So I've Heard

Missing the Moonlight

Maurice Ravel composed his Piano Concerto as a handshake to the American audiences who awaited his first tour of this country. His first movement teems with his new love of the American vernacular; the jazz licks are straight out of Gershwin, maybe a line or two of Paul Whiteman, something of the blues with their flatted sixth note. Then something even more wonderful happens: The solo piano starts the slow movement with a tune fashioned out of pure moonlight. One by one, the winds take it over; when the sheer poignancy has set our souls to rest, the jazz returns for a happy awakening and farewell.

But it’s that slow movement that lingers. At Ojai, Pierre-Laurent Aimard played it just as that famous pink light of dusk engulfed the Valley, and there was no separation between sight and sound. That memory followed me into the Hollywood Bowl a few nights ago, and made it impossible to cope with Andreas Haefliger’s piano made hard-toned and jangly by the amplification, and the music itself made square and unlovely by the pianist’s notion that it existed in small, regular boxes of sound rather than streams of moonlight. The jazz in the outer movements was okay, however, just okay.

So here we are at Bowl time again, that amazing cornucopia of classical music, 10 weeks’ worth, ranging from the inevitable Bruch Violin Concerto with Sarah Chang to Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting music of his own plus a complete Boris Godunov – and all served up, for the choosing, in catered Cytherean luxury or in dollar seats somewhere in Nebraska. No place in the world offers so much for so little. The amplification, with its flaws, is, I am assured, state-of-the-art. There are TV screens so that what you can’t hear you can watch. The fireworks couldn’t be more swell.

Leonard Slatkin conducted the first two weeks of classical concerts, as he has for the last two years. I opted out of Respighi’s Pines of Rome, which followed the Ravel; it came too soon after my trip to Munich, and collided with my jet lag. Actually, the best music making I heard during Slatkin’s stay came the following Tuesday, on a clever program he had arranged – and identified as a nostalgia trip to programs of his childhood at the Bowl (and mine too, at the Boston “Pops”) – that consisted entirely of short pieces, half-and-half trash and precious. “Precious” indeed was the Scherzo from Henry Charles Litolff’s Concerto Symphonique No. 4, with Christopher O’Riley as soloist. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

The piano virtuoso Litolff was another of those obscure Romantics, like the organist Julius Reubke I wrote about some months ago, who gained the admiration and support of Franz Liszt. He turned out several operas, and a small repertory of overstuffed, fustian but curiously attractive piano pieces, which soon vanished from the repertory. This one Scherzo from the fourth of Litolff’s five “Symphonic Concertos” goes clattering up- and downhill, never pausing for breath, spinning huge clouds of virtuosic tracery. There’s a huge legacy of delightful, bad music like this from around 1850, and I love almost every note; the Gottschalk disc that I chortled over a couple of weeks ago belongs on this spider web-draped shelf. This eight-minute tidbit by Litolff – in which O’Riley seemed to be splashing around delightedly – is one of the best. Sad, that only this one movement from the whole concerto ever gets played, and even that not often; I long to hear it all, and never have. How this genre declined, by the way, was tragically demonstrated by the next work on the Bowl program, Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, cobbled together from music from a wartime movie, a compendium of flailings from all the terrible piano concertos – and there were many – concocted in the century since the time of Litolff.

Worth Keeping

Keepers of the Night, which drew good crowds to Glendale’s Alex Theater over the Friday-the-13th weekend, was both an opera-for-children and an opera-with-children that did not insult the musical standards of grown-ups. Many of the latter around me on the night I went, important musical personages all, seemed both surprised and delighted at the charm, sophistication and deep beauty of the music. Inasmuch as the work’s creators, the composer Peter Ash and the librettist Donald Sturrock, bear the stigma of their previous work on Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, one of our opera company’s gloomier escapades, more’s the surprise.

The plotline isn’t much; Shakespeare is not far off, as earthling couples mingle in the affairs of not-quite-earthly (all right, birdly) forest creatures. Everyone undergoes some degree of bewitchment, with the wondrous result, becoming increasingly wondrous as the second act moves on, of a series of ensembles of truly bewitching, complex harmonies. Evocations of Britten’s own “Dream” are hard to dispel; you want to rush home – at least I did – and play that wondrous score until well past midnight.

There were, however, insurmountable obstacles, born of mingling a cast of professional singers with even the genuinely talented kids of the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, in an acoustically imperfect setting – which the Alex stage most emphatically is. On the one hand, here was Suzanna Guzmán, wonderful to hear and hilarious in her many-legged spider getup. (Eat yer heart out, Tobey Maguire!) Up against her were the four children of the bewitched family, almost inaudible except for Brother Dominic, the one in the group whose voice had changed. Microphoning would probably have worsened the imbalance; what to do?

Surely there is a 400-seat in-the-round space somewhere in the area where repertory like this can take hold and flourish. All told, this very worthy work, in an imaginative production conducted by the Master Chorale’s Grant Gershon and directed by Corey Madden, needed the chance for a better life. Keep it.

Hope Remains

The grandiose pillared portico of Munich’s National Theater – built in 1825, gutted by our boys in 1943, reopened in 1963 – bespeaks a city that honors and is honored by its opera. Tristan and Die Meistersinger had their premieres there; the shadows of the Richards, Wagner and Strauss, linger at the podium. New operas remain the tradition, even in this city of dark streets and terrible, dark food. So does the tradition of greeting new operas with “storms of booing” (as one critic reported on Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland last week) and then taking later performances to heart. Old European theaters are built with resonant wood floors, even more so than Disney Hall, and a responsive crowd – like the one around me at the third performance of Alice – can stomp out a fair imitation of several thousand timpani, fortissimo. So it was.

Unsuk Chin, 45, born in South Korea, now living in Berlin, is a wondrously versatile composer. Her Violin Concerto, which Kent Nagano brought out with his Berkeley Symphony two seasons ago, is complex and fiendishly difficult to play and to hear. It also happens to be the first truly great work of this millennium. Many of her chamber works have turned up here on “Green Umbrella” concerts; they are easier of access, and some are actually fun. Alice bestrides the broad range of her musical manners. David Henry Hwang’s libretto – in English, and produced in Munich with German supertitles – actually takes in quite a lot of Lewis Carroll’s proto-sci-fi fable, with the twist of enclosing it all in a dream sequence. Achim Freyer both designed and directed, and under both hats he has gone off like a sozzled skyrocket from the libretto’s suggestions. In press interviews, Ms. Chin has intimated that Freyer’s madcap designs have gone too far from her own visions of the Alice story. “Far” they certainly have gone; “too far” I would challenge. This is the best Lewis Carroll since the movie of my childhood that had W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.

On a stage raked at close to a 45-degree angle, Freyer’s Wonderland characters poke their way out of holes, creating a hilarious geometry. An undulating green line turns into a clarinet-playing Caterpillar. A line of urchins wearing soup pots bang upon them in obeisance to a single can of Campbell’s (Mock) Turtle Soup. Most of the characters are masked in some way; only the venerable Gwyneth Jones as the Queen of Hearts, stentorian as ever, comes on in full blush. The composer salutes her presence in the opera with a sly quotation from Turandot, one of Jones’ signature roles. A ballet of gadgetry – disconnected arms and legs, an enormously distended Cheshire Cat, distorted face masks for Alice and her White Rabbit pal – keeps the stage in constant motion.

There is music to match – music, that is, full of stylistic twitches that seem to touch breathlessly on an evocation of Baroque here, a jazzy blast there. Percussion dominates, with additional performers on side stages to complement the huge ensemble down front. Musical events, like the events onstage, whiz by with wondrous speed. Most of the singing takes place offstage, or through masks; only Sally Matthews, in a virtuosic stint as Alice, and Jones as the Queen actually perform onstage, companioned by Freyer’s marvelous array of puppets, marionettes and humanoids of all shapes and sizes.

Nagano conducted. He has for some time been an active advocate for Chin’s music. Two years ago, while still music director of the Los Angeles Opera, he had Alice placed on the agenda here, and there were excerpts played, as a sort of teaser, at the Ojai Festival. Then Nagano departed to become Generalmusikdirektor at the Bayerische Staatsoper; instead of Alice, we got Grendel. A spokesman for the L.A. Opera told me last week that the company is “still committed” to Alice; his boss, Mr. Domingo, stands by the somewhat weaker statement that there is “still hope.” With the company’s ongoing relationship with the great Freyer – The Damnation of Faust in the past, The Ring to come – and with the triumph of Alice still resounding, it strikes me as pure damfoolery not to take the obvious next step.

Bill’s Double Bill

Talk about Grendel: There was another chunk of biz on the Munich stage that put that sorry affair’s infamous Wall to shame. It happened in Salome, when Alan Titus as John the Baptist, not merely rising from his prison cell as a single menacing personage, arose embedded in a huge Gibraltar-like structure, marvelously fetid and menacing, all the more so on a set that was otherwise all squares and straight lines. Hollywood’s own William Friedkin was the director, and the Salome – svelte, blond, insinuating, overpowering – was Angela Denoke; write down her name and remember it. Preceding the Salome was Wolfgang Rihm’s Das Gehege, a dark and cynical monodrama involving a woman (Gabriele Schnaut) who frees a caged eagle, challenges the bird to seduce her and stabs him as he approaches. As with his superb Bartók-Puccini double bill at the L.A. Opera in 2002, Friedkin came up with a way of subtly linking the two works: The same actor (Todd Ford), in the same angel-of-death getup, was cast in the mute roles as the Eagle in the Rihm and the Executioner in Salome, and Friedkin’s program note, in Leberwurst-dense German far over my head, explained their relationship.

Talk about folks from home: On my last night, the program was billed both as Wagner-Gala – meaning dress to the nines – and Oper für Alle – meaning come as you are. I chose the latter, although it actually referred to a huge video installation out in the Platz, where thousands more assembled under misty but not quite rainy skies. Inside, our own Plácido Domingo was Siegmund to Waltraud Meier’s Sieglinde in the first act of Die Walküre, with the fabulous bass René Pape, whom I hadn’t heard before, as Hunding. On his own, Pape sang King Marke’s lament from Tristan; the dressy crowd applauded happily, and the cheers from the happy Wagnerites outside filtered in through that grand portico. Someone who knows these things tells me that this was the hottest ticket of the entire European opera season . . . and me without a necktie!

Composers

What can a composer say about his or her music that the music itself cannot say better? The question is voluminously argued, with results that fill libraries. Lately they’ve been filling DVDs as well, with results of varying quality.

Here are two DVDs of recent issue or reissue. Both are documentaries on composers about whom I have expressed a qualm or two over the years (which people seem to remember vividly), along with words of high praise now and then (which nobody except me ever seems to remember). In any case, let that pass for now. One documentary is Frank Scheffer’s Elliott Carter: A Labyrinth of Time, on the Ideale Audience label; the other is Christopher Nupen’s two-part Jean Sibelius documentary, “The Early Years” and “Maturity and Silence,” on Allegro.

The Carter title should itself give off fair warning; through no fault of the venerable composer – now nearing 100 – the program is a labyrinth of metaphor. Somehow a convoluted metaphor involving the passage of time becomes entangled in Scheffer’s script with the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings and the collapse of the tower in the Cocteau film Sang d’un Poète, which Carter seems able to neither explain nor pronounce. The congenial composer is seen at his ease inscribing notes and slur lines on paper, one at a time, in his comfortable apartment, and then turns up for no good reason trudging across the Brooklyn Bridge (quite a trudge from West 12th Street). Illustrious figures, including the pianist and scholar Charles Rosen and the formidable Pierre Boulez, offer eloquent attestation to the stature of Carter among today’s composers, with which I have no argument. I do wonder at Rosen’s evocation of the Carter Cello Sonata as the “synthesis” of his compositional techniques, considering that the work dates from 1948 and, thus, predates virtually all his “significant” works.

Oh, well. We look in on Carter and his wife, the late Helen, bustling around their comfy apartment. “I make the beds,” he says. One genuinely wistful note sounds at the end, considering the, let’s say, prickly regard that his music enjoys in some circles. “Where do you see your music’s future?” he is asked.

“People will become much cleverer and sharper,” answers Elliott Carter. “Then they will like my music.”

You will succumb with far less difficulty, may I suggest, to the passionate beauty of Christopher Nupen’s Sibelius study. I did when it circulated on laserdisc; now it returns all that deeper, richer and more powerful. There is no metaphorical nonsense here, except what the music itself wants us to know. The biographical details are detailed and lavish. Musical performance matters are in the hands of the excellent Vladimir Ashkenazy, and there are two remarkable visual effects. One comes at the end of every work, when the camera captures the orchestra from behind as the string players hold their bows skyward and it’s like a Sibelius ocean. The other is the remarkable plastic face of Ashkenazy himself, so eloquent as a conductor that you wonder why he wasted all those years in his admittedly excellent career as a pianist.

Every detail of the entire range of Sibelius’ symphonic career is carefully and honestly explained in Nupen’s painstaking prose; he has had some first-rate researchers. I’m only sorry that he has stopped short of the tone poems, which, as you know, are a Salonen specialty. As it is, I urge you to acquire this exceptional DVD – 151 minutes on one disc! – as preparation for our Philharmonic’s Sibelius splurge this fall (along with the chapter in the Alex Ross book I mentioned last week, which will also be out by then).

Now, about those 151 minutes . . . The last 30 of these are a kind of Christopher Nupen teaser, bits and pieces from some of his other documentaries of fond memories. There is one 30-second bit that you will play over and over: Jacqueline du Pré alone in a railway car, hugging her cello and plucking out something or other in sheer ecstasy. There’s more besides, but those few seconds are worth everything.

Action Shots

For Glenn Gould Hereafter (Ideale Audience), Bruno Monsaingeon has gathered a lot of old performance videos, much of them a young and tiresome Gould motor-mouthing, but set against some exhilarating piano performance. The worst is that this is another of these superimposed scenarios, a passel of obnoxious characters in communion with Gould revenant. The best of it, besides the music, are the miles upon miles of Canadian autumnal scenery. Twenty-five years after his death, Gould’s niche remains unchallenged. Would the Goldberg Variations figure in today’s vernacular had he not, as an exuberant but endearing brat, arrogantly updated them in his sexy 1956 recording? (To his credit, he then went on to learn their essence in time to record them once more.) A vast legacy remains on compact disc of the strengths, the originality – and, indeed, the occasional maddening wrong-headedness – of Gould’s musical thinking. It will, I fear, soon disappear; grab it now or never. On the Monsaingeon DVD, there’s lots of music in dribs and drabs, but not a single complete work and, therefore, no real evidence of what this dazzling, fascinating, irritating young genius really thought or really could do.

Spend a truly uplifting hour with Carlo Maria Giulini as he rehearses the Stuttgart Radio Symphony in Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, and another hour as he performs the work, on an ArtHaus DVD. The year is 1997; Giulini is 83, 13 years departed from Los Angeles. There are deeper lines in that handsome, Italian face and a little more around the middle, but the eloquence, the graceful movement in the arms, the pleading in the eyes: They are still there. “Please,” he tells the winds, “I can’t say it too often. We must sing.” And another time, again to the winds: “You give too much ‘puh.’ I like more ‘aaah.’ ” At the very end of the first movement, there’s a fascinating exchange, as Giulini adjusts Bruckner’s marking between trumpet and trombone, the smallest dynamic detail. It’s what a conductor defines as a minor detail, and you and I hear as a great performance.

Déjà Vu All Over Again: Plácido Domingo zoomed out from the wings at the Hollywood Bowl on opening night, encased in Kristin Chenoweth as wraparound, and I was suddenly overpowered by memory. On October 23, 1966, at the New York State Theater, a somewhat younger Domingo gathered up a fragile Pat Brooks in exactly the same way to launch into the most heartbreaking “Parigi, O cara” in my memory book. No, it wasn’t La Traviata at the Bowl this night, but for that split visual second, it was exactly that for me. For this big, messy evening – a comedy routine by Jack Black that I didn’t expect to like but did, a dumb-ass bit by Jason Alexander that I hadn’t planned to hate but did, young dancers from John Mauceri’s North Carolina School of the Arts that you couldn’t help but love – that suspended moment released the happiest memories.

“MaryAnn Bonino comes into the room,” I wrote in this space in 1992, “and her smile is like the lighting of a hundred crystal chandeliers.” Last Friday at the Doheny Mansion, there was still that light, but also a sad shadow Bonino was there to announce her stepping down as head of the Da Camera Society, which since 1973 has brought world-renowned performance artists to play in settings worthy of them, the series known as “Chamber Music in Historic Sites,” which greatly enhances the audible and visible prestige of this area. The series will continue under the able leadership of the young Kelly Garrison, organist at St. Basil’s and a Bonino protégé these last several years. Garrison is a charming fellow, but nobody played a room like Bonino and her smile. Her future projects include writing histories of the magnificent Doheny home in the Adams District, where these concerts began and where many of them still go on, and of the Dohenys themselves, one of this city’s great families, who brought the likes of the fabulous tenor John McCormack to serenade their guests. In other words, Bonino is dropping out while staying put.

Youth Has Its Sing: Google your way to the Alex Prior Web site and hear 14-year-old Prior, still this side of voice change, deliver Puccini’s tenor socko “Nessun dorma” in the boy-soprano range, a bit wobbly at that. He throws in an extra “Vincero!!!” at the end to even out the cadences, but the audience in the Kremlin – at least the bigwigs around Russian President Vladimir Putin – looks unmoved. Brit-born Prior is studying (what? all kinds of things!) in St. Petersburg, where he has composed ballets and symphonies, and is now working on an operatic version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Hey, Jay!: Perhaps this is the time to look in on Jay Greenberg, another teenage prodigy, who stole the heart of a New York Times correspondent a year ago with his, well, prodigality. Alas, there is nothing on the Greenberg Web site since last August. Can it be?

Curious Replacements Along Parallel Pretexts: The excellent Peter Davis, whom New York magazine fired recently on the pretext that it didn’t need a music critic, has now been replaced by Justin Davidson, former music critic of Newsday, on the pretext that Davidson will also write about architecture (and the unspoken pretext that he owns a Pulitzer and is a couple of decades younger than Davis). Even from over 2,400 aeronautical miles, this smells. And while we’re at it, I wonder at William Friedkin’s hilarious staging of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi being dumped by the L.A. Opera after one time out, with the opera handed over to Woody Allen to direct in the 2008 season. Of the operas that make up that triple bill, I should think that the gooey, lachrymose Suor Angelica would far more need the Woody touch.

The New Gibberish, Anatomical Division: (David Mermelstein, on Esa-Pekka, in The Wall Street Journal):

“One notices that his apple cheeks are giving way to jowls.”

Evidence of the Disappearance of the Symphony: At its annual meeting last week, the 65-year-old American Symphony Orchestra League voted to change its name next September to the League of the American Orchestra. Whether the move will immediately enfranchise other orchestras not quite symphonic to join the league isn’t immediately known, but it’s significant that the voting took place in Nashville.

Leakage: The same day’s mail brought the galleys of Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise, as avidly awaited in circles close to me as that Potter affair seems to be in others also not far off. The publication date isn’t until mid-October, so I am bound to silence, or something close. Within the bounds of friendship, in this case, I don’t see anything wrong in suggesting that “avidly,” in the matter at hand, might well be tantamount to “deservedly”; after all, you’ve surveyed the level of his writing in Ross’ columns in The New Yorker and in his blog named like the book. Furthermore, there is some leakage afoot. Ross has allowed the prepublication in the magazine of an entire chapter, as a teaser you might say; it happens to be the first chapter my eyes fell upon when the galleys arrived, the dark, elegiac piece on Jean Sibelius, largely on his symphonies, bearing the title “Apparition From the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius.” There is strength and eloquence here, and the fascination with history going back into wonderful caverns of atmosphere such to make any listener – myself included – rush out to rehear these strange, multicolored works. How can an orchestra, or a league of orchestras, shirk the modifier “symphony,” confronted with such heritage? And, of course, the book hits the market just as our own Philharmonic starts the new season with its own Sibelius Cycle, a survey of exactly that music. Do I hear some wheels interlocking? Do I care?

Swan Songs

And still they come. There’s no way of knowing where the latest classical disc releases may be had – something-or-other dot-com seems to be the easiest manner of acquisition – but some producers continue to behave as if the market were happy and flourishing, and there are releases out there worth your attention at full price. One of those apparent optimists is the French firm Harmonia Mundi, always a class act, whether at its home base in ravishing Arles or at its local branch in picturesque Burbank.

Philippe Herreweghe is one of the company’s star conductors, Belgian-born, now 60, a musician of exceptional probity and depth, particularly so in the way he can maintain a rich choral texture with the whole musical fabric resonant and clear. His Bach recordings on Harmonia Mundi are remarkable. The Mass, the Passions and a number of the “plus belles” cantatas reach that splendid middle ground: the clarity that casts clear light through the marvelous intricacy of Bach’s choral writing, mingled with the wondrous soft light that makes the mysterious beauty of Bach continually just beyond our reach.

Now there is a new Herreweghe release, perhaps even more mysterious: two discs, 88 minutes of choral music by Heinrich Schütz, German genius of the early Baroque. A contemporary and one-time pupil of Monteverdi, Schütz was a master on his own of the same kind of sudden harmonic coloration that can send the chill up the spine as a key dramatic word is illuminated in sudden dramatic underscoring. He composed exclusively for the church. In Dresden in the 1660s, about 10 years before his death, he began to prepare for that event by creating a setting of the huge text of Psalm 119, a series of motets to be sung at his funeral. It never happened; the manuscript was scattered, and only collected and performed in the 1970s. Whatever the funeral attendees may have missed in 1672 is our gain today.

The music is long, solemn and gorgeous. The chorus is Herreweghe’s 26-member Collegium Vocale of Ghent, with brass, strings and organ from the Concerto Palatino. Listen with a folio of Hieronymus Bosch on your lap, and keep the lights down.

The mood of this music continues, more or less, into the Third, or “Rhenish,” Symphony of Robert Schumann, not quite two centuries later and, appropriately, also on hand in a superb new Herreweghe performance on Harmonia Mundi – this time with l’Orchestre des Champs-Elysées. The best of this music is the movement that seems to capture, and hold in suspension, an ageless solemnity looking back to old Schütz, Bosch and beyond. Schumann’s First Symphony, which shares the disc, is not at all solemn, is much more fun, and dances happily under Herreweghe’s affectionate leadership.

Pianists Named David

From Virgin Classics comes some spectacular work at the piano by a photogenic young man named David Fray, who came before the microphones at 20, just out of the Conservatoire, and plays the Allemande from Bach’s D-major Partita so slowly (11’34” with repeats) as to enchant the program annotator almost to the point of gurgle. (Let him be advised that Glenn Gould plays the same movement at 6’27” without repeats, which comes to 12’54” with.) Young Mr. Fray clatters his way through two major Bach works and the Notations and Incises of Pierre Boulez. His fingers, from the pictures, look about 2 feet long, which may be why they sound so distant from his heart.

David Fung makes his recording debut on Yarlung, a local label; aside from a set of inconsequential Tan Dun pieces, his program is standard debut stuff: Mozart, Schumann, Rachmaninoff. Yes, he plays them very well. No, this is no way for a talented young pianist (which I presume he is) to make any kind of mark. Who does he want to hear this disc? Interested critics or adoring relatives? If the latter, give them Mozart, Schumann and Tan Dun. If the former, at least the other David played Boulez, and even got to pose with him.

‘Tis of Thee

Back in the days of the LP, it was an act of considerable heroism for Goddard Lieberson’s Columbia Records to devote time and money to recording serious American music. Today, nearly every important event takes place in front of a microphone and a competent engineer, and now there is Naxos to build its considerable catalog of Americana from new and recently archived performances. And while Lieberson’s label nourished itself primarily on the luxury of New York performances, the Naxos catalog reaches far, wide and, now and then, risky.

Here, for example, is a perfect delight of a disc, of music from that grand pioneer Louis Gottschalk, who charmed the crowds here and abroad up through Civil War days with flamboyant, virtuosic display pieces. From last year’s Hot Springs (Arkansas) Festival comes a whole disc of Gottschalk’s orchestral works, and it’s a hoot. It includes the hilariously lovable Célèbre Tarantelle and Night in the Tropics, guaranteed to lift you off your seat on first hearing, and Gottschalk’s own arrangement for five pianos, nine horns and 112-piece orchestra of The Young King Henry’s Hunt (don’t ask). There’s even an opera, 13 minutes long, something Cuban. The Hot Springs forces are led by a certain Richard Rosenberg, and you haven’t heard any of the soloists, so you don’t need to now. The performances are as good as they need to be at the price; don’t forget, this is Naxos.

Even more worth your while is a disc of works by Charles Wuorinen, the New York composer who has worked for a time in the shadow of atonality but has more recently emerged into a more congenial, if intensely brainy, musical style, moved energetically forward by lively contrapuntal adventures. Two works on the disc are remastered archive recordings by the Group for Contemporary Music of superfond memory. They are for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, which was also the constitution of an ensemble called Tashi, and that – hold on – is the name of the first of the two pieces. (The other, for the same scoring, is called Fortune.) These are big, stirring, somewhat nerve-racking pieces, wonderful listening. In between comes a percussion quartet, played by a group from New Jersey, and that, too, is a dandy. So, in fact, is the whole disc.

The Fateful Tick

Only György Ligeti could have dreamed it up. And while his Poème Symphonique actually had had its premiere several decades ago (in 1962) and many thousand miles away (in the Netherlands), it proved exactly the right curtain raiser for this 61st run of the wondrously indescribable festival-like-none-other that ennobled a long weekend up among the orange groves and horse farms at Ojai earlier this month. After a couple of years of worrisome relaxation, this was one of the best of the festivals, a return to the good old Ojai days of musical high adventure, some exasperation, deep satisfaction and sheer, delightful insanity. The Ligeti piece on opening night summed up quite a lot of that.

Let me describe what happened. One hundred metronomes – the old-fashioned, wind-up variety – were set up on 10 tables surrounding the outdoor audience area in Libbey Park, and were all wound and set off by operators, simultaneously, at tempo settings specified by the composer. (The entire score consists of one sheet of instructions.) The sounds of tick-tock filled the air – best heard on a sublimely warm, starlit night such as the gods afforded the entire weekend at Ojai. Gradually, after maybe five minutes, the rhythms began to fragment, as one metronome after another succumbed to mechanical realities. By 20 minutes, a real drama had taken hold; you began to think of all those movies, most of them bad, about the end of the world – On the Beach, maybe – and the band of survivors dying off one by one. Two metronomes survived, then one, then silence; you beat back a sob. Who but Ligeti could dream up such meaningful madness, such genuine tragedy, and then attach such a pompous title? His Poème Symphonique remained with me all weekend.

There was more Ligeti at the festival’s end, the Piano Concerto of 1986, that creative period late in his life, when great, exuberant works such as this seemed to erupt effortlessly. Two stunningly able musicians bear Ligeti’s banner forward, and they were both at Ojai: the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the conductor Peter Eötvös (UHT-vuhsh), and their collaboration in this concerto (and in the Ravel concerto to close the weekend) was the stuff of dreams. So is Ligeti’s concerto itself. I love the way he turns the harmony crazy every so often by dragging in unruly, untunable instruments such as the ocarina; his rhythms, with their illusion of several speeds happening at once, are crazier still. Somehow, this all seemed to embody everything unique and singularly wonderful about Ojai. There was another occasion when Ligeti’s music dominated the festival: 1989, when Pierre Boulez was the conductor and the Arditti Quartet played. It rained the whole weekend, and the Philharmonic musicians played in heavy jackets. This time around served as expiation.

Bang

Even Tom Morris joined in. The festival’s able artistic director, formerly of Cleveland, showed up among the percussion ensemble in Stravinsky’s Les Noces in the Friday-night concert and, as far as I could tell, didn’t miss a beat. Stravinsky’s epically vulgar foray into Russian prenuptial manners deserves more hearings; it would make a splendid thunder in Disney Hall. And so it did at Ojai, with an all-star cast including Kevin Short, our recent Porgy. Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion began that program, with Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich at the pianos, and in the middle was quite an exciting work by the multitalented Eötvös, his Sonata per Sei for pianos, percussion and sampler keyboard, something of a memorial piece to Bartók but a knockout work on its own.

Percussion, as I was saying, supplied the beat for most of the festival. One of the morning concerts was taken over by Nexus, the Toronto-based quintet, with a program heavy on novelty (bird songs) and light on the serious repertory. Okay; the coordination, plus charm, in Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood was highlight enough for any morning, and I also happen to be a sucker for old-timey Tin Pan Alley songs on the xylophone.

Aimard’s solo recital filled the other morning concert with his remarkable brain – and fingers to match – operating at full force. First came an uninterrupted sequence: Quiet, reflective, short pieces from late in Schumann’s life segued into two parts of Bach’s final Art of the Fugue segued into short bits by Elliott Carter. The whole 25-minute sequence was more cohesive in the hearing than the telling could convey. Then came Charles Ives’ “Concord” Sonata, whose cohesion, if any, was impaired by the introduction of ponderous descriptive material between movements, ponderously delivered by a local resident. I don’t want to believe that this was Aimard’s idea; his performance of the Ives, at Ojai and on disc, has a rich lyric progression. He succeeds in integrating the work’s obsession with the “Beethoven Fifth” motif into the flow better than any musician I’ve heard; why, then, this artifice? The printed program notes on the work were more informative.

One more concert I found less admirable: Chinese Opera, more Eötvös but less scrutable; not Chinese and not opera, he claims; then what? It’s a set of rowdy tone pictures of European theatrical directors worthy of the composer’s admiration. Filling most of that program was Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, not in its redolent, haunting orchestral colors that have nourished our souls with memories of Bruno Walter’s conducting and Kathleen Ferrier’s final “ewig . . . ewig,” but in a “portable” chamber-orchestra version prepared by Arnold Schoenberg among others. Monica Groop, well-known in these parts, sang admirably; a new tenor, Sean Panikkar, with a bright gleam of a voice, sounds like a real find; Douglas Boyd drew whatever sounds from the excellent St. Paul Chamber Orchestra that the arrangers allowed to remain. Mahler, however, it wasn’t.

Ojai, however, it was. Dawn Upshaw, a festival semiregular (and goddess) returns next year, and the music director is native son David Robertson. About time.

Obiter dictum: Concerning the music-critic merry-go-round reported upon last week: Pierre Ruhe reports that he has been rehired by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in “materially” the same capacity as when he was fired as critic. I’d watch that “materially.”

Flat Tortilla

The opera company that rose to distinction with Don Carlo, Poppea and Mahagonny during its excellent season lurched toward triviality at season’s end, first with last month’s overproduced, overstuffed Merry Widow and now with Luisa Fernanda. In a press briefing a week before the premiere, general director Plácido Domingo expressed the idea of founding a bicoastal troupe devoted to zarzuela, the endearing Hispanic musical theater studded with popular masterpieces, of which Federico Moreno Torroba’s Luisa Fernanda, out of his 80, is one. Domingo stopped short of proclaiming a glowing future for such a fragile, small, winsome entertainment adrift in a 3,000-plus-seat grand-opera house at $200-plus tickets; such a dream demands fulfillment in a setting smaller and friendlier to the art and its audience. However, since his personal history includes years in his parents’ zarzuela troupe in Spain and in Mexico, I suppose it was inevitable that he’d be impatient to share this chapter of his personal history, however inappropriate the venue. Hence the current Luisa Fernanda in Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion, a small, pretty bird where elephants once trod.

Domingo has cast himself in a leading role, one of Luisa’s rival suitors, thus placing others in this unbalanced cast at a disadvantage – most of all his almost voiceless rival, tenor Antonio Gandía, who actually makes off with the girl at the end – but assuring capacity ticket sales for the seven-performance run. There is nothing in Torroba’s pretty score, which dates from 1932, that you haven’t heard in some of this city’s best restaurants. Domingo was in fair voice on opening night, and so was Yali-Marie Williams, a mettlesome, strong-voiced soprano who took over for the “indisposed” star in the title role. Some old friends – the splendid mezzo Suzanna Guzman for one, always a welcome sight and sound – appear in minor roles. The sets, by old-time zarzuela hand Emilio Sagi, who also stage-directs, have already made the rounds of Madrid’s Teatro Real (as you can see on an ArtHaus DVD) and Domingo’s Washington Opera. They are a curious mix: rooms furnished with rows of plain ladderback chairs, with faint shadows of dancers behind a scrim, and a huge tree at the end that is pretty but cramps the whole stage, some striking abstractions, some washed-out emptiness. I gather that the zarzuela tradition does not embrace fancy scenery.

What I Do and Why

The small annoyances pass while the darker clouds gather. The news about classical music is not good; let’s face it. For every successful programming adventure by orchestra managements here or in San Francisco, for every signing of a dazzling and promising new talent, there is news of record companies going under, of orchestras cutting back on projects. The perpetrators are in trouble, and so, now, are the judges, as though Mr. Bush had decided that we could get along with only four or five justices on the Supreme Court – or maybe none.

New York Magazine has just fired Peter Davis, one of its only two classical music critics since it began, as a Sunday supplement to the Herald Tribune, in 1963. (I was the other.) It can get along without a critic, says the editor. Okay, New York has others to look after its busy musical life, including The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, whom I aspire to be someday, but what about Atlanta and Minneapolis, whose major papers have lost or drastically cut back on coverage?

The loudest argument advanced by editors is that classical events usually occur only once or twice, so that they’re gone by the time the review appears (in a daily) or long gone (in the paper you hold). That puts yesterday’s Philharmonic concert in the same league with yesterday’s Dodgers game – and it doesn’t really work there either. The sun shines brighter when the Dodgers win than when they don’t. Classical music aerates a community; we’ve had explosive proof with Disney Hall. It comes cloaked in a certain air of mystery, which the critic is there to penetrate. Because it has a strong impact on emotions, it also generates a lot of nut cases who, these days, have access to the Internet, so that we have both not enough music criticism – or, let’s call it, “writing around music” – and too much in the form of blogs. Alex Ross’ blog, TheRestIsNoise.com, is, however, required daily reading, for its own wisdom, for its generosity in linking to many of those others out there, and for the photos of his gorgeous cats.

This goes nowhere toward addressing the growing problem. A community’s musical life needs a spokesperson – no, more than one, it needs a couple who can disagree, as I do with Mark Swed , who loves Luisa Fernanda – whose credentials have been checked to include some degree of musical education. It disturbs me greatly that Peter Davis in New York, Pierre Ruhe in Atlanta and Michael Anthony in Minneapolis – guys of exceptional musical intelligence – are having their wings trimmed or lopped off. What bothers me even more is the double talk from their former employers, to the effect that the musical life in their respective communities – at a time when the falling off of ticket sales, new-music creativity, school activity, and every other sign you can name of music’s need for strong, intelligent evangelism at the center of each and every community – can somehow survive without the words of serious critical leadership.

Being a critic at its best means, to me, becoming worked up over an experience and simply bursting to share it. The words often begin to come in the car on the way home. After Karel Husa’s Music for Prague, I knew by the time I passed the La Brea turnoff that I had to use the B word for the first time in my life. (The one other time was a quote.) But my favorite experience – perhaps ever – came last fall, when I got so angry over Chris Pasles’ ignorant putdown of the L.A. Opera’s Poppea that I circularized my mailing list imploring people to ignore it, spread the word and go. The opera company sold out the run, and I think I may have helped. That’s what critics do.

The Bullshit Factor

The elderly white-haired gentleman sat on the stage and smiled. “This is one of the world’s greatest composers,” said Steven Stucky by way of introducing his old teacher from Cornell University days. “He is the world’s greatest composer,” repeats KUSC’s Jim Svejda about his Czech mate, week after week, in a heartwarming litany. Now, at 85, Karel Husa himself had come to visit, to listen and smile some more at Music for Prague 1968, his best-known work, racking up 7,000 performances so far. Strange to relate, the Philharmonic had only gotten around to performing it last week, for the first time.

Strange? Strange that the most famous score by the world’s greatest composer – or so proclaimed – has taken nearly four decades to reach our local forces? That it has never been recorded by a major orchestra? Or on a major label? I’ll give you a hint: It isn’t very good.

The work was originally written for school band, with a lot of sharp licks that can lift a band into a fair imitation of seriousness. That, I suspect, accounts for a large part of the work’s circulation; large, meaty chunks of serious-pretending band music, especially with a deeply personal program attached, make for socko programming. Mr. Husa was born in Prague, studied here and there, settled permanently in the U.S. in 1954 and obtained U.S. citizenship four years later. Fourteen years later came the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Mr. Husa suddenly became, in press releases at least, a heroic exile – from the country he had willingly forsaken long before. He composed this half-hour of orchestral meandering with a meaningful title attached to ensure fame: patches of nontonality here to secure his place in his own century, big militant noises there to attempt a handshake with fellow sufferer Shostakovich, a Bartók rip-off (merely embarrassing), and, at the end, a Czech anthem and some bells to proclaim some semblance of nationality with every cliché well in place.

I extend my homage to Esa-Pekka Salonen, who extracted enough agreeable noise from the work to elicit the normal Los Angeles standing ovation. (Rude question, which I, at almost Husa’s age, feel entitled to ask: Were they standing out of obeisance to all this “greatest” hype, or for what they heard in the clogged, constipated music?) I find it curious how little of Husa’s music shows up across the orchestral landscape, in the U.S. or abroad. His fame is maintained by small pockets of dedicated enthusiasts – my colleague at KUSC, or another local spokesman, Byron Adams, author of the simpering Husa article in Grove’s Dictionary. I cannot question the authenticity of their devotion; I just wonder what in hell they hear.

Elsewhere on Thursday’s program, there was much to hear, much that gave pleasure; this was next-to-last in the remarkably rewarding “Shadow of Stalin” series, devoted this time to lives just east of the Iron Curtain. First came Gyouml;rgy Ligeti, earlier music from his pen than most of us know, delightful and sweet. Yet this Concert Romnesc had raised waves, banned by Bucharest authorities after one rehearsal; today, it sounds like a louder and more inebriated paraphrase of one of Enesco’s Romanian Rhapsodies, and a lot more fun that Salonen, aided by a couple of offstage musicians, rode to glory.

At the end came Witold Lutoslawski – another of Steve Stucky’s teachers, and a familiar and much-admired visitor here in his last years. His Concerto for Orchestra preceded those years. It dates from 1954, and shows a composer in his early 40s, writing with the ebullience and the wit that stayed with him to the end, but working within limits carefully defined by a watchful Soviet rule. The music is strongly outlined, folk or folklike, splendidly bright in coloration. You already know, from this early flight, where this composer will soar once his wings are set free.

Positive VibrationsI cannot find enough words of praise for the Philharmonic management for the outlay of imagination, and its realization in special projects like these “Shadow of Stalin” concerts and the “Minimalist Jukebox” of fond memory. They convey the message that the Philharmonic exists as a positive force in creating a culturally aware, informed public. The success has been overwhelming. You could have argued in the first year at Disney Hall that people were being lured by the new hall. Now it is four years later, and you should have seen the crowd on May 25 for a concert of excerpts from two Shostakovich operas and some other grinding Soviet stuff – by no measure an easy-listening program. You couldn’t get near the place; the crowd was mixed in age; at the end, they stayed to cheer their collective heads off – not dash out to grab a taxi as in New York.

The concerts themselves were put together with high imagination. It was a nice touch to have an old, original art-nouveau theremin on the stage, standing beside the one that was actually performed upon, during Gavriil Popov’s Komsomol Patron of Electrification. (I’m sorry to have missed “Pravda,” the all-nighter, with the orchestra of 10 theremins, but I had a note from my doctor.) There were valuable film clips, and a fabulous climax with a complete screening of the Eisenstein masterpiece Alexander Nevsky with Prokofiev’s music performed live by Salonen and the Philharmonic, energized by the screen over their heads. Is there a more spine-crushing sequence in all film sound than those crashes of Prokofiev’s motoric, propulsive music in Nevsky against the bodies and steel of Eisenstein’s opposing armies? And wasn’t it further amazing to hear the splendor of that horrific noise resounding in Disney?

I wrote about Popov in 2004, at the appearance on disc of his one unadulterated symphonic work before Stalin’s ax fell, a First Symphony lasting some 50 minutes; I still hope to hear a proper live performance. The film score, as its title suggests, was somewhat more unruly in style, but there are flashes of a lyric style of considerable depth. Of the major musical talents that emerged during the time of Stalin and then fought to emerge from his shadow, Popov’s throttled genius constitutes a Russian tragedy all its own.

Some of the liveliest music making has come to my attention this season under the least-promising circumstances: one proud parent or another entreating my presence at some doted-upon offspring’s high school’s annual musical production. Los Angeles being the proverbial talent hotbed, the prospects are usually not so dire as at You-name-it-ville; in recent months, in fact, the two shows I’ve attended, both of difficult and demanding material, were exceptionally well produced and performed.

The first was Street Scene, the most ambitious and closest-to-opera of Kurt Weill’s Broadway productions, indeed excoriated in some quarters for its pretensions at its 1946 opening (I was there). Yet these ambitions seemed not to daunt a brave ensemble from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, which mounted a lively, nicely staged, stark and vigorous facsimile of both drama and music at its home theater at Cal State University. Stephanie Vlahos, who has sung roles with the L.A. Opera, did the staging; Alan Mautner led the full-size student orchestra; Victoria Profitt designed the set, not the awesome streetscape I remember from 1946, perhaps, but not at all bad.

Street Scene is a long and powerful show; opera companies here and abroad have taken it up, to good advantage. One cut too many in the second act of this performance sped the action from the murder to the murderer’s capture somewhat hastily. On the other hand, the program book itself carried a series of interesting essays on the characters in the drama, written by the student cast members themselves and offering a set of insights into the tonalities of the performance. Nice idea!

Over on the Westside, the Hamilton High School Academy of Music busied itself with nothing less than Les Miz in nine single-cast performances (with only one trip to the ER, says cast mom Gail Eichenthal). Founded nearly 20 years ago as a magnet within Hamilton High, the academy remains phenomenally active within many performance fields; earlier this season, it furnished the strings, percussion, recorders and hand bells for the glorious riot of Noah’s Flood under James Conlon at the cathedral (on the last day it rained).

I’ve seen Les Misérables before, but never with so much pleasure. It wasn’t only a matter of lusty, young voices singing the daylights out of themselves; it was that, plus the tremendous joy of their doing that with one another, discovering early in the run what marvels occur when voices blend. Lots of Les Miz is secondhand trash, but those guys, the Messrs. Boublil and Schonberg, knew how to compose musical ensembles, and that’s what their show is full of.

Joshua Finkel directed, Jim Foschia led the all-student orchestra, John Hamilton was the chorus master, and when those revolutionist-choristers piled up against the Paris barricades and fought off the right-wingers, you couldn’t ask for better musical theater at any price. And while it’s wrong to pick out individual names of participants in student productions, if Eichenthal’s kid, and the young gentleman who managed the passions of Jean Valjean, and the fabulous meanie who did the Inspector Javert – including a quite convincing suicide leap – survived the nine performances sounding as terrific as they did on the second night, we’ve got some great singers in our theatrical future.

Eloquent Endings

There is this amazing music by Franz Schubert: Song of the Spirits Over the Waters. The words are by Goethe, a metaphor of souls intertwined with watery images. Schubert struggled four separate times with setting the words to music, and finally came up with a richly colored, dark and resonant piece for eight solo men’s voices and five low strings – violas, cellos and a double bass – an impractical scoring seldom heard in concerts considering its extraordinary beauty. Trust the loving serendipity of the Jacaranda guys Patrick and Mark to bring the work forward, which they did to close the last of this season’s concerts, Saturday night at Santa Monica’s First Pres before another sold-out crowd.

It was another of their intricately planned, imaginative programs: all Viennese this time, starting with the Romantic landscape already under clouds (Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, handsomely dispatched by Mark Robson), stepping back into sporadic sunshine for a Mahler group sung by the splendid bass-baritone Dean Elzinga. Beyond Mahler came a plunge into Schoenbergian non-tonality with the Opus 19 Piano Pieces played by Gloria Cheng and the wartime melodrama Ode to Napoleon, again with Elzinga. Came then the Schubert: “Soul of Man, how like water you are…,” a clearing of the air, a benediction.

Next season, announce the Jacaranda people, is the centennial of Olivier Messiaen, and this will initiate a two-year hommage: something of his on every program, and much other music by composers reached by his music and/or his spirit. There will also be eight concerts, more than ever before. The growth of this superbly planned and managed series adds to the sense of strength and enterprise – and, therefore, of pride – in all of this region’s musical life.

Jeffrey Kahane’s return to his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, after a doctor-ordered dropout, drew a happy welcome; he, too, is the object of great local pride and, let him not forget, he owes us – at his pleasure – one final Mozart concerto bash.

This time, instead, there was a pleasant new work – if along LACO’s typical blandness propensities – by composer in residence Gernot Wolfgang, Desert Wind, involving jazz accents and some bright statements by horn (Richard Todd) and oboe (Allan Vogel) soloists. Somewhat livelier was Astor Piazzolla’s delightful, jocular Vivaldi rip-off, his own Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, with violinist Lindsay Deutsch spinning her own magic webs around Piazzolla’s pseudo-Baroque patterns and the music zeroing in close to its original source material at the charming close. On her and Vivaldi’s own, Deutsch contributed one original “Season” and could, for my money, have danced all night.

Three diverse concerts in four nights at Disney: proof enough of the splendid variety of music in these parts – even in May, when the season is supposed to be winding down. The difference in the sounds echoing through these marvelous premises in close succession was, to put it mildly, considerable.

From Behind the CurtainIn 1987, the great opera director and bridge builder Sarah Caldwell conceived a plan: a yearly exchange between Soviet and American composers, each group coming through the Iron Curtain with music and musicians previously unknown on the other side. The plan lasted exactly one year, but in Boston that year, we learned several new names and some fascinating new music. The Boston Symphony played symphonies by Alfred Schnittke; there was chamber music by Sofia Gubaidulina. Both composers – dowdy, gray, as if in their first time out of the mineshaft – were among the many in attendance. The Soviet Information Agency had set up a listening room with tapes. Gubaidulina’s music – including a wonderful concerto for bassoon and low strings, which deserves new performances – amazed us all. Now that both composers and their countrymen are old friends on Western programs, it’s amazing to realize how recently hearing their music seemed so difficult, even dangerous.

That’s what’s behind the Philharmonic’s title, “Shadow of Stalin,” for its current, fascinating concert series. Even after Stalin’s death, Iron Curtain composers needed to resort to certain subterfuges to cover up their most serious creative impulses. Both Gubaidulina and Schnittke composed film scores for their major income, along with other “happy” music on Khrushchev-era socialist-realist lines, in order to be able to scoot into dark rooms and compose works such as we heard on Tuesday’s program. Gubaidulina’s 1979 In Croce is an amazing work for cello (the Philharmonic’s Ben Hong) and organ (Mark Robson), ecstatic and ecstatically played: hypnotic, intense, an unceasing 19-minute mantra. Concordanza, an earlier (1971) work for chamber ensemble, held the attention in other ways: gritty, unyielding, unsmiling, like my early memories of the composer herself.

Schnittke’s Fourth Symphony of 1984 ended the program, a work built out of bell sonorities and, at the end, brief snips of wordless chant, convoluted and, to my mind, not likable. A big-boned performance under the Philharmonic’s associate conductor Alexander Mickelthwate stated its case; other works by Schnittke – including a boisterous First Symphony that includes a rock band, a marching band and a jazz band, all of them bursting into a garland of quotations from symphonies of the past – strike me as considerably more endearing.

EpitomeTwo major creative spirits collaborated in the spellbinding music that hammered at the beams of Disney Hall on Wednesday, and at the collective souls of the sellout crowd within those walls. One was the spirit of Charles Mingus, bygone but endearingly alive, whose variorum collection of music – some his very own, some snuck in from revered other sources – bore the collective title of Epitaph. The other was Gunther Schuller, jazz and classical scholar, musician under many hats, coiner of the term “Third Stream,” who had assembled and edited the Mingus collection for a performance in 1989, then subjected the work to 18 more years of expansion and “creative evolution.” With his help, Mingus’ widow, Sue, has organized a 31-member jazz ensemble whose musicians, Schuller notes, “play jazz that is even more advanced than what Mingus wrote,” and turned out a three-hour chilling masterwork, which in its frequent great moments simply astounds any aware listener with the strength and resolution of its complexity at one moment, its quiet, wrenching beauty at another.

I write, bear in mind, as a newcomer and enchanted discoverer. I remember walking away from my friends’ records of progressive jazz – Mingus among them – in college days, when I should have been receptive. Now I enjoy being transformed, of discovering – in my head and in my spinal column – the hand of a real composer, as plates of genius brass clash against one another in the Mingus “Better Get It in Your Soul” or as horizons darkly vibrate in his “Chill of Death.” There was much to be learned, too, in the variety in the Mingus grab bag: the serene, dark lyricism of an Ellington number, the guileless charm in a Jelly Roll Morton blues. This was an event full of varied racketing; Charlie Mingus, who spoke of Epitaph as a “symphony,” surely smiled his approval.

Mixed BagTime has run out on Time Cycle. Lukas Foss’ adventure in contemporary chic – fluky rhythmic patterns, odd placements on the stage, the players called upon to whisper – served the needs of the Bernstein crowd in the 1960s to pass as new-music supporters. It was the centerpiece of Thursday’s curious collection of new and not-quite-new music, and its struggles toward with-it status turned it into the evening’s most old-fashioned music. Even the delightful bluster of Samuel Barber’s authentically hoary Toccata Festiva, which began the program, with its bingety-bang organ cadenza nobly dispatched by Simon Preston, was at least an honest work of its kind. Not even Dawn Upshaw’s brave management of the Foss vocal tricks could render that music honest.

But Upshaw was also there to sing the music of Osvaldo Golijov, and that is the heaven-made collaboration of our time: a wonderfully perceptive composer whose lyric sense is shaped and colored by a particular “rainbow of a voice” (his words). Golijov has orchestrated three of his songs into a cycle lasting nearly half an hour; the songs, in three languages, summon up the full range of a singer’s versatility. The middle song, “Lúa Descolorida,” is familiar from Upshaw’s performances at Ojai, and it racks the soul: the lament of a tortured conscience under an unforgiving moon. A charming Yiddish lullaby begins the cycle; sad poetry of Emily Dickinson ends it. A DG recording with Upshaw is out this month. When you hear it, and fall under the spell of that “rainbow,” you’ll know why I had to forgo the West Side Story dances at the concert’s end, the very bejesus out of which I’m sure Maestro Mickelthwate conducted.