CLASSCOL

Women conducting symphony orchestras: what will they think of next? This is meant in jest, I hastily add; the phenomenon is, as of some years now, a fact of life. And yet, in all the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 72-year history, no woman had dared to broach its podium during a seasonal subscription concert — no woman, that is, until Marin Alsop this weekend (including this afternoon at 2:30). Interestingly enough, the second claimant in that rarefied category, Britain’s Sian Edwards, makes her local debut in two weeks. A certain skewed perception is, therefore, inevitable. You think you hear genuine musical quality at work on the Music Center podium, but then you shut your eyes and think: am I being honorable, or merely chivalrous? In the case of the 35-year-old Marin Alsop, currently head of the orchestra at Eugene, Oregon, chivalry played no part (or not much, anyhow) this past Thursday night; here was a conductor to the manner born. Blonde, slender (just this side of petite) and refreshingly modest in her podium behavior, Alsop drew high-spirited, poised playing from the orchestra in a difficult program: Bartok’s marvelous Concerto for Orchestra, Tchaikovsky’s evergreen “Romeo and Juliet” and, midway, Leonard Bernstein’s 1954 Serenade for Violin and Strings, by turns winsome, boisterous, contrived and momentarily moving, with Dmitry {cq} Sitkovetzky {cq} as soloist. The Bartok might have been the problem piece, but not this time; Alsop’s reading was the work of someone who truly owns the work. The tempos were dangerous and exuberant — perhaps a little too much so in the finale, at least on Thursday, when details sometimes got blurred. But the playing was big and exciting, virtuoso playing for a masterpiece that merits no less. No, the problem came with the Bernstein. There is sweet music here, and some amusing racketing at the end. But the substance is mostly gesturesome to no purpose. It is a concert work, and yet the first notes of the opening theme also outline the spiky melodic motive that starts the song “Maria” in the “West Side Story” of three years later, and you can’t hear the one without the other. The gigantic Sitkovetzky (son and frequent partner of the Soviet emigre pianist Bella Davidovsky) played the work with the requisite slickness, and Alsop got the orchestral sound nicely throttled down to chamber-music sonority. Important music, however, simply did not come. The remainder of the program — including a dazzling rendition of the Tchaikovsky — made amends. line
Orchestras from abroad that engage in worldwide tours fall into two categories. There are the genuine star-quality ensembles (from Vienna, Amsterdam or Leningrad) which always sell out their American concerts and deservedly so. Then there are the lesser ensembles driven by some sort of nationalistic ego, which draw smaller crowds but usually garner a few reviews that read well back home. These events are at least valuable, if the visiting orchestra brings some of its country’s music that might otherwise escape American notice. The Oslo Philharmonic, which gave two programs this past week at the Music Center, brought along one attractive trifle from back home, Arne Nordheim’s “Canzona.” Otherwise the programs were undistinguished; if they were meant to tell us something about the Osla Philharmonic’s quality, they didn’t. The orchestra’s — and our — time was wasted with standard concertos with uninteresting soloists: Frank Peter Zimmermann in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto one night, Misha Dichter in the Beethoven First Piano Concerto the next. They reminded us merely that the Oslo Philharmonic’s recording career is largely as a backup orchestra for concertos. Whatever the reasons for Norsk Hydro, the Oslo power producer that supports the orchestra back home, to fling it into the international critical arena, those reasons escaped detection. As heard at the Music Center, the orchestra wasn’t bad, just ordinary in tone, often unreliable in attack. Mariss Jansons, its conductor, has appeared here under better circumstances, leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, more recently, the Leningrad Philharmonic. But his proven powers were useless against the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, which sprawled across 75 minutes of the first program. For all the work’s fame (as music composed during the Nazis’ siege of Leningrad and, thus, a paean to Soviet heroism and determination) the Seventh is minor Shostakovich, agonizingly dull and contrived at every moment once the trickery of the first movement has passed. Maybe the work demands the flamboyance of a Leonard Bernstein; maybe the unfurling of flags and the release of white doves at the end might help. Jansons played the music straight, and the result was agonizing. line
Awareness of the splendors of Mexican art, and the desire to pay it tribute, inundates the city these days, and the musical side of the celebration is not inconsiderable. Last Wednesday, however, there was a low point. Xochimoki is an ensemble consisting of the ethnomusicologist Jim Berenholtz and the composer Maxatl {cq} Galindo. At the County Museum they performed on an array of ancient Mexican instruments — flutes, whistles and a handsome array of percussion.There is no preserved repertory of indigenous Mexican music, so the two men made up their own instead: dull, thudding, unchanging drum rhythms, the other instruments spinning out the cliches you may remember from old South-Sea adventure flicks — a sort of generic exotica. If Dorothy Lamour had slunk across the stage in her sarong, it wouldn’t have been out of place. At the start the crowd overflowed the capacity of the museum’s Bing Theater, but by intermission many had left. I am not one to go against tides.More interesting Mexican music, by five contemporary composers, is on tap next Friday at the museum, in the season’s first performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group (prior to their “Green Umbrella” series that starts in January). Ticketholders can also visit the museum’s spectacular Mexican show.But also on that night (Nov. 22) there’s the opening of the Music Center Opera’s “Barber of Seville,” and the Philip Glass/Allen Ginsberg “Hydrogen Jukebox” at Royce Hall. You could go to “Hydrogen Jukebox” the next night, but then you’d miss the following: JoAnn Falletta and the Long Beach Symphony playing Prokofiev’s score to Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky” with the great film (newly restored) on the screen; Jorge Mester and the Pasadena Symphony in the Mahler Sixth Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the promising young German conductor Franz Welser-Moest. Most urgently, the city needs some kind of scheduling commission to coordinate the many performing groups now in action, and to prevent this kind of pileup. The musical life hereabouts is rich enough to merit that kind of supervision.