of the bittersweet, sometimes cynical mood of the play. Incidental music can often be a pain in an otherwise spoken play; this time I wanted more.
On Mark Wendland’s weirdly raked set topped by an overturned stagecoach, Brian Kulick has directed a generally lively, boisterous performance as much acrobatic as verbal, and a good troupe of local actors does his bidding with engaging abandon. Brent Hinkley is especially touching as the lovelorn Leon; Shannon Holt overdoes the vapidity now and then as his beloved Florestine. John Fleck and Michelle Mais work up a fair amount of wise cynicism as the Figaros; Paul Elder and Camille Ameen plunge headlong into the Almavivas’ anger, perhaps a shade too strenuously. The small instrumental ensemble under Keith Clark dispatch its modest assignment — well, modestly.
PLAYBILL
THE GUILTY MOTHER, play by Caron de Beaumarchais, produced by the Long Beach Opera with incidental music by Mark McGurty. Directed by Brian Kulick, designed by Mark Wendland and Peter Maradudin, conducted by Keith Clark. At the Center Theater, Long Beach Convention Center. Remaining performance, tomorrow at 2 p.m. Tickets $10-65. Information: 596-5556.
Count Almaviva………Paul Elder
Countess…………………….Camille Ameen
Figaro………………………….John Fleck
Susanna……………………….Michelle Mais
Leon………………………………Brent Hinkley
Florestine……………………..Shannon Holt

[FI STYLE, OPERA] [QL RICH, MUSIC FOR TUESDAY, MAY 23]
NEW YORK Whenever Louis XIV needed some opera to sweeten the air in
his new palace at Versailles, he snapped his royal fingers and his favorite
composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, sprang to the task. Matters operatic aren’t so
favorable around Paris these days, I hear; still, the rich fruits of Louis’
patronage remain. One of the richest, the opera “Atys,” which dates from
1676 and  can still be made to sound fresh, novel and altogether thrilling,
has in its recent restoration been generally judged as the best operatic event
in Paris in recent, or even distant memory. It was greeted with comparable
acclaim this past week, when the Paris-based fashioners of this miraculous
restoration played a four-performance engagement, sold out to every last
seat, at the Brooklyn Academy.
Opera in the French high Baroque was, and remains, an art unto itself. Italy
lay captive to a grandiloquent if vapid repertory created to gladden the
hearts and throats of virtuoso singers and their fans (whose descendants
pack the standing-room areas at the Metropolitan and San Francisco Operas
today). The Italian-born Lully (originally Lulli) ingratiated himself into a
high post at Louis’ court, and shrewdly read the French taste, which inclined
more toward theater and dance than to flamboyant music. Together with the
poet Philippe Quinault he invented an opera for France that partook
fervently of the high lyric tragedy of the playwrights Corneille and Racine,
and still deployed itself in the simple, clear rhythms of the popular dance
steps at the time. Legend has it that Louis himself often participated in the
dance numbers, and I’ll leave you to imagine George Bush onstage at the Met
in, say, the Grand March from “Aida.”
For “Atys” Quinault fashioned an elegant, moving paraphrase of the
classic myth of Cybele, Goddess of Earth, thwarted in her love for the
shepherd Atys, whom she then drives mad whereupon he kills her rival
Sangaris and, upon regaining his sanity (still there?) realizes his crime, kills
himself and is transformed into a pine tree. For all this complexity, it is a
gorgeous text, and it moves trippingly, in simple rhyming couplets that Lully
fashioned into elegant music that can still hold an audience spellbound over
its nearly four-hours duration. The French have a word for all this: [ITAL
sensibilite. [ENDITAL It does not translate as easily as it looks.
Anyhow, the  musical and poetic wonders of “Atys” are easily sampled,
in the complete Harmonia Mundi recording by the same forces that restored
the opera in Paris in 1987 and   brought it last week to Brooklyn: William
Christie and his ensemble of early-music specialists called “Les Arts
Florissants.” Product of a typically abstract, scholarly Ivy League musical
education (“where we were told,” he says, “that no gentleman ever
actually touches an instrument”) he moved to Paris in 1972 and founded
his group some years later.
The beauty of the Arts Florissants performances (the name is from a vocal
piece by Marc’Antoine Charpentier, Lully’s great rival) is not their slavish
revival of exact Baroque performance rubrics, but their passion to dig out
the life force in this music and translate it intact into contemporary terms.
The sounds of, for example, their 53-member orchestra that came over with
the singers, is not merely the exoticism of ancient instruments, but the
enormous gusto of the playing. (Another applicable, untranslatable French
word: [[ITALelan. [ENDITAL
As they honored the music, so also did this marvelous, seemingly airborne
group fashion a likeness of the sights that this kind of music inspires. The
cast was costumed, not in the uniform, blank robes of a typical gods-and-
goddesses production, but in a magnificent array of court clothes from
Lully’s own time, exquisitely fashioned and tailored as if to be worn by
nobles and not mere opera singers. The set was, similarly, a room in a grand
palace, its walls done to resemble priceless travertine marble, its open doors
affording a view of further rooms and exquisitely paneled corridors.
Two casts of principals alternated in the Brooklyn performances. I had
heard the American-English contingent, headed by the marvelous light tenor
Howard Crook, at an earlier performance in Louis’ own theater at Versailles.
This time I heard the Franco-Belgian cast, the one on the recording, with the
wonderfully lithe, stylist Guy de Mey in the name role and the extraordinary
dramatic soprano Guillemette Laurens as the lovelorn Cybele. The dancing
was sublimely executed by a fine small group called “Ris et Danceries”;
my highest compliment would be to state that you simply couldn’t tell where
the music left off and the stage movement began.
I cannot see, in other words, how a night at the opera could ever be any
better than this.