So I've Heard

Spectral Delivery

With a brassy blast onstage and an ethereal sigh from violas as if from another planet, the Monday Evening Concerts proclaimed their return in full force at Zipper Hall last week. Last year’s concerts had been a tentative set of “what if?” programs under guest curators, designed to see whether this basic and essential venture in musical exploration could survive the shock of being rudely cut loose by its grossly misguided LACMA management. Now we know; last week’s was one of the great programs in Monday Evening Concerts annals: important music wisely chosen by a management firmly in place, performed by a nicely selected ensemble mix of local and international players. Of the three remaining programs in this season’s docket – the next on January 7 – the same may be said.

This one began with music by Romania’s Horatiu Radulescu, played by the Alsatian violist Vincent Royer, who in two extended works – one in partnership with our own Kazi Pitelka – took his instrument into mysterious, spectral realms while crowning those almost-silent areas with dark-toned, near-brutal melodic patches. “Spectral” is, in fact, the current term for this intensely inward music; it has many practitioners, including the late Gérard Grisey, whose works the Philharmonic has played. In his view of musical sound as a spiritual substance, Radulescu can also be seen as something of a disciple of the late Karlheinz Stockhausen – who died last week – although the task of cataloging the vastness of that German visionary’s influence on his several contemporary generations is likely to occupy decades.

So, of course, does the music of Igor Stravinsky, whose In Memoriam Dylan Thomas provided a brief oasis of almost-tonality. The Monday Evenings gave the work its premiere in 1954; I produced its radio premiere, simultaneously, at Berkeley’s KPFA. (Funny: There hasn’t been a day since, when I can’t hear old Edgar Jones singing on demand its five-note theme, yet I think of it as a melodically austere piece.)

Then came the music of Iannis Xenakis, another Romanian: first, the breathtaking solo percussion piece Rebonds, played by the astonishing Steven Schick; then Eonta, “chamber music” (it says here) for piano and five brass instruments. Two trumpets and three trombones have at the piano for some 20 exhilarating minutes. They play into the strings, aim their instruments upward to reverberate, against the ceiling and against the back wall, out into the crowd; they generally misbehave. The pianist – the phenomenal Eric Huebner, fearless, red-haired local-boy-making-good in the realms of new music – enters the fray with something like 20 fingers at the ready. The piece is an explosion of pure, nonstop energy. Xenakis wrote it for the Japanese virtuoso Yuji Takahashi. His sister Aki has also taken it over. That’s okay; there are notes enough for two.

With a Name Like Stucky . . .

The next night’s Green Umbrella concert was a long-overdue tribute to Steven Stucky, on the occasion of 20 years of his stewardship of the Philharmonic’s new-music programming (under several titles). I don’t know of another orchestra so handsomely endowed with the advisory services of a major musical figure so broad-minded in the quality of his musical outlook, so generous in the breadth of his involvement in the contemporary arts.

Stucky’s contributions to Tuesday’s program ran more or less backward: a piano quartet and the Dialoghi from the last couple of years at the start, the Boston Fancies, which go back to 1985, at the end. (Did I hear them then? And did I mishear them then as work by a glib conservative whom I could never befriend musically? How we have grown!) What I heard last week was the work of a skilled craftsman, master of musical expression through getting the right notes in the right places and – in the matter of the Boston Fancies in particular – leaving notes out when they weren’t required. These are spare, utterly charming pieces, for reasons I didn’t realize in 1985. The recent Piano Quartet is a big, eloquent piece. Its composer is a contemporary master, whose presence does us proud.

There was other music on the program, by Stucky associates: James Matheson’s Songs of Desire, Love and Loss, which, I deeply regret to say, I’ve completely forgotten after one hearing, and Susan Botti’s setting of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” which, I confess with equal regret, I remember all too well. That’s because her manner of song – composition and performance – closely resembles the upward-and-downward vocal pathways of Meredith Monk, which is a name that always makes me leave the room.

The Specters (cont.)

At Jacaranda on Sunday, there was more to be heard from spectral realms as this worthy concert series finally reached its goal for its multiyear plan, its celebration of the music of Olivier Messiaen. The landing was soft: a gathering of pieces from Messiaen’s tender years, packed with pretty ideas but hardly the substance of the visionary elder master and his explorations into the insubstantial – yes, spectral – world he would later explore so eloquently. Still, there was a lovely, warm-hearted Vocalise for cello and piano, and a couple of bird-in-landscape piano pieces from Messiaen’s 21st year that gave full notice of the scene painter of later years.

Some splendid programming of works from earlier pens – Liszt, Debussy, Ravel – gathered with the usual acumen of the Jacaranda guiding spirits, conditioned the audience’s ears for revelations to come. Steven Vanhauwaert (van-ha-WARE) was the pianist, a young man from Belgium who has carried off several local piano-competition prizes and played on Sunday afternoon as though he deserved them all. Timothy Loo, a Jacaranda founding spirit, was the excellent cellist in Debussy’s convoluted, quizzical Cello Sonata. The crowd at First Presbyterian was smaller than usual – the winds over Santa Monica blew chill that afternoon – but the brave were well-rewarded.

Small Perfection

I like the L.A. Opera’s La Bohème, as I usually do. Hearing Puccini’s infinitely appealing score at Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion the other night, in a generally excellent performance under Hartmut Haenchen, who had also led an okay Don Giovanni the night before, I found myself amazed once again (for perhaps the 500th time) at what a sure piece of dramatic workmanship it all is. The cast is young and exuberant, and plays well to each other. I’ve always liked Herbert Ross’ indoor-outdoor set, which looks like someplace where people actually live. I noted the anachronism – the half-finished Eiffel Tower in the background, which sets the date at around 1880, and Musetta’s fancy car in Act 2, from around 1930 – but I wasn’t in the mood to let such things bother me. I missed the scene from the third act, however, with the bicycles.

Alas, I awoke the next morning with a lousy cold, as I usually don’t, and wondered if something I’d previously written, among the dozens I’ve written about the opera, might hold my place this once. I think this one does:

What makes an opera work? If I were to guide a friend through the devious answers to that question, my final goal would be an understanding of the human interplay with Mozart’s music in The Marriage of Figaro, tempered with awe at the interaction of harmony and tragedy in Berg’s Wozzeck. There would be other major mileposts along our way – Verdi’s Otello, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and parts of The Ring, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. We would start with La Bohème, and we would stay there for quite a while.

The very opening: It takes two brief musical phrases – Marcello’s music ill-tempered and choppy, Rodolfo’s response lyrical, soaring – and we know these two characters as well as they know each other. Later, Rodolfo’s graceful curve of a tune will recur during his first outpouring to Mimì (“Che gelida manina…”).

The guys plan their outing, to spend some new-found cash downstairs at the café. A melody winds its way softly through the orchestra, distinctive in its antique harmonies, which I had learned in Charles Cushing’s class at UC Berkeley never to use (parallel fifths! automatic D-minus!); it might be an old Christmas carol. The same tune, more joyous and aggressive, will usher in the festivities in Act 2. It will reappear, chill and bleak, at the start of Act 3, where it will transform into a haunting tone poem about a dismal corner of wintry Paris at daybreak. I love Puccini’s atmosphere pieces, usually at the start of operatic acts: the Roman daybreak in the last act of Tosca, life along the river at the start of Il Tabarro, dawn breaking over Nagasaki near the end of Madama Butterfly, even the offstage choruses resounding through the Chinese night in Turandot, leading up to “Nessun dorma.”

Aroma Therapy

Mimì knocks and enters; soft strings fill the room with her aroma. Her radiant, quiet tune becomes her first song to Rodolfo (“Mi chiamano Mim씝); it will identify her throughout the opera, will turn sad under her farewell in Act 3, and will shatter and drift away as her life ebbs at the end. Listen, in this first encounter, as she and Rodolfo move toward each other, shyly and with broken phrases, then a more substantial vocal line as their hands touch.

The second act of La Bohème is surely Puccini’s shortest: under 18 minutes in my favorite recording (not telling). It’s amazing how much takes place, with the interplay among the Bohemians down front, the biz with Musetta and her sugar daddy, the street kids and their balloons, the panorama of surging Paris life, including parading tin soldiers, on Christmas Eve. It’s all like cinematic writing before its time, and you can’t resist.

It’s easy enough to poke holes in Puccini’s art, and heaven knows that I’ve done my share. I saw the (2002) movie of Tosca, fell in love with Angela Gheorghiu in the title role, and still came home with the empty feeling of having wasted two hours on music that constantly must strain for its dramatic effect, whose harmonies curdle the senses with their drab insistence, whose characters derive no life from their music and remain cardboard even in moments of high passion. La Bohème is different; it teems with life, it reaches out in its youthful urgency and pulls you in. It survives restaging, as in the not-bad Baz Luhrmann updating. Its storyline outlives generation gaps, but its music retains its appeal even more fiercely. There is a moment in the last act, after the mortally ill Mimì is brought back to the garret to die, wherein if I’ve heard it 500 times I have wept real tears 500 times. The forgiveness scene at the end of Figaro also affects me that way, as does the moment in Die Walkre when the doors blow open and moonlight pours in; if this one masterpiece off Puccini’s workbench reaches me on that level, then Puccini can’t be all that bad.

Dirty Business Afoot

“Don Giovanni,” the question ran, “is it the world’s greatest work of art, or merely Mozart’s greatest opera?” The late Winthrop Sargeant raised it, but left it dangling, in the old Life magazine in its juiciest days as pop-culture avatar. The Don Giovanni question – greatest vs. near-greatest – had already been argued for more than a century, and continues to resonate – currently at the L.A. Opera – today and beyond. Whether calling for superlatives or not, and the current production certainly merits a couple, the opera came into the world unlike anything previously seen or heard on an operatic stage, and the strength of those differences remains awesome, 220 years later.

No opera before its time, and few since its time that come readily to mind, begins by holding its audience in relentless grasp over perhaps 20 minutes of continuous energy: the overture that breaks off for Leporello’s first music, which then is interrupted as the Don is pursued to midstage by Anna, then by the Commendatore’s intervention, the duel, the old man’s murder and the Don’s escape – all without stopping at a full cadence. It’s one of Mozart’s unparalleled methods for simply suspending our breath over extended time spans.

That is one of my favorite Don Giovanni moments, and it’s one that at least allows us time to follow its unfolding over several minutes. Another, in the second act, comes as a more sudden shock. Five of the characters, all of them angry at Giovanni for one reason or another, believe they have him cornered in a dark courtyard and are prepared to inflict five varieties of bodily harm upon their supposed captive. But that supposed victim turns out not to be Giovanni at all, only his schmuck of a servant, Leporello, disguised in his master’s cloak. The harmony has been sailing on in an agitated but steady C minor, but then Leporello reveals himself. The group onstage recoils in shocked surprise and, as the harmony reflects this in a sudden jolt downward from C to A flat, we too recoil. Mozart’s operas are full of these harmonic shocks, every one delicious in a different context. By Beethoven’s time, that kind of harmonic shock begins to appear in instrumental music as well – as early as the Opus 2 piano sonatas.

Anyone who really gets transfixed in the experience of a Don Giovanni performance is bound to end up disturbed. Our instincts lead us to expect a certain classical symmetry, overlain in Mozart’s case by a passion that shows itself in an amazing richness of harmony. In this opera, Mozart goes further. Music breaks off, leaving us in suspense. Another magnificent moment occurs when the wronged Elvira, who has apparently been trudging the streets of Seville bewailing her betrayal by the Don to anyone who will listen, comes upon Giovanni and Leporello while grinding out her torch song. Impolite to the last, the men break into her song, turning it into a freeform ensemble (and a magnificent one at that). The whole concept of operatic form moves forward at this moment; even Beethoven a generation later, who admired Figaro and Così, found Don Giovanni immoral.

Reruns

It is, which means that it maintains the crude power to inspire great performances. The first truly great complete operatic recording of anything came with a Don Giovanni performance at the 1936 Glyndebourne Festival, originally a schlep on 23 shellac discs, now still available – the last time I looked – on three CDs. Fritz Busch conducted, and the precision of his ensemble work remains untouched; John Brownlee was the suave Don, and Salvatore Baccaloni, before he became overly aware of himself as an Italian clown, was a beautifully antic Leporello. Ina Souez, who ended up running, and singing in, a gay bar in San Diego, was the incomparable Anna. After 70 years, the sound is amazingly clear; this set is to me the rock upon which any Mozart collection should be based.

But there have to be others. Of the three Mozart operas that Peter Sellars has monkeyed with and reset into contemporary landscapes, the Don Giovanni, relocated to New York’s East Harlem, with Lorraine Hunt’s Elvira to set your transistors afire and Eugene Perry punctuating the “Drinking Song” by hurling bottles against a brick wall, becomes an exact updating of the work’s pristine violence. At the other end, but comfortably in place, is Harmonia Mundi’s new recording under René Jacobs, wisely and beautifully sung throughout, the paradigm of Mozart performance in our time. Owning all three (especially with the Sellars on DVD) is no excess.

Director Mariusz Trelínski has located the opera somewhere on the edge of sanity, with little in the way of stage furniture – except for an open-sided coffin that rises and falls midstage and at the end divulges the moldering corpse of the Commendatore – hardly the “statua gentilissima” of Lorenzo da Ponte’s script. Boris Kudlicka’s stage is a large black box, pierced with openings for doors and windows, the black walls occasionally becoming mirrors to turn a handful of stage actors into a mob. There is gadgetry galore – a zany ballet to personify the “thousand and three” victims enumerated in Leporello’s “Catalog Aria,” a dancing forest around the Don’s latest hanky-panky. Giovanni works his oily seduction on the innocent Zerlina, while pushing her firmly onto a bed of garish crimson.

Costume designer Arkadius has decked out his principals – the heroines and their swains who occupy the Don during the course of the opera – in a consistent color scheme: paired yellows for the bumpkin lovers, formal black-and-green for the nobles, a rich, mournful blue for the jilted Elvira. The period is Mozart’s own, wildly exaggerated with the women’s gowns on panniers nearly as wide as the stage itself. The musical matters, under the excellent German conductor Hartmut Haenchen, accomplish much the same for the ear. Uruguay-born Erwin Schrott returns as Giovanni, lithe, insinuating, menacing with a voice of similar character. The women who bring about his downfall form a first-class ensemble: Alexandra Deshorties as the majestic if somewhat frazzled Anna, Maria Kanyova as an Elvira totally unhinged in the clash of love vs. hate. As the comic servant Leporello, Kyle Ketelsen delivers some expert and hilarious footwork, with singing to match. Stylistically, in fact, both servant and master seem adrift in a whole ‘nother opera – the one by Mozart.

Those Were the Days

As we waited for Alex Ross to show up to talk about his new book at the Los Angeles Central Library a couple of weeks ago, the hypnotic sounds of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians came over the PA system: one masterpiece filling in for another. Here is Ross on that music: “The seeming stasis of the sound encourages the listener to zero in on seemingly inconsequential details, so that the smallest changes have the force of seismic shocks and something as simple as a bass line going down a half step sends chills up the spine.”

This is the writing of someone who knows how to listen, and the subtitle of Ross’ The Rest Is Noise is “Listening to the Twentieth Century” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30). That particular passage is the best explanation of listening to minimalism in its simplest manifestation that I have ever come across, by all means better than any I have ever attempted. (I must endeavor, difficult as it may be, to avoid a tone of jealousy here, so as not to undermine a friendship that began in 1992, in adjacent seats at the Met during an otherwise forgettable Philip Glass operatic premiere – music, by the way, that Ross more or less disowned in last week’s New Yorker.)

What Ross has done here, with wit and a grace of language that belie the expanse of his task, is to fold last century’s music – all of it: rock amp; roll, Webern, Ellington, Salome – into a tidily outlined social and political history. The range of his musical vision is his great enabling force; go to his blog, also called “The Rest Is Noise,” all one word, and summon up his huge and magnificent essay from 2004 “I Hate Classical Music” (subtitled “Listen to This”) and follow the evolution of this vision over years. It’s not classical music that he hates, by the way; it’s the need felt by those of pedantic turn of mind to isolate certain kinds of music as “classical” and other kinds of music as not.

Choosing a favorite episode would probably mean writing out the whole book, but some do linger. One is surely the best – and saddest – account to date of why there is no Sibelius Eighth Symphony, and why the aging composer’s musical pen was stilled for the last three decades of his life. Of all the critics outside of Finland who took up the Sibelius cause, none wrote more worshipfully, to the point of actual pestering, than The New York Times‘ Olin Downes. In letter after letter, cable and telephone call, Downes maintained a steady importuning to the bedeviled Sibelius on the matter of the Eighth Symphony. Downes even brought his mother into the act, a woman of some persuasive skill, who sent along an eloquent reminder that immortality could only befall composers of Nine Symphonies. In 1927, Downes actually journeyed to Finland in an attempt to exact that hoped-for Eighth Symphony and, of course, accord it a world premiere on American soil. The only result was to add to the old composer’s irritation. For another 15 years, the game went on: a promise, a postponement, another promise. Came World War II, with Finland joining the Nazi cause, and the game was suddenly over.

One other memorable vignette, also a study in decline but with softer lighting, is the Leonard Bernstein summation all critics attempt to write, with varying success. The last four pages of Ross’ Lennie chapter succeed as well as any I’ve seen or tried: a concise rise-and-fall of the New York Philharmonic years, the Broadway years, the “stupefyingly powerful” Mahler advocacy, “freighting [the symphonies] with the themes he should or would have addressed in his own music if only he had the time or the energy or whatever it was that he ultimately lacked.” That’s what I’ve been trying to say, all these years.

18 and Counting

The town of Allendale, in western Michigan, is definitely “not on anyone’s touring schedule, except maybe John Deere,” says Bill Ryan, who heads the new-music ensemble at Grand Valley State University in Allendale. Last year, he and his ensemble were turned on by news that the world was celebrating the 70th birthday of Steve Reich; they decided to take part, and in no small way. The goal they decided upon was Reich’s formidable, hourlong Music for 18 Musicians, a work widely regarded as the masterpiece of “pure” minimalism (no argument here).

To say the least, Ryan’s ensemble was diverse, ranging from some students who had already memorized the score from the 1999 Reich CD to a few students who knew nothing of Reich or his music. “After a month of rehearsals,” says Ryan, “I began to realize that pulling off a good performance was not only possible but well within our grasp.” The next step was a pilgrimage, Ryan and five band members journeying to New York to attend the Reich@70 Festival at Carnegie, solicit coaching from some of Reich’s ensemble members and ask a blessing from the great man himself – all of which transpired. After a dizzying couple of days in New York, which some in the group had never seen, Ryan and his five returned to Grand Valley U., “exponentially enhanced.” The results are clearly audible in the sharp-edged, hugely energized playing on the Grand Valley State Music Ensemble’s new disc, on Innova, of Music for 18. Yes, they actually use 20, and somebody in the Reich band told them that that was okay.

Worth the Wait

Martha Argerich is a force of nature, pure and undiminished. Perhaps it’s true that she cancels out of many of her engagements; she has been ill a lot in recent years. But when she does appear, in the condition she was in last Thursday night at Disney Hall – boy oh boy, does she perform! She drove through the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto on all eight cylinders, leaving nothing by the roadside and turning that near masterpiece into a show of maximum strength and delight. I never knew the work, from Prokofiev’s flamboyant years in America, was that good, and I’ll never know again, unless I hear the EMI disc, which is also by Argerich and conducted by Charles Dutoit, as it was last week.

This was, incidentally, the next-to-last event in the Philharmonic’s Festival of Youth Orchestras, in which some of our local bands stood cheek by jowl, so to speak, with visitors from Venezuela and Finland – an unfair comparison, actually, since both those countries are miles ahead of ours in developing this kind of ensemble. They were here, if anything, to tell us to get a move on in this crucial area. There is already some good news on this front, however. The Philharmonic has sent advisers out to work as mentors for a three-year stint with eight local “partner” youth orchestras. Four of those local orchestras, furthermore, rang down the curtain on the current festival with a free concert at Disney Hall. This is the next step after symposiums, and it’s how things really have to start.

Thursday’s concert presented the UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) Verbier (Switzerland’s festival in the town of that name) Orchestra, which was founded in 2000 by, among others, James Levine. (You knew immediately that some kind of bank or corporation was behind this, from the number of gents in suits, the number of areas in Disney roped off for private receptions, and the number of people applauding between movements.) Dutoit, Argerich’s former husband, was the congenial conductor for her sublime performance of the Prokofiev, for the Berlioz “Fantastic” Symphony and, as an encore, for Chabrier’s sure-fire España Rapsodie. Argerich on her own contributed one of those marvelous Scarlatti sonatas (in D minor) that are really takeoffs on a strummed guitar, and in which I swear she took every repeat twice (hurrah!). Then she played two parts of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, and we all held our breath that she’d play the whole set – but no. I don’t know anyone who plays Schumann better than Argerich.

Many people, however, conduct Berlioz better than Charles Dutoit. Many orchestras perform the “Fantastique” with greater suavity of tone. Dutoit’s reading of the “Fantastique” was speedy and loud, and Berlioz’s shepherds on their hilltops merely sounded like two oboists counting time, and his severed head failed to bounce.

Messianic Zeal

I missed the first of this season’s Jacaranda concerts through sheer stupidity – attending instead the Philip Glass opera in San Francisco. Last weekend’s concert held enough satisfaction for two events. The series’ connoisseur programmers, Patrick Scott and Mark Alan Hilt, are engaged in a multiyear celebration around the 100th birthday (1908) of Olivier Messiaen in the broadest sense. This time, the program was all-Debussy, music by the composer furthest out of the ordinary world at his time and, therefore, closest in spirit to Messiaen’s. Later programs in 2007-08 will venture as far afield in search of Messaien influencers as Bach and Liszt, not to mention Tchaikovsky, Xenakis and Stockhausen.

The Debussy program included familiar treasures – the shimmering wonderment of the G-minor String Quartet, one of the earliest works, and the Violin Sonata, the very last – and some music less well-known. Outstanding among the latter were two sets of Songs of Bilitis, songs to poetry of Pierre Louÿs, lines to be sung with rapture, and wonderment, mostly, at the miracle of the female body – one set for singer and piano, another for reciter with flutes, harps and celesta rolling forth sounds one might expect to hear among heaven’s angels.

Over the years, Jacaranda has gathered a steady performers’ group with its own nicely interlocking style. Chief among them is the Denali Quartet, founded by cellist Timothy Loo with violinists Sarah Thornblade and Joel Pargman and violist Alma Lisa Fernandez: a spirited ensemble that has braved the rigors of Ben Johnston’s just-intonation harmonies and the craggy rhythms of the totality of Revueltas in one sitting. Splendid pianists have come through the ranks, including ophthalmologist-turned-virtuoso Scott Dunn and Gloria, Mark and Vicki from the PianoSpheres roster.

It’s not too soon to talk about a “Jacaranda style.” It has to do with taste: the personal values of a couple of highly educated music lovers, which happen to interlock with a considerable audience who find common cause, don’t applaud between movements and welcome a reasonable alternative to the I-10 on a Saturday night.

Strength in Numbers

Chances are that the Philharmonic’s new music director, when he takes over the podium a couple of years from now, will not ask the orchestra to perform in patriotic jackets, nor will he ask the players to fling them out into the audience after the last encore. He is unlikely to demand that they twirl their instruments between solos, or toss them skyward at the slightest provocation. Yet these were some of the shenanigans in the final moments in the second of two concerts last week by the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and its – soon to be our – switched-on conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. With a capacity crowd in the hall tearing down the virtual goalposts and another onstage matching them cheer for cheer, you had to be there to experience the pandemonium. By any standard – social, political, musical – it was totally deserved.

There was a lot of talk about youth orchestras here last week. There was a symposium in which important people – the mayor, Philharmonic people, education people – spoke about the obvious benefits of full-fledged symphony-size orchestras as an extracurricular activity, moving on to forming serious ensembles, like the Bolívar and the Sibelius Academy that was here two weeks ago and the UBS Orchestra still to come, with players ages 18 to 24. We have such orchestras here, like the sleepy American Youth Symphony, whose free concerts at Royce Hall draw big, sleepy crowds; what we don’t have – yet – is a firecracker leader to inspire such an orchestra with a sense of its own importance, to its community, to its players. That will take a few more symposiums.

Here comes Dudamel, and the best news is that he’s real, a serious and dedicated musician who’s seized by the music he’s performing, and that he’s already a practiced hand in forming great and spirited young orchestras. His orchestra numbered something like 200, against our own Philharmonic’s 106. Just the sight of all those chairs on the empty stage was enough to turn you – or me, at least – dizzy. Dudamel led the big works on both programs – the Fifth symphonies of Beethoven and Mahler – from memory; okay, he’s recorded them both and is entitled to know them by heart. What’s important is the way both these works have come to live within him. The baton technique, mostly a forward thrust, is clear and not particularly graceful. His left-hand motions are more fascinating: also not graceful, not swooping, but with each finger delivering a separate message.

Of the two symphonies, I was more won over by the Mahler; I’d held off hearing the disc. Disney Hall offered no resistance to the mighty onslaught of 11 double basses, eight horns and similar bloated figures across the board. There was a fine, light humor in the pacing of the scherzo, and an even lighter touch in the folksy moments of the finale. The notorious – yet noble – adagietto was, to my taste, paced exactly right.

Beyond the inevitable wayward horn here and bassoon there, the Beethoven performance seemed to these ears somewhat waterlogged by the weight of it all. Even with the double-bass contingent whittled down to 10 – from the previous day’s 11 – I found the sound of four horns (for Beethoven’s two) and I-forget-how-many bassoons (for Beethoven’s most interesting scoring, his bassoon pairing) just a shade murky, no matter how excellent the performers and how spirited the splendid young conductor’s choice of tempos. But that crescendo out of the gloomy reaches of the scherzo, and the impact of the trumpets announcing the triumphant arrival at the golden frontier of C major, could not have been more thrilling. That’s why we need orchestras, and conductors, and Beethoven.

Olé

The ersatz conviviality of the Bernstein West Side Story dances had begun the first program (of two); now, following the Beethoven on the second, it was time to dig seriously into where these marvelous music people had gleaned their effervescence. Music by Mexico’s Arturo Márquez and José Pablo Moncayo and Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera – all throbbing with hot rhythms and that major/minor delicious uncertainty that colors the lifestyle south of the border – completed the printed part of the program. Then the lights went down for a few seconds; when they came up again, the whole orchestra sported the Venezuelan finery that I’m sure you all saw on YouTube.

Then who should show up but John Williams, to tone things down a peg with the Star Wars theme. (Surely, even he knows better music than that.) Then Gustavo – excuse me, Maestro Dudamel – got his podium back for three more numbers, including a replay of the Bernstein “Mambo” number from the night before, with the crowd getting happier and more insistent and the jacket biz . . . For all I know, they may still be there.

In the audience sat José Antonio Abreu, the distinguished gentleman who, with a group of musical advisers, dreamed up the National System of Youth Orchestras – known as El Sistema – that has now given Venezuela 130 youth orchestras comparable to Simón Bolívar, countless children’s orchestras and more than 30 adult orchestras, many of them peopled by children out of impoverished neighborhoods, given their instruments by the state. Put this together with the chorus that came up a few years ago to perform Golijov’s St. Mark’s Passion and you have a compelling picture of a national musical subsidy that needs a lot of study in this country. Perhaps more than symposiums, even.

The Glorious Fourth

The six blows of Thor’s hammer – the metaphor is Donald Tovey’s, not mine – resounded through Disney Hall on Friday night, and then we were done with Sibelius. Esa-Pekka Salonen had chosen the Fifth Symphony to end his three weeks of “Sibelius Unbound”: all seven symphonies, most of the tone poems, a single shard from the theatrical scores, not the violin concerto . . . I experienced no epiphanies, unless you count the Sixth Symphony, which I had never heard before in live performance, and the Third, which I still haven’t heard live, having made the unwise decision to journey to San Francisco for Philip Glass’ new opera, about which more later. (I atoned by finally unwrapping my disc of that symphony, and wishing that I hadn’t. What a weak work!)

It’s easier for me to write about music close to my heart than it is the music I deplore. I came to these concerts in the firm belief that if anyone could turn around my long-standing dislike of these symphonies, it would be Salonen and our orchestra, with the magnificent clarity of their playing in that hall and with Salonen’s own newly acquired eagerness to plead the cause of his musical patrimony. (In our first interview here, he was all for dismissing the Sibelius heritage as an albatross.)

Instead, I heard the grand, rolling tune in the finale of the Second Symphony, almost a second national anthem after Finlandia, obscured through the buzz of strings. I heard the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies as almost nothing but buzz, with, in the Sixth, its maddening capriciousness in chopping off a promising idea, or even a whole movement, where logic might ordain a proper continuation. The Philharmonic’s program notes dub this work the “Cinderella” of the symphonies; might not “Rumpelstilskin” be more appropriate?

Then there is the Fourth Symphony, lean and hungry. I suppose it is some kind of perversion to find this the most satisfactory work of the seven, but hear me out. First, it sounds the best; its relatively spare orchestration allows everything to be heard, loud and clear. That “everything,” furthermore, I find exceptionally attractive, stirring in a way that I don’t often find in Sibelius. One of many instances is that magnificent brass tune that bursts out, after a long accumulative process, to cap the slow movement, followed immediately by wisps of melody that quickly come together as the theme of the finale. On my critics’ bookshelf, I find little writing about the Fourth Symphony, but I like this, from Constant Lambert: “The work as a whole is notable for its intensity of mood, its grim austerity of color and its elliptical compactness of form, qualities in no way popular with the multitude and in 1912 definitely out of fashion with so-called advanced composers.”

So be it; you have to work hard to be moved by this grim, A-minor symphony. I am, and I find it worth the effort. Those receding mezzoforte chords that end it, in bristling, orchestral, that’s-all-there-is tones, are among the most gripping musical sounds I know.

Old School Ties

Came also the youthful orchestra from Salonen’s alma mater, the Sibelius Academy, with members ages 18 to 26, lively, attractive and just as good as the previous installment I’d heard in Carnegie Hall about 10 years ago. They landed with a full program: a brief Chorale by Magnus Lindberg – a variation on Bach’s “Es ist genug” – Prokofiev’s Fifth Piano Concerto with soloist Juho Pohjonen, 26, and Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Suite of four tone poems. Salonen conducted. Everything came off capitally; the young Pohjonen – though not so young as reported in the Times – is the latest in a long dynasty of steely-fingered Northerners, and excellent of the breed.

Also adjunct to the series was an evening by the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society, with an evening perhaps somewhat more forgettable. Looming largest among the dispensables was the G-minor Quartet by Edvard Grieg, music for tea parties to be played behind potted palms, excruciatingly long-winded. Sibelius’ one quartet was also played; I had planned to exculpate it as a juvenile work until I learned that it dates from between the Third and Fourth symphonies. Shorter and infinitely more amusing works by Carl Nielsen and Aulis Sallinen filled out the program, all neatly played by Philharmonic members.

Glass, Darkly

Something analogous to a death wish draws me over long distances to Philip Glass operas: the Columbus opera at the Met, a Bob Wilson CIVIL warS segment in Rome, a Doris Lessing sci-fi piece in Houston and now Appomattox at the San Francisco Opera. As you can glean from the title, this latest work concerns the ending of our Civil War, the meeting of the generals at the Virginia town of Appomattox Court House and Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U.S. Grant. If you need to bone up, there is James Thurber’s “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” which tells approximately the same story. Approximately, that is.

Christopher Hampton wrote the libretto, which covers considerable ground before and after the surrender: the last days of combat, some of it brutal, the virtual rape of Richmond by Grant’s army, racist behavior, including some raunchy speechifying against blacks up to the present time. Riccardo Hernandez designed the sets, among them a striking angled ramp that divided the stage and allowed director Robert Woodruff some spectacular action during the Richmond scenes. Glass’ music rose to that occasion too, with snarling dark winds and percussion. Most of the time, however, it was pretty much just another Philip Glass score: noodle noodle. You wonder why I went. So do I.

Cornucopia

Common knowledge has it that the 32 piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, composed over 26 of his 57 years, encapsulate the most revealing portrait of his creative life. By the same token, it has been said, performances of these works can also stand as a set of opinion pieces on Beethoven’s artistic life by every pianist who takes them on – and, by that token, by Beethoven himself on every pianist who braves their demands. By my latest count, we have access to 15 recorded sets of these implicit essays, plus the one that is currently taking shape under the fingers of András Schiff, in Disney Hall, several other halls, and on ECM discs.

No, I haven’t heard all the other 15, just some. They offer varying testimonials of the vulnerable genius, the legendary creator who found his piano his most willing companion to accept his earnest and sometimes violent musical thoughts, beyond the expressive power of the string quartet or even the small symphony orchestra. There’s a great scene in the Abel Gance Beethoven movie, the best of the lurid bunch: Ludwig at his piano composing the storm music for the “Pastoral” Symphony. There’s a fevered outburst on the piano, then a segue to a lightning flash, another run, another flash; it’s nonsense, of course, but that’s what’s really going on in Beethoven’s mind in the “Patheátique” Sonata or the “Appassionata,” or the fugues in Opus 106 and 111.

There’s some of that in the finale of the very first sonata, Opus 2 No. 1, which Schiff captured quite appropriately in the first of his Disney Hall concerts. On the whole, from the evidence of this first live concert and other performances on disc, I find his playing uneven – sometimes dry and overly precise, more like his excellent Bach recordings; sometimes marvelously relaxed and serene, like his Schubert on a wonderful DVD. What I’ve liked most of all so far was his performance of the slow movement of Opus 2 No. 3, which is, indeed, a foreshadowing of Schubert. What has puzzled me the most, so far, was his decision to drop the da capo, the specified reprise, in the Menuetto of Opus 2 No. 1, especially since he has otherwise been meticulous about observing repeats. He explained this decision in one of the lectures he once gave on the Internet, but even that strikes me as frivolous, especially as he doesn’t make similar omissions in other sonatas.

At home, I listen to my EMI discs by Alfred Brendel, the second of the three sets he has recorded, wise and spacious. Then, of course, there are the performances by Artur Schnabel, whom everyone of my generation revered for his wisdom, his poetic quirks and the cantankerous insights in the footnotes of his printed editions. Times were when there were the Schnabel discs and no others, and now Naxos-UK has issued them in Ward Marston’s excellent remasterings. I still refer to them, most of all for the sheer poetry Schnabel could extract from the slow movements of the late sonatas. But the fact remains that elderly fingers did not always fulfill his visions, and such passages as the finale of the “Hammerklavier” Sonata can be painful.

Old Pals

I have been too long away from the California EAR Unit. This sovereign new-music group, born at CalArts, more recently dispossessed at LACMA when that institution foolishly abandoned serious programming, is now at REDCAT, where last Wednesday’s program was mostly the same old same old, with mostly the same old personnel. Louis Andriessen’s 1986 Dubbelspoor led my favorites’ list: quiet for Louis, a lovely sequence of crystalline tones led by the glisten of Amy Knoles’ percussion magic. I also liked Raphael Biston’s .oscil, music for “bent” timbres and interesting sudden bursts. From Australia’s Lisa Lim and CalArts’ Ann Millikan there were large, rather unformed pieces, whose bloviating program notes tended to promise more than what occurred; and from Franco Donatoni, onetime teacher of Esa-Pekka, a short concluding piece that teemed with his customary bustle.

Philip O’Connor’s clarinet and Eric Clark’s violin are new to the group since LACMA; Amy, Erika Duke Kirkpatrick’s cello, Dorothy Stone’s flute and Vicki Ray’s piano are the steadies from as far back as I can remember. That’s remarkable; the EAR Unit is one of the country’s foremost long-term ensembles serving music’s cutting edge. Its members do other things, of course: studio work, teaching. But they continue as well as the EAR Unit, and they are part of what outsiders have come to recognize as the unique ferment here in Los Angeles. They call it the “Continental Shift,” and other envious names.

The Dark Side

Deplorers of Sibelius’ music, among whom I occasionally number myself, list the Fourth Symphony as the Great Exception, the expressive marvel that uses the fewest notes to state the most profound matters. So it is; this icy, barren work of half statements and unfinished thrusts engages our participation, obliges us to complete these paradoxes in our own imagination, and results in the link between listener and creative artist that is the goal of all great art. It isn’t just a matter here of the composer leaving blank spaces for us to fill in; it’s more that he engages us to join him along his rock-strewn creative path, which he has, this once, made enticing. For this latter process, there was the enormous assistance of Esa-Pekka Salonen and his orchestra, this past Thursday, appropriately turned gray-toned for the occasion.

The Seventh Symphony ended the program, as it did Sibelius’ symphonic career. In between came Steven Stucky’s Radical Light in its world premiere. It’s a 17-minute crescendo and decrescendo, insubstantial up against other recent Stucky works, all of which I tend to admire for their attractive presence on a middle-ground, conservative plane. Less happens in the new work, perhaps, but its orchestral language is bright and appealing, with moments of jeweled twinkle that will attract friends, myself among them.nbsp;

The Youth Has His Fling

Many weeks before the whoopee at the Philharmonic attendant upon the accession of the 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel – who returns, by the way, next month with his own Venezuelan youth orchestra – the even younger (21) Lionel Bringuier had also captivated the local judges and earned an assistant conductorship amid enthusiastic huzzahs. At last Tuesday’s Green Umbrella concert, this slender, bespectacled Niçois got to show his stuff before a grown-up audience – he had already led a couple of kiddie events – and made it clear that he had a lot of stuff to show.

The program was tough, challenging and rewarding: music by Finland’s Kaija Saariaho, the profound, often mystical classmate of our own Esa-Pekka, and Luigi Dallapiccola, the Italian who had evolved a style blending his innate romanticism with his allegiance to Schoenbergian atonality. Bringuier led Dallapiccola’s whimsically titled Little Night Music – lapidary, enchanting, so many gleaming crystals set into a dark and shifting landscape – and Saariaho’s Graal Thétre – a violin concerto lasting half an hour, dense and dark, loaded, says the composer, with subtle allusions all the way from Arthurian knights to Beethoven. Jennifer Koh was the adept soloist; Bringuier’s leadership was poised, unmannered and clear. Orchestra members I spoke to, who had been bowled over by his showing at the auditions a few months ago, repeated their praise. At the same time, the junior reviewer from the L.A. Times, obviously in need of inventing a critical stance, decided that this was a performance superior to Salonen’s (with Gidon Kremer) on the Sony disc, and that is so much baloney.

About Dallapiccola: During my time in New York – the ’60s, say – his music was a constant companion, at small chamber-music concerts and at orchestral events as well. His powerful opera Il Prigionero showed up in several productions, including one in 1960, conducted by Leopold Stokowski at the City Opera that I can still run on my internal video – it shared a double bill with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, would you believe! His music was, for me, a kind of reconciliation: intense, emotional beauty expressed in an espousal of the most forbidding contemporary principles. There are wonderful songs, choral works – Salonen has recorded his Songs of Prison as well as the opera – a big piano work inspired by Finnegans Wake, and chamber works. His legacy is small; he died too soon, just as students from all over were beginning to make the pilgrimage to study with him. Reviving this one work, whose Italian title, Piccola Musica Notturna, glides so beautifully off the tongue, should be the first step of many.

Also under the Umbrella were two shorter Saariaho works: Six Japanese Gardens for percussion, ably dispatched by San Diego’s Steven Schick, and NoaNoa for solo flute, ably played by the Philharmonic’s own Catherine Ransom Karoly. Both were “enhanced” – “cluttered,” I would say – by video projections by Jean-Baptiste Barrière. This the guy from the Times nailed spot-on: “Basically the 1960s light-show experience.”

The Winds Do Blow

“Sibelius Unbound” has begun at the Philharmonic, and there will be time in the next weeks to chart whatever discoveries, rediscoveries and reasons for changes of long-held opinions these interestingly planned programs may afford. So far no good, however: Trudging through the murk of the Second Symphony’s orchestra – woodwinds shrieking through the swirls of violas and cellos casting a fog over the insipid tune crafting – can hardly be reckoned an enlivening experience under any circumstances. Heard following the icy clarity of Salonen’s own Wing on Wing, as it was at last weekend’s concert, it lapses into utter grayness. I grew up in Boston, where Serge Koussevitzky played the Sibelius Second almost as an anthem, and where Sibelius’ name continually appeared beside Beethoven and Brahms on fave-composer lists.

Salonen may never earn a place on those lists, but his emergence as a serious and original composer should be, for all of us, a matter of pride. “For all of us,” I say, because he himself has made it clear that life in Los Angeles and the benevolent deal the Philharmonic has cut him, equalizing the two sides of his career, have made it possible to work as an independent composer, not merely as a conductor who composes. I love the whimsy of Wing on Wing; it is a fantasy about Disney Hall itself and its architect. It is about the Philharmonic only in that its idiosyncratic demands are no longer beyond the powers of these 106 players, and Salonen can take credit for that.

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s winds are its treasure. Blended into the elegance of its small string section, they create the perfect facsimile of the 18th-century orchestra of our imagination. Alongside his series of Mozart piano concertos, in which these wind players’ ongoing conversations with Jeffrey Kahane at the piano were one of the marvels, Kahane has also been devoting quality time to the symphonies of Haydn’s last years. Last Sunday’s concert at Royce Hall ended with No. 99. I might have been inclined to suggest, ever so softly, that Kahane might consider a more relaxed tempo here and there, but his Haydn performances are irresistibly lively, and, as I was saying, just their sound is a wonderland of its own. So it was with No. 99, with its tricky key changes in the first movement, and the sublime melody that sort of sneaks in to catch us by surprise and wonderment in the second. All repeats were observed. You wanted there to be more.

Augusta Read Thomas provided the evening’s novelty, Murmurs in the Mist of Memory, a 15-minute, four-movement piece for strings composed in 2001, inspired by four Emily Dickinson poems but working up a nice eloquence on its own. André Watts was the evening’s soloist, unburdening himself of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in the noncommittal manner that has been all I’ve heard from his playing in the recent past. Many in the audience, need I add, stood and cheered; the spectacle of 10 fast-moving fingers is all it takes, sometimes.

Czech Mates

Finally, Jenufa; finally, Karita Mattila: Our opera company has never more brightly shone. Leos Janácek’s opera probes deeply into human agony before extracting its triumph. Its flow, past moments of unspeakable horror, seems to echo at all times that of the human heartbeat. Even its Czech language seems readily comprehensible; that is the earnestness of Janácek’s music. It is also, of course, the penetrating dramatic intensity of the cast at work at the Chandler Pavilion, led by Mattila – who is not Czech but Finnish and who is at every moment transformed by her role into an irresistible entity. In her ability to wrest forgiveness from cruelty, Janácek’s lyric mastery makes his Jenufa one of opera’s towering personages; the further wonder is the way Mattila inhabits that character so completely: her moment of near madness at the loss of her child, the profundity of her acceptance as she looks beyond the sins of the man who has loved yet wounded her. I rank her accomplishment among my most profound experiences from any stage: alongside Kirsten Flagstad’s Isolde, Laurence Olivier’s Oedipus.

There is much of value, as well, from James Conlon’s musical direction, splendidly motivated and knowing. Long before the first notes sound, when most conductors might be vouchsafed a pre-downbeat martini or two, Conlon is already out front, chatting up the pre-performance crowd with his strong and valuable insights on the opera and its origins. Olivier Tambosi’s stage direction, previously seen at the Metropolitan Opera and on the DVD from the Liceu at Barcelona, is exactly right for this opera: long, austere lines of action, a stage largely open and uncluttered. (I could, however, learn to live without the large boulder that fills in most of the second-act space; it may have symbolic significance, but I found it blank and ugly.)

Eva Urbanová is the troubled stepmother, the Kostelnicka whose well-intentioned murder of Jenufa’s baby becomes the fulcrum of the unbearable human tragedy. Jorma Silvasti and Kim Begley are the brothers Steva and Laca, put on Earth to make life for Jenufa both complicated and interesting. Jenufa runs once more, this weekend; beg, borrow or steal your way in and share the pride in our opera company at its finest.

Gloria in Excelsis

Gloria Cheng finished her Piano Spheres concert last Tuesday with the piano smoldering on the Zipper Hall stage and the near-capacity audience in about the same state. Iannis Xenakis’ music will do that to you sometimes. His 1973 Evryali certainly did: a portrait of “the eldest of three hideous Gorgon sisters . . . with hands of brass, sharp fangs . . .” Cheng’s program was, as usual, a fascinating tour around the sphere of today’s pianistic possibilities: from the trickery of Helmut Lachenmann’s anti-musical Guero – in which the performer extracts dry-point clicks and clacks by attacking the keyboard with a credit card (Amoco or Mobil, we were informed) – to the visionary quietude of a Takemitsu Litany and an exotic jungle fantasy by a young Messiaen. Of lesser interest was a brand-new, bone-dry sonata by UCLA grad student Dante de Silva, still in the academy in more ways than one.

That sorry venture was nicely balanced, however, by an elder, wiser one by John Cage, whose 55-year-old Water Music got the proceedings back on track. “Water,” as you might guess, actually consisted of a bowl of the stuff, plus some whistles, a radio, a pack of cards and some gadgetry for “preparing” the piano; all thoughts of Mr. de Silva’s run-of-the-mill formalities were nicely demolished, as our Gloria neatly restored the Piano Sphere to its proper dimension. A couple of knockout works by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter filled out the program. Piano Spheres, one of our most cherishable concert enterprises, is again in orbit.

All in the Family

For four years now, there has been an annual bash in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. The Carlsbad Music Festival, organized by native-son composer Matt McBane, this year ran for a weekend in an auditorium in the town library, drew large and happy crowds. Three ensembles performed: So Percussion, Real Quiet and the Calder Quartet. All the music was by Americans, mostly young, all young at heart: Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, David Lang, Phil Kline and, of course, Matt McBane. The Monday before, there had been a preview concert at Zipper Hall at which all three ensembles performed. In Carlsbad, Matt’s sister sold tickets and discs; his dad ran the spotlights and mikes.

Aside from that family aspect of the festival, you had to admire the notion of a young composer taking upon himself the task of getting his music heard, and the music of people around him. So Percussion and Real Quiet are upcoming ensembles making their way, via small record labels. The Calders have pushed into more established territory, but they also came to Carlsbad to play Terry Riley’s music (which I had to miss for time pressures). I particularly liked Real Quiet – cello, piano and percussion – which must, of course, create its own repertory. The sense at Carlsbad, therefore, was of a festival of people involved with inventing music, not just playing standard stuff. The other good thing was that the audience, of native Carlsbaddies, were listening to all this new music without worrying about its newness or oldness or familiarity. I liked that.

Oh, and by the Way

The Salonen contingent was back at midweek; if there is a more thrilling resonance than the sound of the Philharmonic playing Berlioz in Disney Hall, it remains undiscovered. Two snippets from the Roméo et Juliette symphony served as wraparound for the opening-night gala, with Renée Fleming to sing Ravel and Puccini as the luscious middle. Also tucked into that half-length program: a curious Luciano Berio reworking of a Boccherini (!) martial fantasy, insubstantial but delightful.

Oddly enough, another Berio reworking, this time of the final, unfinished Contrapunctus of Bach’s Art of the Fugue, began the next night’s first subscription program, an interesting setting for winds and brass ending with a dissonance of Berio’s fashioning. Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen followed, solemn, dark and resigned music from the end of a sorrowing composer’s life, perhaps somewhat out of place as a season’s opening music. Even so, the meathead in the audience who tried to end it with premature applause – twice – strengthens my hopes that someday there will be IQ testers at the doorways of concert halls. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony glisteningly performed, outstanding among feel-good symphonies, ended the evening properly.