So I've Heard

I sit here deeply pondering, surrounded by the many years of my life, trying to decide what I could spare or miss. Over there is a small orange box of clippings, Boston Herald, 1944, my first halting steps. I’d be embarrassed to read them now, but they are there. Next is a fat binder of New York Times pieces, 1961-63, not bad. Then, the bulky scrapbooks from the New York Herald Tribune. The day that great paper folded, in its latter-day avatar as the World Journal Tribune, I drove down to Barclay Street and grabbed all the music archives I could carry, and here they still are. On a shelf, in Stor-All boxes, are my pages from New York, New West, the Herald Examiner, the Daily News . . . On my desk sits the iMac with my 15 years at the L.A. Weekly so far, which take up the space, electronically, of the following dot.

There sits my life, and everything else that I would miss in this world is the direct result of what’s in those boxes, those files. From them I have earned the right to shake hands with Esa-Pekka Salonen and hug Frank Gehry, to lunch with Ernest Fleischmann and bask in Zubin Mehta’s scorn. I have earned the right to sample the mysteries of the tasting menu at Matsuhisa and been guided by Jonathan Gold, in person, to discover the indescribable delicacy of steamed live shrimp at Full House. On my own I have mastered a couple of passable ptés, and a jalapeño corn bread that gets me invited to illustrious homes.

It’s a life nourished, replenished and reinforced from younger, vital sources. Ryan, on his way to journalistic brilliance, saw to it that I got to James Brown’s concert at the Bowl and the Mingus Epitaph at Disney; I guided him through Monteverdi at the Opera. Raymond’s sound engineering, in a garage I used to think was mine, produces recorded rock of a depth and variety beyond any cliché I might have entertained about that genre. Barbara, who turns her shaggy dogs into sweaters, flew here from her farm in Indiana to drive me around after spinal surgery. Sixty or more people show up here on New Year’s Day, eat and drink well, and stay to talk into the night. I love them all, and love that it happens.

The room where I do most of my pondering is a second-story add-on that I put in about 12 years ago. There are windows on all four sides, and a balcony facing west. The stairway is lined with CD shelves, but not all the discs have been unwrapped. I love silence. A friend told me that the room is like a tree house, and that’s exactly right; it’s also the right size of the manageable remainder of my life at 83. Almost every afternoon, around 4:30, a flock of wild parrots goes streaming, and screaming, past my south-facing window: a streak of brilliant green flecked with bright red. That’s the most identifiably Californian thing about my life here that I would miss. The rest is identifiably my own. One of these days I might decide I could do without all or part of it, but not for some time.

One Class Act

Of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung, Andrew Porter wrote, “[It] is a piece that sounds ridiculous when described and yet proves enthralling in performance,” and I agree. The work, composed in 1968, consists of a B-flat chord sustained for about 75 minutes by six singers seated on pillows in semidarkness. The single harmony is “enhanced” by the recitation of magic names, short poems and rhythmic motifs that pass from member to member – all at a low volume that trails off now and then toward near silence. Some variation of vocal color is achieved by the singers’ improvising with vowel color.

On the new Harmonia Mundi disc, the members of Paul Hillier’s Theater of Voices take a few liberties with vocal shadings and other tricks. The “New Cologne Vocal Soloists,” heirs apparent to the group for whom Stockhausen composed his piece, performed the work here at LACMA, much more straightforwardly, and thus more dully. Ideally, the work belongs in a small church, and we will hear it thus next April 12 in, you might guess, one of Santa Monica’s “Jacaranda” concerts.

The Hillier version makes for a wonderful disc. The music is quiet; it sometimes dips below the level of silence, but you must let it envelop you; don’t wander off. Hillier himself has wandered off. When I last lunched him, he was at the University of Indiana. Now he’s in Copenhagen and conducts a chorus in Estonia, from which he sends back marvelous recordings, contributing to one of the sadly few truly class-act classical labels in this parched world of ours.

Harmonia Mundi’s new Don Giovanni keeps alive one corner of that desert, however. It is now possible to marvel at all three of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas in these remarkable performances under René Jacobs, each of them an achievement in ensemble, vocal interaction and impetus that redefines the nature of this miraculous repertory for our time. That Jacobs has been able to bring this off in all three operas – Figaro and Così Fan Tutte no less than this new three-disc Don Giovanni – adds to his achievement. His singers make up no all-star casts; it is their brainpower that enchants here first, their tonsils later.

That said, this is an emphatically good Don Giovanni, superbly put together and intelligently packaged, with some cogent notations by Jacobs himself. Johannes Weisser is the splendid, insinuating Don, Lorenzo Regazzo his all-too-wise manservant, Leporello. Two Russian sopranos, Olga Pasichnyk and Alexandrina Pendatchanska, are the hysterics in Giovanni’s life, Nikolay Borchev and Sunhae Im the rustic lovers Masetto and Zerlina – a tidy and nicely balanced cast. One small problem easily resolved: The arrangement on discs follows the opera as given in Vienna, with a couple of arias from the Prague performance (including Ottavio’s “Il mio tesoro”) moved out of place to tracks at the end of the same disc where they would ordinarily occur earlier. Just push a couple of buttons and you’re back in Prague.

Another

I sit here with a book on my lap so heavy as almost to stop circulation, yet so beautiful that I have to hold it close. It is Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM (Granta Books), which could be just another record-company blurb, but isn’t. For one thing, it comes boxed and sells for 95 bucks; for another, unlike any other record-company blurb you’ve ever seen, it’s worth its selling price.

As I flip the pages, I listen to music: Valentin Silvestrov’s Symphony No. 6, played by Andrey Boreyko and an orchestra in Stuttgart, a huge and powerful work running over an hour. Silvestrov is a composer I know only because of several discs I’ve heard on ECM. I notice that an orchestra from St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) is coming here soon, and the program consists of Schubert, Schumann and Prokofiev. Why are they traveling 6,000 miles to show they can play music we already know? Why aren’t they playing Silvestrov or Schnittke, or perhaps some Russian composer we don’t yet know here at all? They would knock us out of our seats with the slow movement of the Silvestrov Sixth (get the disc and hear for yourself). But no, we get the Schumann Piano Concerto, with a burnt-out soloist who hasn’t been around for years.

Manfred Eicher started ECM in 1969, with far horizons in his line of sight. From these many pages, I see him as a serendipiter from the date of birth, with impulses that sooner or later had to find their way to disc. From our one meeting so far, at an Oregon Bach Festial in, say, 1984, I remember his all-seeing eyes most of all. (Arvo Pärt was also there, and I mostly watched him.) From Eicher more than any other one person, I have learned the breadth of the musical field – how, to cite one small example, you could fuse the very hot saxophone of Jan Garbarek to the medieval singing of the Hilliard Ensemble and forge a whole new art. (Mnemosyne, one of their several albums, is on my desert-island shelf.)

Anyhow, this gorgeous, fat, heavy book, with the same photography that makes every ECM disc a treasure even if you’re deaf, and with editing and profound essays by the superb British critic Paul Griffiths (whom I wish we had more of, or even one of), stands at once as a tribute to the visions of Manfred Eicher and a panorama of the contemporary, creative musical mind. The music that Manfred has brought to my attention – with a little help, by the way, from his New York right arm Tina Pelikan, one of the few press people whose calls I return – makes for an impressive list: Pärt, Garbarek, Holliger, Saluzzi, Tuür, Zehetmaier, Mansouri, and on and on. Getting their act between hard covers is only their next logical step. Trouble is, nobody in the record biz these days can afford their damn book.

No, Luciano

“But, of course, he’s no Pavarotti.” That was Thomas Wachtell in 1984, head of a bygone organization called Music Center Opera, discussing Plácido Domingo and defending the company’s decision – which I had deplored – to cancel the annual visits by the New York City Opera and pooh-poohing the recent guest shot by London’s Royal Opera in which Domingo had sung the lead in Turandot. “That’s a minor role,” said Mr. Wachtell, who also found occasion on the same KUSC interview to inform the listening world that “Alan Rich has the integrity of a cockroach.”

The Pavarotti of Tom Wachtell’s imagining was a symbol, already both more and less than the magnificently gifted and (yes!) artistically responsible musician whose New York debut (Rodolfo in La Bohème, with Mirella Freni, November ’68) I heard with delight as critic for the fledgling New York magazine. There was intelligence in the way Pavarotti knew how to shape, and to shade, the curve of an Italian lyric line, and there are recordings to bear this out.

The Nemorino he creates in the 1973 L’Elisir d’Amore (London/Decca) is more than the rural booby of most productions. The “furtive tear” he describes is partly his own, and he sings for every lover whose crucial words have failed him. Add to that the confrontational fury in the banquet scene in his Lucia di Lammermoor of the year before (same label) and you have a supremely capable, musicianly tenor, with a voice of melting purity and a fine sense of how to direct that voice in the cause of high drama. Add to that Pavarotti’s remarkable sensitivity toward words – rare in opera singers of any stripe, almost nonexistent among Italian tenors – and you have the complete artist Pavarotti once was and could have remained. I love his singing of the word “primavera” in the so-called “Cherry Duet” in Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz, a slight, pastoral opera that he and Freni render irresistible on a two-disc 1969 EMI set; it simply pulls “springtime” right into the room.

Yes, Giorgio (1982) began the downward slope. The film was not only a disaster; it was a typical exploitational disaster: a celebrity pasted into a cornball script. Herbert Breslin was the producer, not quite the most disliked of all front men in New York’s classical-music world – let’s leave it at that. Breslin then went on to produce Pavarotti himself, not so much as a valued member of an opera company with a distinguished repertory and a growing intelligence toward the care and feeding of that superb but inevitably fragile voice and artistic conscience, but as a moneymaker willing to submit to the needs of the musical chop shop that builds the “Three Tenors” repertory and similar kibble.

Perhaps Pavarotti would have slanted his career toward the cheap side by himself; he wasn’t given the chance. His last opera appearances constitute a study in pathetic overreach. His last time here, a concert at Staples Center with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, was full of bravery and full of music that, even through the strident amplification system, now and then sounded like Pavarotti. That’s all you could ask for – that, and the memories.

Yes, Aaron

Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise will be published next month; the Aaron Copland chapter was sneak-previewed in a recent New Yorker. Let me reiterate: This will be the best book on what music is about – really about – that you or I will ever own. This last week of classical concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, with Leonard Slatkin rounding out his three-year stint as principal guest conductor, was also full of Copland and other serious matters; strange, how closing weeks every year seem to offer the season’s most substantial programming.

Copland’s Third Symphony, the final work, was begun in 1944. It starts tough: quite a lot of grinding dissonance and heavy scoring, almost as if to compensate for the lighter scoring and the sweet harmonies of Appalachian Spring of the year before. The Ross chapter makes a lot of Copland’s closeness to the Soviet composers, and it’s possible to hear in his first movement some of the harmonic restlessness in the Shostakovich Fifth, which was new and much discussed at the time. (Ross goes on to discuss a composers’ meeting – or, let’s say, collision – when a delegation of Soviets, including Shostakovich, came to New York.) As with its Soviet maybe-counterpart, the Copland symphony culminates in a flag-waving finale, which incorporates his previous Fanfare for the Common Man. I think I prefer Appalachian Spring.

That work of high enchantment, in fact, began the program two days before – not in the feather-light original version for 13 instruments, alas, which would probably have blown away in the Bowl’s breezes – but in the somewhat too resonant full orchestration; oh, well. Edgar Meyer was on hand, with the first of his bright and bouncy double-bass concertos, which he plays with huge displays of having the world’s best time. Both his concertos show off their composer’s diverse musical backgrounds: lovely, cantabile slow movements right out of 19th-century romanticism, great larrupin’ finales right up there with Mister Copland and some fairly awesome finger-snappin’. There was a whole encore of that too; its name was “Pickle.”

Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee continued the Tuesday program, delightful, small coloristic pieces with the inspiring visuals shown on the video screens; Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue ended it, in a tentative, stumbling performance by Michel Camilo. Thursday’s crowning glory was the return of the too-long-away cellist Lynn Harrell, drawing audible poetry from the wondrous Dvorák Concerto, music the color of the oncoming twilight, with Eric Overholt’s horn solos the shape of the surrounding hills. That’s what you take home from the Hollywood Bowl, as from no place else on Earth.

Homecoming

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s return to the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl began a week of cultural overload such that you’d ordinarily expect in mid-January. Yet here we were in summer’s waning days. Well, for starters, it wasn’t just any old week at the Bowl; it was the kind of challenging, provocative week that the place deserves at least once every summer – or more. There was even – would you believe – opera with the video screens used not just for mug shots of second clarinetists but actually for a purpose: to carry the translation of the text, just as in a real opera house. When did you ever see that before at the Bowl? (Ans.: never.) Someone in the Philharmonic’s video department has finally awakened to the reason those screens belong up there.

I have long admired Diavolo, Jacques Heim’s company of airborne dancers, athletes and, for all I know, masters of the game of Quidditch, who interact in bodily conversation with each other and with inanimate structures to create a language of dramatic movement beyond easy definition. On a warm Tuesday at the Bowl, cheered to the skies by a large and warm-hearted audience, the operative word was “interaction,” and the result was thrilling.

The music was Salonen’s 2001 Foreign Bodies, “fiery masses of sound,” says the composer. Out of Tina Trefethen’s large cube – placed center stage, pierced with several holes – arms, legs and then whole bodies twisted their way into view, matched by the music’s twisting, furious undulations. As the 10-member dance company re-formed downstage and continued their interactions, the cube behind them broke apart into large pie-shaped segments of lustrous metal and plastic on which the dancers zoomed up, down and around, propelled by the music’s built-in urgency. Lights onstage and overhead picked out spots on the structures, which then reflected back to surfaces along the Bowl’s walls and ceiling. The whole spectacle was an interlock of moving dancers and structures uncannily matched by Salonen’s marvelous score. I can’t remember ever seeing the Bowl’s performing space turned into something quite this sensually alive – oh, maybe when Gustavo Dudamel conducted the incandescent music of Revueltas at his debut there two years ago. When else?

Eventually, the parts of the cube pushed back into their original shape and the music wound down – it lasts some 20 minutes, and you can hear it on the same Deutsche Grammophon disc with Salonen’s Wing on Wing. I wonder at the future of this remarkable piece of performance art. It’s a masterpiece in Diavolo’s repertory and a gorgeous illumination of the Salonen work as well. It belongs with Salonen and the Phlharmonic, not to be danced with some creaky ballet orchestra and not with a recording. It needs to be on a stage as part of a concert, in the same place as a featured soloist in a concerto. Somehow or other, it belongs in a repertory, even if that repertory has yet to be invented.

Mahler’s First Symphony, by Salonen and the Philharmonic alone, filled out the program, with the called-for offstage trumpets at the start really far offstage – a trick that always makes you think that Mahler actually composed with the Bowl in mind. It was a grand, broad performance, properly vulgar where such seemed to be called for, properly heaven-storming at the end.

No Sex, Please

Two nights later, there was Boris Godunov, not the one with the familiar Polonaise and the Love Duet but Mussorgsky’s original, no-frills creation: austere, somewhat dry in orchestral sound, its rhythms and melodic shapes deeply rooted in its composer’s naive national identities before his “rescue” by his more sophisticated colleagues. This is the version that Valery Gergiev brought to Orange County earlier this season with his Kirov company and his trunkfuls of seedy scenery, the worthwhile part of their misbegotten “Ring-around.” Mikhail Kit, who was the Wotan in some of the Ring performances, was also the Boris in one of their two performances of that opera and, as he was at the Bowl, an aging but eloquent singing actor. It would be good to see him for once on a properly designed and directed stage set. One assumes that for Salonen this Boris project must be something of a trial run for some project as yet unannounced. Los Angeles’ local companies have yet to produce a Boris Godunov in any version.

Nobody will ever agree on the proper Boris. Unquestionably, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff’s reorchestration of the opening scenes, including the “Coronation” choruses, makes a swell but wrong noise. Mussorgsky’s dark, edgy original, with its irregular rhythms, peers behind Rimsky’s finery to reveal a more troubled Russia with its impoverished masses, and endows the ascent of Boris with the right cynical coloration. The Polonaise and all the love-duet stuff were Mussorgsky’s own inferior capitulation to spicing up the action; leave them out and you’ve got more than three hours of almost continuous men’s voices. Most performances of Boris are some kind of conflation of Mussorgsky’s own two versions, with scenes left in or out: a scene at St. Basil’s Cathedral from the first version, a scene in Kromy Forest from the second. Since both scenes end with a Holy Idiot bewailing the fate of Russia, you can’t have both, and at the Bowl we got St. Basil’s. Salonen’s performance, with Mr. Kit heading a capable cast of visitors, most of them from the Maryinsky Academy of Young Soloists and the massed but sometimes wobbly forces of the Pacific Chorale, followed the pure Mussorgsky original. Judging from wisps of overheard conversations from prematurely exiting Bowl-goers, it did not fulfill everyone’s idea of a swell night of opera at the Bowl. At the very end, as if on cue, there were coyotes in ardent conversation above the parking lot. They knew something that the rest of us must guess.

Opera Indoors

Fidelio is back, to start the L.A. Opera’s 21st season, with music director James Conlon and his orchestra getting – and meriting – the evening’s biggest applause. The opening scenes with the country lovemakers are no less silly than ever; the opera doesn’t really start until they’re gotten rid of. But that’s Beethoven’s problem, not ours; Fidelio is must-see and must-hear, and this production is an honorable dispatch of this problematic but supreme opera. It is the work of Italian director-designer Pierluigi Pier’Alli, brought over from the Queen Sofia Palace of the Arts in Valencia. His stage is full of menacing verticals , and some strange mechanical images that make it look as if the hapless Florestan is imprisoned in some sort of huge factory. On the other hand, the staging at the moment of rescue, one of operadom’s sublime 60 seconds, is thrilling indeed.

Best of all, this is a Fidelio that sounds as it’s supposed to, and that’s rare. Rather than the usual beefy Wagnerian tenor, there is the youthful and young-sounding Klaus Florian Vogt; his first “Gott!!!” ringing out of the darkness seemed to herald a new era in Fidelio tenors, and all for the better. The Leonore/Fidelio, similarly, is the youthful Anja Kampe, with a rich, true voice that could cut right through all those horns in her first big aria and a figure that could pass for a lad in the Rocco household . That, by the way, is presided over by the magnificent basso Matti Salminen, and it’s a great casting choice to see him towering, a couple of feet taller, over the Pizarro of Eike Wilm Schulte. Good over evil; that’s what opera is all about, after all.

Verdi’s Requiem, concert music in operatic language, ensued on the same stage a few hours later. Great singers were on hand; the work demands no less. One, the phenomenal German bass Rene Pape, was making his long-overdue debut: Tall and handsome, with a voice of similar qualities, he is the Marke, the Sarastro, the Gurnemanz of everyone’s dreams; we here must continue to dream. Arturo Chacón-Cruz was a last-minute fill-in, the latest in a line of baby-faced Mexic
an tenors and excellent of
the breed; soprano Adrienne Pieczonka and mezzo Stephanie Blythe completed the vocal quartet. All performed handsomely.

From Plácido Domingo’s conducting I heard nothing but cues correctly obeyed, little from the L.A. Opera’s orchestra or chorus that told me of Verdi’s wonderful lyric lines, the “Lachrymosa” that sweeps across the heavens, the “Hostias et preces tibi” at which no listener should be able to sit dry-eyed. You do not shape a Verdian lyric line by simply waving a stick at a stageful of performers. The performance, I suppose I have to add, was sold out, at a $250 top. Go figure.

Where She Danced

Götz Friedrich’s television production of Richard Strauss’ Salome is finally available on DVD, from Deutsche Grammophon. In 1974, it defined what opera could accomplish on a television screen; it does so again. Watched on a screen of any size, it vaporizes physical dimensions and hangs suspended as a breathtaking painting of its time – the masterpiece that Gustave Moreau, say, strove toward – in which the personages of the Strauss and the Oscar Wilde drama live their fetid existence and stride to its loathsome climax. Everything about color and sound and location seems exactly in place; above all, there is no awareness of camera and microphone. On my many shelves of DVD’d opera, there is nothing like this one. It doesn’t even matter that I have been known not to care for Salome very much; I can’t stop watching this one-of-a-kind masterwork.

Teresa Stratas is the Salome, her head imprisoned in a jeweled skullcap so that there is nothing but face, on which the full motivation of this willful, vengeful, poisonous child plays out. It is an amazing performance, to watch and to hear; she was 36 or thereabouts, and it is a full capturing of the adolescent monster of the Strauss score. Better yet, she is perfectly matched against her mother of the play, the Herodias of Astrid Varnay – she who once broke hearts with her Sieglinde and her Brünnhilde, here delivering the fiendish cackle that defines and fulfills the bloodlines of her unspeakable daughter.

But everything works here, from the slobber of Hans Beirer’s Herod to the helplessness of Hanna Schwarz, as the doe-eyed Page who must watch as her beloved Narraboth kills himself in helpless adoration of the unattainable Prinzessin. Karl Böhm, who has supped often at the Strauss table, does so yet again as conductor; with the Vienna Philharmonic to do his bidding, who could ask for anything more?

The Fat Man Sang

Luciano Pavarotti figured little in Los Angeles’ operatic life – one La Bohème at the Bowl in his early (a.k.a. serious artist) years – but he did give his time and talent generously in pension-fund concerts at the Chandler Pavilion and elsewhere. About the “Greatest Star” headlines that have flashed across the skies in recent days I have been digesting second thoughts, while reliving the pleasures in the artistry of some of his authentic “greatest hits” – the tender, enveloping warmth of his L’Amico Fritz for one of many. More next week.

Fiddling on Grand

Thursday was chamber-music night on Grand Avenue: indoors with the Calder Quartet in Zipper Hall, outdoors with the Kronos Quartet, plus Wu Man and her magical pipa a short walk down at the Water Garden in California Plaza. The timing was sufficiently staggered so that you could take in both programs. Both were produced in association with the Western Arts Alliance Conference that was going on all week, which meant that the audiences included numbers of incredulous-looking members in suits along with the rest of us ordinary Californians.

The Calder Quartet – violinists Ben Jacobson and Andrew Bulbrook, violist Jonathan Moerschel, cellist Eric Byers – grows in depth and expressivity, as chamber ensembles must. Their residence at the Colburn School continues, with more public concerts scheduled next season as Colburn becomes a full-time graduate school; their affiliation with Juilliard also continues, establishing them as our first bicoastal quartet. Their participation on Thursday was only half a program, but it included a beautifully shaded, sleek reading of the Ravel Quartet, full of nuance and insinuation and lovely half-lights. Their other music consisted of a curious segue – the adagio from a late Shostakovich quartet blending into the final movements from the Second Quartet of Christopher Rouse: music the guys have played before and probably the best music by Rouse I have yet heard. I had to forsake the rest of the program, a set by the Billy Childs Jazz-Chamber Ensemble, to make the trek to the Kronos.

That, as always, was full of fun and mystery, a program of many short and exotic pieces, studded with attractive names – Terry Riley, for one, and something I heard through the capricious sound system as “Laguba Laguba by Berman from India.” The incredible energy behind Wu Man’s playing of her equally incredible, towering stringed instrument came across as always, but was sometimes laid waste by the sound system that seemed to coagulate everything. The image I got was of strands of pasta unstirred in the pot and stuck together. Amplification at California Plaza has never been kind to the sound of strings, solo or in small groups, and much of the exquisite tracery of Wu Man’s instrument – or, for that matter, the splendid work of the Kronos behind her – had to be taken on faith. Still, these admission-free concerts, which this summer have included such splendid explorations as an evening on the Harry Partch instruments and, still to come on Sept.15, a gamelan program, are part of what makes this city tick.

Rach Attack

Of all the really bad music that survives in unaccountably frequent performances, it is the Third Piano Concerto of Rachmaninoff that seems to me the least deserving. Bad enough that its ascendancy to even greater fame in recent years has rested on a film – Scott Hicks’ 1996 Shine – which itself is based on a pack of lies. The concerto itself is a scrapbook of big, noisy pianistic ideas, each a catchy moment in itself but none of them with the cohesion that drives the attention forward. The Second Concerto of a decade before is so much the better work, not only in the richness of its basketful of grand tunes but also in its impulse as a piece of music, moving forward toward a climactic point and then properly letting go.

Still, Number Three seems to possess some degree of survival power. A good-looking pianist at work on its clattering nonentities indeed fulfills many peoples’ ideal of what musical performance is supposed to look like, in a way that a less demonstrative musician – Jonathan Biss in the Beethoven Concerto, say, earlier in the Bowl season – might not. The video screens of Nikolai Lugansky’s finger work during his performance, last week at the Bowl , of the Rach Three – as it has come to be called since that movie – did, every now and then, take on the look of pots of pasta aboil. (Sorry, I seem to be stuck with that metaphor; it comes of writing hungry.) Furthermore, Mr. Lugansky did fulfill that ideal: a good-looking pianist at work, strong-minded as well as -fingered, capable of wading through all that you-know-what and emerging with trousers dry. Kirill Petrenko was the evening’s conductor.

On his own, Mr. Petrenko led the Philharmonic through the First Symphony of Shostakovich, a work full of adolescent nose-thumbing but many grown-up charms as well. The symphony seems to be about growing up, in fact; by the time we reach the slow movement, the composer has begun to preface every new idea with a “but seriously?.?.?.?” and it suddenly becomes very beautiful, very tragic in a 19-year-old’s way. Later there comes a portentous solo for timpani – perhaps the first such animal in the repertory – and a diabolical ending soon afterward. How to resist? Some people put down this First Symphony; I don’t think you can really know the inner Shostakovich unless you take this small, imperfect but genuine work to heart. I did, and it seemed to clear the air quite nicely.

Madame Butterball

Stephen Hartke’s The Greater Good is something we’ve long awaited: an American opera of genuine musical stature that uses the elements of opera in proper balance to create dramatic ebb and flow consistent with a storyline. The opera is out on a two-CD Naxos album, recorded at its premiere last year at the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York. It runs two and one-half hours; it could use a little trimming here and there, but what new opera couldn’t?

The story is Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif,” one of that French master’s magnificent ironies. Boule de Suif (“Ball of Fat” or, perhaps, “Butterball”) is a prostitute of considerable renown. Fleeing from Rouen in a packed stagecoach after the Franco-Prussian War, she alone has food, which she shares with her hungry, aristocratic fellow passengers. The coach is stopped and held prisoner by a Prussian officer at an inn. The passengers implore Butterball to venture her talents upon the officer to gain their freedom. At first, she is proud: She is not for hire. Then she relents. Next morning, the passengers embark; Butterball joins them, worn and bedraggled from a hard night’s work. They snub her: a common whore. The coach rumbles on.

The text is Hartke’s own, drawn from Philip Littell’s dramatic adaptation. The marvel of his music is its impulsive sense of ensemble, a bristling counterpoint in which the personalities of the individual passengers, crowded together in that rattletrap of a coach, burst forth. The orchestra is well used, a dissonant, sardonic commentary nicely balanced against the continuous fabric of interwoven anger and self-important pride. Now and then, a solo voice breaks through with some kind of aria; there are lovely, sad moments in the second act as the imprisoned passengers dream of home. One woman waxes rhapsodic over memories of snow “. . . except that it gets dirty right away.” An old man fusses about losing his bank accounts to the occupying Germans; an old woman misses her cat; a nun quietly recites her rosary. Boule de Suif herself is the voice of calmness, as she thrills the crowd with accounts of her conquests, her methods. Later, as the group is marooned at the inn and must pass the time in storytelling, the music loses some momentum; here is where some trimming might be in order. But there is one delicious moment, as the Butterball magic enfolds the susceptible Prussian officer and the creak of bedsprings (squeaky high woodwinds) filters down to the waiting crowd below.

The recording is from a live Glimmerglass performance conducted by Stewart Robertson, efficient and clear, every voice exactly right for what is needed, the audience presence to add a degree of resonance. Someday I’ll get to visit this enterprising little company in their tiny home in upstate New York with its amazing, adventurous repertory, next door to all the baseball stuff. The cream of it gets to the New York City Opera; I don’t know whether there are plans for this work by Hartke, who is on faculty here at USC, but there should be – in New York and for companies here as well. It will need superb musical and stage leadership to achieve the superb ensemble sense that you can hear on this recording.

It’s time also to mention the activities at Naxos over the past few years, totally contra the deplorable decline in recorded repertory elsewhere, in amassing a catalog of American music on disc. They include an “American Classics” catalog with every disc, and it’s an amazing document. It lists, for starters, practically everything important in the American symphonic repertory – Diamond, Harris, Schuman, Piston – newly recorded on Naxos. They go ‘way back, with the Gottschalk collection I went bananas over a few weeks ago, and a disc of charming, amateurish music by the great diarist and self-styled critic George Templeton Strong. They offer more of Charlie Ives than any other label has ever carried, more of Sam Barber, and a 50-disc collection of serious music by American Jewish composers, underwritten by the Milken Archive.

French CzechStéphane Denève was last week’s Hollywood Bowl conductor, a Frenchman of impressive mane who had also won hearts at a Disney Hall concert last season. He had good reason to do so again. Dvorák’s Eighth Symphony is a heart-warmer, and Monsieur Denève has learned its secrets. Mostly, they consist of allowing the orchestra to relax and allow its textures to lie open, so that flutes and oboes can make their way through the strings. That’s what Brahms never learned, and why all the symphonies of Dvorák are so much more fun to hear than Onkel Johannes’ four ponderosities, however impressive their thought content.

Sergey Khachatryan was the soloist, crowd-pleasing before he played a single note of Prokofiev’s G-minor Violin Concerto, and crowd-pleasing all the more once he began. The stream of good-looking violinists is never-ending; it’s some kind of syndrome, I suppose. Young Mr. Kh . . . towers above the crowd; he was very, very good. That particular concerto towers too; it is a serious, intricate and genuinely intelligent work (despite its having been written for Heifetz, who, sure enough, played only on the surface of it on his recording).

All these good things happened on the program despite the wretchedness that began it, the Leopold Stokowski orchestral transcription, from the organ original, of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue. One must wonder: What brand of organ did Stokowski have in mind when he transcribed its sounds to the uncomprehending realm of the symphony orchestra? Perhaps a barrel organ at London’s Battersea Park? A Mighty Wurlitzer at Radio City Music Hall? I have had my reservations about the repertory and the sonorities rampant within the world of the pipe organ in my lifetime, but the sheer sonic brutality of that opening music the other night inspires me to bind myself to every pipe organ within reach – as some of my friends do to trees – to shield them from such abomination.

The End of Mozart

Someday I will have my own music school, and the course I will teach will be devoted to Mozart, one movement at a time per semester. I would start with the slow movement of the D-minor Piano Concerto (K. 466), which was on the Hollywood Bowl program last Thursday, and I’m not even sure that one semester would be time enough to expound on the reasons for being in love with this music.

You have to start with the setting. The colossal grump of the first movement has receded into shadows. Now comes a single solacing voice, the piano, with its little tune like candy wound around a stick; smiling, the orchestra echoes. Not much later (measure 40 if you’re following along), the true magic occurs: the piano alone in the simplest of one-finger tunes, over the lightest of orchestral throbbing. It could be Susanna at her marriage to Figaro, or Pamina handing off the Magic Flute, but Mozart doesn’t need words this time . . .

Okay, you’ll have to wait and take the course; just know for now that this is the kind of thing that happens in slow movements of Mozart’s piano concertos – try also K. 467 or 482, and 488 will break your heart. Shai Wosner, a young pianist from Israel with very long fingers that showed up well on the video screens, was the evening’s commendable pianist, not yet in the suspended animation that the slow movement demands – check out the Alfred Brendel recording for that – but certainly a young man worth watching. He used the Beethoven cadenzas in the first and last movements; not many pianists do, because they’re scary. They are oversize, adventurous rhapsodies on the music that the young Beethoven, recently arrived in Vienna and anxious to make his mark, had fashioned for a memorial concert organized by Mozart’s widow.

This was the last event of Nicholas McGegan’s four-concert “Grand Tour,” and it brought the vagrant Mozart home to Vienna for his “Jupiter” Symphony, the last of the three he composed in a miraculous burst of energy in six weeks in 1788. The program began with a set of sneeze-length Contradances that Mozart ground out to bring in bread and butter, sometimes recycling tunes from operas. The “Jupiter” was properly grand, with all the big repeats respected – when did this last occur at the Bowl? – and the contrapuntal finale taken at a considerate pace so that the monumental pileup at the end – all five themes in a simultaneous contrapuntal tangle – could be savored and marveled at.

The turnout was close to 10,000, twice the usual crowd for a Thursday Classics event. Not a single aircraft polluted the sky this night. Something about the size of the Mozart orchestration, even at its maximum in this “Jupiter” Symphony, seems exactly the right size for the Bowl. There is no more Mozart on this summer’s schedule, however.

Rumi Squared

When I got to the Disney Hall box office Friday night, there were only two tickets left, at $150, and several screaming expostulators. If nothing else, this first-time-on-Earth appearance by the “Rumi Symphony Project Cycle Number One” represented some kind of public-relations triumph. They put it on, you came, and boy-oh-boy did you yell yourselves hoarse over Lord-knows-what.

That title itself should raise eyebrows. Major Rumi projects have fared badly here before; the 1998 Philip Glass-Robert Wilson slide show to open the rebuilt Royce Hall ranks as one of the area’s major fiascoes. Now the venerated Persian poet is being honored for his 800 years; the symphony, however, is an art form of a mere 250. Why connect the two? Apparently today’s bridge builders aren’t that easily fazed. In amassing his “Rumi Symphony” project (not all that symphonic, since only nine musicians were involved last Friday), a certain Hafez Nazeri has proclaimed his inspiration from the words of the great poet. He is aided in this in that he is the son of Shahram Nazeri, the internationally acclaimed Iranian vocalist, singer and improviser to the poetry of Rumi, who, according to a press release that – although I haven’t tested it personally – is probably meant to glow in the dark, has been hailed as the “Persian Nightingale” and “Iran’s Pavarotti.”

What the younger Nazeri has done, from the evidence of Friday’s concert, is to absorb some of the melodic and harmonic idiom of his Persian heritage, spread it around a mix of indigenous and symphonic players (led off in a throbbing solo by Philharmonic cellist Ben Hong) and compose big Western-style music with this material. There’s nothing new about this; check out Rimsky-Korsakov’sScheherazade, a successful if cornball Persian symphony. Maybe Nazeri didn’t use as big an orchestra as Rimsky-Korsakov, but Rimsky didn’t have microphones. Most bothersome was that he had, somehow, enlisted his father’s participation in this ersatz Orientalia. At the start of the program’s second half, however, the elder Nazeri took the stage alone, and for about 15 minutes sang his own, and the poet Rumi’s, freeform, rhapsodic music, which broke free of all the contrivances, the fakery of the rest of the evening’s music. Neither Pavarotti’s nor a nightingale’s, his voice was dark, rich, throbbing – the sound of a whole man’s soul. For those few minutes, an elderly man stood alone on a darkened stage, sounding forth with eloquence and pride the lyric poetry of his heritage, made us all happy to be there, and turned what might otherwise have been simply filial insults into some kind of art.

Waiving Rules, Ruling Waves

A mighty man is he, this Nicholas McGegan. You might not think so at first; he’s a fellow slight of build, and he has a way of approaching the Hollywood Bowl podium a little like a demure bunny rabbit, but the might is there nevertheless. It’s in his music: his Handel recordings on Harmonia Mundi with the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and the terrific planning and music making manifest in his current stint at the Bowl. In that paradisiacal retreat in the Cahuenga Pass, he’s come up with a splendid and workable idea: four concerts on successive classical Tuesdays and Thursdays, outlining a sort of Grand Tour, with the young Wolfgang Mozart as the Grand Tourist who travels from one musical milieu to another – London, Venice, Paris, Vienna – surrounded by other people’s music in each place but also working on his own. This grows, from the baby talk of a First Symphony composed in London to the passion and original genius of the final “Jupiter” Symphony in Vienna. (Curiously enough, a tune that turns up in the slow movement of that First Symphony becomes, with or without Mozart’s contrivance, an important element in the “Jupiter.”)

The first program, which found the child Mozart being toasted in the Handel-dominated London, enlisted the aid of the fine British tenor John Mark Ainsley in a couple of Handel arias (“Where’er you walk,” “Waft her, angels”) of familiar but ravishing beauty, and also a couple with awesome coloratura that, alas, inspired some pretty dismal imitators in the men’s room at halftime. (I don’t get paid to review bathroom coloraturas.) At the end, there was music from Alfred by Thomas Arne, whose final number, McGegan told the crowd, “encapsulates all the virtues the British admire and like to think they possess.” Whereupon all 6,000 of us stood and sang “Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves” and departed happy.

Vivaldi was the marquee name in Venice in 1770, when the 14-year-old Mozart brought in his Mitridate, Re di Ponto; McGegan’s second program leaned strongly toward the native son, with only two short orchestral bits from Mozart’s opera. Concertmaster Martin Chalifour performed two of Vivaldi’s solo concertos, of which one, in C major, also called for a solo lute as accompaniment in the slow movement; that work too (No. 190 in the catalog) stood out above the Vivaldian grasslands by virtue of some interesting dissonant harmonies. Chalifour also led the ensemble in two of Vivaldi’s concertos for four violins, from the notable “Estro Armonico” collection, whose intertwined writing for soloists probably had a direct influence on Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos.

I write in midseries, with Paris and Vienna still to be heard; so far, the turnout has been above average for midweek attendance, even though these programs do not call upon the full orchestral forces – and surely sound better through the amplification for exactly that reason. It’s about time that Bowl management occasionally faced the idea that this can be a place for brain-involving programming such as this miniseries, not only for music of the pleasant past but also – just now and then – something from our own time.

Obiter dictum: I hope you won’t confuse McGegan’s “Grand Tour” with Classical Destinations, a dreadful package from EMI (CD, DVD and a book from Amadeus Press) of error-ridden musical essays setting composers in their native lands with simpering narrations delivered by Simon Callow in the affected appreciationese that, I am sure, is partially responsible for serious music’s tragically low estate these days.

The French Touch

Two operas, composed 232 years apart but no less fresh to the ear, emerge from the smoky ruins of the record industry. Clocking in mere moments short of three hours, with every repeat and da capo meticulously honored, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Thésée in its gorgeous rendition from the Boston Early Music Festival, on CPO, might possibly challenge an unbeliever’s patience. At well under two hours, a long-hoped-for recording of Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue on Telarc should be cause for some rejoicing despite predictable flaws.

To Thésée, then, the masterpiece of the sublime opportunist who weaseled his way into the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and practically invented the art of opera, dance and all the fancy production values they required. You love it or you don’t. There is a love story: Theseus and his Aeglé. The jealous Medea tries to interfere and is almost successful. Five minutes before the final curtain, the goddess Minerva, dea ex machina, drops in (literally) in her chariot, with full brass band, and resolves everybody’s problems. Before this, there has been three hours’ worth of splendid music, sent forth in wonderful Baroque sonorities by the Boston Ensemble led by the lutenist Paul O’Dette, who has played here many times and whom we all know to be the best there is. So are Howard Crook, the countertenor who sings Theseus, and Ellen Hargis, the Aeglé.

We all know and love Paul Dukas’ 1897 tone poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice for more, I hope, than the cut-down version in Fantasia. His fantasy opera about Ariane and Bluebeard, written 10 years later, uses a text by Maurice Maeterlinck, a strange affair not easily unraveled. Ariane is the Seventh Wife, who outlives her predecessors to live on with her mysterious seducer. He, meanwhile, barely survives an attack by villagers outside his castle, angered by his evil deeds. The opera was admired in its time by no less than Arnold Schoenberg.

Now it’s here, in a recording led by the omnivorous Leon Botstein, with the BBC Symphony sounding somewhat tentative and the recorded sound a little murky, but enough to convey the remarkable richness and range of color in the scoring. The sounds are late French; I want to say Franck or d’Indy, but the music is better than anything I know by either of them. It’s a fascinating score all by itself. The singing, by Lori Phillips as Ariane and Patricia Bardon in the important role as her Nurse, is just okay. The whole venture satisfies my curiosity about the work but makes me want all the more to hear it live someday.

Ninth, but Not to the Nth

Something, I am sorry to inform you, stood between me and the paroxysms of delight with which the other 12-or-so thousand happy spectators greeted the efforts of Michael Tilson Thomas of San Francisco in his two concerts leading the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl last week. Simply put, that something is my inability to take him as seriously as he, given his enormous talents for self-promotion, seems to expect. That said, I hasten to add that I enjoyed those two concerts considerably for what they were: a lot of very classy note playing performed by a very classy orchestra under a good-looking conductor who’s great fun to watch. What they were not, however, were any kind of serious measurements of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven or – so far as they go – the lesser but worthy works of Bernstein and Copland that showed up on the second program.

I have said this before of MTT in action, indoors and out, and the suspicion remains: The principal subject of his performance is his performance. You could admire the detail in the Beethoven, at least in the first two movements, and still miss the magnificent sense of accumulation that makes both these movements the overpowering experiences that they are. In the scherzo, he observed Beethoven’s stipulated first repeat but not the second, thereby distorting the time scale. The slow movement went by so fast, with so little differentiation between its contrasting sections, as to trivialize its sublime impact. Before the finale, MTT went through some kind of ludicrous “now get this” motion on the podium, and then delivered nothing really worth the getting. The vocal forces were a mixed blessing. Eric Owens sang his exhortation mostly off key; a helicopter wiped out all of Jessica Rivera’s soprano solo later on; Philippe Castagner’s tenor solo was the evening’s distinguishing moment . . .

That, and some minor but attractive bits of Beethoveniana that MTT had dug up to fill out the program: stuff that the composer had churned out to keep the pot boiling in between his more substantial endeavors. Actually, some of Beethoven’s music for the August von Kotzebue drama King Stephen, which began the evening, is interesting as a sketchpad for tunes in the Ninth Symphony; other sections are interesting as proof that he could craft a ho-hum tune along with the rest of the Viennese tune spinners. And one little piece called Bundeslied, for singers and winds, is proof that Beethoven could dash off an authentic four-minute charmer better than the rest of them, and that MTT’s skill as a digger-outer is beyond challenge.

Someday the clouds will part around the name and achievements of Leonard Bernstein, and music like the Symphonic (why that?) Dances From West Side Story will probably figure among the genuine works of his genius, pushing the pretentious symphonies, choral works and other overreachings into deserved obscurity. These splendid, energy-laden Danceswill, by that token, be removed from the purview of symphony orchestras, and restored to the realm of the smaller, theater-size bands who can do them better justice than all the noise MTT stirred up the other night.

There followed Aaron Copland’s turn: six (seven with the encore) of his wonderfully flavorsome settings of old American songs, rich, rugged music sung by Thomas Hampson, who owns them for this generation (pace Marilyn Horne). Then came more Copland, the quiet, reverent, deeply patriotic Lincoln Portrait that once, nevertheless, got banned by our nation as “lefty” (at the 1953 Eisenhower inaugural). Gore Vidal was the reader, an eloquent and significant choice. Seated in his wheelchair, the grand old hell-raiser rose to the occasion with a delivery of Lincoln’s words pointed and meaningful. At the end, he stood and walked off. MTT followed, not on water.

The Man Who Loved Mozart

The video of Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute seems to be hard to find these days; surely a memorial reissue is mandatory. Among the hundreds of opera tapes and DVDs now at hand, this one stands magically apart, an operatic film purposely made, not just shot from the wings, about a performance by people, totally absorbed in and in love with their work, finding their place during the course of an excellent performance of Mozart’s enchanted and enchanting play-with-music. The performing space is part of the magic: Sweden’s little Drottningholm Theater, the size and shape of spaces Mozart himself knew. Never mind that the theater was taken apart and reconstructed for the filmmakers; never mind all the other artifices, including the fact that Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, which we usually hear as The Magic Flute, is here given in Swedish. The real music is still present, where it matters. Above all, this is a filming of Mozart’s work that also, with consummate ease, becomes a document of an audience having a wonderful time there, from the delighted face of the little girl (Bergman’s daughter) during the overture to the occasional backstage glances as the camera tiptoes around the theater while the magic unfolds onstage. It becomes a film of how we would like to see an opera someday, as a disembodied spirit freely roaming – through the theater, through the stage, through the mingled souls of everyone involved – only they won’t let us. Lucky Mr. Bergman.

Smiles of a Summer Night is Bergman’s Così Fan Tutte: the game playing, the cynicism, the superior wisdom of the social inferiors, the awareness at the end that those final matchups aren’t really going to work. (Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, are even more careful than Bergman to leave this point unresolved, to the continued bemusement of two centuries of opera directors.) Bergman adorns his plot with more characters than the opera’s six, but the parallels are inescapable. Both works are, unto themselves, perfect.

Firm Foundation

The Philharmonic hires well. Last week’s classical concerts at the Hollywood Bowl were entrusted to the orchestra’s second-tier leaders, assistant conductor Joana Carneiro and associate Alexander Mickelthwate. They represent an orchestra’s crucial support system, the young conductors, recently out of conservatories or competitions, sometimes with a few years on podiums with orchestras in the boonies here or abroad, sometimes not, who stand closely by. They conduct the kiddie concerts, perhaps a “Green Umbrella” or two. They attend rehearsals, make themselves useful doing all kinds of backstage chores, wait for the principal conductor to fall off the podium so they can re-enact the Cinderella story. Almost any major conductor you can name – Salonen, Tilson Thomas, all the way back to Toscanini – has at least one such episode in his vita.

Carneiro and Mickelthwate represented a nice contrast: the former born in Lisbon with a fair list of conducting dates in Portugal as well as here; the latter German, who in his first year here made his conducting debut on 30 minutes’ notice, replacing an ailing conductor in a murderous program of Shostakovich and Adams. Both young conductors came to the Bowl last week with programs that could pass as self-portraits: Carneiro with a Hispanic mix, rendered impure but all the more enchanting with the added accents of the Frenchman Ravel and a couple of soloists out of Brazil; Mickelthwate with the German romantics and a Korean soloist to draw the crowd.

The steamy, slithery harmonies of Ravel’s Spanish Rhapsody glided effortlessly into the warmth over Cahuenga Pass on Tuesday; so did everything that followed. Carneiro’s musical impulses are admirable, and the orchestra was producing elegant, seductive sounds for her all night. Arnaldo Cohen, Brazil-born, now at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, was the pianist in a sleepy performance of Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain – but I think the piece itself is sleep-inducing – and the fabulous Luciana Souza, whom we know and love for her singing of Golijov at Ojai and on a new DG recording, caused the very air to sizzle in the all-too-brief vocal passages in Falla’s El Amor Brujo. Most fun of all, I have to admit, was the closing, inevitable Boléro of Ravel, with the video screens, for once, really keeping up with the instrumental changes in this maligned, amazing work.

Thursday night’s inevitability was Sarah Chang again entangled in the Bruch Violin Concerto, the third pairing in my Philharmonic files, plus one I remember trying to forget in Orange County. Is it a matter of stuck wiring? Is it the Korean national anthem? (It does draw the crowds.) This was Mickelthwate’s final date as the Philharmonic’s associate conductor; why lumber his last program with this drab misadventure midway? He moves on to become music director of the Winnipeg (brrr!) Symphony, and when he returns (as he promises), it will be in the distinguished role of guest conductor. His tenure ended with a spacious unfolding of Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony in all its crippled but somehow affecting eloquence.

Bubbles (1929-2007)

I’ll bet anything that when Beverly Sills found the typo in the first line of Bubbles, her autobiography – “I sang my first aria in pubic” – she let it stand; it would be just like her.

One afternoon in 1979, we floated around on rubber horsies in her pool on the Vineyard. She’d just taken over the City Opera from Julius Rudel, and was full of tidbits about the mess he had left her: new productions booked without set designers, that sort of thing. Balancing a small tape recorder in a breezy pool isn’t the easiest of journalistic tasks, but I managed. I got it all into my article for New York Magazine, and Rudel exploded. Beverly phoned. “Oh, was that an interview?” – I could see the eyelashes coyly fluttering. “I guess I just didn’t know.”

That was a low point, and there were a couple of years after that when I felt I needed clearance from her implacable manager, Edgar Vincent, just to say “hello.” I prefer to dwell on the high points; there were many, though we started off slowly. I fished out my Herald Tribune review of her Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare at the New York City Opera, September 28, 1966, which is generally reckoned as her career turnaround, and there isn’t much: “Beverly Sills is the Cleopatra of everyone’s dreams and her handling of some ferocious coloratura is all the more remarkable . . .” I was too much the scholar for the extended gush, too aware of how Handel’s score had been mishandled in the edition prepared for the New York City Opera.

I really fell for Beverly Sills in a college gym in Medford, Massachusetts, some four years later, as she came marching down the center aisle, waving an enormous Tricouleur and trilling Donizetti’s bugle call that begins his Daughter of the Regiment. Sarah Caldwell had put that performance together, as conductor and director, and those two ardent, blithe spirits – plus a gang of right-minded collaborators – had invented a way of creating opera out of voice and spirit and performing space that remains unique in my opera-going memory.

Sills would go on to a fabulous career under other conductors and directors, and make us aware of a repertory of great opera – of the bel canto era most of all – that we might otherwise not have known. When she sang with Caldwell’s company in Boston, or later together in some memorable La Traviata performances at the Met, there continued to be an interweave of musical understanding, of the nature even of a simple phrase, that elevated the artistry of both beyond anything they accomplished by themselves. Tragically, little or none of that great togetherness has been preserved.

We had too little of Sills’ artistry here in Los Angeles. The brief visits by her City Opera incurred resentment from local forces over booking time at the Music Center, and the deal was finally torpedoed with an outburst of ignorant proclamations that I hope will never again come to light. Other, happier, memories are there for the keeping.