So I've Heard

Getting It Right

Of a couple of dozen productions I have attended of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, the one currently at the Music Center (through this weekend) is by some distance the finest and the most enjoyable. It contains the most of George’s music, in an opera often cut, properly treated by both vocal and orchestral forces under John DeMain, who, it might as well be admitted, knows how the music goes better than anyone else alive. The staging, by Francesca Zambello, has no blind, deaf or dull spot; it takes off at a breathless pace at the rise of the curtain and doesn’t perceptibly stop for breath (or allow any of us to do the same) for its approximately three hours’ length. That’s about the same number of hours as last week’s Merry Widow, by the way, whose demands on your time, you could swear, came to twice as long.

“Porgy lived in the golden age,” begins the novel by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, which gave us the stage play and, eventually, the opera, “. . . an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten but not yet destroyed.” Peter J. Davison’s stage sets have speeded up time’s processes somewhat. His Catfish Row, updated to the “early 1950s” from 1928, is a true slum. Doors hang from their hinges; the roller coaster on Kittiwah Island, where the Picnic Scene takes place, is a scrapheap. The spirit of the joyous community remains, however, and Porgy has inherited its gold. He is one of opera’s grandest personages, no less complex for his humble origins. The role was sung with noble resonance by Kevin Short in the first of the two alternating casts, the one I saw on opening night.

The Bess that night was a slithery, slinky bundle named Morenike Fadayomi, with pure, radiant high notes that lit up the house. She’s a versatile actress all the way from “happy dust”–sniffing floozie to adoring bedmate. You have to wonder, as Porgy becomes rooted in the serious repertory alongside Figaro and the Ring, how generations of singers come to deal with the work’s special vernacular. Years ago, the first recordings of this music were by white Metropolitan Opera stars, and the trials of hearing their “Bess, you is my woman now” were fairly excruciating. Now Ms. Fadayomi, born in London, raised in Nigeria and Switzerland, performs Aida and Mimi in Germany, yet sings Bess on our stage as if born to the part. I heard nothing but superb and wonderfully idiomatic voices that night, including Angela Simpson’s showstopping “My man’s gone now,” Ashley Faatolia’s delightful walk-through as the Crab Man and Jermaine Smith’s incomparable rubber-legged routines as Sportin’ Life.

Matters of idiom aside, this was, simply put, a night of truly great opera, made especially so by Francesca Zambello’s stage-sure direction, in which even the cherishable small moments – the comings and goings of the street peddlers, the placing of scolding wives on various levels of Davison’s rickety set – left their ineradicable mark. The staging of the hurricane, with the terrified chorus clumped together in center stage and the scenery blowing every which way to the tremendous thuddings in the orchestra (probably amplified, but so what?), was something to carry home and relive. It made it possible to forgive Ms. Zambello, at long last, for her absurdity-studded 1991 staging of Berlioz’s The Trojans, in our opera company’s greener years.

Mort on MortI’ve known Morton Subotnick longer than any star in the new-music galaxy. In the 1950s, he was a freelance clarinetist in San Francisco, studying with Darius Milhaud at Mills and feeding me precious backstage gossip from the San Francisco Symphony during its bad old days under Enrique Jordá, for my crits on KPFA. I ran into him in New York one day, when he was composing big electronic works for Nonesuch Records – symphonies, almost – with names like Silver Apples of the Moon. He told me about his new job at a school back in California with funding from, of all people, Walt Disney, and we had a good laugh over that.

I visited one of CalArts’ new-music festivals, and over coffee, Mort told me why life in California was better than anywhere else – partly because nobody took the critics seriously. He was composing what seemed to me pure magic: music for instruments and computers, with the instruments activating the technology so that music retained its relationship to a live performer and wasn’t just a matter of staring at loudspeakers. I looked in on his classes, watched some of his students’ work with mixed audio and visual media. I think it was Mort more than anyone else who convinced me that the air in California was what I, too, wanted to breathe.

More recently, Mort has produced some excellent educational CD-ROMS, in a series called “Making Music.” Kids get to construct scales, rhythms, melodies. They learn about variations, at various grades of complexities. I have to confess: I’ve spent an evening or two “making music.”

At the season’s final “Piano Spheres” concert in Zipper Hall, Vicki Ray’s program ended with Subotnick’s The Other Piano, a piece for piano with surround-sound processing. The work is “other” to Morton Feldman’s 1977 piece called, simply, Piano; both run approximately half an hour. Vicki played, while Mort, at his laptop, captured her notes and formed harmonies that floated through the hall out of surrounding speakers. The music was mostly slow and dreamlike, not at all Feldmanesque, purely the other Mort. We, sitting there, floated, surrounded, inside the sound. Talk about your magic.

The Other Piano will be released this summer on a Mode DVD in 5.1 multichannel: something to do the dishes to, or to lose yourself in.

The signing of 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel to take over the Los Angeles Philharmonic podium – snatched from the hot grasp of half a dozen other conductor-hungry American orchestras – has been a coup both musical and political, in many circles even dwarfing the coming of soccer’s David Beckham. To Philharmonic president and CEO Deborah Borda credit redounds for the superlative end run, contract in hand; to her predecessor Ernest Fleischmann go the honors for recognizing the musical value of this remarkable young man, who will not arrive in Los Angeles to take over the orchestra until 2009. Let Ernest tell the story:

“In April 2004, the Bamberg [Germany] Symphony held its first-ever Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition. I was one of the judges, along with Jonathan Nott and a member of the orchestra. We received 300 videos, and chose 16 hopefuls to come to Bamberg. One was from Venezuela: Gustavo Dudamel, who led his Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra, and already there was something exciting about that video that stood out from all the others, a passionate young orchestra that seemed to be playing at the edge of its seats. The competition program consisted of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Ruuml;ckert Songs, the Schubert Fifth and something contemporary from each competitor’s country. No, we didn’t inflict 16 complete Mahler Fifths on the orchestra or on ourselves; we could stop a performance when the points had been made. Only the finalists led complete performances.

“There were four finalists. Esa-Pekka joined us for the finals. By then there was simply no question that Gustavo was not only the winner; he was the kind of natural, instinctive musician that comes along rarely. His age has nothing to do with it; he had that ability to make musicians give something that they could not give otherwise.

“That November, Deborah, [vice president, artistic planning] Chad Smith and I traveled to Venezuela to see this phenomenon on his native turf. That’s when the wheels started turning. It’s an amazing thing that Deborah has accomplished in these past few weeks, by the way, literally flying in over the heads of agents and orchestra managers to sign this guy and make him our own. I think it helps that he likes it here.”

Daniel Rothmuller has been a member of the L.A. Philharmonic’s cello section since the 1970-’71 season, and associate principal cellist since 1975. That means he has played under Zubin Mehta, Carlo Maria Giulini, André Previn and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and is in fit qualification to get a handle on the orchestra’s music-director-designate, Gustavo Dudamel. I asked him to talk about how an orchestral musician judges an incoming conductor, and how that relationship builds (or doesn’t build) over the years.

“It doesn’t take much time,” he says, “and it doesn’t take many words. Whether it’s a new conductor, like Dudamel, or someone we’ve worked with for years, words are the most useless part of the communication process between the conductor and the orchestra. Take Giulini. Everything he wanted to tell us about the music, the interpretive magic of everything he played, was in the look in his eyes. André’s great failing was exactly his inability to make eye contact. His best work came when he was conducting from the piano, in a concerto or in chamber music; then he could reach out to the other players, but not from the podium.

(Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

“Zubin? You had to keep your eyes on him every moment! We had trouble with Esa-Pekka at the start; it took him a while to learn about eye contact, but now he’s got it.

“People don’t acquire talent; they’re born with it, and then they acquire technique. The reason Gustavo has come on so strong with the whole orchestra is his fantastic ability to connect with everybody. That’s because he has acquired so much technique so soon, and knows how to use it. He seems to do everything so easily, so naturally. And he did this the first time, at the Bowl, with almost no English in his vocabulary. He’s only now making his way. We’ve all loved him from the start.”

Minimal Merriment

Of all the unreasonable choices for operatic fare to sweep cheery breezes across this season’s repertory, a revival of 2001’s The Merry Widow, in the San Francisco production by Lotfi Mansouri – originally conceived by him in 1981 as a gala vehicle for reigning diva Joan Sutherland, padded out to Wagnerian lengths (like this sentence) with songs, choruses and an interminable ballet from other Lehár operettas – is about as deadly a decision as I can conceive. Even the enlivening presence of the indomitable Susan Graham goes just so far. She makes her first entrance as a Dolly clone, in a red getup on a staircase surrounded by men in white tie, which draws its share of audience yuks and thus establishes the evening’s level of low-down jokiness.

To those unfamiliar with the airborne wonders of Lehár’s operetta under more reasonable auspices – the EMI recording with Schwarzkopf, to name one of several – I can only offer assurance that this is, indeed, a work of utmost elegance and pointed, sly humor, worthy to stand in the company of the best of Johann Strauss, and with a measure of tenderness that can even surpass that other Viennese master. To rev it up into this noisy burlesque of itself insults the work and its audience – whose response on opening night was considerably short of ecstatic, by the way, for all the recent journalism about the need for opera to dumb itself down. The greater pity is that the two principals of this production, the witty and genuinely intelligent Graham and the company’s longtime stalwart, Rod Gilfry, give off the sense that they could be the nucleus of a properly accented Merry Widow, which this noisy, waterlogged mess was not. They were in the wrong place the other night, and so was I.

Tristan Redeemed

Earlier in the week, I completed my 15-hour immersion in Tristan und Isolde, hearing Wagner’s transcendent masterwork for the first time at Disney Hall in a performance worthy of its name. Christian Franz had sung here before, through microphones at the Hollywood Bowl in Wagner led by John Mauceri, hardly reason to anticipate the rich, ringing, beautifully modulated Tristan he brought to Salonen’s ensemble, live at Disney. The more remarkable: He was flown in only in time for a day’s rehearsal with piano, to replace the ailing (and inadequate) Alan Woodrow, with a brief walk-through of the staging. The beauty of the blending of his bright, consistent tenor into the luminous torrents of Christine Brewer’s soprano is a memory that will remain; so will his racked death cry of “Isolde” as darkness finally closes in.

I am no further transported by the curious circumstance of Tristan-as-Project, or by the visual ecstasy, so widely proclaimed, in Bill Viola’s bubbles, after these many hours under the spell of the sound of the opera under Salonen with his orchestra, of Brewer and, finally, a tenor worthy of her. This matter of worthiness is at the core of my mixed feelings about the “Project,” and it concerns the height of the pinnacle upon which this one world-shaking, world-shaping work rests. It doesn’t diminish Bill Viola’s art by very much to believe as I do that it is unworthy of Tristan und Isolde; most art is.

Goldberg Unvaried

Johann Gottlieb Goldberg lives in history, not so much for any music he composed, but for the set of variations his teacher, J.S. Bach, wrote for him – or so the story goes – to play for his insomniac boss. The splendid Italian ensemble Il Giardino Armonico corrected that discrepancy at their Disney Hall concert last week by performing an attractive C-minor sonata (for two violins and viola) by the real Goldberg that contributes mightily to the man’s credit.

To the ensemble’s credit, as well, was an enterprising selection of works, almost none of which I had ever heard before in a long life of hearing Baroque music. Giovanni Antonini, the seven-member group’s director and recorder soloist, contributed three wonderfully madcap concertos for his instrument, by Telemann, Nardini and (need I add) Vivaldi – a perfect way, all told, to sweep the hall of its last Wagnerian echoes.

For Whom Mr. Bell Toils

From Washington comes encouraging word of a rise in musical taste among the general public. It seems that the Washington Post hired the violinist Joshua Bell to perform as a street musician, incognito, to test his recognizability, or the abilities of a transit-bound big city to respond to good music. One morning not long ago, the violinist stationed himself, with his expensive instrument, at a well-traveled spot near one of the city’s Metro stations, at morning rush hour. He wore the basic attire of a street musician. A TV crew and reporters were discreetly stationed nearby.

The program bestowed upon scurrying Washingtonians was generous and varied: Bach’s Chaconne, Schubert’s Ave Maria, Ponce’s Estrellita, the Chaconne another time. Post reporter Gene Weingarten had asked the conductor Leonard Slatkin what he thought the hour’s take might be for a world-famous violinist playing under such conditions. Slatkin’s guess was $150. Joshua Bell’s take came to $32.17, which, considering the playing I’ve heard from him lately, seems at least 17 cents too high.

Slava (1927–2007)

I met Mstislav Rostropovich twice. The first time was at a White House recital, when I was most impressed with the way Rosalynn Carter got all the Russian names right. The second was out here, when five minutes into our chat, there were already hugs. He called me “Alanchik,” which I still use for special messages. We talked about cellists becoming conductors, and he brought up something I’ll bet nobody else has ever thought about. I’ll try to remember his wonderful Russian word order. “After all, who knows how good play cello Toscanini?”

There’s one video that I often resort to for uplift: Slava and Carlo Maria Giulini performing the Dvorák Concerto (and also the Saint-Saëns, but never mind) on EMI. The man who could draw that long A-flat-minor melody in the first movement of the Dvorák into a conversation with all the gods of music is the man to spread the words of the peacemakers to the world at large. Slava was both.

The Tristan Reject

Not content with merely presenting the inscrutable masterpiece, the opera that changed the course of artistic thought forever, the Philharmonic offered further ennoblement under the rubric of “The Tristan Project.” First injected onto the Disney stage in 2004 with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde kibbled into three separate acts, three nights, three tickets (with some appropriate additional music added each time as curtain raiser), this time around there were also two very long nights of the complete opera at single but raised ticket prices. Enhancing the performances has been a “realization” by the eminent video artist Bill Viola, projected (that magic word again) onto a screen above the orchestra, with another screen up back for the folks up front. Peter Sellars is credited with the staging, which consisted mostly of getting people on and off the stage. Best of all, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic served as pit band. On to New York the whole shebang now goes, for a two-night stand in Lincoln Center’s crippled acoustics at higher prices.

Any questions? I have a couple. I wonder first about the artistic integrity in offering an opera – Tristan in particular, so musically interlocked – on three separate tickets. Opera companies, including our own next season, get by without such curious practices. My next question has to do with sight versus sound: Wagner’s music in the gorgeous realization by Esa-Pekka and his orchestra in Disney Hall, rising to fulfill every curve of Frank Gehry’s design, versus the flat images of Viola’s video translations, which stop at the edge of their frames. It becomes a clash of dimensions; even a stage set – David Hockney’s for the L.A. Opera, which we’ll see next year, with its fabulous lighting – suggests an infinity that reaches out to embrace the music. Viola’s – and I am trying hard to circumnavigate the fact that this second time around, I am not all that crazy about his Tristan visuals anyhow – does not.

Beyond his staging, Sellars contributed a titillating program note, two pages of small print retelling the Tristan und Isolde story with a homoerotic overlay that posits a lovers’ relationship for Tristan and King Marke, with Isolde brought in to silence the gossip columnists. This should delight Sellars’ academic colleagues at UCLA, known for their outing of notable personages in the artistic galaxy. In any case, basso John Relyea’s dreary performance of Marke’s interminable “How could you?” litany, upon the discovery of the lovers’ betrayal, suggested that Tristan, whatever affair he was in, was well out of it.

Aside from Christine Brewer’s larger-than-life, impressively accurate Isolde, in fact, there isn’t much joyousness to report about the singing. Canadian tenor Alan Woodrow, the Tristan, has the bright, plangent tone of his countryman Jon Vickers, but in both performances I saw last week, his wanderings from pitch made him almost unlistenable. (Past deadline, Christian Franz replaced him in the final performance; more next week.) Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter was gorgeous to hear in Debussy’s La Demoiselle Élue on one of the single-act nights, but she was miscast as Brangauml;ne in the opera itself, and her song of warning in the second act did not, as it should, merge into the moonlight that flowed, radiant and seductive, night after night, from Salonen’s magical orchestra.

Finland 2, Norway 0

Salonen was also on hand last week to curate the final event in this season’s Monday Evening Concerts at Zipper Hall and welcome its composers, Norway’s Rolf Wallin and Finland’s Kimmo Hakola, the latter a former classmate of Salonen’s from that legendary class at the Sibelius Academy, a veritable hotbed of compositional originality.

And indeed, it was a chamber concerto by Hakola that won most hearts in this large crowd, a brightly scored work for 11-member mixed ensemble starting off Furioso, ending Misterioso and encasing a middle-movement Amoroso so aswirl in amorous harmonies that nobody seemed to want it to end. After intermission, a few more hearts were won with Capriole, another Hakola charmer, shorter and full of strange turns – including a reminder of Finland’s part-Mongolian ancestry. Two works by Wallin, a collection of miniatures more attractive in their titles than in sound, and an ongoing and ongoing piece for improvising singer – the phenomenal Sidsel Endresen – in a computerized soundscape, won fewer hearts all told.

Performances through the evening of unfamiliar music were remarkable; the group included the full membership of the Calder Quartet, pianist Gloria Cheng – without whom half of Los Angeles’ music making would disappear – and visitors clarinetist Carol McGonnell and cellist Claire Bryant. Thus ended, with great success, a concert season that many feared would never happen. Organizer, administrator and everything but dishwasher Justin Urcis tells me that the next season begins, at Zipper, on December 3.

Inescapable Anne

Here’s a where-has-he-been-all-my-life name for you: Grigori Frid. Born in Petrograd in 1915, he was apparently an influential Russian composer throughout his life, through many regimes. His monodrama for singer and small orchestra, setting passages from The Diary of Anne Frank, Grove’s Dictionary tells me, is popular in many German houses. Deservedly so, as last week’s performances by the Long Beach Opera made clear.

The work itself lasts about an hour. Andreas Mitisek, the company’s artistic director, extended the evening with the help of a Holocaust survivor named Laura Hillman, who lives nearby, who has published a memoir, and who, of course, would now be the age of Anne Frank had she lived. Mrs. Hillman sat onstage and read excerpts from her book interspersed into the 21 passages from the Diary that Frid had set to music. His music, reminiscent of some of Prokofiev’s bright, edgy film scores, was flung out by an expert nine-piece band. The songs and bits of dialogue were delivered with charm, grace and the stuff of heartbreak by a remarkable Armenian-American soprano, Ani Maldjian.

The whole thing took place not in any kind of auditorium, but in a basement space adjoining a parking garage at the Sinai Temple in West L.A. The walls were crude; the ceiling was low; the performing space was something you could almost trip over. You could, in other words, transport yourselves to Otto Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. Very clever: This was a transporting evening in more ways than one.

When People Die . . .

Back in 1992, the host of KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic – what’s-‘is-name? – let himself be hypnotized by the Third Symphony of the Polish composer Henryk Górecki, and passed it on to the rest of us. For several weeks, it seemed as if that was all you could hear, morning after eclectic morning, on the station. The recording, a Nonesuch number conducted by David Zinman with Dawn Upshaw singing the doom-haunted lyrics, some of them taken from walls in Nazi prison camps, seemed to stretch out this quality of vaporous melancholy compared to sturdier versions on Polish discs, but it certainly established Górecki’s reputation in the U.S. When he came here a year or two later to conduct a performance of the work at USC, the performance was even slower, more melancholy. Whatever his compositional inclinations may have been before the Third Symphony’s rebirth as a minimalist anthem – there are a few perky chamber works around on import labels, and a lively harpsichord concerto has had a few performances – his name exists tied principally to that one slow, quiet work…

Until now. Here at hand is one more work, also bearing the number 3, lasting nearly an hour, and bearing the subtitle “… songs are sung,” slow and quiet, purely instrumental this time, and of a dark, elegiac, penetrating beauty almost painful to hear but so demanding to be heard that you pray it will just keep going. It is the Third Quartet, played by the Kronos Quartet (who commissioned it, as they had Nos. 1 and 2) on a new Nonesuch disc. Górecki finished the quartet in 1995, but held it back from the world (“I don’t know why,” says the eccentric, reclusive composer) until the Kronos performed it late last year.

It is music to sit quietly to, and give yourself to, in undisturbed solitude. Four of its five movements are very, very slow; you might think of Shostakovich, perhaps of his 15th Quartet, but there isn’t the tragic undertone of that Soviet work here, rather a deep, heartfelt meditation. The one fast movement is the third (of five), and what surprises there isn’t the change of pace but of harmony. The music becomes very sweet, folkish. At the end, the music reverts back to its earlier mood, completing a cycle and, perhaps, inviting a second hearing. “When horses die, they breathe,” runs a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov that the composer cites. “When grasses die, they wither; When suns die, they go out; When people die, songs are sung.”

When Record Labels Live . . .New Albion was a San Francisco label that specialized in interesting new music, and did so very well, first with Bay Area composers – Terry Riley, Ingram Marshall, the Wind Chants of David Hykes, Lou Harrison – later with world composers. Foster Reed and his small company exemplified what record companies are supposed to be doing to fill in the blanks that the big guys always leave unfilled. Now the company has relocated to New York’s Taconic Hills, but a recent package of releases indicates that its pace of good work continues.

A disc (Incantations) of the music of Giacinto Scelsi strokes some of the same nerve centers as does the Górecki, but with a different rod. First off, you have to know that Scelsi’s English wife, Dorothy, was distantly related to the Royal Family, and their wedding reception was held in Buckingham Palace. (She later left him for good, and he lived his last years in a palazzo of his own, in Rome.) He was the Italian who chose to compose between the notes, exploring the microtonal areas reachable by the voice or by strings and brass instruments whose tone might be “bent.” An hour’s worth of solo “song” on this new disc – unaccompanied, or joined by mirror images on tape – starts off unsettling but not for long. The singer, Marianne Schuppe, has such remarkable control that you begin to hear her vocal lines, and her incredible range, as a musical language all its own, haunting, powerful and, in its own way, very beautiful.

So is the sound of one grand piano on another disc, surrounded by 10 musicians armed with long strings fashioned out of the stuff of musical bows, which are threaded under the piano strings and played by being pulled up and down. The sound is that of an idealized ensemble of supercellos, intensely resonant and richly harmonized; other players attack the strings with piano hammers and guitar picks – anything but fingers on the keys. This is the Bowed Piano Ensemble, based at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, whose inventor, composer and leader is Stephen Scott. Their fourth New Albion disc, The Deep Spaces, is an utterly charming selection of songs to poems of Wordsworth, Byron, Mary Shelley and the like, sung by Victoria Hansen.

Schubert UnfinishedOnce in a while, something splendid falls through from one of the big companies too. Such a windfall landed last week from EMI, the latest in its sporadic Schubert series combining Ian Bostridge singing lieder and Leif Ove Andsnes accompanying and performing some major piano work on his own. This one is full of storm and frustration. The storm is in the crash and clangor of the C-minor Piano Sonata, the first of three imponderable, huge piano works from Schubert’s last year, with its final movement like a nocturnal journey through a demon-infested dark forest with an Erlking behind every tree. It is also in a violent, ironic long song, “Grave-Digger’s Homesickness,” which Bostridge hurls forth, over lightning bolts from Andsnes’ piano, in a manner to remind us that he is also the ——–
AUTHOR of an excellent book on witchcraft.

Just as fascinating is a small collection to end the disc, of songs and piano pieces that Schubert left off without finishing. There are dozens more of these in the Schubert catalog; the six that were chosen are especially frustrating. They all build up a head of steam, they all modulate interestingly into some other region before Schubert leaves off. Most fascinating is “Johanna Sebus,” a song to a Goethe text about a bursting dam and a child faced with the task of carrying her mother and her goat to safety. Will they make it? Alas, we’ll never know, at least not from Schubert.

Moving Along

One day in 2005, Ernest Fleischmann, former honcho of the Philharmonic and now of the musical world at large, invited me to lunch, a frequent and pleasant occurrence. This time there was good food, plus a command. On no circumstance, came the order from Ernest On High, was I to miss the upcoming Hollywood Bowl debut of the conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Truth to tell, I had entertained every intention of missing that event; a late-season Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, with the trek to Cahuenga Pass long since grown tiresome, and the new opera season downtown beckoning, was something far down on the appeal scale.

But Ernest Fleischmann is, among his great attributes, a keen evaluator of young conducting talent. In his days of so-called retirement, he has spent much time as judge at major European conducting competitions. It is through his acumen that the Philharmonic had latched onto the services of Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Now, in the past couple of years, he has returned to us from happy hunting with a pair of estimable trophies: the 20-year-old Lionel Bringuier, who starts his first season as the Philharmonic’s assistant conductor this fall, and Dudamel, who made his North American debut at 24 at the Bowl on that night to remember.

Word was out; the place was crawling with agents from conductor-hungry orchestras. Onstage too the atmosphere was electric. “We knew right off that this was a special talent,” cellist Dan Rothmuller remembered when we talked at Monday’s press conference. I wrote about Dudamel in this space, about “fiery, consuming energy,” about “the extraordinary electricity that warmed the otherwise chilled crowd that night.” He returned for a Disney Hall concert of equal merit a year later, and now earns his own spotlight as music director–designate, with his actual tenure beginning, at age 28, in the fall of 2009.

You should have been at that press conference last Monday, to take in those smiling faces. Ernest was off in Berlin, but everybody else was on hand to say the right thing. The triumph, of course, was to have grabbed the hottest young conducting property right from the hot grasp of the other top orchestras that are desperately seeking conductors right now: New York, Chicago… the list goes on. (One devastated critic in Chicago – onetime home, after all, of the Black Sox – has already written a weeping “Say it ain’t so” article.) The greater triumph, as the spread of honcha Deborah Borda’s smile made clear, is for the Philharmonic, with this one bold swoop, to have won the right, and the mechanism, to reshape and to redefine the relationship between the classical repertory and its audience – today’s and tomorrow’s. You can fill up young Dudamel on caviar from Patina, but in his adorable opening speech, he also let on his passion for the hot dogs at Pink’s. He fended off some questions about a possible leaning toward the popular arts, but I would guess that when it comes to establishing a relationship between the so-called serious and pop, young Gustavo is at least as interested in tearing down fences as in mending them.

Esa-Pekka Salonen has moved the Philharmonic far along this conciliatory path, and it’s significant that he chooses to remain among us, to continue to capture the essence of this place in his music. I thought the huge turnout when he showed off his composition methods at the Apple Store a few weeks ago was a fair indication of the heightened stature he and the Philharmonic have attained here. The piece itself, the nine-minute Helix, was the right kind of serious, unflinching contemporary music to engage a young audience’s interest and pride. I imagine Dudamel’s manner of community outreach will be somewhat different. The important thing is that both musicians seem to me to be participants in an extraordinary rejuvenation within an art form whose demise some naysayers have all too glibly foretold. What delight to be riding along!

No Place Like Home

Jacaranda is home again. Renovations are done at Santa Monica’s First Pres; the place looks good and sounds great. Last Saturday’s homecoming concert drew as close to a sellout crowd as never mind. There’s your success story.

The program was all-American and all-remarkable. Two really rough-cut works trod with emphatic step. One was Frederic Rzewski’s piano setting of “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” from his North American Ballads, played by Scott Dunn, piano music that leaps off the keyboard to create a rural and menacing setting. Ben Johnston’s Fourth Quartet is also imbued with a rural atmosphere. Johnston, now 80, is the least known of our individualists, off in the woods somewhere devising tuning systems, teaching now and then, poking around in old hymnals and in Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone theories. This Fourth Quartet is probably his masterpiece; fiendish to play for its rhythmic complexity and because it keeps running off into odd scale patterns, it is also built around the old-timey hymn “Amazing Grace.” Jacaranda’s Denali Quartet handled it fearlessly, and made most else on the program – even Steve Reich’s Eight Lines for pianos, flutes, clarinets and larger string band – seem a piece of cake by comparison.

There was more and sweeter cake too, a piece by Morty Feldman: Who has even heard of his Between Categories? It’s for violins, cellos, pianos and chimes: two sets of each, answering each other, mostly pianissimo, across the front of the church: Imagine! Only those Jacaranda guys, Patrick and Mark, could have dug up a piece like that . . . and made it work. (It did, like a distant cloud passing far overhead.)

Scott Dunn began the program with a handful of Scott Joplin rags. Wonderful, rich, wistful pieces – “Solace” often has me in tears – these really constitute our American counterpart of Schubert or Chopin waltzes, and ought to be given equal prominence on concert programs. First, they need to be given substance; Dunn, an excellent and imaginative musician, lessened their value by omitting every one of the repeats. Something like that last refrain of “Solace” (remember it from The Sting?) needs the time to break our hearts. Cutting it short like that broke mine.

Rousing the Dead

Christopher Rouse burst upon the scene in the 1980s, with a barrage of orchestral works bearing titles such as Bump, Phantasmata and Infernal Machine and, in sheer decibel power, living up to their names. Later on, he was to master the more eloquent modes of expression; a cello concerto (commissioned for Yo-Yo Ma and the L.A. Philharmonic) and a couple of string quartets expanded the range of his expressive powers while exploring the gentler regions of the audible spectrum. In his 90-minute Requiem, however, which received its world premiere in the capable hands of our Master Chorale and attendant participants under the enlightened leadership of Grant Gershon at Disney Hall a weekend ago, the volume knob was back at 11, and Mr. Rouse was back in his old stomping ground.

The idea here is to intersperse the Latin verses of the Requiem with poetry reflecting on those verses – English, or the Italian of Michelangelo: a plan reminiscent of Benjamin Britten’s in his War Requiem. A solo baritone, the eloquent Sanford Sylvan (Mao Ze-Dong and Klinghoffer in the John Adams operas), sang haunted poetry: Seamus Heaney on a child’s death, Siegfried Sassoon on suicide, Michelangelo on his own immortality. The chorus bursts through, most often ferociously and buttressed with the customary Rouse battery of multiple percussion. A children’s chorus sits immobile, and joins in after 80 minutes with celestial, forgiving harmonies as the baritone soothes an audience’s injured eardrums with a prayer for peace.

The skill here is exceptional; not a nut or bolt is out of place. Some people I have heard from – fellow critics, music students, ardent concertgoers – have been stirred by the piece. I was not. I enjoyed the contraptions, the splendidly concocted blasts, and the way Gershon’s vocal and instrumental forces kept everything in balance in that superb hall. I enjoyed all that exactly the way I enjoyed the sheer physical impact in that marvelous new Korean horror film, The Host, and if I had my choice of which work of art to experience again, I’d go back to the film any five times instead of once to Mr. Rouse’s Requiem.

It was quite the week for new music, actually, on both sides of Grand Avenue. Also at Disney Hall, a few days later, there was a much more rewarding premiere, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Helix in its first U.S. hearing, music first written for a BBC peace celebration led by Valery Gergiev. Actually, this is the piece that Salonen had sneak-previewed at the Apple store in Santa Monica a few weeks ago to show off his use of the software program known as Sibelius. I wrote about it at the time.

The new piece is shorter than anything by the real Sibelius. What it is, is a nine-minute acceleration of a simple note pattern – a helix, in other words – and what is wonderful about it is that it is (a) a tough-minded, complex piece of contemporary orchestral music and (b) delightfully easy to follow, no more complex than (quite similar, in fact, to) Ravel’s Boléro.

South on Grand

Across the street at Zipper Concert Hall, there were two new-music events worth mentioning (if not for the same reasons): one worth every minute, the other worth few if any.

For someone who claims (in his biographical notes) never to have heard the Beethoven Ninth Symphony live, Mark Robson certainly demonstrated a wise and varied musicianship in his “Piano Spheres” concert on Tuesday night: music from all over the map, spread over the keyboard, invoking fond memories of old friends here and gone.

Framing the program was enchanting, rowdy music by Louis Andriessen at the start – his 1983 Trepidus, short, clangorous, jumpy music – and a clutch (four listed, but I counted six) of Gyouml;rgy Ligeti’s Etudes Pour Piano at the end, marvelously wise, complex aphoristic pieces from the composer’s last years. In between came more treasures of varying value: first, a set of Morton Feldman pieces from 1959, tiny, very soft, very freely composed for each hand, the Feldman we tend to forget in the light of the hourslong pieces of his last years; then, John Cage’s The Seasons, his ballet score transcribed for piano, music of greater discipline than most of his familiar scores, somewhat like Satie and, again, very beautiful. Also on the program was Mauricio Kagel’s “Piece of Filmmusic”: pure Dada, something involving a wrestling match between a semiclad pianist and a metronome, a holdover from when people went for that kind of thing.

The people of a chamber ensemble known as Nimbus have been bombarding me with reminders of their existence; Thursday night found them too at Zipper, and there was, therefore, reason to check them out. Nimbus, along with its music director, Young Riddle (that’s his name, and do you know your Harry Potter?), believes in themed programming; last Thursday’s theme was PALIMPSEST in large letters, which is the ancient practice of writing manuscripts on top of pre-existing manuscripts, with the earlier writing erased but sometimes recoverable. Mr. Riddle seems to have been attracted, perhaps unduly, by the fact that one of Yannis Xenakis’ minor compositions bore the title Palimpsest, and decided to build part of his program around the matter. He enlisted a CSUN colleague, Dan Hosken, to compose an electronic overwrite over the Xenakis and to make both works the gist of the concert.

The program began with Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra in the boiled-down version by Felix Greissle, in a performance by the ensemble that I will kindly extenuate as sight-reading. Then came the Xenakis, then the Hosken+Xenakis. Oh, I forgot, there were “mystery pieces” before each half: unannounced solo pieces (Stravinsky, Steve Hoey) to give the (very small) audience a swell tease. Mr. Riddle talked on and on, most of his words swallowed. This was easily the worst concert I’ve been to this year. No, the year is young; make that two years.

Julius Who?If the name of Julius Reubke means nothing to you, that’s understandable; mine, however, is the even greater guilt. I’d seen the name for years, on posters and programs, record catalogs and small entries in encyclopedias, always connected with a single work, a long organ sonata of churchly mien. That had always been enough to conjure an image of something grinding from around the dark and gloomy 1890s, piling up the chromatic counterpoints in the manner of, say, Max Reger. It was Reger’s Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H – root canal set to music – that preceded Reubke’s sonata on Paul Jacobs’ program at Disney Hall on a recent Sunday night, an exhilarating evening and a learning experience as well.

I learned above all that I had miscalculated Herr Reubke’s history – and, therefore, the shape and sound of his music – by several decades. His time had come and gone much earlier in the 19th century; born in 1834, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 24, leaving behind two large sonatas, one for organ and another for piano. Most important in that brief lifetime, he was a protégé of Franz Liszt, and the big Organ Sonata I was hearing that Sunday for the first time in my 82 years, with surprise and delight, simply glistens with the Master’s imprint.

To that sonata, Reubke attached a program, based on a complex paraphrase of Psalm 94. Pleas for Divine Vengeance and declarations of Faith and Trust resound; the entire work is built, in the Lisztian manner, out of a single theme undergoing transformation, building toward a climactic fugue, something of a ringer for Liszt’s own Piano Sonata – a resemblance in no way shameful. You had to marvel, at the power of the work and at the tragedy it entails. There is great beauty here, underlined in Jacobs’ obviously loving registration; its power builds with the assurance of a composer in command of his craft, yet less than a year from a wasting death. According to the all-too-brief biography in Grove’s Dictionary, the Reubke Piano Sonata is an even more adventurous work than the one for organ; I await with some impatience the package from Amazon.

Inevitably, BachThe shadow of Sebastian Bach fell upon most of the music making last week, either in the celebration (most of the time) or in the defacement (as in the aforementioned Reger abomination). Paul Jacobs’ organ program included one of Bach’s lovely trio sonatas, crisp and elegant and intricate and beautifully detailed under this remarkable musician’s young fingers. It also included a Mendelssohn sonata, which also hovered agreeably close to the spirit of Bach: the influence of the chorale melody, the lapsing into recitative, the charming solemnity. There was more Bach as encores, two short pieces to send us home uplifted and happy.

Next night, the Monday Evening Concert laid claim to a relationship to Bach, although a sense of strain was sometimes evident. “Bach and the Music of Today” was the overall title; Kent Nagano was listed as curator; pianist and conductor Ichiro Nodaira was out front in all but one of the works. His credentials as a performer of Bach might bear examining. He began the program with a pair of preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, went on to a rather hectic reading of the Chromatic Fantasy, pedaled as heavily as if some Chopin nocturne were the matter at hand, and ended with Ferruccio Busoni’s dreary, over-upholstered piano transcription of the Chaconne from the D-minor Partita (for solo violin), as false to the Bach original, and to the sound of its period, as the Reger noted above.

In between, there was music of – and truer to – its own time: the delightfully intricate Viola, Viola (for just those) by George Benjamin; the deliciously rowdy Fantaisie Mécanique by Unsuk Chin; Kurt Rohde’s Double Trouble, a double concerto for violas and small ensemble; and Nodaira’s own Texture de Délire, a nicely atmospheric piece for small ensemble including electronics, 25 years old but certainly more up-to-date than Nodaira’s performances of Bach. Strange, that a musician who creates such attractive music in the spirit of Bach, which this short, attractive piece from 1982 surely is/was, performs the composer’s original conceptions so poorly.

Spreading the PassionNext day came the St. Matthew Passion, its dimensions respected and its spirit as well. Under Martin Haselboeck, our local baroque ensemble known as Musica Angelica has grown in prestige and in programming ambition. Currently, they are joined with Haselboeck’s other group, his Orchester Wiener Akademie, in a tour of the Matthauml;uspassion that began in Mexico City, picks up choruses in various cities along the way, lands in Spain this weekend and ends up in Munich in time for Easter. Worth the trip? Yes.

Somewhat adrift in Pasadena’s acoustically iffy First United Methodist Church, with a cranny-filling audience of 800, the chorus – a too-small unit from John Alexander’s Pacific Chorale forced into inadequate space – faced the major problem: There was just no sound to the sound. Haselboeck solved one problem neatly, bringing soprano Christine Brandes out front to fill in the boys’ voices in the opening tripartite chorus, but the two other parts – the wonderful “Who?” “Where” back-and-forth and the later “Donner und Blitz” that sets a hearer’s teeth on edge – were as formless as last week’s Nudelsuppe.

The soloists made amends, handsomely. Brandes, an old Philharmonic friend, held the room breathless with her “Aus liebe,” as did Klaus Mertens in the final aria, his rich bass-baritone beautifully twined around the plangent lament of William Skeen’s viola da gamba – the sound Bach used one time only in each of his Passions, at the moment of Jesus’ death. An excellent young countertenor, Spanish-born Carlos Mena, took on the alto arias; if he didn’t quite break hearts with the “Erbarme dich,” I don’t know who can since we lost Kathleen Ferrier. Andreas Karasiak sang the Evangelist; Stephen Salters, the words of Jesus – both eloquently. Overall, the greater triumph belonged to the excellent Haselboeck, for his taut, beautifully shaded, forthright, dramatic reading. That man knows his Bach.

Opus 110

As Alfred Brendel’s recital at Disney Hall last week amplified, in no work does the voice of Beethoven – defiant, despairing, triumphant, vulnerable – resound more compellingly than in the next-to-last of his 32 piano sonatas.

I’ve never fully understood that glorious, quirky sonata of Beethoven’s declining years; Brendel’s grand, loving performance didn’t so much solve its mysteries as cast them in wonderful lights. The sonata begins prettily enough; the complexities take over with an unexpected left-hand rumble after the scherzo. On the next page (of my old, tattered copy from Doblinger’s backroom in Vienna), there are half a dozen changes of key, sometimes two within the same measure. There’s a weird sequence of repeated high A’s, like a fire alarm, and a descent like the fall of an angel. A most dolorous lament ensues. In the next minutes, the lament will lead to an orderly fugue, which will give way to a return of the lament, which will then give way again to the fugue, sort of. This time, however, the fugal melody comes in upside down (legitimate practice, if you know your Bach), and not for long. Suddenly, the music gathers a fearsome momentum, not so much from speed as from a triumphant thickening of the harmony. If you want to know what “ecstasy” sounds like in its musical equivalent, these last pages of Opus 110 are what you turn to. I know of no other passage like this in Beethoven for sheer onward musical impulse; perhaps the coda of the first movement of the “Eroica”; what else?

Brendel began his program preparing our ears and our souls for the Beethoven with an unusually stormy, mettlesome late sonata of Haydn, a work in C minor full of jerks and changes and marvelous flights into uncharted harmonic regions. After the Beethoven, there was Schubert: three impromptus, sonata movements in all but name, meticulously dealt with but, to my taste, just a shade too much so. Tears should flow during the rhapsodic second theme in the F-minor Impromptu; the spine should shiver when the principal theme jolts back into earshot. The notes were all there; the music, not quite. (My ears are full, and will always remain so, of the playing of Mitsuko Uchida on a summer day at Ojai.)

To round off, there was more stormy, mettlesome C minor – the familiar, forward-looking Mozart sonata in that key – as if to create a dark, glowering frame for the whole splendid evening.

Unresolved Dominance

Doctor’s orders have obliged Jeffrey Kahane to suspend his survey of Mozart’s piano concertos, conducting his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard, with one program (four concerti, including the popular D-minor) postponed indefinitely. One must not be greedy; what we have heard so far constitutes a joyous and distinguished event in our concert life, reason enough to anticipate the final concert, whenever.

Last month’s concert ended with the D-major “Coronation” Concerto. I had somehow forgotten the particular marvels of this late work, the interweaving of harmonies in the last movement. Their echoes remain with me, the uplift gleaned from the remarkable individuality in every one of these two dozen lapidarian works, the two dozen different ways this unique genius contrived to oppose a solo instrument and an orchestra, to create a wordless drama from that opposition, and to make it mean something different and wonderful each time. Everyone who comes under the spell of Mozart’s piano concertos does so for a different reason and falls in love with different moments. (Mine, above all others, occurs during the slow movement of the E-flat Concerto K. 482.)

Newly arrived in Vienna, the young Beethoven was stirred by his encounter with Mozart’s piano concertos, performed the D-minor at a memorial organized by Konstanze Mozart and composed cadenzas for the work. His own rather bland first concerto (published as No. 2) simmered sweetly in Christian Zacharias’ self-conducted performance with the Philharmonic last weekend. Composed in the same year, 1796, Haydn’s final symphony (No. 104, the “London”), which shared the program, was something else again: amazing, robust, adventurous music with a flight of fantasy in the slow movement that, by itself, seemed to close the door on 18th-century musical propriety with a mighty slam.

Edgar Baitzel (1955–2007)

On paper, Edgar Baitzel was the L.A. Opera’s chief operations officer; he was also its heart. I did not rate the monthly breakfasts with him as did my higher-placed colleagues, but I do remember a lunch at the start of his tenure here: 2000, I think. I guess he had done a pretty good vetting job on my tastes and hang-ups. Ever the staunch company man, he came up with a fistful of testimonials to Mrs. Domingo as an operatic stage director, a matter on which I had expressed grave doubts. Better yet, he brought to that lunch table a gift basket of promises of what the L.A. Opera would do under his leadership. One was Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, and of course I laughed myself silly at the possibility of that ever happening. (It did.) Then there was Wagner’s Ring. (Well, that promise is still alive.) There was a menu of pie-in-the-sky at that lunch, and sly Edgar Baitzel saw to it that it got served.

He was the right kind of executive for this company at that point in its development, for a most important reason (among others, to be sure). He knew music. The world is full of opera companies run by millionaires and impresarios and tenors; here was a man who actually knew what was going on on the stage – and, more to the point, what should be going on. He would have fixed the wretched look of that Tannhauml;user or heaved it off the Venusberg.

He will be hard to replace, but he must be replaced. If you ask me (and please don’t), I think that James Conlon has some of the brainpower, the imagination and certainly the musical knowledge that we’ve lost with Edgar Baitzel’s passing. Hold on to him.


At 10 a.m. on Friday, March 23, the L.A. City Council will honor Alan Rich for his contributions to the cultural life of Los Angeles.