So I've Heard

After 800 years, Hildegard von Bingen is back in the headlines. Records of her music are beginning to pile up. Only last week there was a very clear   photograph of her in a West Side throwaway paper. (At least I [ITALassume [ENDITAL it’s a photograph of her; it came alongside an article about her music, and had no caption. What else was one to think?)
Let me assure you: there was a Hildegard von Bingen. She was born in 1098, and died 81 years later — a remarkable old age in those pre-antibiotic days. She rates 2-1/2 pages in Grove’s Dictionary. From early childhood she entertained visions; later, at the urging of the monk Volmar, she wrote them down: a cycle of apocalyptic revelations that made her famous in her time. She founded an abbey near the Rhine village of Bingen, was often consulted on matters of theology and politics by leading figures of the time, and became known as the “Sibyl of the Rhine.”
She also composed — not symphonies, operas and concertos, of course, but extended musical settings for her own poetry. We have access to a great deal of music of her time, but Hildegard’s surviving manuscripts are among the earliest that we can actually ascribe by name to a specific composer. Most music in those days was simply composed For the Glory of God and dropped anonymously into the collection plate. Here was Hildegard, standing up for her own creative rights — one of the first to do so — and a woman at that!  Do you begin to understand those headlines?
Two major recordings of Hildegard’s music have done the most to spread her name and her fame: a Hyperion record called “A Feather on the Breath of God” which has been out for some time, and a recent two-disk EMI set that contains an entire cycle of her works, a sort of morality play called “Ordo Virtutum” (“The Play of the Virtues”). Both sets are performed by some of the best early-music proponents of our time: the “Feather” by an ensemble under Andrew Page (who has done those marvelous “Carmina Burana” restorations), the “Ordo” by the German ensemble Sequentia. In both cases, the records at very least afford an interesting and beguiling excursion into the way latter-day musicians go about reconstructing music of the past, and endowing their findings with the aura of antiquity. Where the original manuscript may consist of a single line of dim symbols, today’s performers have spread it out for voices and instruments, including some snazzy percussion.
That’s important. The surviving manuscripts of Hildegard, or of the hundreds of unnamed scriveners in the service of church music at her time, offer up the barest outline of unharmonized melodic shapes: scratchings and wobblings, on fragments of parchment, whose interpretations are still a matter of controversy. The aforementioned article in the West Side throwaway seemed to operate from the naive notion that, in addition to sitting for that fine photograph, Hildegard also completely composed the big, complex scores we hear on these records, all written out for voices and instruments as any modern composer might.
The music, as it emerges from the hands of modern arrangers and onto these nicely-recorded CDs, is undeniably pretty. I am amused, however, at how an application of latter-day promotion has elevated this music to a higher level of grace than anything else of its time. Hildegard never achieved sainthood in the annals of the Church; now the modern hype machine has stepped into the breach. How would  her  noble spirit react to the knowledge that  she  has joined the ranks of modern crossover heroes? Did Hildegard really die for our sings [cq]?
A recent Philharmonic concert introduced the name and the music of Arvo Part to the hallowed Music Center precincts. Word of this reclusive, Estonian-born mystic poet and composer, now living in West Germany, has circulated slowly. Three records of his music are readily available on the ECM label. The first two are of quiet, intense, sparse but overpowering works for small instrumental ensemble — including the 12-minute “Fratres,” which the Philharmonic played. The third is “Passio,” a 71-minute setting for voices and instruments of the Passion Text from the Gospel According to St.John — the same text used in Bach’s famous setting, but here sung in Latin.
Like Hildegard, Part has achieved crossover status. (My measurement for this — partly if not entirely — is that music by both composers turns up on Tom Schnabel’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” on KCRW, my lifeline to the outside world.) Like Hildegard, too, his music exists in a curious, elusive continuum.
“Passio” is a strange, disturbing, utterly haunting work. Much of it hovers on the edge of silence, as does “Fratres” (especially in the version for string quartet, which the Kronos has played and recorded). The Passion story is narrated, by a vocal quartet with solo parts for Jesus and the Evangelist, in an unadorned, syllabic style, with a modal harmonization by a small instrumental ensemble that sounds both contemporary and old beyond time. 
Mostly out of journalistic convenience, Part has been called a “minimalist” by some semi-listeners. If that is so, the music of Glass and Adams and Reich is maximally luxuriant. So spare, and yet so intense, is this “Passio” of Part that it seems to create a vacuum into which the listener   — the willing, cooperative listener, that is — is drawn beyond any power of resistance. There is a sort of time-vacuum, too; Part scores the work for a group of early-music specialists (Britain’s marvelous Hilliard Ensemble on the recording). The vibrato-less singing and string playing destroys any sense of chronological specificity; this is music of any and all times.
The Estonian conductor Neeme Jarvi, who conducted Part’s “Fratres” with the Philharmonic, knows him well; they both emigrated from their native land on the same day. Jarvi spoke to me enthusiastically of earlier Part scores, including three large-scale symphonies which he has recently recorded. At a time when some of us feel the need to raid the ancient archives in search of novelty, here is another genuinely new, vitally important composer on whom we can pin hopes for music’s future.
Since Wagnerian Ring-o-Mania has currently seized imaginations in some corners of the musical world, it is time to point out that the 1935 recording of the first act of “Die Walkure,” with Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and with Lotte Lehmann, Lauritz Melchior and Emanuel List the singers, has been reissued on a single EMI compact disk, still sounding fresh and vivid, still sung — especially in the case of Lehmann’s Sieglinde — in a way that ruins any possibility of there ever being a better performance. More simply put, this is one of the best performances of anything, ever.

Expected miracles are no less miraculous than the ones that surprise. Pierre Boulez did, as expected, start the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the road back toward a state of orchestral grace at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday night. The playing he got from his musicians was alert, precise and richly colored. The program was full of challenge, even a few brambles. Yet the quality of the music, and the way it was played, encouraged the not-large-enough audience to hang around and cheer, for a longer time and with better reason, than than on any recent occasion at the Music Center.
Two works were played: the “Formazioni” of Luciano Berio, completed in 1987 and heard for the first time on this coast, and Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle,” a two-character opera dating from 1921, done in concert dress. The works are far apart in musical language; drawing parallels between them would be a futile exercise. What they do share, however, is a stupendous range of bravado simply in the use of the orchestra.
The Berio makes no bones about its aim at tonal virtuosity. The orchestra is seated strangely, with violins up back, string basses  down front, and clumps of winds and brass scattered through the ensemble so as to engage in a certain amount of antiphonal byplay. The work lasts about 20 minutes, and seems to move forward on an unbroken energy curve. Powerful, abrasive, aphoristic fragments well up from the orchestra; much use is made of a steady, pounding repeated-note figure, almost like a fusillade.
It’s immensely powerful, appealing, original music which, at the same time, seems to look back to the way Berio and his colleagues — Boulez among them — were composing two or three decades ago, in the throes of a passion for the atonality of Schoenberg and Webern that they would later disown. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of backward look, of course, if such it be. Caught up in the momentum of the work, I had the unshakable sense that I had heard it before, but was hearing it better now.
About the Bartok, there are no such questions of old or new; the sense of newness in this magical  one-of-a-kind score remains. The scenario, with its undertone of psychotic horror that repelled censors, and many audiences, when the work was new, is by now familiar coin; read any half-dozen recent movie scenarios and you’ll find the essence of “Bluebeard” dragged to its imponderable extreme in at least half of them.
But you won’t find, anywhere else, music with the iridiscent glow of this score, the power it has to hold its audiences motionless for its 50-minute duration. The vocal lines are not, of themselves, arresting; what makes them work is the uncanny rightness of Bartok’s range of orchestral color and the way voices and instruments form a unity greater than its parts.
The work is intended for staging, but no production I’ve seen or can envision — including a genuinely off-the-wall production by the New York City Opera in which each singing character was shadowed by a dancer to embody a psychological alter ego –  serves as a visual counterpart adequate to the music. The superb suggestibility in the music itself doesn;t seem to need visual realization.
Under Boulez, the music itself was marvelously realized. Two splendid soloists were on hand: Susan Quittmeyer, a little bothered in her lower range but otherwise brilliantly dramatic as the gloom-haunted Judith; Laszlo Polgar, a stunning, strong bass new to this area, stupendous as the blood-obsessed Bluebeard.  The performance was in Hungarian; the rarely heard spoken Prologue was given in English by Gail Eichenthal.
The singing was fine, but it was the orchestra, and the astounding level of its playing, that capped the evening in both works. There’s nothing of the conjurer in Boulez, at least nothing apparent to the naked eye. His batonless beat is straightforward; he puts on so little show that you usually forget to watch him. Somewhere along the line, however, he does conjure up a way of convincing an orchestra of the rightness of his musical visions, and the results come across as a way of playing in a class by itself.
The opening-night crowd was far too small for the magnitude of the occasion. Two Boulez weekends remain at UCLA, plus a “Green Umbrella” concert at Japan-America on May 22, plus a miraculous weekend at Ojai, June 2-4. From where I sit, Boulez is now, and has been for decades, the most important figure in the  musical world. To our great fortune, there is some unnamable essence in this city — and apparently nowhere else in America –that lures him here every happy now-and-then. I urge you to experience his work for yourselves; it’s a rare and cherishable opportunity.

Once again the crowd was large and, for the most part happy; Chamber Music/LA ended its fourth annual go-around in a blaze of popularity if not glory. The playing, at the Japan-America Theater on Sunday afternoon, was mostly (if not entirely) of de luxe quality. The music, alas, was not.
Mozart wrote few works that can be truly called dull, but the G-major Trio (K. 564) pushes strongly toward that epithet. Its opening melodic gambit is strained; the ensuing variations attempt to inflate a rather trivial theme; the final rondo, while pretty enough, seems to look back toward the blandness of rococo chamber music from earlier generations.
Much the same, I’m sorry to report, applies with equal candor to the Piano Quartet of Schumann (Opus 47). The work dates from 1842, and was composed almost simultaneously with the Opus 44 Piano Quintet. From the evidence, however, the Quintet apparently absorbed all of Schumann’s creative inspiration at the time; there was nothing left for the Quartet.
The music strains and gesticulates, but there is little profile in any of its ideas. Alongside the glorious, assertive, breathless energy of the Quintet, this piece is a washout. Yet it is often played; this was the second performance I’ve heard in recent weeks. Schumann is, after all, a name to contend with, and for some players this seems reason enough to keep even his inferior scores alive.
Jerome Lowenthal and his piano were the illuminating spirits in both these works. A modest, smiling East Coaster whose repertory is vast and whose good deeds are many, Lowenthal was one of the founding spirits of this festival and has recorded with several of its stalwart players. Along with Yukiko Kamei and Nathaniel Rosen in the Mozart, and Christiaan Bor, Marcus Thompson and Jeffrey Solow in the Schumann, he did what he could for the pallid, flagging music, and it was almost enough. I especially liked the antic, playful rubato he brought to parts of the Schumann.
Finally came the Brahms B-flat Sextet, with all its groaning, heaving, gesturesome emptiness. Brahms, the story runs, destroyed all his music he thought unworthy; if this piece was granted survival the mind boggles at what the rejects must be like. At its worst, the piece stands as a denial of the whole concept of chamber music: its players do not partake in a democracy of performers, but combine their sounds into a thick, formless murk.
I survived two movements; more would have been a sacrifice far beyond duty’s call. The acidulous, intrusive tone of Paul Rosenthal’s violin didn’t help matters much. There is an old recording, with Jascha Heifetz taking on the first violin part, where he too played in this manner. That wasn’t chamber music, either. ]EP

Twenty-five years ago, when I first sat down with Pierre Boulez to discuss the future of the C-major scale and similar weighty matters, he had already emerged as a pulverizing presence on the musical landscape. He had called, in one famous interview, for a destruction of all the world’s opera houses and a reduction of the operatic repertory to just one work — Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Mahagonny.” He had terrorized avant-garde circles with an article called “Schoenberg is Dead.” 
The Boulez who comes to UCLA this weekend — where he begins a series of weekend concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic,  — has mitigated his outlook somewhat. Kinder? Gentler? That may be going a little far, but at least today’s Boulez has broadened his world view considerably. The opera he will conduct on this weekend’s concert is not Weill’s agitprop masterpiece but rather Bela Bartok’s mystical, psychological “Bluebeard’s Castle.” And he is actually delving into musical history — as far back, at least, as the Ninth Symphony of Gustav Mahler, a work now in its venerable ninth decade.
Much, I need not remind you, has befallen Pierre Boulez since his hellraising days a quarter-century ago. As conductor of the New York Philharmonic following Leonard Bernstein, he had seven years to play footsies — not very happily, if truth be told — with the conservative dodos on that orchestra’s board. To amend  his nihilistic views on opera, he has recorded (marvelously) a repertory extending from Wagner’s “Ring” to Berg’s “Lulu.”  At New York’s Juilliard School he breathed fire at student workshops for hopeful composers and conductors; in his Los Angeles visits, on the contrary, he has played benevolent older brother to invited auditors at his rehearsals, and intends to do so again this time.
But while Boulez has brought about a more genial accomodation with the outside world, his own deeds and creations have thrown up a continual challenge to comfortable and easy definitions of the nature of music. Combat Central is, of course, his IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Music and Acoustics), a vast and surprisingly joyous workshop that serves as a kind of marriage counselor for music and electronic technology.
Interestingly enough, says Boulez, the IRCAM experience has forced him to expend more awareness on the music of the past. “It’s good to maintain contact,” he noted at an informal get-together a few days ago. “I don’t conduct music of the past just out of nostalgia, however; I don’t see any good in cooking something again that was already cooked 100 years ago. But I like to remind myself of the impact this music — the Mahler, for example — had on me when I was younger. I look upon my time with an orchestra as a hygienic exercise.”
This year the statewide University of California is helping to spread the hygiene, bringing to Los Angeles a group of 25 handpicked music students who will attend the  rehearsals at UCLA and, Boulez promises, have plenty of opportunity to examine the scores, ask questions and learn a lot of challenging music from close up.
“It will be an experience in musical realities,” he says. “At the Paris Conservatoire, musical education is completely out of touch with reality. It isn’t enough, just going to concerts; the only real learning comes when you are close to the music-making. Music can be listening, thinking, dreaming… but it also has its practical side: what can you expect of an oboe player? how much does a horn weigh?”
Lucky students; they couldn’t ask for a better guide into the dry facts of music. There is a mystique that surrounds the Boulez brand of music-making, but it has its roots in the man’s genuine gifts as a conductor. Time and again he has come to an orchestra as guest conductor — notably the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1984, when it last gave a Boulez series at Royce — and transformed an indifferent, tired ensemble into another orchestra entirely, elegant and exquisite balanced.orchestra that even the archetypal Frenchman only dreams about. Even his New York detractors, put off mostly by Boulez’s penchant for adventurous — shall we say — programming have to admit that the orchestra never sounded so good as during his time there — not before under Bernstein, and certainly not since under Mehta.
That, at least. you can expect once again, in the excellent acoustics at Royce, or when Boulez and the orchestra move up to the  sylvan setting at Ojai for several miraculously challenging programs June 2-4. It’s ironic, in a way, that this supremely gifted orchestral craftsman has devoted so much of his life to playing with non-orchestral sounds, through the monkeying around with synthesizers and computers at IRCAM. Boulez sees the notion of electronic involvement as just a logical step in the evolution of the sound.
“It’s traditional,” he says, “that composers want to go beyond the resources that are available to them at any given time. And so the musical industry must always keep up with composer’s hopes for the future, as well as his needs in the present. The growth in the iron industry in the 1840s, for example, made it possible to build pianos with stronger frames and with much more tension in the strings. This, in turn, led the great virtuosic piano music of the 1850s and beyond.
“Today, a composer may want a certain sound on the harp, a microtone between two regular notes. But you cannot build a harp that will hold its tune so exactly that you can get such a note. Similarly, you cannot easily get microtones high up on the violin, because our fingers are too fat to find the right position exactly. And so, to satisfy the composer’s desire for these notes, we develop electronic means.”
The danger, as Boulez sees it, is in mistaking the electronic gadgetry in a new work for the excellence of the work itself. “The composer mustn’t be the prisoner of technology,” he says. “He must give something back; the composition must be his, not the machine’s.
“I’ll never stop conducting the orchestra. No matter how excellent our machines become, my greatest pleasure is my conducting.” [END

It always works: plan an interesting program and the crowds will come. Monday night’s Green Umbrella event at the Japan-America Theater stands as proof: a program of genuine interest, a near-capacity crowd.
It was a program about daring, about musical exploration into unknown regions — most of all, into unknown sounds. It was an act of some daring, back in 1924, for the expatriate American George Antheil to essay a 20-minute piece scored for nothing but percussion instruments — plus such exotica as electric doorbells and an airplane propellor. As a concert piece or, even better, performed alongside its Surrealist/Dada filmic soulmate and namesake –  concocted by such blithe spirits as Man Ray and the cubist painter Fernand Leger — Antheil’s “Ballet Mecanique” is an exhilarating creation.  He never again composed anything as good.
If the Antheil work, along with the film as beautifully restored by William Moritz, was the evening’s joyous highlight, it did not stand alone. Edgard Varese’s “Deserts” began the program, music by probably the most fearless of all composers, whose every work represented a purposeful step into the unknown. “Deserts” was begun in 1949; it represents one of the first serious attempts  to incorporate electronic sounds into the orchestra.
True, those electronic sounds are, by today’s standards, rather primitive, resembling at times nothing so much as shortwave radio static. Yet the piece moves with abrasive, searing energy; while the orchestral and electronic sections barely overlap, Varese’s own fascination with the power of pure sound comes across.
These are big, seminal works.  In the pre-concert discussion composer Morton Subotnick freely acknowledged his debt to these  musical ancestors. A pioneer himself especially in computer-related music, Subotnick has now developed an easy mastery over this live-vs.-electronic interplay; such works as his “Key to Songs,” and the new “A Desert Flowers” — which had its West Coast premiere at this concert — have despite their considerable complexity even made their way  into crossover circles.
“Flowers” is a considerable work: four movements lasting nearly half an hour. Some of its straightforward, jogging energy may be familiar from earlier works, but the degree of contrast among sections marks a welcome change in Subotnick’s outlook. On one hearing I would single out a long, quiet slow section — a long-held deep droning, illuminated by soft flashes like the calling of distant birds — as the musical high point.
This was the next-to-last of this season’s “Umbrella” concerts, the last of the programs produced by CalArts, with that school’s first-rate New CalArts 20th Century Players, brilliantly led on this occasion by guest conductor Stephen L. (“Lucky”) Mosko — with a taped helicopter as an acceptable substitute for Antheil’s propellor. Along the way there were also smaller program entries of variable delight: James Tenney’s jovial short piece, “Wake for Charles Ives” for nothing but four tenor drums in a steady rat-tat-tat; Charles Dodge’s “Viola Elegy,” a memorial to Morton Feldman, with Laura Kuennen’s rhapsodic if overlong  viola solo wreathed in warm, caressing electronic emanations.
Michael John Fink’s “L’Age d’Or” enlisted the composer at a computer, pumping electronic commands, mostly of a rather bland, minimal content, into a row of playerless Yahama Clavinovas lined up in front of the curtain. If this last represented a vision of a post-atomic musical desolation the rest of the program, I gladly report, was a great deal more optimistic.

Sunday afternoon I sat in the handsome music room of a serene old Pasadena mansion, beguiled by the soft, silken sounds of David Tanenbaum’s guitar. Out through the picture window I watched as a beautiful small bird — some kind of finch, I think — landed on a branch and joined in with the music. Then I thought to myself: if Mary Ann Bonino could somehow distill and bottle the essence of these Chamber Concerts in Historic Sites — both the music and the ambiance — the result would probably be declared an illegal substance.
They’re that stimulating — these superb entertainments. This, the last in this season’s concert series, took place in the grand old Freeman A. Ford House, one of the Greene Brothers’ great creations, dating back to 1907, surrounding a courtyard full, on this occasion, of good cheese and perfect strawberries. Can anyone still doubt that this is the best of all possible worlds? Or that Bonino has had a hand in making it so?
Tanenbaum, New Yorker by birth and now based in the Bay Area, is one of the brightest of the young guitarists. He has built a distinctive reputation by shying somewhat away from the traditional guitarist’s repertory and cultivating an interest in some of the serious, exploratory works for his limited instrument that a number of composers — among them Peter Maxwell Davies and Hans Werner Henze — are writing today.
He began with four lovely, deceptively simple, short pieces by Lou Harrison, works that explore exotic tunings and influences from Asian sources; these were followed by a group of short, adventurous Etudes by Cuba’s Leo Brouwer. The afternoon’s highlight, however, was a 10-minute sonata by Max Davies, composed in 1984 for Julian Bream: serene, reflective, mystical music that, with the quiet resources of this solo instrument, creates the effect of a vast landscape — extraordinary, powerful music small only in its physical dimensions.
Two Dowland lute pieces,  Bach’s B-flat  Partita — imaginatively transcribed by Tanenbaum from the keyboard original — and a couple of Spanish-style encore pieces ended the varied and agreeable program. The guitar is gaining respect as a concert instrument, largely because players with Tanenbaum’s skill and good sense are encouraging new works. One problem, however, is that these soft, intimate sounds invariably seem lost in large, impersonal concert settings. This  time, thanks to Bonino and her inexhaustible treasure of good thoughts and deeds, the instrument seemed right at home, and so did we all.

There is more great music in any five minutes of “The Gondoliers” than in all of “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miz” combined. Why, this being so, must we languish so long between magical encounters with the glory of Gilbert and Sullivan, while the cultural kibble of today’s musical theater sprays out its crumbs  from all sides?
A brief respite from latter-day horrors was in order this past weekend, when Richard Sheldon’s Opera a la Carte touched down at Ambassador Auditorium with its  marvelous “Gondoliers,” done straight as written — perpetrators of the current Long Beach Opera offering kindly take note — and done with great comedic high style. Sheldon founded the company nearly 20 years ago, and has obviously been its principal nourishing force; in this production he was the stage director and also took on the main patter role of the Duke of Plaza-Toro, both on a level of skill to gladden hearts of the most devout Savoyard.
There aren’t many companies like this any more. An attempt to revive London’s defunct d’Oyly Carte troupe has now failed. There’s the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players,  a first-rate full-time company that does two or three productions a year at Manhattan’s Symphony Space; San Francisco has its Lamplighters; we have Opera a la Carte which, now that I think of it, is quite a meaningful title. In this age when some stage directors take fiendish pleasure in tarting up the Gilbert and Sullivan repertory — sometimes even successfully, as with the Music Center Opera’s “Mikado” — it’s significant that those other above-named companies are dedicated to maintaining the d’Oyly Carte performing rubrics that go back to the time of the creators who, after all, usually knew best.
Like Saint Paul to the Romans, the  d’Oyly Carte veteran Donald Adams came into this “Gondoliers” company as guest artist, to recreate his sumptuously resonant, rubber-jowled, oversized Grand Inquisitor. It was a glorious performance, as it always has been, but it wasn’t just a star turn among mere mortals. The company managed a consistent performance level worthy of its distinguished guest: Sheldon’s Duke, Eugenia Hamilton, in a hilarious hoopskirt roughly the size of a jet hangar, as his Duchess, Alison England (a living doll if ever there was) as their daughter Casilda, Laurance [cq] Fee and Mark Beckwith as the enthroned Gondoliers, Kris Kennedy and Kathryn Stewart as their brides — the most appealing female roles in the entire Gilbert and Sullivan canon.
David Barber’s brightly colored cutout set designs were adequate if little more; Frank Fetta’s conducting was adequate if at times a little sleepy. The chorus — even if their numbers didn’t quite measure up to the “four and twenty” girls of Gilbert’s playscript — was well-drilled in both music and movement.
All we have to do now is to find a way to nail down Richard Sheldon and his company in our midst on a 52-weel basis — if only to allow the still-pointed satire in both the words and music of the G&S repertory to mirror the realities of today’s world, (There’s quite a lot in “The Gondoliers,” about political profiteering and influence-peddling in high places, that the Messrs. Bradley in City Hall and Wright in Washington might take to heart.)  More than ever now, when overpriced mediocrity is all we can expect from our living practitioners of musical theater, it’s time for a wholesale Gilbert and Sullivan restoration. Those old boys knew all the answers. So do the folks of Opera a la Carte, inheritors of the spirit.

There is nothing I know from the pen of the late Samuel Barber more beautiful than his “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” No performance I have ever heard — including that of Eleanor Steber, for whom the music was written — matches the radiant beauty of Dawn Upshaw’s new recording on Nonesuch, with David Zinman and New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
Barber wrote the piece in 1947, for Steber with Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony; three years later he rescored it for smaller orchestra, and that is the version usually heard today. His text is the whole of James Agee’s intensely poetic, nostalgic prologue to his novel “A Death in the Family”: a small boy’s memories of a summer twilight in a loving home. In 15 or so minutes, Barber manages to tuck around Agee’s glowing prose a lovely patchwork of simple, quiet melody: a gentle, rocking pastorale theme that recurs, other music of great good humor.
Upshaw’s rise in the past few years has been a joy to watch. What I love about her performance here is the clear, limpid, unforced way she shapes Barber’s great lyrical phrases, and the pure beauty of her diction. For all the outpouring of a great vocalist’s art in the Steber performance (which she recorded twice), she never had the sense of phrase, and certainly not the diction, of this new performance. You couldn’t find a better piece to demonstrate the  beauty resident in music of our own century.
The record also includes John Harbison’s “Mirabai” song-cycle, more recent music of exceptional beauty by a composer whose best work — like Barber’s — has been in the realm of vocal music. A cute aria from an early Menotti opera, and Anne’s big aria from Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” round out this cherishable collection, Upshaw’s first substantial recording on a major label,  a glowing testimony to a great new artist whose horizons seem limitless.
The particular nerve endings so nicely soothed by Upshaw’s singing today were long ago gently stroked by the creamy tones and honeyed phrasing of the German soprano Tiana Lemnitz, whose best-known recording was her Pamina in the 1938 “Magic Flute” recorded in Berlin under Sir Thomas Beecham. The flood of old performances, mostly from radio broadcasts, resuscitated by small record labels for CD reissue now, implausibly and miraculously, turns up Lemnitz’s 1944 performance of Wagner’s “Wesendonck” Songs, in performances — on the Acanta label — that hover like silvery cobwebs in an ancient attic newly opened. Robert Heger is the conductor; the record is filled out with the overripe, late-romantic “Glockenlieder” of Max von Schillings, eloquently sung by Peter Anders. But the Lemnitz half of the record is the treasure, and it is beyond price.
Perhaps we’re all a little out of breath from the musical events hereabouts in the last couple of weeks, a game of musical chairs somewhat staggering to the credulity. Just a week ago I named the Estonian-born conductor Neeme Jaervi as a plausible top choice to replace Andre Previn at the Philharmonic; a day later Previn had (to no great surprise) walked away from his scheduled final week of the season, and here, lo and behold, was Jaervi  in our midst to rescue that final program.
My high estimate of his abilities stems mostly from recordings; I had missed his previous appearances here in 1985. But those recordings are spectacular. Chief among them is a complete set, on the Chandos label, of the nine symphonies and most of the tone poems of Antonin Dvorak, all performed under Jaervi’s baton by the Scottish National Orchestra.
It should come as no surprise to find Dvorak so eloquently performed by a non-Czech composer — an Estonian, at that. Like the Italian Giulini a generation ago, Jaervi is reached by the childlike grandeur, the ingratiating insinuation in this music. The music itself is full of revelation, especially if you still think Dvorak’s range of expression begins and ends with the “New World.” Listen to one of my favorite “unknown” symphonies, No. 5, and hear the work of an interpreter with the patience to allow the music to smile its own smiles, and amble at its own pace, and the forbearance to let the unruly finale rant and rave and, ultimately, storm the heavens with golden sonorities.
There is wonderful music-making on these Chandos disks. (The last, with the Symphony No. 8 and the extraordinary tone-poem “The Wood Dove” that seems to prophesy the melodic turns of a Kurt Weill, will be released in a couple of weeks.) You cannot blame me, therefore, for wondering if that brand of musicianship mightn’t be jwhat we need on our local podium.
A complete set of the Dvorak Nine, in performances of this quality, is always welcome. Did we also need another of the Beethoven Nine? I suppose there’s no point in asking, so long as every ambitious conductor on the face of the planet regards his (or her) personal view on these sovereign works as a kind of signature on a contract drawn up by supernatural powers.
Two major Beethoven-symphony projects are drawing to a close: Christoph von Dohnanyi’s complete set on Telarc, with the Cleveland Orchestra, and Roger Norrington’s on EMI, with his London Classical Players. Both sets, praise be, are issued as single records, so that their conductors’ respective outlooks can be sampled without mortgaging the premises.
I admire Dohnanyi greatly, and have no difficulty in regarding his Cleveland as our best American orchestra –and not far below the best anywhere. There is a quiet, respectful eloquence in these performances; they grow on you. The Dohnanyi Sixth comes very close, for me, to being my favorite recording of any Beethoven symphony. Its congenial way of unfolding, its sure and gentle way of holding the pace in that celestial slow movement, the humor throughout — all these are, to me, exceptional examples of a great conductor’s art. The odd-numbered symphonies, especially the Seventh, are here and there a little cautious. But there isn’t a false move, a wrong turning, anywhere in these performances, and the sound of the Telarc recording is its own catalog of miracles.
The Norrington series, with its adherence to Beethoven’s minutest rubrics thoughout including the unworkable metronome markings that the composer — already deaf — stuck in willy-nilly, continues fascinating. The sound is startling at times, especially when those hard tympani sticks exact their toll on the authentic skin drumheads. The tempos are all the more startling, justified mostly by Norrington’s own skill in clarifying orchestral balances. I could not conceive of owning these as my only Beethoven symphony recordings; at the same time, I refer to these disks often; their refreshing unorthodoxies (which Norrington, of course, identifies as strict orthodoxies) becomes a constant stimulus to rethink everything I think I know about these works. You can’t ask more than that from a record.
I wish I felt that way also about Norrington’s new disk of Berlioz’ “Fantasic” Symphony (also on EMI). Sure, there are enough “departures” — again, as always, in the name of honor to the composer’s own wishes — to make this an equally simulating, thought-provoking venture. But I feel more the cold hand of the laboratory dissector here, and less the ardent fire of a Berlioz devotee; that, in this music, is a fatal flaw.

Everybody knows that Giovanni Paisiello’s “Barber of Seville” of 1782 isn’t a patch, comedically or musically, on the more famous Rossini opera of 34 years later. Still, the early work has a great deal of charm, and more than a few moments of genuine high style; it takes a real effort to suppress this opera’s many virtues. In its new production, unveiled Saturday night as the first in a cycle of entertainments  based on the plays of Caron de Beaumarchais, the Long Beach Opera almost succeeded in this regard. In the end Paisiello won out — but barely.
The destruction was spearheaded by two visiting, but hardly flying Dutchmen, director Hans Nieuwenhuis and designer Paul Gallis, both of them working under the familiar if deplorable delusion that small jokes can become twice as funny when made into large jokes. Just the opposite, actually, happens to be true. Dear, sweet Paisiello and his modest but shapely comedy simply groaned under the weight of the stage gimmickry, none of it particularly funny, some of it particularly embarrassing.
Example: every scene was framed by a recurrent bit of pantomime, not mentioned in either play or opera, wherein Count Almaviva, and the Rosina he will win during the course of the evening, sit at a wedding feast. The table pops up from the stage floor and then pops down again (with a loud clunk); it is the approximate width of the stage so that the nuptial couple are separated by vast space — like Citizen and Mrs. Kane in Xanadu. A group of flunkies serve the dinner; the menu is even listed in the program. But the food is whisked away after the first bite. Why bother?
Example: Rosina and Dr. Bartolo make their first entrances on His-and-Her balconies, suspended gondolas that resemble heavy traffic on a ski lift. Rosina, on her entrance, is watering a plant, with real water. Accidentally, she misses the plant and waters the waiting Almaviva down below. That gets a laugh, so you know she’s going to do it again. She does it again.
Example: the credit-card gag; the electronic-keyboard gag for the Lesson Scene; the bursting-balloon gag for Michael Gallup’s “Scandal” aria…but why go on? Director Nieuwenhuis has burdened a perfectly fine musical conception with a repertory of stage shtik that merely clutters the opera and which, furthermore, his cast cannot manage very well.
This is an  adequate singing ensemble, sometimes more than that. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the director, or to anyone else, that high comedy — or even low comedy posing as high — can work only when there is a meticulously devised, consistent acting style. Maybe, with guidance, someone might have shown Don Bernardini, the Almaviva, or Kathryn Gamberoni, the Rosina, the difference between fine comic acting and mere mugging. Apparently, nobody did.
And so, the chance to rediscover a sweet little comic almost-masterpiece, with some moments of ensemble writing that surely guided Mozart’s pen in his own Italian comedies, has been weakened in one of the Long Beach Opera’s rare miscalculations of the past few years. Not all is lost, however. Nicholas McGegan’s splendid little orchestra contributes a fine, forthright crackle that moves matters past even the most abject stage business.
No opera with Michael Gallup, furthermore, can be all bad; his strong, forthright Basilio could, with proper thinking-out, have been the bulwark for a solid, truly comic evening. So could the bright, mostly appealing Figaro of John Fanning and the Bartolo of David Evitts, a creation unusually responsive to the sadder aspects of this foolish figure. Gamberoni’s Rosina began badly, with the voice little more than a squeak in the first couple of scenes. But her big Lesson-Scene aria got her back on the track, and her angry outburst near the opera’s end was superfine. 
But the cause of the Paisiello “Barber” was lost early on, and remained just out of reach during the long evening. Oh well, this slender, slight opera may have been an easy one to push over. Next weekend comes “The Marriage of Figaro,” an indestructible masterwork and, thus, a far more formidable challenge to forces of destruction. Go to it, Long Beach!
PLAYBILL
THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, opera in two acts by Giovanni Paisiello, libretto by Giuseppe Petrosellini, from the Beaumarchais play. Produced by the Long Beach Opera, directed by Hans Nieuwenhuis, designed by Paul Gallis, conducted by Nicholas McGegan. At the Center Theater, Long Beach Convention Center. Remaining performances: 5/10 and 5/14 at 8, 5/27 at 2; tickets $10-$50; information 596-5556.
Figaro………John Fanning
Almaviva………Don Bernardini
Rosina………..Kathryn Gamberoni
Bartolo……….David Evitts
Basilio………..Michael Gallup

Iona Brown led her Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra into unfamiliar territory on at the Japan-America Theater on Friday night, and staked out a handsome claim. Contemporary American music has not figured on her programs until now, to any great extent. As her vehicle of entry into this most rewarding area, John Adams’ “Shaker Loops” was an excellent choice.
Originally composed for seven solo strings and easily expandable for a larger ensemble, Adams’ marvelous invention was also, for him, a vehicle of entry. It dates from 1978, and stands as Adams’ first coming to grips with the minimalist esthetic. Eleven years later, it remains fresh and energetic: simple on its gleaming, hypnotic surface, but amazingly complex in the way it interweaves complex melodic and rhythmic fragments of varying lengths into a seamless fabric.
How far this composer has come in those 11 years! “Shaker Loops” is Adams’ purest minimalist score; in later works he works that style into a variety of contexts; minimalism has become, for him, one of a number of languages he has mastered. Yet the “Loops” is more than just a seminal work of historic interest; it is a beautiful half-hour’s worth of exuberant invention, not easy to play, very nicely done by the 24 string players of Iona Brown’s ensemble. It has also not lost its power to irritate the nonbelievers, judging from the number who came up to complain to me (why [ITAL me? [ENDITAL) during intermission.
This was the season’s final concert by this justly famous and valuable ensemble: a program entirely for strings, led by Brown, as usual, from her post as first violinist. It began with a Purcell Trio Sonata — wonderfully rich, vivid stuff from the High Baroque, its wild chromatic harmonies at least as disturbing as anything in the Adams. Vivaldi’s 4-Violin Concerto followed. a rich, flavorsome work well known in its original version and also in Bach’s transcription for four harpsichords.
The playing — as much as could be heard over the whoosh of the hall’s faulty air-conditioning system — was elegant, stylish, and refreshingly unmannered. Neither Brown nor her orchestra get very much involved with this “authentic instruments” controversy; her players play modern instruments, but with a sense of dedicated style that is proper for music of any century.
Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence” ended the evening; I might have preferred more very old or very new music, but the work has its share of prettiness. True, the original scoring — for six players — doesn’t transfer to a larger ensemble as well as the Adams did. But Brown, very considerately, did cut the ensemble back to original proportions in certain intimate passages, notably in the slow movement. It brought the season to a brave, sonorous conclusion.